Recently, I saw an interview with a celebrity that floored me.

In the interview, Wilmer Valderrama on CBS Mornings talks about his experiences with being a teen actor. He tells the story of Mr. Tucker, who encouraged him to pursue his acting career while Valderrama was filming That 70’s Show during his last years of high school. My first reaction was “How do they always find a way to get in touch with anyone?” My second thought was just how serendipitous it was to have a teacher during a critical year in his life who saw him as a fully brilliant human being.

In one of the poignant moments of the interview, Valderrama says, “You know, you come to this country with the thought that anything is possible. And then it is. And then it’s individuals like him that say you can do it, and then all of a sudden you start thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I can do it, you know?’ Maybe I can do something bigger than me.'”

Yes, I felt that, too.

It made me reflect on this recent Pew Research article highlighting teachers’ perspectives on the state of the profession. One of the core tensions with teaching is how the occupational and economic concerns of teaching stand in contrast to the ethical, moral, and spiritual undertaking of the work. On the one hand, teachers deserve to get paid much better than they do. That’s been true well before I started teaching. The inertia baffles me. On the other hand, teachers that I speak to still struggle with the lack of school supplies, mounds of paperwork, and what we’ll call “student discipline.”

When it comes to recruiting and retaining teachers, the current strategies attempt to use flash over substance. In my view, the best recruiters for teaching are the current classroom teachers. But, for all the great teachers we have in our profession, we also have to listen to communities across the country naming the way racism, ableism, sexism, and other identity-based discrimination are keeping students from seeing themselves in our public schools. Teaching isn’t just about what’s being taught, but who’s doing the teaching.

In a perfect world, teachers’ interests and students’ interests would form a close-to-perfect circle. But it’s not close, so here we are. Some sociological perspectives on the state of teaching ensue:

The Teacher Side

These days, people have a myriad of solutions for recruiting and retaining more teachers. Some have suggested that we should compartmentalize the job of teaching into different parts. But teaching is as much about the follow-through as it is about the initial interactions, hence the relationship building. Others have sought to amplify the need for racially diverse teachers, but this, too, rarely accounts for the pipeline for teaching. After all, someone’s gotta do the hiring. Then there are those who have created professional groups of teachers that subsidize teachers’ experiences through after-school activities and stipends. That helps, but the system seems slow to take up these solutions more sustainably.

But time and again, teachers keep giving America their lists of what keeps them working, and America says, “OK, thanks. Try again next year.”

Some have argued that teachers shouldn’t allow for their work to be exploited. However, the teachers I speak to wouldn’t dilute their labor to match the dollar amount they receive. In other words, it’s up to districts and schools to match the efforts teachers put into their work with the right salary. Of course, this tension leads to teachers leaving in droves. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers rarely blamed the students for their departure. Since the onset of this pandemic, student behavior has taken a more central role in how teachers see their work.

But students are also the gift. Let me explain.

The Student Side

In my research, I surveyed teachers of color in different contexts, content areas, and racial and cultural backgrounds. When it came to students, 96% of them said they wanted to teach students of racially diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, they were unapologetically satisfied with teaching mostly Black and Latinx students because this satisfied the mission-driven parts of their work. But all of the teachers in my research agreed that student relationships and culturally responsive curriculum mattered a lot to them.

But as I’ve said previously, teaching might look the same on paper, but it feels different. Some of that might come from how students match authority figures with what they see on their TVs and devices. Much of it, really, is about us.

While it may feel true that students have changed, it’s also true that we still need teachers who can nurture students’ academic and socioemotional development. Neither of these are “soft.” All of these skills require a sense of individual and collective responsibility. This specifically becomes more urgent in schools that are under-resourced and over-scrutinized. Where society generally lacks of political will and societal imagination, educators of color and conscience generally don’t.

Despite what’s happening in their devices, students of all ages are telling us they still need the best of us.

Recruiting To Retain and Sustain

People spend too much time these days focusing on the teachers who leave and not enough on the teachers who stay. This has been true for some time and continues to drive the narrative. Teaching deserves folks who not only stay and fight, but stay and thrive. The teaching profession deserves bolder vision setting that creates pathways for a sustainable profession first and foremost.

Knowing that the best of teachers won’t diminish their efforts despite the lack of economic returns is exploitation. But that same dynamic allows for otherwise dedicated folks to get squeezed out of the work they love. Too many higher-ups use “What about the children?” as a pejorative to make people accept less in their work.

Yet, when I see the interviews with folks like Valderrama, we know how powerful it is when we can attend to the aspirational parts of the work. In fact, the reason why we should pay educators more – particularly those at the elementary school level – is because paying them more means they can concentrate on the dozens of humans in their charge. When a teacher worries less about the professional and economic sides of the job, it frees them up to put more energy into the moral and creative parts of their work.

If systems don’t allow for teachers to see their own genius, how readily will they see that in others? The more we invest, the more we may even allow for those students to do something bigger than them. That thing could be teaching.