This Teacher Appreciation Week, Conservatives Need to Find a Better Way of Talking About Teachers

Over the years, conservatives have rightly pointed out the need for K-12 education reform but have frequently gone about it the wrong way, not only blaming teachers but stereotyping them as all being political actors who only enter the education profession because they’re too stupid to do anything else (“those who can’t, teach”) or to indoctrinate kids with liberal beliefs.

But this rhetoric is inaccurate and ultimately unhelpful to the cause of positive education reform. It ignores that the plurality of teachers, per a 2017 Ed Week survey, describe themselves as moderate, with 29% identifying as either “liberal” or “very liberal” and 27% as “conservative” or “very conservative.” It ignores that teachers themselves are often dissatisfied with what they are expected to tolerate and enable in their classrooms, with many being forced to teach things they disagree with. Perhaps most of all, this rhetoric pushes dissatisfied teachers further toward union bosses and other Leftist ideologues, who offer them false comfort and false hope of reform—but at least treat them with a little respect—even if they use them to make the system worse.

It would be dishonest to pretend that unqualified “Libs of TikTok”-style teachers don’t exist; they do, and they’ve not only harmed students—they’ve harmed, by association, the public image of the teaching profession. But these bad apples represent the rot in the system. They don’t define the good teachers who are simply trying to do their jobs, and, if anything, they contribute to the exodus of teachers from the profession.

Indeed, there’s a difference between the dysfunctional system and the teachers who are doing their best to teach in spite of it. American students are falling behind because their teachers’ hands are tied, not because their teachers are incompetent.

I know this firsthand. I worked as a middle and high school teacher in a few summer programs and at two different schools—one of which happened to serve students in the inner city—during the 2023-2024 school year. I turned down second interviews from several schools for the following academic year based on the sheer amount of ideology I saw on their curriculum, and while I received a full-time offer at a normal private school that I liked, I ultimately turned it down, too, realizing that if I stayed in the profession any longer, I’d be committing myself to a broader, failing system.  

Independent Women’s newly released report, “Give Teachers a Break: Cutting Red Tape to Unleash the Potential of America’s Great Teachers,” lays out how teachers are themselves often victimized by bad public policies. Proponents of education reform should see teachers as allies, rather than impediments, to changing bad policy. 

Teachers understand how education can transform a child’s life perhaps more than any other group besides parents, and they also understand that various policy choices don’t help them. For instance, progressive federal and state policies have made student discipline near impossible and have hurt teachers by barring them from being able to manage their own classrooms. As a result, poor student behavior has become the number one reason teachers are leaving the profession en masse.

Our education system doesn’t have to be this way. As Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an article titled “Teachers and the Right,” “a school is an inherently conservative institution. We build and maintain schools to expose children to our nation’s history and culture, and to prepare them for a responsible adult life of informed, engaged citizenship.” Conservatives should continue to advocate for school choice, which is crucial for giving parents leverage, but we should not narrow our aspirations in the process: conservatives can and should also make public schools sane again, bringing teachers on our side as we do so. We want to reform policies related to student behavior and disability, grade integrity, the onerous teacher licensure process, and the ideologically corrupted social emotional learning curricula—so do teachers!

Conservatives should understand that if we want our students to learn well, we need to show gratitude for teachers, beginning with how we think and speak about them.

President Trump is already reframing the discourse around education. “Teachers, to me, are among the most important people in this country,” he said, when signing an executive order to begin dismantling the Department of Education. “We’re going to love and cherish our teachers, along with our children, and they’re going to work with the parents, and they’re going to work with everyone else, and it’s going to be an amazing thing to watch.” President Trump has also advanced this cause with another executive order to give teachers more control over student discipline. 

This is an important start. Yet conservatives need to do more to advance policies that empower teachers and give these professionals the respect they deserve.