When Teachers Speak: What Happens When We Actually Listen

"I don't feel that safe, because I feel like Black women are losing their jobs. Teachers are losing their jobs."

Margie Mathews has been teaching English for 22 years. Twenty-two years of lesson plans and parent conferences, of grading essays and shaping young minds. And in 2025, she's afraid to call her superintendent about a poorly designed handout.

That's where we are.

The Panel Nobody Wants to Admit We Need

We hosted our third stakeholder panel this fall at Matiq Labs, and this time, we took a radical step: we invited actual teachers to a panel about teaching. Revolutionary, right? Apparently, yes—because as my co-host Jacob pointed out, he'd just received an invitation to another education panel about "what teachers need" that didn't feature a single classroom teacher.

It's the equivalent of hosting a panel about brain surgery without inviting any surgeons. But in education, we do this all the time. We let former teachers who haven't been in a classroom in a decade, policy wonks who've never taught, and consultants with expensive PowerPoints speak for teachers instead of creating space for teachers to speak for themselves.

Jacob and I weren't having it. So we assembled three women with a combined 51 years of classroom experience and asked them one central question: What has this school year felt like for you, and what do you actually need?

Meet our panelists:

Margie Mathews teaches English at John Adams Middle School in Santa Monica. She's in year 22, which means she's seen administrations come and go, watched trends cycle through, and developed the kind of classroom instincts that only come from thousands of hours with 12- and 13-year-olds.

Brittany Lowe is a special education teacher in LAUSD, working at the elementary level. Sixteen years in, she's also a mother of two young children, which gives her a unique vantage point on how the profession treats working parents—spoiler: not well.

Maya Suzuki Daniels teaches high school at San Pedro High School and has taught across private, charter, and public school contexts over 13 years. She's also on UTLA's bargaining team, runs a community patrol before school starts, and is raising her own children while managing 150 students.

These aren't burned-out first-years or disgruntled outliers. These are veteran educators, the backbone of the profession, the ones who've stayed when half their cohort left. And they're exhausted in ways they can't fully name.

"Draining in a Way I Can't Describe"

When we asked how this school year feels, all three women landed on the same word: draining. But it's not the normal tired that comes with the job. It's something heavier, more pervasive.

Brittany returned from maternity leave to find her union blocking the school doors—not as protest theater, but as a literal barrier against ICE. One of Maya's students missed two days of school because people were surveilling her family's home. Maya herself wakes up at 5 AM to run a community patrol for 90 minutes before teaching all day.

"It's just this constant threat in the background," Maya said. "This sense of being under attack, being under siege."

This isn't hyperbole. This is the daily reality for teachers in Los Angeles in 2025. They're not just teaching reading and math. They're protecting students from deportation, managing trauma they weren't trained to address, and doing it all while funding gets slashed and politicians debate whether they're even competent enough to choose their own books.

The Disrespect is the Point

If there's a through-line in this conversation, it's disrespect. Not the casual kind, but the structural, systemic, policy-embedded kind that tells teachers they're replaceable, incompetent, and suspect.

Maya put it bluntly: "There's this idea that we can't understand policy or don't know how it will be implemented. I'm a very good reader. I'm a professional reader. In fact, I spend all day reading. I can definitely understand a law, a policy briefing, and even read a budget."

The condescension is everywhere. Weekly professional development sessions that treat teachers like perpetual novices. Administrators who've never successfully managed a classroom telling veteran teachers how to teach. Parents demanding to inspect units and interrogate decorations because they've been told teachers are indoctrinating their children.

Brittany drew a stark comparison: "I don't know any company in the world where a CEO would take over who's had no experience. But right now, you have a Department of Education led by someone who's never been in education."

And then there's the working parent penalty. Brittany's husband has never been made to feel guilty for taking time off or having children. But she's in a profession that literally serves children, and she can't feel supported in raising her own. Teachers get written up for using their allotted sick days. They're locked into their school parking lots after hours because administrators changed the gate codes without warning (yes, this actually happened to Maya).

"You can't lock us in," Maya said, still incredulous. "I hate to tell you, but you can't do that and think that's okay."

The Teacher They Wanted to Be vs. The Teacher They're Allowed to Be

All three women entered teaching with ideals. Margie wanted to do liberatory teaching—student-centered, future-ready, creative. Maya wanted to teach critical thinking and social justice. Brittany wanted autonomy to use her expertise in reading intervention.

But the system has other plans.

Margie described the impossible double bind: administrators encourage innovative, student-driven learning, but when they do walkthroughs and see students working on individual projects instead of sitting in rows on the same page, they act confused. So teachers end up teaching two ways—keeping meticulous records to prove they taught the standards, while also trying to actually liberate students' minds.

"It's a conflict all the time," Margie said. "You're always wanting to do what you want to do as a teacher, but afraid you're not getting them everything."

Maya called teaching "one of the most heavily surveilled professions." Her mother is a physician who takes a professional development course every six years. Maya has weekly PD. The message is clear: you can manage 150 teenagers, but you'll never know what you're doing well enough to be trusted.

And the fear is real. Not abstract, career-anxiety fear, but concrete, "I could end up on the internet for teaching a book" fear. Margie wanted to flag a district handout that accidentally read "Salute ICE" but hesitated because, as she said, "Black women are losing their jobs."

Brittany admitted that when asked to join this panel, her first thought was: "I have to be careful with what I say. This is my livelihood, my career, my health insurance for my kids."

Teachers are afraid. In California. In 2025.

Where They Find Support (Hint: Not From the System)

So where do teachers feel supported? Mostly, they don't.

Margie isolates in her classroom, working in her "little bubble" where it's safest. She finds validation from students—12-year-olds who say thank you, who want to learn, who remind her why she started.

Brittany is one of the rare teachers with an "amazing, phenomenal principal" who actually leads. But she knows this is rare. Most administrators, she said, are out of touch, haven't been in classrooms in years, and default to "you deal with it."

Maya finds support in her union work and veteran teacher mentors—the older women who stopped by her classroom early in her career and said, "Get out of here, go home." She's on UTLA's bargaining team, and while she admits "it's a hot mess," it's also "teachers, and it is our voices."

Alumni emails keep her going—former students writing to say they used what she taught, that college wasn't as hard as they expected, that they're grateful. "I'm not teaching you now," she tells her current students. "I'm teaching the you that I can see in the future."

The One Thing They'd Fix: Money

When we asked what problem they'd tackle first, all three came back to the same thing: funding.

Maya didn't mince words: "Prop 13 has got to go." California's tax structure is strangling schools. If the Prop 55 extension fails, one out of six teachers gets cut. She's gone on strike twice in 13 years. This isn't a short-term budget gap—it's a structural crisis.

"Whatever I would want to fix is going to require funding," Maya said. "And I'm not talking short-term stipend grants. Long-term, structural, systemic change is absolutely essential."

Brittany agreed: counseling, sports, arts—everything comes down to funding.

Margie added the cruel irony: decision makers want autonomy and innovation, but then tie funding to test scores and hold teachers accountable when students don't perform. You can't have liberatory teaching and teaching to the test. Pick one.

What We Owe Them

Our panel ended with a challenge: What action will you take this month to shift power, shift funding, and bring attention to actual educators?

Not people who used to teach. Not people who studied teaching. Not consultants with frameworks. Actual teachers in actual classrooms.

Maya offered practical advice: drop off Kleenex and Clorox wipes. Show up to strikes. Don't send teachers webinars as thank-you gifts—send pastries. Treat them like the professionals they are.

But the deeper ask is this: trust them. Respect them. Pay them. Fund their schools. Stop surveilling them. Stop gaslighting them. Stop asking them to be counselors and social workers and security guards and then blaming them when test scores don't rise.

As Maya said, "Can we treat each other like human beings? I would really want that in an education system."

It's the lowest possible bar. And we're not clearing it.

Margie's been teaching for 22 years. She shouldn't be afraid to call her superintendent. But she is. And until we reckon with why, we're not serious about education.

We're just serious about talking about it.