When you don’t plan for your next generation, you are assured you will evolve into obscurity if not extinction. Aspects of our culture go missing over time. Then existed then, over time, their need dissolved and poof! They are no more. Consider these areas of employment – telephone operators, elevator operators, gandy dancers, phrenologists, redsmiths, scissor grinders, telegraphists, lamplighters, soda jerks, lectors, town criers, film projectionists, log drivers, and milkmen. The need for these employments once was and is no longer. They drifted to obscurity then elimination. Evolution in the world of work and the elimination of fields of work is real. Our teaching crisis is that we are short of teachers who want to teach.
Extinction takes many forms. For the dodo bird, extinction meant elimination – there are no dodo birds today. Through a combination of hunting, deforestation, and purposeful destruction of dodo nests, these birds that were first identified by explorers in the early 1500s were gone by 1681. Poof! While the existence of the dodo was in human hands, not the bird’s, they continue to be a landmark in the reality of extinction.
Obscurity then extinction – will public education teachers be next? Obscurity is when the primary function of school is day care for children; extinction is when any adult can be a day care provider.
What do we know.
We know these two facts:
- More people are leaving the educational profession than are entering. The profession has a current gap of almost 70% in the number of teachers quitting, retiring, and moving on compared to the number of new teachers beginning work in the field.
- There are more persons in Wisconsin with valid teaching and other educational licenses than the number of educators currently employed PLUS current and anticipated job openings. We have an abundance of licensed educators. However, licensed educators do not choose educational employment.
Hence these questions. If we have an abundance of dodo birds, why are we experiencing a shortage of dodo birds? Why do we have an abundance of licensed teachers and a shortage of teachers in classrooms? Why do people spend the time and resources necessary to gain an educational license and then choose not to be employed as educators?
Why is this thus?
Teaching in public education is on the drifting list. There is a shortage of teachers in most states leading to either larger and larger classes for an employed teacher or increased numbers of students taught by an unprepared teacher. There is a clear shortage of teachers with specific licenses, special education being the teacher hardest to find. Math and science and computer technology are close followers in the shortage market.
Why? Compensation has been and continues to be a real downside to teaching. The source of teacher pay in most states is through legislative funding and state funding is always political. Legislators balance state budgets by controlling educational spending, one of a state’s largest annual expenditures. Clearly, teacher pay was not keeping up with the cost of living prior to our current national economic inflation woes and suffers greater discrepancy now. Teachers chronically lose spending power. Teachers are choosing to leave classrooms for employment that pays more.
Second, education is being beaten up politically. Politicians are making education a partisan campaign battle topic. Conservative legislation dictates what teachers can teach and cannot teach, how they may address children, and threaten teachers with prosecution and loss of license for teaching unapproved subjects. Some teachers are being bullied out of their profession.
Third, the deficits of student learning loss in the pandemic put teachers on the hot seat for an impossible speedy recovery of lost learning. The financial cliff of federal pandemic dollars to schools will cause many recently added school positions to be discontinued due to no continuing local funding. Tutors and interventionists and additional teaching positions will be terminated. And the pressure for current teachers to make good on all mandates, all requirements, and all political entreaties within the historical structure of school is causing more teachers to seek other employment.
Finally, teachers suffer from the “pile on” effect. 75% of departing teachers cite their being overworked and under appreciated as their real reason for quitting teaching. Piling on happens in many ways.
Going back two decades, No Child Left Behind began a trend of government mandates with the expectations of “do this or be replaced”. State assessments in reading and math became a school’s annual report card. Art, music, PE, shop, marketing, technology, computer science, agriculture, and world language teachers all were told to incorporate ELA, reading, and math in their daily instruction in order to raise school test scores.
Across time family and school relationships have drastically changed. The number of homes with two working parents struggling economically has significantly increased parallel to a decrease in parental supervision of children doing schoolwork at home. This is not a complaint about parents but a statement about new realities. Classroom teachers spend more daily time with a child than the child’s parents. Teachers have become frontline care takers and surrogates for parents.
Teacher shortages mean teachers in school needed to assume additional assignments and responsibilities. The most egregious of these are non-instructional duties, such as recess, lunch, and bus duties, but also more before and after school tutoring for students who need extra time. These are things that absent teachers used to do. Every extra duty subtracts from teachers’ workday time for planning, correcting and grading student work, professional meetings, and communication with parents. Planning, correcting and grading, and communicating are essential work so teachers do these from home.
A teacher’s time for home and family life has been greatly eroded by piling on. What is billed and contracted as an 8:00 am to 4:00 pm job, now is a 7:00 am to 9:00 pm job. There is the 8:00 to 4:00 school day with seven or more hours of assigned duties and there is the before and after schoolwork at home necessary to be a complete teacher. Work life reduces home life for teachers.
Teachers’ resignations are not equally distributed. Resignations are greater among:
Young teachers. They are lowest on the compensation scale, carry undergraduate debt, face housing scarcity, and are not seasoned to the realities of teaching today. They also have the least to lose in a career change early in life.
Teachers in low-income districts. Resources matter. When the common response to an inquiry is, “We don’t have that in our district” or “We cannot afford to do that”, it does not take long for teachers to seek employment in districts with needed resources.
Teachers in districts with high diversity. Diversity equals educational challenges. There are more non-English languages spoken, more cultural nuances, more special needs students, and more non-educational struggles. Teaching in high diversity districts requires more than teaching from teachers.
Resignations create the greatest havoc in districts that have the greatest difficulty in recruiting new teachers.
Where schools and classrooms are empty due to diminishing enrollment, there also will be schools and classrooms empty due to diminishing numbers of prepared teachers.
What can we do about this thusness?
- Compensation is the easy yet wrong answer. Teacher compensation needs to keep pace with costs of living. No more and no less. Why would those in charge argue differently? Well, there are reasons but that is for another day.
- Beyond compensation, restructure the work so that the right work, causing all children to learn, can be accomplished. Do these:
- Maintain class sizes of 20-25 children. Although the STAR studies indicated class sizes around 15, there was no compelling research to support such small class sizes. A class of 20-25 gives school leaders enough flexibility to manage enrollment. More importantly, a teacher can effectively instruct 20 to 25 children, create positive daily interaction with each, understand the individual learning needs of each, and still utilize whole group instruction as appropriate. The “paper” load for 20 – 25 is manageable. The parent contact requirements are manageable. In many urban schools, 20 – 25 reduces their current daily student assignment by 40% or more.
- Invest in classroom teachers for initial instruction and level two interventions. Assign current interventionists to classroom teaching. Too many dollars are spent in correcting and filling in after-initial teaching. The hiring of interventionists assumes failed initial instruction. With proper class sizing and planning time regular teaching can resolve student lapses in learning.
- Make planning and prep time real and inviolate. Assign each classroom teacher a minimum of 90 minutes of daily prep time. This does not include before and after school time as that is when professional meetings occur. Before and after school time also must be reserved for student and parent access. 90 minutes of uninterrupted prep time allows a teacher to ensure clear and targeted lesson plans, quality feedback on student work, and planning that accommodates all student needs.
- Extend the annual teaching contract to include 20 days of summer curriculum and teaching development time. Inserting PD as stand-alone days in the school year is absurd; it is lip service to the school board’s obligation to provide PD. We wouldn’t expect children to profit from a stand-alone day of essential teaching and learning. Summer PD provides accountable educational in-service as administrators and teachers have adequate time for professional training, collegial interaction, and practice/reinforcement of new training. Everything we know about teaching children should be applied to teacher in-service.
- Assure that teaching is politically agnostic. There is no place for partisan politics in the education of children. Our goal is to cause all children to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for each to be an informed and problem-solving adult. In the now, we need to stand against partisanship that would tell us what to teach and what not to teach based upon political positions and political retribution.
The Big Duh!
These are seven bullet points that make a difference between a teacher being in the classroom and being in another profession. Much like the dodo bird that what made extinct by how people and the culture of the time treated it, classroom teachers are responding to how people and the culture of today treat them. We can leave things in the current status quo and watch the number of qualified teachers dwindle until public education is truly just day care or we can change the culture to ensure public education continues to be our nation’s most important continuing institution.