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Some changes to education, such as the increased use of technology, have made teachers' lives easier. But decreased investment in public school has left teachers with stagnant wages and limited resources, leading to waves of protests and strikes across the country.
Here is a look at all the ways being a teacher has changed over the last 50 years.
If you're a teacher with a story to share, email aakhtar@businessinsider.com.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were defined by waves of teacher-led protests and strikes. Teachers in urban areas like Chicago and San Francisco called for better wages, smaller class sizes, and better benefits.
Teacher unions helped lead the push toward collective-bargaining agreements for teachers. By the late 1970s, 72% of public-school teachers had collective-bargaining agreements, and union membership soared.
Not everyone befitted from union membership. In 1968, white teachers in New York City went on strike after being dismissed from teaching at a majority black and Latino school. The strike flamed race-related tension between union leaders, who took the side of the white teachers, and teachers from communities of color.
Nearly 60,000 teachers went on strike in September and November 1968, resulting in a loss of one-fifth of the school year's instructional time, and impacting 1 million children.
The late 1970s is also when the number of female teachers began to increase. Women made up two in three teachers as of 1981. Today, they make up 76% of the teacher population, which has grown from 2.5 million to about 4.5 million since the '80s.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan's administration released the "A Nation at Risk" report, which condemned American public schools for failing to keep students competitive with those in foreign countries.
Before Reagan's report, teachers had autonomy to decide their curriculum and how they wanted to conduct the classroom. The "A Nation at Risk" report, however, led to a movement to standardize teaching across the country.
Schools adopted academic standards, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards was established in 1987.
Even today, teachers follow mandated curricula and predetermined lesson plans, and have little say in a school's budgetary and professional-development decisions.
Teachers say technology has had "mostly positive" impacts on student research skills, but nearly 90% believe digital tools were leading to shorter attention spans in the classroom, according to a 2012 Pew survey.
Today, the pay gap between teachers and comparable professions has widened to 18.7%. What's worse, teachers earn less on average in inflation-adjusted dollars than they did in 1990, according to the Department of Education.
Today's teachers also spend more time in the classroom than almost every other developed nation. As a result, 93% of teachers reported high stress levels in a 2017 survey. Only 7% of teachers self identified as “well-adjusted.”
This decade gave way to a resurgence in activism. After educators in West Virginia walked out in April 2018, fellow teachers in other states followed suit to demand higher wages and increased K-12 spending.
