textarea not displaying text from channel

I’m creating a front-end form for logged in users to edit their entry. Everything is working fine except for the text area. If I render it in the most basic format like this:

<textarea>This is test text</textarea> = works fine <textarea>{teaser_text}</textarea = will not display the text. As soon as I add the brackets, it wont render the text. Looking at the source code also shows no text.

I do have a rich text field right below it, and that is working, although I had to add:

[removed][removed]

to the page to get it to work.

Any idea how to get the textarea to display text from the channel?