30+ Reasons Teachers Feel Disrespected

Wondering why teachers are leaving the profession like rats abandoning a sinking ship? The answer can be summed up in one word: DISRESPECT.  Teachers have always endured a modicum of disrespect, but the separate sources of disrespect have exponentially multiplied over the past few years. Here are just a few of the reasons teachers aren't feeling a whole lot of love just now ....

1. Our pay is not commensurate with other professionals who are expected to acquire an equivalent amount of education. In addition to a college degree in the content area we intend to teach, most districts require that we obtain a teaching degree. In most other fields a masters degree earns you more money; in teaching, however, it's seen as a prerequisite for accepting even the lowest paid positions. Try explaining that to your college loan company.
2. Our pay often fails to provide a living wage. It's hard to feel respected when people don't seem to care that we can't actually live on what we're paid
3. Our pay raises are at the whim of local governments.  Unlike other careers, where raises are generally consistent, teachers live in a constant state of uncertainty. Often, our salaries are "frozen" for years at a time, or even slashed. Oh, and forget the concept of "reward for effort." There is absolutely zero link between job performance and renumeration - no matter how hard we work, no matter how brilliant we are, our renumeration will be based solely on our years of service.  
4. Being expected to either pay for the supplies we need out of our own pocket or to do without. Are nurses required to buy PJs for their patients? Are waiters expected to supply their customers' tableware? Why are teachers expected to buy pencils, erasers, notebooks, etc. so that their students can participate in learning? 
5. Politicians using teachers to score points by accusing us of all manner of improprieties: liberal agendas, grooming, godlessness. I get that one of the cheapest ways to win votes is to make voters afraid of something and then promising to fix it, but teachers are tired of being the bogeymen in this scenario. 
6. Politicians and school boards treating us as engines of indoctrination. Teachers have ethics, standards, and measures of professionalism, one of the most important of which is that we teach actual truth. Teach "alternative facts" at home if you must, but stop demanding (at the risk of firing) that teachers engage in this sort of indoctrination.
7. Politicians feeling free to trade our actual lives for a few votes. Nothing makes a teacher feel valued like being told that their lives are worth less than someone's political career. 
8. Politicians who think that education can be run like a commercial venture, disregarding the fact that no commercial venture on earth is required to entirely disregard the quality of their raw materials while simultaneously guaranteeing the quality of 100% of the product
9. Politicians who compare charter schools to public schools, pretending that this is an apples to apples comparison in spite of the proven disparities in hours spent per student, parent engagement, and student ability/motivation
10. Citizens who claim they value education, but then consistently vote against school bonds or taxes that would fund education
11. Students who, having learned their social skills from social media trolls during Covid, feel empowered to treat their teachers with profound disrespect
12. Working conditions that range from uncomfortable (broken windows that let in heat/cold) to dangerous (mold)
13. Virtually no protection from abuse (cursing, physical harm, stalking) at the hand of students or parents
14. Reformers (especially eccentric tech billionaires) who believe that they understand education better than thousands of actual professional educators
15. Reformers who believe that there's a "one size fits all" approach that will work for all students, disregarding the frankly obvious fact that no two kids learn the same way
16. Reformers who think that standardized tests are accurate measures of student ability
17. School administrators who force us to adopt their "educational fad of the year" (often tied to the latest educational best-seller), regardless of the whether data exists to prove that the method is in any way superior to practices currently in place.
18. School administrators who that micro-manage their staff. Too many administrators seem to assume that their job is to tell teachers how to do their job rather than facilitate the ability of teachers to do their job. Teachers deserve to be treated as the competent professionals that they are, not junior sales associates. 
19. School administrators who continue to saddle teachers with new responsibilities (address learning loss, transition to blended learning, teach SEL, do more data analysis, etc.) while failing to relieve us of the burden of existing responsibilities. Teachers are resilient, but all humans have limits. You simply cannot keep piling bricks on a horse and expect it to keep moving forward (much less at a gallop). 
20. School administrators who refuse our requests for days off because they can't find subs. I'm not just talking about vacations here ... I'm talking about teachers being denied the leave they need to receive critical care, teachers who have been denied leave for important family events (like graduations), teachers who have been asked to provide sub plans *while in labor.*  Politicians playing with our lives is bad enough; admins refusing to let us live our lives, a whole different level of disrespect.
21. School administrators who expect us to constantly do more with less ... like spending more time building relationships with students while simultaneously increasing our class sizes, or requiring that we use new technology while taking away the professional development days we need to learn how to use new apps.
22. Members of the general public who treat teachers like we're getting paid to do nothing over the summer. The vast majority of us are on contracts that pay us for exactly the number of days that we work and no more. Moreover, we often spend our summers engaged in entirely un-renumerated school-related work, like redesigning lesson plans or engaging in professional development
23. Members of the general public that treat teachers' unions as if their purpose for being is to promote political agendas instead of ensuring that teachers are treated fairly. Apparently teaching being the one career where teachers - lousy, lazy, coddled bums that they are - deserve all the exploitation they get?
24. Parents who treat us as free daycare, unwilling to support their students' education in any way. At least pretend to take your child's future as seriously as we do.
25. Helicopter parents who treat us like idiots or assume we have some sort grudge against their students.  We especially appreciate the incivility of parents who send daily emails that rob us of our planning time, who expect us to provide their students with free one-on-one tutoring, or who expect us to respond to their communiques evenings & weekends.
26. Parents with unrealistic expectations: who expect us to "cure" their childrens' learning disabilities, teach them manners, oversee their social lives, or ensure that their child receives a degree even if they were absent 70% of instructional periods. 
27. A general underappreciation for the actual number of hours that teachers work in the course of a week. You're tired after your 40 day workweek? Try 10hr days + another 8hrs of grading or admin work over the weekend ... ~60hrs per week. And those hours don't come out of TV time - most teachers have to carve them out of "hide": time that they could have been spending with their own children and families.
28. A general underappreciation for the huge amount of extra-curricular skills we are expected to teach: social skills, career skills, administration functioning, self-regulation, manners, leadership, responsibility, citizenship, resiliency ....
29. People who genuinely think that "those who can't do, teach" or who assume that teaching requires no particular skill - that, in fact, any veteran or "Teach for America" college graduate can do it. Imagine the humiliation of being repeatedly told that the job you trained your whole life to perform could be done just as well by amateurs.
30. People who think teachers shouldn't care about material things because our reward is the satisfaction of "making a difference in the life of a child." We're human beings, not martyrs. We may enjoy our jobs, but we're not interested in sacrificing our lives to the needs of other people's students.
31. People who tell us we're stupid to have become teachers, and that if we're disrespected then it's no more than we deserve for being foolish enough to have chosen teaching over more lucrative careers. Not all careers are measured by financial reward.