When I decided to be a teacher, more than thirty-five years ago, the profession looked very different than it does today. Being a teacher meant making a difference in the lives of children. It meant contributing to the community. It was, and still is, a noble profession.
Today is a different matter. Today, teachers are under attack. From testing to budget issues to Betsy DeVos’s move toward school vouchers, a teacher’s job is quite different than it was when I entered the profession more than three decades ago.
Why would a student, accumulating thousands of dollars in college debt, take a job that pays so little and has so many headaches? How long might it take a newly minted teacher to pay back all the loans? What emotional and mental costs might come with a career in education?
We are going to face horrible teacher shortages in the coming years. There will still be some wonderful and dynamic teachers entering the profession. However, there will be fewer and fewer of them – and many will leave the profession in their first few years.
It is already happening. More than half of all new teachers last less than five years in the classroom. There are more former teachers in the workforce than those in the classroom.
Why are they leaving? Why are fewer students training to be teachers? This is not difficult to figure out.
Whether it is in high poverty schools or schools with demanding parents, it is difficult to be a teacher. While we often talk about addressing the mental health needs of students, we rarely think about the emotional and physical strains of their teachers.
Whether its parents who “lawyer up,” yell, scream, threaten, and rush to defend students who need to face the consequences of their actions, or parents trying desperately to make ends meet, teachers must cope with the constellation of family issues that rock their students. Over entitled or under-resourced, teachers get to be part social worker, part diplomat, part case manager and then are evaluated on their students’ test scores.
No wonder there are many schools that are stuffing classrooms to the brims or finding any warm body to babysit classes without a trained teacher. This is a situation we are going to see more and more as an aging teacher population retires. People my age represent a disproportionate percentage of today’s teachers.
Let’s assume that we still have some saints who are willing to sacrifice all and go into the trenches, I mean classrooms, and help kids learn. What happens to them when they get there? Who will support them? Will we talk about teachers’ mental health needs? How will we keep them in the profession?
These new teachers will be buffeted by the political and social forces that are testing teachers right now. They will be judged based on tests, handcuffed into scripted curricula, and then will have to compensate for all the social ills that plague society in general, but schools in particular. Then, they will burn out.
I watch my colleagues spend far too much of their precious time dealing with everything except education – and I taught in a privileged school.
Without teachers, we cannot have schools. If every child cannot attend a public school, what happens to our nation? If only the wealthy can afford a quality education for their children, what do we become? If teacher shortages mean that public schools become banks of computer monitors and babysitters, what is our future?
We need to rethink teachers’ experience. We need to revolutionize our public school system. And I have not heard anyone provide a viable solution.
Some of my sources and further reading:
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