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More teachers are leaving their jobs. Can anyone really blame them? [1]
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Date: 2023-03-07
Teachers leaving the field at an increased rate combines with existing shortfalls. Public sector jobs were left behind in the strong job growth of 2022. “State and local government employment is still 2.3% below pre-pandemic levels as state agencies, school districts, and local governments have struggled to fill vacancies—a result of low pay, cuts to benefits, increasing demands, and other factors,” the Economic Policy Institute's Nina Mast and Daniel Perez wrote, and, critically, “More than half of the remaining jobs shortfall is in public education jobs, a long-standing shortage exacerbated by the pandemic.”
We’re looking at multiple factors crashing together: an existing teacher shortage, lagging hiring after the crash of the pandemic, attacks on teachers, attacks on public schools, additional stresses for teachers in helping students whose lives are marked by the pandemic. Staffing shortages tend to feed staffing shortages, piling stresses on teachers until they leave, creating worse staffing shortages.
And Republicans have been unrelenting in their attacks on teachers and public schools, creating an environment of fear and intimidation around the teaching of or talk about race, LGBTQ issues, and more. In one Ohio classroom, a school district official put a stop to discussion of a 1961 Dr. Seuss book chosen for inclusion in an NPR podcast because the students started drawing lessons about race and racism from the book. (Which, again, was written in 1961. By Dr. Seuss.)
They’re not stopping. A Montana Republican recently proposed a law banning the teaching of “scientific theory” from schools. (Gravity is a theory.) Florida passed a “don’t say gay” law and other state legislators and congressional Republicans have proposed copycat bills. It goes on and on and on.
Those attacks and new laws then send a message to parents that they can and should complain aggressively about anything they do not like in the schools. Another RAND Corporation survey found that teachers were more afraid of parents than of lawmakers.
“I feel like I have a sword over my head and any parent is able to cut the string if they disagree with the curriculum, for legitimate reasons or not,” one teacher said. A high school math teacher said, “The constant reminders at department and staff meetings about the vicious social media posts on a community Facebook page and how it could affect our school’s public image and ultimately our employment has made me less courageous to embrace these topics during instruction. I am not in a financial position to be brave about this at the current time.”
Then there’s the burnout. “We do too much with too little and for too little,” a teacher told CBS News last year, explaining why she was taking a break from the profession. “We just don't have enough support and resources to make things right.”
There’s also the teacher pay penalty, which hit a new high in 2021, with teachers earning 25.5% less than other college graduates.
It’s no wonder that teachers are leaving. It’s more remarkable that so many are staying. But the departures and the oversized effort it takes to stay both need to change. Educating the nation’s children is too important to allow teacher turnover and school staffing shortages to become a self-perpetuating crisis. That means increased pay and benefits and time to prepare lessons. It means pushing back, hard, against attacks on teaching history or literature that make some (white) people uncomfortable. It means keeping books on shelves and allowing teachers to support their students. It’s not rocket science, what needs to happen. But it does take political willpower, and too often these days the political willpower seems to be concentrated on the far right.
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