James Forman Jr. Quotes

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.

You can get rid of the teacher certification requirements, and you're still not going to have a rush of incredibly high-quality people going into teaching as long as teachers are valued in the way they currently are. The way we value people is by how much we pay them.

I think good teachers are underpaid.

Teachers need to be paid like professionals.

As a former teacher, it pains me to watch such an essential and rewarding profession suffer due to government neglect.

Teachers who have committed their lives to the classroom deserve better than our politics has given them.

Our teachers at the public school level are the most underpaid for the importance of their job in America.

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.

Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.

If teaching isn't rewarding and challenging, we're going to continue to lose our best teachers to work in other fields.

I have fought to protect those benefits that ensure better salaries for teachers across the Nation such as grants to pay off student loans and funding for Teach for America. Still, we must all do more to show our continued appreciation for our Nation's leading role models.

Most teachers still say they love teaching though they wouldn't mind a little more respect for their challenging work and a little less blame for America's educational shortcomings.

I am deeply concerned with the diminution of the teaching strength of the country as a result of the disproportionately low salaries that are paid to teachers throughout the country.

Teachers have such hard jobs and they don't get paid well. And in order to be a teacher you need a lot of education, so people aren't teachers for any other reason than they want to be, and they want to help educate the next generation of people.

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.

Unionized teachers have destroyed much of the state school system.

Often times the public school teachers are ridiculed or they are made to feel inferior but this is really undeserved.

Teaching is the profession that makes all other professions possible and yet we do not treat teachers as professionals.

We don’t get the quality of people going into teaching that other nations do…. When people go teacher bashing, they are making the problem worse.

We don't look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you're called a professor if you're a high school teacher, and they pay teachers - they pay teachers in Europe.

Israeli teachers are not required to hold an academic degree, and their salaries are the lowest in the Western world.

Our teachers are valuable, and our public policy should reflect that.

We definitely have to take care of our teachers more. Raise the pay. Give them the tools they need.

We've got to make sure that teachers are respected, that they are rewarded, that young people like yourself who have talent and want to work with people, that you're able to support yourself and live out a great life being a teacher.

Teachers have the hardest and most important jobs in America. They're building our nation. And we should appreciate them, respect them, and pay them well.