Nínive Calegari and Dave Eggers have partnered with Academy Award-winning director Vanessa Roth to continue the dialogue on teachers’ salaries and announce the launch of an interactive website, www.theteachersalaryproject.org. The website marks the first stage of a new documentary project that will bring attention to the inequality between the importance of teachers’ jobs and the pay they earn.

The Teacher Salary Project will be a feature-length documentary film, interactive online resource, and national outreach campaign that delves into the core of our educational crisis from the eyes and experiences of our nation's teachers. The website, which launches today, is both the first step and an integral part of the innovative filmmaking process that invites teachers, and anyone passionate about education, to participate in the making and spreading the word about the film. Visitors to the site are invited to upload their own videotaped stories on teaching, become community reform partners, and donate to the project. The evolving website will become the only digital archive of teachers’ stories about teaching, from which selected submissions will become a vital part of the film.


“The purpose of the Teacher Salary Project is simple,” says Calegari, who taught in public schools for a decade before co-founding 826 Valencia. “It is to honor teachers and to demonstrate that they’re critical to the viability of our democracy. All research points to the fact that the most important component in a student’s school experience is the quality of their classroom teacher. Raising the salaries of our strongest teachers will allow us to attract and retain the best possible teaching force.”


“We see teacher salaries and conditions as the first step in universally improving public education in America,” says Eggers. “If you treat teachers well, you bring and keep the best people in the profession. The best teachers produce the best results — any way you measure them. And a school full of excellent and fulfilled teachers can solve the school’s other issues far better than can a school where teachers are underpaid, frustrated, and constantly leaving. We’ve got to shift our focus from constant student testing and onto teacher compensation and retention.”


Roth, who has been making award-winning documentaries for over a decade, says, “The exciting part of this project from a filmmaking perspective is that we’re not asking the education community to just sit back and watch our film, but to be actively engaged in shaping the stories we tell and the effect we have on education reform.”


The documentary will tell the stories of the men and women who do the heavy lifting in education, the ones closest to our children -- the 3.2 million teachers who spend every day in classrooms in every corner of the country. The film will follow 3-5 teachers at different stages in their careers, all of whom are struggling with the conditions in which they’re teaching. Weaving in commentary by policy experts on every side of the debate, the film will bring awareness to the real and imminent crisis in our educational system. In keeping with the storytelling styles of Eggers and Roth, the documentary will be a character-driven film, which will tell moving and compelling stories that explore this urgent issue through humor, warmth, provocative questions, and the energy of the teachers who fill the screen.


The result will show how devastating the effect of poor teacher conditions are on schools and children. Where teachers are underpaid, staff turnover is constant, schools are unstable, and students are taught by substitutes and poorly trained teachers. The results are predictably awful. By contrast, in schools where teachers can afford to build a life as an educator, the teachers grow and gain mastery, the schools attract the best from around the country, and test scores and college admissions soar. America can dramatically change its education system within a generation. Focusing on attracting, supporting and retaining the best teacher force in history is the first step in doing so.


The film will be produced by Calegari, Roth, and Eggers, and directed by Roth.

www.theteachersalaryproject.org