The GND solves education through environmental stewardship – that’s key..

Educators Are Green Workers.52 The ability of any nation to care for and educate its youth in many ways determines the future health of civic, social, and economic outcomes. For each individual, quality education, and early childhood education in particular,53 is a major determinant in emotional health and lifelong wealth potential. For communities and societies, education—to the extent that it is accessible to all children regardless of race, class and gender—is a driver of economic prosperity, crime reduction, and geopolitical stability. To build a sustainable society, education and educators are essential. There are a number of unsustainable trends in child care and pre-K–12 education that could be ameliorated if these sectors were treated as vital in achieving a sustainable economy. The importance of early childhood care and education as a driver of long-term sustainability has been overlooked, to the point of crisis. The average cost of child care and nursery school in U.S. cities has doubled since 2000,54 and at least half of U.S. families report difficulty finding child care.55 and for those who do have children, not having these options causes millions of parents to stay home instead of working—costing individuals in lost wages, and the economy in productivity.56 The provisioning and infrastructure for education in America is another crucial element of generational sustainability that’s in need of serious investment. Pre-K–12 schools, mostly funded by state and local governments, have had deep cuts to operational budgets in the past ten years. Many states have not reached pre–Great Recession levels of funding,57 Adequacy in funding for schools is deeply tied to a community’s wealth and property taxes, because local funding covers nearly half of the total financial support for Pre-K–12 schools—meaning that intense disparities already exist in public schools, and typically follow lines of race and class. For example, recent research has shown that, without adequate state and federal assistance, the funding gap between predominantly white and predominantly black schools amounted to $23 billion.58 Budget cuts have also hurt teachers’ salaries. Those educating the nation’s youth should be able to focus on how to best help students learn, rather than, for example, worrying about how to find money for textbooks, or having to personally contract a substitute teacher in case of absence. According to a Department of Education survey, in the 2014–15 school year, 94 percent of public school teachers paid for school supplies without reimbursement.59 Meanwhile, the average annual wage for preschool, primary, and secondary education teachers that year was $55,500—a figure which has stayed the same or slightly declined, in real terms, over the past twenty years.60 One survey showed that 55 percent of teachers are not satisfied with their salary, and nearly 20 percent of public school teachers—one in five— take on second jobs during the school year. It’s no wonder that historic teachers strikes occurred in the same states that have seen the biggest education budget and teacher salary cuts.61 In many of those same states, such as West Virginia and Oklahoma, state budgets have been further hurt by the decline of the fossil fuel industry, and school budgets have been sacrificed by too-low taxes on the industry—a major rally cry during strikes.62 Lastly, educators are green workers because they interact directly with long-term environmental sustainability in two key ways. First, teaching environmental and civic stewardship and related topics such as ecology and climate change, and publishing resources for integrating environmental issues and climate change into curriculum, from Pre-K–12 to higher education, is critical to sustainability. The need to better embrace educators as green workers is underscored by the need to include more modules on climate change on the curriculum: currently, 86 percent of teachers say kids should learn about climate change while only 42 percent teach it.63 Teaching these topics earlier and more robustly could certainly impact outcomes from individual behavior to future public policy. Second, caring for and engaging with youth who are directly impacted by environmental issues and climate change, whether emotionally or physically, is also critical to the concept of sustainability. As Marnie Brady, an assistant professor of politics and human rights at Marymount Manhattan College, recently said, “the living conditions of their students are indeed the working conditions of their classrooms.”64 As environmental stressors increasingly impact childrens home lives, so too will that stress become the setting in which teachers do their jobs. Teachers will increasingly need supplementary training in order to effectively identify, interact with, and ensure the safety of students dealing with depression, trauma and toxic stress—whether it’s related to housing instability, or other environmental and psychological impacts of climate