I'm a teacher and I am tired. There are a lot of reasons I'm tired, but at least one of them is avoidable: I'm tired of articles by journalists that misunderstand, misrepresent, or simplify why teachers are fed up, and why we're quitting in droves. Perhaps the problem is that they're not interviewing actual teachers, because we're too busy to talk to them? So, instead, journalists speculate. They speculate that teachers are quitting because of federal paperwork, because that's the enduring legacy of No Child Left Behind, right? That we're quitting because kids these days are too exhausting, because everyone loves complaining about how
kids these days are unmotivated, socially clue-less, and out of control. Or (this one makes me laugh) they speculate that we're quitting because of culture wars, as if teachers are actually going to undermine the content, quality, or veracity of what they teach no matter how many parents get dragged out of school board meetings.
No one seems to get the simple fact that we're leaving because we're tired of being overworked. It's both that simple as that to diagnose, and as difficult as that to fix.
Think about this: Every year new expectations get added to teacher "to do" list with no provisions made for the extra time or effort required to implement them. (In Washington, these initiatives have a name - they're called "unfunded mandates.") What's 15 extra minutes every day, more or less?
The problem: while new expectations continue to get added, the old ones never go away. I've been a teacher for 15years. At the rate of one new initiative per year, 15 extra minutes per day, this means I'm now working - at a minimum - 3.75hrs longer per day than at the beginning of my career.
That's on top of the 8hrs I spend in the building and the extra10-15 extra "off the clock" hours per week that every teacher has always been expected to sacrifice to the cause of teaching.
Over 17 more hours per week, and we're not just talking about temporary "crunch times," as may be common in other careers - a push to finish out a contract, a surge to complete work by the end of a fiscal year - but a never-ending, never-relenting expectation that we put in 65-70hr every week for 10 months out of the year. Without a hope that the load will ever lighten, and with the entirely realistic expectation that the load will only continue to increase in future. If we were getting lawyer or doctor pay, the hours might just be worth it. But we all know that that's not the case here.
The obvious solution is to lighten the load by terminating previous initiatives. If only it were that easy. The problem we face is that the vast majority of these new initiatives are genuinely worthy. Thanks to technology, to research, and to an increased understanding of the science of learning, we're capable of doing a better job of educating students than ever before. Who wants to make cuts that undermine the effectiveness of teaching?
Let's play a game. You get to be the Superintendent of a major school district. You're desperate to stop the hemorrhage of qualified teachers leaving the profession - and leaving your classrooms in the hands of high-school educated "monitors" who's reading levels may be lower than the students they're supervising. Which of the following services do you cut?
1. Online teaching. It's great that we're moving more teaching online, since students are going to be living in an online world. But who's transitioning all those traditional pen-and-paper activities to online activities? Updating them to accommodate constant upgrades in platforms and apps? And then constantly transitioning them to different platforms and apps as school systems jump from vendor to vendor? TEACHERS.
2. Preparing our students for 21st century careers. It's great that we're finally focused on the importance of teaching 21st century skills. At last someone has figured out that potential employers almost never ask "So, when did the Civil War begin and end?" but they often do ask "tell me about a time you had to collaborate with peers to analyze a problem and come up with a solution." But who's designing all those student inquiry-directed learning activities that are replacing worksheets and textbooks? Who's infusing the curriculum with mini-lessons on collaboration, creative and critical thinking, communication, resiliency/risk-taking, growth mindset, and ethics? And who's replacing all those old multiple-choice tests with syntheses, analyses, and reflections ... and who's grading them? TEACHERS.
3. Constantly adopting new/better "best practices." For instance, it's great that we're shifting our emphasis to mastery based learning, ensuring that no child is "left behind," but that they receive whatever remediation they require to master the content. But who's providing the specific, individualized feedback required for students to identify their academic gaps? Who's designing and delivering the remediation to fill those gaps? And who's grading all those extra assessments? TEACHERS.
4. Increasing our outreach to parents. It's great that we're becoming more proactive about forming relationships with parents. But who's creating and maintaining those online parent/student portals (often updating them several times throughout a single day)? Rounding up interpreters in order to communicate with parents who speak different languages? Responding to parent emails and phone calls in a timely and professional manner, regardless of whether the requests are appropriate, reasonable, or polite? TEACHERS
5. Improving the legal protections that ensure students receive a Fair and Equal education. It's great that we're putting in place protections to ensure that our special needs students receive the services that they are entitled to. IEPs and 504s are supposed to protect those rights, but every time a new story breaks about the abuses of some bad actor (school district, particular school, etc.), more (and more, and more) layers of protection are required. And who's responsibility is it to ensure that all those layers of protection are scrupulously enforced? To maintain all the appropriate paperwork, to gather proof of progress against goals, to attend meetings? TEACHERS (particularly special education teachers).
6. Improving the supports we are able to provide to students with disabilities. It's great that we're constantly improving how we use technology to scaffold common student disabilities such as attention deficits, organizational deficits, and reading/writing deficits. Fonts designed to help dyslexics read, apps that "ding" every 2mins to remind students to remain on task, automated checklists to keep ADHD kids organized, speech-to-text and text-to-speech apps that make reading and writing tasks accessible to all! But who's job is it to keep track of all these newly available scaffolds? Match them to the students that can most benefit from them? Teach students how to use them, and then ensure that students are utilizing them? Measure their effectiveness? TEACHERS (specifically, special ed teachers).
7. Infusing our curriculum with SEL. It's great that we've finally acknowledged that we need to be valuing and supporting the social and emotional learning (SEL) of our students as well. But who's stuck trying to monitor the social-emotional health of 120 students while simultaneously teaching their content? Who's instruction time is constrained when school districts forbid new instruction on religious holidays, and then recognizes 13 days as religious holidays? Who's responsible for modifying instruction to ensure that it includes opportunities to validate the cultural experiences of a multicultural classroom? TEACHERS.
8. Scrubbing our systems to ensure equality and social justice. It's great that we're finally addressing traditional inequalities in the way we educate, test, and discipline students in "at risk" categories. But who's changing up the curriculum to infuse best practices for teaching our students who may be living in poverty, learning English as a second language, or who are members of underserved minorities? Who's attending hours of professional required to learn, exchange, and grow these new strategies? Who's scrubbing the data to ensure that these new strategies are working? And who's instructional time is sacrificed when teachers are increasingly expected to utilize such techniques as "restorative justice" to deal with students who are persistently tardy, disrupt the classroom, or interfere with the learning of others ? TEACHERS.
9. Providing more individualized education based on data. It's great that we're finally centralizing student information so that all the info we need about their lives, their academic abilities, their behaviours, activities, strengths, weaknesses, accommodations, special needs and parent communications are all easily accessible in one place. But who's inputting all that data into these systems? Who's delivering all that standardized testing and logging all those anecdotal inputs? And who's expected to take the time to peruse all the data and use it to differentiate instruction for individual students? TEACHERS.
10. Training our teachers to be ready to cope with a whole new host of threats, dangers & crises. It's great that we're doing a better job of preparing teachers to handle crises such as active shooters, worsening weather, students in the throes of various medical crisis (soooo many allergies!), and pandemics. But who's instructional time is robbed to make time for an ever-increasing number of required safety drills and professional trainings? Who's spending more time than ever working their way through mandatory trainings on asthma/epilepsy/diabetes/hypoglycemia? Who's investing dozens of hours figuring out how to cope with the altered reality of pandemic instruction? TEACHERS.
Well, Superintendent? Which of the above are you willing to give up? As a teacher, a parent, and a concerned citizen of the U.S., I'm not willing to give up any of them. But neither can we expect the current system to endure. We can't keep loading new expectations onto teachers without dealing with the consequences of those expectations.
Teachers are tired. Their work-life balance is a joke. They're not getting paid nearly enough to motivate them to remain. And so they're leaving. In multitudes. And the exodus is going to continue unless things change.
I don't claim to have any answers, but I imagine any plausible solution set will have to include at least some of the following:
1. We're going to need more bodies in buildings. We need more adults in classroom - co-teachers, ELL support teachers, special ed teachers, IAs, and qualified subs - to help deliver content, provide differentiation, assess learning and deliver interventions. Also more adults - psychologists, social workers, mentors, and special education case workers - to work one on one with students who need extra social, emotional, or behavioural supports in order to be able to participate meaningfully in classroom instruction. We need more school security and safety personal to perform oversight duties (supervise bus/cafeteria/halls, oversee restorative justice conferences) that rob teachers of valuable planning time. Finally, we need more parent volunteers, mentors, and tutors to work with students after school to provide additional resources for intervention. At this point I'm not sure any amount of money is going to be enough to attract the quantity and quality of teachers we're going to need into the future, but one thing we can do is address work-life imbalances by shortening the number of hours that teacher work in a week.
2. We need to be finding new ways to form school/parent/community partnerships. We're going to need a much more effective and equitable way to involve parents and communities. If we can't get more adults into the building, then we need to be recruiting more adults outside of the building to perform the essential functions listed above.
3. We're going to need more IT support, and a little restraint. We're teachers, not graphic organizers, apps creators, or systems engineers. Some of us couldn't even figure out how to use copiers. We need IT support personnel in every school to help troubleshoot hardware and apps; but more than that, we need IT coaches that can help teachers move content online, optimize blended learning to deliver learning and assessment as efficiently as possible, and identify opportunities to leverage learning through tech. Finally, we need school districts to stop switching out classroom management apps every 2-3yrs! Each time there's a switch, teachers spend dozens of hours porting work from one platform to another. What a ridiculous - and totally avoidable - waste of time. We get that the salesmen at educational company are really good at convincing Superintendents that they need more capability than they have, but what use are bells and whistles when no one has the time to use them?
4. We should be rethinking curriculum priorities. Are we using what precious classroom hours we have on the right things? The world is changing; shouldn't our curriculum be changing too? For instance, why are we still insisting that students memorize a foreign language, in a world where universal translators sell for $100? Would classes that focus on global issues/understandings rather than global languages give us more time to focus on 21st century skills, student-based inquiry, SEL, equity, and social justice? Should we be rethinking about how we might repurpose some PE time to focus on mindfulness and other practices that support not just physical health, but also social and emotional health? Most of all, we need to be sure we're sticking to data-proven best practices and not allow ourselves to be distracted by educational fads being promoted by educational consultants marketing their latest bestseller
As I say, I don't claim to have any answers, but I do have one prediction: if we don't figure out a way to lighten the load on teachers, and do it soon, the mass exodus is going to continue.
