As a current junior at Illinois State University (ISU), in order for me to receive my education degree, per state law, I will spend at least a semester (16 weeks) in a classroom as a "student teacher" paired up with an active educator. For a large chunk of the semester, student teachers are fully in charge of a classroom and most work 40+ hours/week planning curriculum, activities, lessons, assessments, and learning accommodations, all while still juggling schoolwork of their own. In the midst of all this, education majors are required to complete an extensive, rigorous licensure exam called edTPA which education publisher Pearson charges unemployed students $300 for. 

Recently, I've thought lots about my upcoming semester of student teaching since meeting a man who wanted to be a teacher for as long as he can remember. Greg was a Biology Education major at ISU until his very final semester on campus, the time he was confronted with the feat of student teaching. The problem: Greg couldn't afford to student teach. Like many students, Greg wasn't lucky enough to have the means to make rent, buy groceries, and pay tuition all without having any income for a consecutive 4-5 months. Greg had no choice but to drop his education credential so he could at least afford to make it to graduation. His lifelong dream of being a teacher came to crumbles all because of a blatantly classist expectation that assumes he would be able to work full-time and survive nearly half a year without a penny of income. Greg isn't the only one.

Maybe you're thinking, why don't you just work on the weekends? Or at night? Most universities either strongly discourage or do not allow student teachers to have a job during this semester. Find in the student code - if you violate this policy, you could be at risk of being removed from the program. Some other solutions include borrowing loans to pay tuition but loans don't pay the bills. You could live off of a credit card but how will you get approved for a credit card without any income? We could apply for welfare but most states don't offer welfare to full-time students. Let's say you get a secret job on the weekends earning $11/hour for 16 hours. This gives you $176 (before taxes) per week to pay rent, buy groceries, make car payments, afford textbooks, medicine, gas, and any other underestimated expense for a college student...but let's remember that this solution is not even allowed.

Did I mention that this not only deprives students of personal income but actually costs us thousands of dollars of tuition? The associated course student teachers are enrolled in is a 10-12 credit hour course with the average class worth just three credit hours. For perspective, ISU, the largest producer of teachers in Illinois, charges $400 (in-state) per credit hour thus creating a student who works full-time, not allowed to have a second job, and owes $4,800 to the institution (nearly doubled for out-of-state students) for all the student's hard work. Clearly, they've forgotten about the burden of rent, groceries, car payments, and other expenses. Furthermore, this issue disproportionally affects people of color, especially in low-income areas like Chicago due to the current inadequate support that their communities and schools receive. Recruiting people of color to the profession is crucial, considering white people make up 82% of our teachers yet only 47% of our students.

Our largest and greatest investment as a community is public education. When we are running low on teachers like right now, class sizes get bigger and learning conditions get worse. When we recruit plenty of highly qualified, well-compensated teachers to give our students smaller class sizes with individualized attention and more resources, we foster a generation of active learners and future professionals. I believe if students knew they had financial support to live on while student teaching, more aspiring educators would enter the field.

This May, a teacher candidate will earn her degree. She'll get a job, but due to her massive burden of college debt and lost income during her student teaching experience, she'll be living at home for a couple of years until she saves enough of her criminally-low salary to rent a small apartment. But what if she was able to offset her immediate burden of debt with the financial support from her career-long employer, the State, during her last semester and earns a competitive, deserving salary that the vast majority of Americans believe is long overdue? Perhaps, in this case, she'd be able to buy a new car a little sooner, move into her apartment a little earlier, thus, stimulating the economy and on top of that, she's a better-prepared educator for her students.

Illinois passed two laws in 2019 to combat the teacher shortage; one increased the teacher minimum wage to $40,000 from $11,000 and the other eliminated the basic skills test requirement (ACT/SAT). Now that aspiring educators know our intelligence isn't being measured by testing performance, it's time to ensure that a student's ability to become a teacher is not hindered by their socioeconomic status. If Illinois wants to recruit educators into the profession, it's time to take the classism out of the career. Student teachers deserve to earn a stipend of at least $500-$1,000 per month from the state to ensure that a student won't have to decide if she's paying the rent or the car payment that month - just to be able to work for free. 

This is an equitable and economic solution. The downright classism education majors witness is shameful. When we finally start investing more in our public school educators before, during, and after our careers, we will see growth in the profession and in our classrooms.