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In this third and final installment of our interview, Eggers announces his plans to create a new documentary depicting the professional lives of teachers. (You heard it here first.)

Eggers and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Vanessa Roth are collaborating on a film they hope will do for teaching what An Inconvenient Truth did for the environment. Featuring footage taken by teachers themselves, the film aims to offer a first-hand view of the challenges educators face every day--and to inspire greater public support for teachers' work.

Eggers' advocacy for public schools and educators took center stage at the TED (Technology, Education, Design) Conference, where "the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration." (No, I wasn't invited.) At TED, Eggers introduced Once Upon a School, a new project that shares stories about communities supporting public education and challenges adults across the country to become involved in their local public schools.

Below, read a transcript of Eggers describing his forthcoming documentary project and Once Upon a School in part III of Public School Insights' exclusive interview. (You can also see previous installments of this interview:

• Part I: Every Child a Writer. Eggers describes 826 National, the network of community-based centers he co-founded to help students with their expository and creative writing skills [read the transcript here]:
• Part II: Motivating Reluctant Writers. Eggers describes his strategies for getting students excited about writing [read the transcript here])

PART III INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  Is there any work on your horizon you would like the public education community to hear about?

EGGERS:  There is one thing in particular.  We're trying to make the book Teachers Have It Easy: The Great Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers into a documentary, because it would be even better illustrated on film.  It's going to have a point, which is teacher's salaries.

About a year ago, we asked a bunch of different teachers across the country to film their day‑to‑day lives and do a video diary and tell us about it.  We've been getting some phenomenal stuff. At the same time, we've been trying to raise money and get a real project underway for the fall to finance and film this movie. It would follow the same format as the book, where we are really just explaining to people the day‑to‑day lives of public school teachers across the country, because everybody thinks they know what it is to be a teacher: "Oh, I was in school.  I know what it was like"-which is insane.

And Vanessa Roth, who just won an Oscar in the Short Subject just a month ago or so, is on board to direct this documentary.

I think the thing that pleased me most about the book was this comparison that we had between a teacher's day and that of a pharmaceutical salesman who was making double what the teacher's salary was.  [It illustrated] how the hours aren't always [a teacher's].  A pharmaceutical salesman can decide when during his calls he is going to stop at Starbucks, check his e‑mail, and play a little video game on his computer, and when he gets to go to the bathroom-all of these different things that the average public school teacher doesn't have the luxury of dictating when and where he or she is going to do.  And then, of course, the basic "going-to-the-bathroom" problem...When does that happen?

I can't wait to see this on film, to compare the two days.  Again, this is one of the things that people don't know, but once they do see these things on film, I think it's going to be a real breakthrough.  We're actually hoping that this would be a tipping point moment, like An Inconvenient Truth, [where] people will say, "Oh, my God, what are we doing?  There it is.  You know, I never saw it like that.  And of course [teachers should be making] $80,000, but how about more?"

Right now, we're actually going to start a website that you'll be able to find through 826 National. We'll be looking to raise money from actual people, not through big corporations or anything like that.  We're actually going to raise the money on the street, so to speak, and [through] little donations-the same way that you would donate to a candidate if you believe in that candidate...if you have 5 or 10 dollars.  We're going to raise the money that way.

I'm 100‑percent sure that we'll do so and that this thing will start filming in the fall.  We'll use found footage that teachers send us, and we will also be following four teachers throughout the year. 

 It's up to somebody else to talk about computers and every other sort of angle that one can come at it from, but our feeling is that if you start with salaries and you can retain all the best teachers, these people who might leave in the first five years...Since we have been at 826 here in San Francisco over the last six years, all but one of the first group of astounding teachers that we worked with and learned from have left.  Ands they're all under 35.  They have all left the profession to go into educational software or real estate, or they work at Google, or all of these [other] things.  What do we need to do to retain them?

The movie and the book focus a lot on one guy, Jonathan Dearman, who is on our board now.  He left teaching to do real estate, and he's the best teacher anyone ever saw here in San Francisco.  He had to leave [teaching] to raise his family and buy a house-San Francisco is an expensive place to live.  So how do we keep the best teachers teaching?

And then, if everyone is still teaching, is happy, feels valued, and is given the freedom to be a creative professional...I think that the other problems are small, compared to that.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  Tell me about "Once Upon a School."

EGGERS:  That came out of this TED conference that takes place every year in Monterrey, and that's a gathering of maybe 2,000 technology, entertainment, and design minds-and they gave me the chance to make a wish.  And I wished that all of those people and their organizations and companies would find ways to help the public schools in their neighborhood.

So they helped start this website called OnceUponaSchool.org, which is trying to collect a thousand stories of these kinds of partnerships, new and old.  Right now we're really just trolling around for inspiring stories and telling them on the website. Eventually there will be, I hope, hundreds of new [stories]  where people see what other people have done and say, "Oh yeah.  I want to do something like that." And maybe they'll sponsor a book at their local school or an arts program, or they'll build a computer lab and maintain it-things like that.  Until that day when teachers start at $80,000 and go from there, we need to help [them] wherever they need it.