White House puts teachers in the spotlight while Latinos look away

At a reception with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Tuesday, a man in a blue plaid suit suddenly started crying.

The man is one of the teachers of the year in Washington for recognition and a state dinner hosted by first lady Jill Biden on Thursday.

“Of the 50-plus teachers they had, easily 10 that they literally — they were in tears for,” said Roy Sosa, a fintech entrepreneur who surprised each of the educators with a $5,000 gift at the reception.

“They cried because this $5,000 was going to allow them to do something that would really take a weight off their shoulders.”

Biden’s first official dinner for teachers and Sosa’s gift have something in common: Both were designed to make educators more visible in a political environment that is shifting the education debate toward culture war issues.

For Latinos, a demographic that traditionally prioritizes education, the issue has begun to go unnoticed, replaced by economic concerns, health care and gun violence.

UnidosUS’ 2023 pre-election survey of the Hispanic electorate found that three of the top five issues for respondents had to do with the economy: inflation, jobs and affordable housing.

Health care and gun violence round out the top five, followed by immigration and the border, and only then by education and the quality of public schools.

It’s a dramatic shift in priorities — ahead of a hotly contested election — for an electorate that for decades has reliably listed education as one of its top five concerns.

A similar 2020 UnidosUS poll shows that education trails only racial justice, health care, employment and the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2006, education was listed as the top political priority for Latinos.

In both UnidosUS and Pew Research polls, education appears likely to be replaced by temporary issues, for example, the coronavirus response in the 2020 polls.

The shift away from education is also notable for a demographic with a larger school-age population. The average age of Latinos was 29.5 years old in 2021, compared to the national average of 37.8, according to the Pew Research Center.

But if Latinos don’t come to education, education will go to Latinos, according to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

“In this polarized political climate, where extremists traffic in chaos, fear and division, we must be intentional in both elevating the promise of public education and fighting for the resources needed to improve it – including bilingual and multilingual education to support Latino students. . In other words, we need to connect the dots to eliminate the noise. This is how Latino voters will hear us,” Weingarten said.

“Another thing we know is that Latino voters are unwilling to give in to extremist education policies that censor educators and ban numerous books – something eerily similar to what dictators across Latin America have done and which Latinos firmly reject.”

In addition to politics, Sosa said that changes in economic patterns are also generating disinterest in traditional educational policy.

“We now have close to 60 million Americans who earn their income from the gig economy. And that’s cool — and not so cool — because you don’t need as much education to be an Uber driver and an Instacart delivery person, an Amazon Prime delivery person or a TaskRabbit delivery person,” said Sosa, who co-founded his first fintech company. , NetSpend, with his brother Bertrand in 1999.

“But the reality is that we need to — I think education is so much more than just academics, especially when you go from kindergarten, we’ll say, like, seventh, eighth grade. I believe there is a lot of human development that goes beyond what AI automation can do,” said Sosa, whose children attend public schools.

This view is shared by teachers.

“Public schools in the United States do something that no other institution and no other country does – they create opportunities and a path to knowledge for all students, regardless of background or cultural identity,” said Weingarten.

The first lady, who teaches writing at Northern Virginia Community College, has pushed for teachers to return to the center of policy discussions about education.

On a surprise appearance On “CBS Mornings” last month, Biden congratulated National Teacher of the Year Missy Testerman and announced that he was elevating the annual Teacher of the Year reception to a state dinner at the White House honoring Testerman and the Teachers of the Year. each state and territory.

“It’s one of my favorite events at the White House when we bring out the Teachers of the Year and celebrate them every year,” she said.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced a series of measures to support teachers – in 2022, public school teachers earned an average of $66,397 per year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The measures include creating a center to help with recruitment and retention through the Department of Education, funding to train special education teachers and making available data that shows, by congressional district, how many teachers have received student loan relief.

Still, average teacher earnings are only slightly above the Social Security Administration’s national average salary index: $63,795.13 in 2022.

Sosa, who plans to continue funding the Teacher of the Year cash award with a view to expanding the program, said it’s not just about the money.

“We’re going to spend the next few months figuring out how we can multiply it in size. I’d like to see it, when we get to next year, I’d like to see it on the level of – it might not get there on day one, but I’d like to see it on the level of the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys. I would like to see this in a big auditorium, whether it’s Carnegie Hall or the Kennedy Center,” Sosa said.