Teacher shortages are a national problem. According to a recent survey, the number one reason teachers give for leaving the profession—55 percent of them—is dissatisfaction. By comparison, financial considerations are cited by 18 percent. Between the top and bottom are Financial/personal reasons, Retirement, and Pursuing another job, in that order.
This isn’t new news. It’s from the 2012 School and Staffing Survey put together by the National Center for Educational Statistics along with a follow-up survey in 2013. It came up again in a recent panel discussion in Washington DC, and sadly, it’s more relevant today than it was five years ago. As with any survey, the numbers are approximate. General dissatisfaction covers low salaries as well as a host of other issues, and in a place like Arizona with its bottom-of-the-barrel salaries, money concerns certainly rank higher than elsewhere.
But as a teacher who retired just when our national obsession with high stakes testing was revving up and class sizes were climbing, I’m certain a growing sense of dissatisfaction pervades the teaching profession, driving many a gifted teacher out of the classroom and making potential new teachers think twice about going into the field of education.
When I went into teaching and began my 30-plus year career, it was because I wanted to teach. I wanted to be part of helping young people learn. I wanted to be part of helping young people grow. I wanted the freedom to shape my curriculum in a way that suited my interests and teaching style so I could maximize my enthusiasm and effectiveness.
And, God, I loved the “Aha!” moment, when a student or a group of students or an entire classroom got it, and it showed on their faces. It was twice as pleasurable when the “Aha!” came from students who weren’t used to experiencing moments like that in the classroom. If there’s one thing I miss most about teaching, it’s that.
I didn’t go into education to teach students how to improve their scores on a standardized, fill-in-the-bubble test. I never wanted to be a classroom drill sergeant who puts students through their paces, showing them how to perform on a limited, regimented series of tasks. That’s drudgery for the students and for me. Where’s the potential for joy, where’s the sense of discovery for any of us, student or teacher?
I didn’t want the pressure of having my performance as a teacher measured by my students’ performance on a high stakes test. There’s plenty of genuine pressure on teachers, standing in front of a class full of students every day and trying your damnedest to help them learn. Hitting the scoring mark with students who bring a whole host of problems and needs and gifts into the classroom which should be addressed, except we’ve got to get through all these drills and pretests so there’s no time to deviate from the curriculum set by the need to succeed on the test, that’s not the kind of pressure I signed up for.
Did I mention increasing class sizes? I found I could teach to 25 individual students. Give me more than that, and some of them are going to get lost in the crowd — and crowd control becomes a larger part of my job.
Did I mention the campaign to turn the public against teachers, blaming societal problems on the people who see the products of those problems walk into the classroom every day, then see them leave the classrooms and walk back into those same problems? Someone said trying to fix schools without dealing with the problems in the outside world is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door. Teachers used to be respected. Until the mid-1990s, when I told people I was a teacher they looked at me with a certain regard, sometimes even reverence. Then it changed. I began hearing what was wrong with teachers, which was pretty much everything. I felt like I was supposed to apologize for . . . for what? For being a teacher, I guess.
I imagine some college students considering what profession to follow, people who might otherwise be inclined to teach, remember the test-driven classrooms they spent so much time in and hear teachers trashed instead of respected, and wonder why in the world they would want to spend their professional lives in that world.
Having said all that, there’s a good chance that if I were a college student today, I’d still opt to teach. Fortunately, lots of people feel the same way, but not enough to replace teachers who are leaving.
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2017.
You talk about society turning against teachers, class sizes, performance testing — but not the biggest problem in education today … disengaged parents who demand that teachers do their jobs for them.
Parental responsibility – a necessary force in student education – is largely non existent today.
I am waiting for the hate TUSD (including Huppenthal) trolls to arrive, so readily with DS columns, and start ridiculing. Teaching is not an easy job and it continues to get harder on many levels, some which are never seen by the public. Most teachers deserve better because they work hard (some do construction in the summer), they must tolerate disrespect from know-it-alls who know little about the day-to-day pressures, and they work in a state close to number 50 in every area of support for their work. And all this happens after they must go though years of preparatory studies, at least for now.
I am waiting for the hate TUSD (including Huppenthal) trolls to arrive, so readily with DS columns, and start ridiculing. Teaching is not an easy job and it continues to get harder on many levels, some which are never seen by the public. Most teachers deserve better because they work hard (some do construction in the summer), they must tolerate disrespect from know-it-alls who know little about the day-to-day pressures, and they work in a state close to number 50 in every area of support for their work. All this happens after they must go though years of preparatory studies, at least for now.
This was my experience when considering switching to elementary education as an alternate career track, and that was back during the Shrub Administration (first term). I can only imagine the environment has worsened since then.
In reply to Commenter #1 (that’s a really rude handle, just by the by): Disengaged parents need to be re-engaged, not blamed. If you want better parents, give them the support and resources they need: subsidized health care (physical and mental), subsidized quality child care for parents who work outside the home, more parenting classes, economic opportunities (more jobs, better wages), and more adult education opportunities. Incentives, not punishment, drive performance: that’s basic human psychology. Think of it as using the research-proven tactics in business leadership for the public good.
MrMarkAZ – Everything you are saying is precisely whats wrong with the mindset of today … the federal govt should give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give give …. and give some more, until the USA fully transforms into a socialist country like Venezuala …. where people are now eating dog food for dinner.
You have no clue what you are talking about. Disengaged parents should not be blamed, eh? So they have children, but they should take absolutely no responsibility for them?
You are a clueless moron.
It is fascinating that public charter schools pay less to teachers and yet teachers are going to them in droves. Perhaps they like the culture and trade that for pay?
In the last of the 25 annual Metlife surveys, 39% of teachers rated themselves “Very Satisfied” with the teaching profession – meaning that 61% are highly susceptible to a job offer outside of education.
In the most recent large-scale survey of Arizona teachers, the typical teacher estimated that ten of their fellow teachers were going through the motions, not dedicated, not in the zone. You can blame that on money, but the authors found no statistical difference between Arizona and other states, expressing astonishment at that finding.
A different culturally reality is possible. One where classroom test scores and gain in test scores are acknowledged to be the proper measure of academic achievement and associated with success but not the proper feedback for success of the enterprise.
Over the course of 20 years, Chandler has increased its measured relationships by two points a year. The percentage of parents rating it excellent has gone from 38% to 75%. My estimate is that a district can increase by as much as 7 points a year. The Vail district is at 70% but last time I checked, stalled out.
The nation as a whole is at 24%. That is what our current education culture produces and that is what people desperately want to get back to – the old ways.
Optimal systems create intense positive interdependence between all the participants and imbue that interdependence with the purpose of creating value for all the participants.
Our current education system creates intense negative interdependence between students, neutral to negative interdependence between teachers and a complex interdependency between parents and teachers ranging from highly positive to highly negative.
You can design systems to replace that unhealthy mess with completely positive interdependence. However, that would be a different culture and unknowable to people immersed and products of an existing culture.
I am running a classroom where I have created intense positive interdependence between highly at-risk, all minority students with the purpose of practicing math problems. So far this year, my students have performed 262,973 math problems correctly – an average of 9,740 each over the course of 34 class periods.
David, you say that practice is drudgery and I would agree with you absolutely but only under the current classroom design. My students experience joy at knowing they are faster, more fluent, better than they were yesterday. One of my more at-risk students, an English Language Learner, was blunter. She told me that she would only come to school on days where the math program would be operating. She can do 60 problems a minute correctly and she loves it.
Your inspirational lectures are critical but so is practice. That at-risk student can’t close the gap without it. Without it, they are behind and getting further behind. My students don’t need homework. When you do 600 math problems while at school, you’ve done as much as practice can do for you.
And where are teachers least satisfied? Public schools.
What we need is more illegal immigrants and low-wage immigration in general. More people, lower wages, fewer benefits. It’s a recipe for great improvement.
Wow. It is incredible to me that anyone who hasn’t done/isn’t doing the job of teaching even comments. I would hardly consider myself qualified to comment on the techniques a surgeon uses to remove a gall bladder…so I would just shut up about it.
I have taught for 31 years-27 in Arizona. I am now in another state, and the morale and respect for teachers is MUCH higher-as is the pay. Yet I am still the same teacher I was in Arizona-where I didn’t get one penny of a raise for 10 years. One of my very gifted, amazingly talented former colleagues (in Arizona) left the public schools this year-against her wishes. But she received a $10,000 raise, so…. Yeah. It is criminal what is happening to public education-the bedrock, the great equalizer, of our democratic society, in Arizona.
Naomi,
What you say might be true, but it is not measurable on the large-scale measures that we use to take the temperature of education.
In the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, Math scores for the nation fell for the first time in 40 years. Arizona led the nation, number one when comparing 4th-grade test scores to 8th-grade test scores 4 years later.
On the 2015 Gallup survey, parent’s rating of the quality of their child’s school fell nationwide to the 2nd lowest rating in 47 years.
We have any number of districts which hit all-time highs on their internal measurements in 2015, way above the national measurement. Measurements which have been done the same way for more than 20 years.
Quality is more than gains in math and reading scores and an excellent relationship with parents. It’s decent food in the cafeteria, dance classes, history, science and a thousand other things. But, some districts, such as Chandler, are reaching excellence in all these things. And, parents see it.
There is yet another issue, not mentioned in the article, nor addressed in the comments. Our son had to leave school to provide for his family. He returned, received his BA while working at a full time job, has 2 years of classroom experience in Middle School Special Education and Title 1 as a Teaching Assistant, and genuinely wants to teach. He does not have his certification, although that ,according to the state, is not required. He applied to every school district in Tucson and did not even receive one offer. Not even a temporary or probationary opportunity. I may be naive, but a 40+ year old male, with teenage children of his own, willing to teach at any grade level, not a fresh young graduate who may barely be older than the students to be taught, would seem to be a pretty decent commodity. So, the school districts can gripe all they want, but when someone who wants to work in a less than desirable profession gets no consideration, the districts are equally culpable.
Doug Martin, I can’t respond to your statement that teachers are going to charter schools “in droves.” I don’t know what the nature of teacher shortages are at Arizona’s charter schools, if they exist. Maybe you have information I don’t which you can share. But here are some facts to put your statement in perspective.
You don’t need a credential to teach at a charter school, and never have. So far as I know, there are no education requirements in state law. That means charters can draw from a larger pool of people, making it easier to find teachers.
Charter school teachers leave more frequently than district school teachers. At many charters, there is a very high turnover rate. That doesn’t sound like the teachers have found a wonderful place to teach.
Teach For America is a program which takes college grads straight out of school, gives them a six week summer training course and puts them in teaching positions in district and charter schools around the country. The purpose of TFA has been to help supply teachers to underserved schools, mainly those with children from low income families. Over the past few years, TFA has become tightly connected to the charter school network. Though nationally charters educate something like 7 to 8 percent of students, more than 30 percent of TFA teachers go to work at charters. If charters had an easy time attracting teachers, it doesn’t make sense that, proportionately, 4 times more TFA teachers end up at charters than at district schools.
Meanwhile back at the TUSD ranch, let’s take a look at what drives teachers away.
http://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/pueblo-hs-principal-suspended-without-pay-
Teaching in public schools requires people like Safier who eloquently describes what turned him on in the classroom (well said) and what today would presumably turn him off. He also mentions Teach for America, something I view as old wine in a new bottle. In 1969, one of TFA’s predecessors was the Teacher Corps. Same premise. I enrolled and stayed in the program for a year as an intern in one of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhoods. The kids, 6th graders, were great, their parents less so, but the end gamers for me were two distinct groups. The first was the PTA, the teachers union. The second was the instructors in Temple University’s teacher preparation program. What a deplorable bunch of coconuts. Substandard would be a compliment to these folks whose collective interest and experience in the classroom was self-serving at best and a con game at worst. I remained in Education for over 10 years, received my degrees, but never set foot in a public school classroom as a teacher again. The exodus from the teaching profession has been in the works for decades and likely will continue for decades more as the only new entrants will be those who could not find better, more satisfying careers paying more than a bit above the minimum wage.
David, thanks for your service.
” My students don’t need homework. When you do 600 math problems while at school, you’ve done as much as practice can do for you.”
And the first time they come across a problem that takes them more than a minute to solve, what will they do? Throw a fit?
You are kidding yourself if you think your students doing 600 problems is evidence of sound math education.
Unbelievable!
Dan Kennedy, you are by my count the third professional educator (sounds like that’s the position from which you write) who has pointed out the invalidity of the math “teaching” methods Huppenthal repeatedly cites as an “achievement” in these comment streams. Kudos to you. The situation we are in in Arizona is not a good one. People who flaunt Huppenthal-style ignorance of education have not only been given free reign to do this to students whose parents have no way of knowing that this is not real math education, but they are also architects of education policy.
Rick Spanier, is someone dabbling in public education and then getting out when the conditions change so that they are no longer agreeable something that could be described as “service”? As for your own choice, exiting the profession and then disparaging everyone you came into contact with in the field — parents, teachers, and teacher educators — what kind of stance is that for a citizen in a democracy where more than 80% of those who vote will graduate (if they graduate at all) from public schools?
In politics and in education, seems like democracy cannot work when too many stand on the sidelines, with no skin in the game, no child in the schools, and from there make condescending commentary about how the beleaguered runners in the race they observe are beneath them. Meanwhile the citizen advocacy tasks that would make a concrete improvement to the educations of the majority of our fellow citizens have too few people willing to move them forward, or even take enough interest to know what they are.
I will never forget canvassing for a school board candidate in an affluent neighborhood of retirees most of whose homes were vacant (not cool enough yet in those early fall months to get on a plane and return to Arizona, no doubt). Of the few that were in residence and answered their doors, most didn’t even know what school district they lived in. Skipped that part of their ballots when they voted, no doubt. One of them actually argued with me that he was in a more affluent district than he actually was, not realizing that he’d gotten a deal in his retirement home price precisely BECAUSE, the way the boundaries were drawn, he was NOT in that district. There’s a small glimpse of the REALITY of “democratic control” of public ed in Arizona. It bears little resemblance to the beautiful theories of Safier and his fellow Supporters of Public Ed.
Depressing. None of this — not Safier and his camp, not Huppenthal and his, not Spanier and other disengaged sideline commenters and voters like him — bodes well for our children or for the collective future of this state.
@Kudos to long-suffering teachers who stay in the game
You have no idea of my background in public education, especially at the political level of board politics or supportive parent-teacher groups. None.
My comments concern why I decided not to pursue teaching as a vocation and focused on the negative role played by the teachers union in Philadelphia and the level of instruction in Temple’s teacher preparation program.
I didn’t disparage teachers, I called the teachers union out for what was then a preoccupation with reducing hours of instruction and concerns unrelated to teaching their students. The instructors in the teacher prep courses were, again in my opinion, unqualified hacks. The parents? What do you say when one or two show up for parent teacher conferences and the rest never show or take any role in their kids’ educations?
One city, one teachers college, one teachers union. That was the critical mass that turned my away from public school teaching. There are people like Safier, who dedicate their lives to teaching because they love seeing the lights come on in their students’ eyes and are willing to put up with the ongoing distractions that impinge on their ability to teach. All praise to them. They are heroes.
Rick Spanier:
You used your particular experience in Philadelphia to support a more general point about the massive exodus of the competent and those with other options from the teaching profession. If you didn’t think your particular experience in PA with parents, teachers’ union, and teacher educators had broader application, you wouldn’t have embedded it in that context. Moreover, what do your words imply about those who are still teaching in public schools? Read them again and ask yourself.
Whatever Safier’s teaching role was in the past, in another state, his role now vis a vis our largest local school district has not been one many teachers would understand to be supportive of their efforts. He supported and excused Board members who outsourced subs and damaged their pay and benefits. He took an active role in defending the district’s use of 123 and 301 funds, more of which should have gone to teachers.
He can write columns and you can write comments. Good for you. From the perspective of parents who have to get children educated in the underfunded and dangerously chaotic educational “system” in his state and teachers who put up with terrible conditions and pay here, it seems that this would be of more value: supporting the policies, candidates, and funding allocations that can make a constructive difference in students’ (and teachers’) lives.
@Kudos to long-suffering teachers who stay in the game. @Few take an interest in what matters
Here’s what I think: I respect those who comment here under their own names. I wonder about those who use ad hoc addresses of the moment to engage. Assuming you are one-in-the-same, why would I continue a debate with a chimera? Are you real? A bot?
And here’s what I think, Rick Spanier: I respect those who comment under their own name and those who comment anonymously when their comments have CONTENT that is worthy of respect. Yours often fall in that category, but in this particular stream and on this particular topic, in my honest (and non-automated) Arizona parent-and-teacher opinion, not so much.
What is “a preoccupation with reducing hours of instruction”? Would that be, perhaps, a valid concern with increasing the hours available during the school day for planning and grading? Most of the public school teachers I know are mothers with dependent children still at home. They are doing underpaid and undervalued work during the school day so they can do unpaid and unvalued “non-work” raising their own children afternoons, evenings, weekends, and summers. In this context, reducing hours of instruction would be a valid goal that would support increasing the quality of services delivered to students. Probably the relationship between this advocacy goal and quality of services would not be clear to a wet-behind-the-ears, earnest “I’m here to save the world” TFA or Teacher Corps recruit, but it is very clear to those of us who know first-hand the life circumstances of most teachers in the “still-a-ghetto” or “in-Arizona-even-more-a-ghetto-than-it-ever-was” profession of K-12 teaching.
(Very tired of the “from-on-high” commentary of male “educators” who portray themselves as heroes and get congratulated for how self-sacrificing they are when many or most of them do only part of the job their female colleagues do: most if not all of the women are doing the same amount of work during the school day AND the lion’s share of the work of child rearing and household management at home. During the years when their children are growing up, most if not all of the female teachers I have known have literally had not a moment to themselves during any of their waking hours, year-in, year-out.)
Recommended reading for those baffled by the above comment: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Chapter 7, entitled “Hell’s Kitchen.”