President Obama honored Minnesota 2014 Teacher of the Year Tom Rademacher and 54 of the nation's other Teachers of the Year at the White House Wednesday.
The annual ceremony took place in the sunshine of the White House Rose Garden and featured a speech from this year's National Teacher of the Year, Shanna Peeples, an English teacher in Amarillo, Texas. The president met every state's honoree, including Rademacher, an English teacher at the downtown Minneapolis FAIR School.
"America's future is written in our classrooms," Obama said as the teachers stood on the steps behind him. "We all depend on our teachers, whether we have kids in the schools or not. They deserve our support and our appreciation."
"And they also probably deserve higher salaries," he added, to applause from the audience.
The Teacher of the Year program is run by the Council of Chief State School Officers, which chooses a National Teacher of the Year from the pool of state titleholders annually. The national honoree steps out of the classroom for one year to become an ambassador for education worldwide.
Rademacher has had a busy year since being selected Minnesota's Teacher of the Year last May, speaking at events for teaching programs throughout Minnesota.
But he isn't a stranger to speaking out. Rademacher does it frequently on his Twitter and Tumblr pages, writing about topics ranging from education policy to inequities in the classroom and his personal motivations for teaching. During the rioting following the Ferguson grand jury decision in November, Rademacher discussed the events with his students, who come from diverse racial backgrounds, and then tweeted their thoughts. It garnered some national attention.
"The system that we have is not structured to serve all the kids that we're supposed to serve," Rademacher said. "So the teacher job is to bridge that gap between what you're asked to do and what you know you need to do for your kids."
