Interview: No Day at the Beach

What does it mean that in America today, you can find teachers selling stereos or cleaning houses on the side to make ends meet?

For Nínive Clements Calegari, Dave Eggers, and Daniel Moulthrop, coauthors of Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers (The New Press), it means that teachers deserve more respect—and more money. In their book, they set out to show the financial and professional demands on educators today, underscoring the gap between public perception and reality. Interweaving teachers’ own stories with policy analysis, they depict a profession in crisis, perhaps unsustainable without significant changes in how teachers are paid.

We recently spoke by phone with Calegari, a former social studies teacher who’s the founding executive director of the writing/tutoring center 826 Valencia, to find out more about the book’s background and ideas.