Reevaluate current loan forgiveness programs, for teachers!

The vast majority of educators enter their career in a quest to educate our young and impressionable youth. They have dreams of making a difference. Teachers ensure that their dreams come to fruition, by planning engaging, differentiated and rigorous lessons. In addition to teachers spending countless hours planning, they spend even more time cultivating rapport with the parents and students that they serve. Teachers do the aforementioned, day after day, even though they continue to be underpaid and under-appreciated. In addition to teachers being underpaid, post obtaining a master’s degree (so that they are deemed highly qualified in their content areas), they are often left with expensive student loans, with high interest rates. Unfortunately, this usually means that teachers are working to pay back their student loans, because often times they have very little money to pay their monthly bills, let alone money to travel or partake in leisure. Moreover, many teachers work part time jobs, just to make ends meet.

Currently, there are loan forgiveness plans that forgive $17,000 worth of debt, for teachers who have worked 5 consecutive years in schools that serve students who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This is problematic, because educating youth, is educating youth. Furthermore, all stakeholders, in the arena of education, know that the scholar who lives in an affluent school district requires just as much teacher preparation, as the scholar that resides in a non-affluent zip code. For this reason, I am asking policy makers to reevaluate their EXTREMELY limiting loan forgiveness programs that are available for teachers, by extending loan forgiveness to ALL teachers. I am also asking that policy makers consider reducing or eliminating interest, for teachers.