There is a teacher shortage in the nation and it should not take a great deal of thought to find the reason: they are not paid well and their profession is not much respected for its contribution to the welfare of the country.

What is called the teacher’s “wage penalty” hit its high point in 2018, at 21.4 percent. That penalty is “the percent by which public school teachers are paid less in wages and compensation than other college-educated workers,” according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Think of it as a comparison in your own workplace, where everyone but you is being paid at the professional level and you are making one-fifth less than the rest. You’d be looking for another job, too.

In a nutshell, that’s what is happening in the schools across the country. In addition, most teachers use their own money to buy supplies for their pupils and some even have provided food for some who have been in great need. Now, schools and other organizations are providing backpacks of food on Friday afternoon, so the children will have something to eat over the weekend. This is a travesty that should not ever have become an institutional occurrence in American schools.

This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg in education. One drain on public schools is the so-called charter school movement, by which private schools (many owned and managed by corporations) take a share of the school district’s tax money and get to pick their own students and rid themselves of students who chronically “under perform,” or those who are disruptive. Where do these cast-offs from the charters go? To the nearest public school, of course, and the public school is required to take them. Thus, the public schools are expected to do more with less.

No one should look to the federal government or state governments for relief from these slash-and-burn policies for public education, in which local schools are considering the elimination of such things as music, art, after school activities, and some sports. Schools in inner cities and rural areas, which serve minorities and poor whites, are already at the mercy of the budget-cutters at the federal and state levels, putting a greater burden on tax-paying property owners, however modest their incomes.

Teachers are getting hit from at least two sides: less money from all levels of government in school budgets and the drain of public school budgets by charter schools. The answer from the federal government was for President Trump to name Betsy DeVos secretary of education. DeVos is a lifelong proponent of private schools, vouchers, home schooling, and charter schools, in which she is invested. The billionaire secretary is not necessarily invested directly in charter schools, but is invested in funds or other groups that invest in charter schools. She is also invested in companies that hound students who have borrowed considerable funds for their college education, but have difficulty repaying the debts on a teacher’s pay. And that goes for other professional occupations as well.

DeVos was nominated by Trump and her nomination went forward for confirmation without the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee having had the chance to study the 108-page ethics report on her from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. She was the only nominee who skated through in that manner. During her confirmation hearing and elsewhere, she has continued to insist that the U.S. needs more, not fewer, charter schools, even though there is no oversight for them by the local school districts. They are private in pretty much all but the funding that they take from public schools.

Much of this has been reported well by Dr. Walter C. Farrell Jr., a Black Commentator columnist, who has deeply researched and followed the emergence of charter schools and the corporate entities and politicians who have given wholehearted support for alternatives to public schools, even as they have taken resources and weakened public schools in most places where they exist.

Teachers have put up with much abuse over the past several generations, even though they have signed on for their work, not for riches (as if there were any), but for the love of teaching children in their most formative years and for the responses that they get from the children as they learn new things every day of their school life. Class size is a big issue, with most being satisfied with 30 children, a lower class size being even more desirable. But, the choking off of budget money for not just the “extras,” but to even cut teaching staff to lower budgets and, therefore, the local tax burden, has been just too much. In the past, a teachers’ strike would have been unimaginable, but it has happened in various states in the past 12 months.

There have been teachers’ strikes in places where there is no union, and they’ve won many of their demands. Unionized teachers have struck and have won. Most charter schools are not unionized and their teachers are expected to do as they are told and do not have much of a voice in the operation of these corporate schools, whereas in unionized public schools, teachers’ unions have a voice in the conduct of education and in the granting of certification and credentials for teachers. There are efforts right now to allow charter schools (for-profit or non-profit) to train and certify their own teachers.

“Providing teachers with a decent middle-class living commensurate with other professionals with similar education is not simply a matter of fairness. Effective teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student educational performance. To promote children’s success in school, schools must retain credentialed teachers and ensure that teaching remains an attractive career option for college-bound students. “Pay is an important component of retention and recruitment,” according to EPI. If stability of the education of children is important, it’s important to curb or stop the rise and fall and closing of charters, according to the rise and fall of their profits, even in the middle of the school year. They can do such things, because there is no control by a duly elected school board.

There is a rising of teachers, with or without unions, just as there has been among nurses, who did not choose their profession to get rich. Yet, there have been strikes among nurses in many parts of the country, as the teachers have struck. These are the last workers who might be expected to strike, because they care about their students and their patients. Their strikes are most often about the care they can provide and the teaching attention they can give to each student. That should tell the American people about the state of the caring professions, about the dire need to address the problems of class sizes of 40-60 and about dangerous under staffing of nurses on most floors of hospitals and health care facilities of every kind.

Both of these professions are in need of support by taxpayers and politicians by way of living wages and support in their daily work, but just as much, they need to know that their work is respected. They must not be vilified as some politicians and right-wingers have done over many years, to make a few cheap election points.

If there’s a shortage of teachers, look to see where they have gone (or never entered a classroom after being certified.) It is likely they will be found in some other profession, where the act of switching jobs would give them a 20 percent raise.