Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Morale among teachers fluctuates the same way it does in any workplace. Sometimes it’s rooted in local conditions. Over the years my colleagues and I have spent stretches down in the dumps. At other times our spirits were high, even when we were suffering the normal volume of problem students and bureaucratic stupidities.
I don’t presume to speak for other teachers or other school faculties. It appears to me, however, that owing to our metastasizing impotence in the face of disruptive, dangerous students, and even more to the pernicious edicts of arrogant, incompetent policymakers and officials who visit schools and classrooms but don’t work in them, many of my colleagues, many good teachers, people I know, novices and veterans, are growing daily more desperate.
They’re edging closer to becoming a statistic.
The statistic varies from survey to survey, but a leading authority on teacher longevity estimates that “between 40 and 50 percent” leave by the end of their fifth year. Recent federal data reckons that nearly one in five quit after four years, a figure judged “too low” by some of the study’s authors. Either way, that’s a lot of teacher casualties.
The Washington Post recently spotlighted why teachers “leave the profession in droves.” The Post’s guest commentator, a teacher with eight years of classroom experience, begins by noting that our daily planning and correcting chores mean our days don’t end at three o’clock just because our students go home. In addition, many of us have to work through our high profile summer vacations so we can pay the bills.
This isn’t a reason to feel sorry for teachers. It does mean, though, that our wage and hour situation isn’t as rosy as it might seem “on paper” to regular citizens. The strains of a teacher’s daily regimen also surprise many beginning teachers and explain why some of them decide to drop out.
Most workers, however, have felt at one time or another that they were working too much and getting paid too little. The Post’s guest commentator focuses on five other, more qualitative explanations for why teachers leave.
The first reason she simply labels “reality,” the jarring collision between beginning teachers’ “mistaken sense of what is waiting for them in the classroom” and what’s really there. She attributes this slap in the face in part to the “inspiring” stories fed them by their “idealistic professors.”
Since most education professors either never taught or left the classroom long ago, their inspiration and instruction are predictably poor preparation for real life with real students. This was true when I took education classes 40 years ago. Yes, “teachers in training need more time in real classrooms” and “seasoned mentors” to help them in their first years. They also “need less theory and more hands-on experience.” Unfortunately, theory is all that most teacher training programs and professors have to offer. Even worse, those theories pass in and out of fashion faster than hemlines.
My responsibilities rightly include correcting students’ work and reporting their progress to their parents. As for the rest of my paperwork, including all the grandiose action plans, improvement plans, and curriculum plans, I don’t want more school time to do it.
The commentator next addresses the “lack of respect” given teachers by the media, “parents, principals, and central office workers.” She asserts that “in no other profession is a college-educated individual questioned, second-guessed, and blamed” the way teachers are.
Lots of people feel disrespected at work, regardless of what we do for a living. Partly this is because we no longer expect civility from one another. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration; he’s an epitome. However, in the education arena everybody’s been empowered except teachers. Parents can say what they want to us in the most vulgar terms. Even students can. And there’s no end to the condescending pronouncements that issue from central office staff. Everybody’s an expert on teaching except teachers.
“Overwhelming paperwork” is third on the commentator’s list. She details the reports, plans, and miscellaneous documentation that teachers are required to complete, concedes that this “paperwork will never go away,” and proposes that we be given more planning time during the day to deal with it.
My responsibilities rightly include correcting students’ work and reporting their progress to their parents. As for the rest of my paperwork, including all the grandiose action plans, improvement plans, and curriculum plans, I don’t want more school time to do it. I want the bureaucrats who hatch it to acknowledge its pervasive pointlessness, even if that means acknowledging their own pointlessness. I want them to justify what they do before they require me to justify what I do.
The Post’s teacher reports that some students don’t care and don’t make an effort, but there’s hardly anything new about children and adolescents who abstain from learning. She’s right, though, that it’s absurd to judge her performance based on their resulting standardized test scores, a stab at “accountability” that is new.
Her proposed solution, however, likewise misplaces accountability. She wants “stakeholders,” meaning “teachers, parents, and administrators,” to find “new ways to engage” those students, to remake “the school experience” so students “respect their teachers” and have “relevant reasons to engage.”
Some teachers are incompetent, and others, through their conduct, have sacrificed respect, but that’s not generally the problem. Schools need to stop doing backflips to accommodate students’ bad behavior and apathy.
The commentator’s final lament is that budget cuts mean teachers never know if they’ll have a job next year. She’s right, but the fact is we enjoy more job security than the average worker. On the other hand, it is easier to fire a teacher than most people think. It’s also increasingly true that teachers who question the latest touted initiative commonly incur administrative wrath. Many teachers labor in a climate of threats and intimidation.
Some disheartened teachers leave to teach somewhere else in the hope that somewhere else will be different. Others just give up altogether and resolve to make their living another way. Many who remain are hampered in their efforts by their despair.
Their various departures from our school have left it a poorer place and cost our students dearly.
Attrition is a fact of life in every enterprise. It would be normal and arguably beneficial if the least effective teachers were the ones who were leaving. But if education’s appointed leaders are driving out the best, the brightest, the teachers who hold their vocation most dear, then maybe those leaders are the ones who should be leaving.
Parents, citizens, and school boards: Take notice.
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