Steven Singer is a veteran teacher in Pennsylvania. In this post, he offers five ways to slow the teacher exodus.
He begins:
As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, schools across the United States are on the brink of collapse.
There is a classroom teacher shortage.
There is a substitute teacher shortage.
There is a bus driver shortage.
There is a special education aide shortage.
The people we depend on to staff our public schools are running away in droves.
It’s a clear supply and demand issue that calls for deep structural changes.
However, it’s not really new. We’ve needed better compensation and treatment of school employees for decades, but our policymakers have been extremely resistant to do anything about it.
Instead, they’ve given away our tax dollars to corporations through charter and voucher school initiatives. They’ve siphoned funding to pay for more standardized testing, teaching to the test, and ed tech software.
But the people who actually do the work of educating our youth. We’ve left them out in the cold.
Now with the smoldering pandemic and increased impacts on the health, safety and well-being of teachers and other staff, the exodus has merely intensified.
Frankly, I’m not holding my breath for lawmakers to finally get off their collective asses.
We need a popular, national movement demanding action from our state and federal governments. However, in the meantime, there are several things our local school districts can do to stem the tide of educators fleeing the profession.
These are simple, cheap and common sense methods to encourage teachers to stay in the classroom and weather the storm.
However, let me be clear. None of these can solve the problem, alone. And even ALL of these will not stop the long-term flight of educators from our schools without better salaries and treatment.
To read his five proposals, open the link.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Having taught both in college and 9-12, this nails all the reasons for what will be a permanent shortage. Teaching college classes and earning top ratings were easy compared to the micro-managed, ridiculous requirements of too many students and not enough prep time in public school. Classes have only grown since the excuse of the Great Recession. Public school teachers are exploited as cheap labor while central admin and charter owners soak up private sector salaries. AFT and NEA are useless in addressing the structural issues.
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Exactly. Singer nails it. For public school teachers, there. is. never. enough. time. Not even close to enough time. But Mr. Singer’s radical solution (send the students home early one day a week) is NOT enough. Every middle- and high-school teacher needs AT LEAST two prep periods a day.
I worked at high levels as an executive in the textbook publishing industry, but when I was an Executive Vice President in a billion-dollar-a-year publishing house, I didn’t do a fraction of the work that I did as a high-school teacher. The demands of that job–a lot of them mandatory unnecessary busy work imposed by state, district, and building-level administrators–spilled over and consumed EVERY MOMENT of my time outside the classroom. It was insane and impossible and extremely stressful, and after getting up at 5:30 to get to class at 6:30 so I could spend an hour putting mandatory bellwork and standards and so on for the day on my white boards; after teaching all day; after completing paperwork and grading all night, I would wake up the next morning to an email from all staff warning of the dire consequences if the required data chat record forms were not received by administration by x time on x date.
It was ridiculous. Meanwhile, I was supposed to “individualize” for 185 students. Right. And walk through walls.
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And the attitude of administrators was always, “If you were a good teacher, this walking through walls stuff wouldn’t be difficult for you. You would know how to do it.”
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cx: to all staff
It rapidly got to the point where I dreaded opening my email. The actual TEACHING was the least thing on my plate, thanks to time-consuming administrative directives.
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of, in real time, get chastised for taking time off to bang your head against the wall
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LOL. ciedie. That too!!!
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And the let out kids early, at least where I am, doesn’t give us more planning time. We have 2 hour late start one day a week, and guess what we’re e expected to do? Go to 2 hours of meetings every week and do a bunch of busy work, then teach a full day If students. It’s exhausting and humiliating.
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humiliating being a key word in this horrendous game: treat professional adult teachers as incompetent and irresponsible children
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Unless we start believing that professional teachers know what they are doling, the teacher exodus will continue. While salaries and benefits play a role in the exodus, what most teachers long for is being given the opportunity to teach and make decisions. We need to stop bogging teachers down with clerical nonsense and cumbersome emailing demands.
While I agree that Singer offers excellent suggestions to slow the teacher exodus, there is one more I would add. Public school districts must stop hiring biased, incompetent pseudo-administrators from the business world. As Chiara has repeatedly stated, these business types are brought in to demoralize teachers, undermine and dismantle public education. Districts that care about their communities and young people will steer clear of MBAs, Relay and Broad Academy graduates. They are being hired to disrupt, not improve schools, They will send the public schools into a death spiral as destruction is their goal. Your district will face a mass exodus of teachers.
Administrators set the tone for the school district. Traditionally trained administrators are prepared to better serve the public schools. Most of them understand the mission of public schools, and majority of them value communities and the professionals that do the hard work of teaching and supporting young people.
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I have not experienced the administrations you describe here. I thank my fates.
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Unless we start believing that professional teachers know what they are doling, the teacher exodus will continue.
Amen
Many years ago, when I was a baby teacher–about 21 or 22 years old–I was at a party hosted by my fiance’s parents. I remember standing with a group of people and one of them asking me what I did for a living. “I’m a teacher,” I said.
“Oh, which university?”
“I teach high school.”
“Oh,” my interlocutor said, with a tone that sounded as though I had said that I go survive by dumpster diving. Suddenly, no one was interested in talking to me. It was palpable. I thought even then that teachers got very little respect. Little did I know how bad this would be 40 years later. It’s far, far worse now than ever. The disrespect toward teachers is both omnipresent now and completely systemic–built into a system that has taken from them their autonomy, their self direction.
And, of course, when you treat people like nonprofessional, utterly expendable hired help, that’s what you get.
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My sister’s hisch admin in upstate NY [1400 studs] has a structure that manages to work around this problem fairly well: 1 principal + 4 asst principals. The top guy (invariably a guy) is an adminimal with next-to-zero teaching experience who changes every 3yrs or so. The poor guys burn out quickly. The school is essentially run by the 4 asst princ who all have extensive teaching experience in the district – often right at that school – plus admin qualifs & experience. Among them they do what he should be doing, while he runs on a hamster wheel trying to please state Dept of Ed…
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Unless everyone who is not a teacher stops believing that they know more about teaching than professional teachers, the teacher exodus will continue.
Similarly unless everyone who is not an infectious disease specialist stops believing that they know more about the spread of viruses than the experts, the pandemic will continue.
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I am not particularly hopeful about either case.
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Yes, all five of Singer’s salient and insightful ways — each of which ring so true to me — to save the teaching profession in the United States can be boiled down to one simple truth, Wall Street does not belong in the school house on Main Street. Get the testing companies out, get the privatization companies out, and get TFA out. In other words, build a time machine and return to the 1960s, before the numb brained, neoliberal knuckleheads put their profits ahead of sustainability.
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Those who can, teach.
Those who can’t, tell teachers how to teach.
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I have a favorite coffee mug that reads, “Those who can, teach. Those who can’t go into some less significant line of work.”
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Mr. Singer mentions the onerous demand to complete lesson plans. Permit me elaborate on this to give you an idea what he is talking about.
When I first started teaching, back in the 1980s, we were required in all three of the schools in which I taught–two public schools and one Catholic school–to submit lesson plans. These consisted of, for each class, the topic being covered and a behavioral objective. (IKR? Behaviorism had a long, zombie-like afterlife in K-12 education.) At any rate, completing the lesson plans took about half an hour. In my last position, in a typical semester, I would have five preps for classes meeting two or three times a week (we were on a block schedule). So, I had to submit 13 unique lesson plans every week. This involved completing a 2 and a half page form for each lesson, with additional attached pages detailing individualization for students with 504 and IEP plans. So, about 3 pages, times 13–39 pages of lesson plans per week. Each lesson plan had to include the Skill Focus, the Common Core Standard(s) covered, the Learner Outcomes, the Bellwork for the lesson, the HOT (higher-order thinking) Question, the Essential Question, the Vocabulary for the Lesson, Lesson Notes/description of the approach to the lesson, the Exit Activity, the Multiple Intelligences addressed, the Assessments, and the Homework Assignment, in addition to those notes on how the lesson was being individalized for each student with a 504 plan or an IEP plan and for each student who was an English language learner.
I took to doing these on Saturdays because I knew that they might take more than a day, and I would need the time on Sunday to complete them. Typically, it took me all day on Saturday and much of Saturday night. Grades had to be posted weekly–two per student–by Monday morning, so there was also the grading burden on the weekend.
Then, I had to print out each lesson plan and put it in a binder for the prep, and said binders had to be open during each lesson so that an administrator wandering into my room could refer to it. So, I went through a lot of paper and ink cartridges at home.
Insane, right? On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable request–teachers should be able to tell you what they are doing for each lesson. And they should plan. But the actual planning and the creation of a a detailed record of each plan (as opposed to notes to one’s self) are two different things, and the former was extremely onerous–a slog, every week.
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cx: the latter was extremely onerous
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I realize that my situation was unusual because I had so many preps. I taught 11th and 12th-grade English, Theatre, Debate, and Film.
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Many students signed up for Film thinking that it would be a blow-off class where they would simply watch movies and zone out. And in previous years, under previous teachers, that’s what they did. Those kids were in for a big surprise in my classroom. Here is my outline for the class:
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Well, Bob. No Dukes of Hazard, I see. That Daisy not enough of a looker for you?
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The only daisy that made my class was the one in Lyndon Johnson’s campaign ad.
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You know, Roy, I don’t think I ever saw an episode of The Dukes of Hazard. I know. Clearly, I lack culture.
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Could not recall if I ever saw one in its entirety either. I do find the use of the confederate battle flag in a fundamentally neutral way an interesting contrast to our present social and political climate in which it has once again become identified strongly with an extreme right in the political spectrum. One represented by a major political party that shall remain nameless, I might add.
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in a fundamentally neutral way
no such thing
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There are people teaching in my county that spend every weekend on lesson plans. It is a practice that I could not do and simultaneously maintain my duties to family and community. Recently, the requirement was removed from my school. A colleague told me he actually does more planning now. Go figure.
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Ofc he does more planning now. He has the time to do that.
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Singer has written the best essay on the teaching profession I have ever read. He begins with important aspects of teaching like time and planning. He wraps these in a package called respect.
Absent from the essay is the issue of student workload. I have a friend who has spent the best part of the last half century teaching at a fine old traditional private school. He once told me that the maximum number of students he has ever been responsible to teach was 65. That was the maximum. And he was teaching the students in our society that were the easiest to teach. No IEPs. No 504s. No children who had inadequate nutrition for the most of their lives. I have been lucky. I have never taught more than 155. I know teachers who have been teaching more than that their entire career.
While class size is important, class composition and total numbers of students are also essential.
Mr. Singer, I tip my hat to you. Singer for Education secretary. On the second thought, why pull a good teacher out of the classroom. Let’s just elect a few political leaders with the courage to do the right thing.
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Agreed. It’s an outstanding piece.
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Yes, the way public school teachers are treated and paid in the United States is not only a tragedy, it is a crime that should be punishable with a life sentence in prison without parole.
I taught for thirty years (1975 – 2005). When I started teaching, classroom management (mostly behavior control) and cooperation from the administration were not a big problem.
Then in the 1980s President Teflon-Don Ronald RayGun released the lying, misinformation-laden “A Nation at Risk” report and got rid of the Fairness Doctrine.
What followed was an all-out one-sided war against teachers from not only politicians running for election but the media. Teachers were being blamed for just about everything: illegal drug use, teen pregnancies, STDs, the exploding prison population, et al.
At parent conferences, some parents blamed the teachers for their students not doing any work because the kids were telling their parents, the teachers were boring. And some of those parents yelled at us. One time, I was ready to fight one of the dads for how belligerent he was. He accused me of losing his daughter’s homework and when I asked her to open her English folder and found all of the incomplete assignments I was being blamed for losing still in the folder, he demanded I accept them late (after the grading period was over and they were all incomplete). I refused and he complained to the administration that his daughter should be allowed to finish that work and get credit for it. That father never apologized for accusing me of losing his daughter’s work. The vice-principal and principal were smart enough to know that it wasn’t safe for them to order me to do what the father demanded so in this rare case, the parent lost. If admin had told me to do it, I would have refused, and they knew it, too.
It got so bad that I wanted to leave teaching before I’d finished my twentieth year. I was even offered a job in management for a large restaurant nightclub chain called the Red Onion, but the pay was worse and the hours longer, if you can believe that, so I stayed in the classroom.
By the time I retired in 2005, the atmosphere was so toxic at school, I decided that if I had to find a job after retirement, I’d volunteer to return to the Marines as a walking IED and die blowing up some al-Queda terrorists. There was no way I was going to ever return to teaching. A few years after I retired, the high school where my daughter was a student offered me a long-term substitute job in English.
I told them NO and made sure to burn any bridges that might exist by telling them I’d be such a pain in the ass for administration that they wouldn’t be able to sleep at night because I’d haunt them if they didn’t cooperate by supporting teachers 100%. And, I knew they weren’t doing that because from what my daughter was telling me, that district was just as toxic as the others. It seems that almost all administrators in most districts had a corporate high stakes rank and punish test them to death mindset and knew nothing about what it took to teach.
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There really are no “safe spaces” for teachers anymore. At least that’s how I would summarize points 1-3 and 5 in Steven’s recommendations. The space to think, speculate, and improvise–with and about subjects, students, and longer-term goals–is essential to teaching…something as essential as just having extended periods to read…what one want to read, not has to read. I can already see political fodder being made about how lazy teachers are, after all they have time to read!
One of the things I never appreciated or understood in my short teaching tenure was how I was given room to fail. And I did more than a few times. I guess it goes with the territory of being having a twenty-ish, everything-is-possible view of the world. What a rube. But seriously, so much of what I read about what passes for “teaching” these days–keep your head down, don’t make waves, follow the prepared lesson plans–has nothing to do with the profession.
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We are actually “required” to follow a state-prescribed online curriculum outline, which I entirely ignored except when I had to pretend that I wasn’t ignoring it in order to jump through some administrative hoop. The state outline wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t great, either.
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Hewing closely to the curriculum progressions in textbooks and in state-provided curriculum outlines is useful for newbies, but if someone has been teaching for 10 years and cannot vastly improve on the groupthink in these, he or she should not be in the profession.
Education deformers love asking, “What’s your alternative to standardization and what you call ‘top-down directives?’” They expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here, for example, is an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
In place of the grade-by-grade bullet list created by Coleman and his minions in service to Master Gates, states could promulgate a few general guidelines (a very broad framework–perhaps four or five principles in each field of study), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
and
open-source crowd sourcing via a national Wiki of alternative, innovative ideas in each area of K-12 study. In other words, we could have
Competing, voluntary learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson and exercise templates, model diagnostic and formative assessments, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki, and
subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development,
freely adopted by autonomous local public schools
and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–by teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
The time for reflection and critique is essential, as the brilliant GregB notes.
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Education Deformers, especially the ones who get big bucks from the likes of Bill Gates or Laurene Powell Jobs, love to claim that public schools “haven’t changed in a hundred years” and require dramatic reinvention. But it is they who insist upon the old top-down management technique–Taylorism (see Frederick Winslow Taylor–1856-1915)–and on depersonalized learning software that is basically Behaviorist Criterion-Based Programmed Learning (see Sidney L. Pressey, B. F Skinner, Edward Thorndike, Norman Crowder, et al.) with a graphical user interface. Old wine in new bottles, but still vinegar.
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If the management revolutions in manufacturing in the 20th century taught us anything, it is the breathtaking power for continuous improvement of scuttling the old top-down management approaches in favor of bottom-up empowerment. See my notes about what autonomous teachers could do with a national wiki from which they would be FREE to choose materials, objectives, pedagogical approaches, etc., with whatever modifications are appropriate to a) their own interests and expertise and b) their particular students.
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But basic to this–an absolute prerequisite–is that teachers start being empowered and be given the time to plan and critique and respond to student work and reflect on their practice. A great approach to that: Japanese Lesson Study.
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And part of that is lightening the load. The biggest difference between exclusive private schools and other schools is that in them, teachers have many fewer students and a lot more time.
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I was very fortunate to be able to work outside ‘the system’ for the last two decades. I designed my own program [Spanish & French for tots 2.5-5yo] with much help from a Brit teachers forum, buttressed by Asher’s TPR and Blaine Ray’s TPRS programs from out West. And peddled myself to local daycares and preschools.
Yes, I did ‘formal lesson plans’, to further sales and get parent buy-in and provide fun at-home reinforcement between weekly lessons. But no one was measuring and assessing what I did in the class room but me.
I once had to ‘align’ my curriculum to ‘state standards’ for a reformy employee-daycare director. Proved to be a very familiar exercise, as I’d had a corp job during the ‘70’s-‘80’s sea change to computerized project mgt, MBO-style. Essentially a dog&pony show to justify your existence. When I was a supv, I did all that stuff, to free my hand-picked, experienced team to do the real work. I was the firewall between them & bosses/ clients.
School admin has to do budgeting, staffing, logistics, supervision. If they are also required by Powers That Be to run a 24/7 dog&pony show to justify the existence of public school– guess who that’s going to be delegated to? And guess how much real work gets done?
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It came to me last week. The biggest reason I’m retiring this June is standardized testing.
I was writing something about this idea to send to Diane early Friday morning but never got around to finishing it. But, yeah, that’s the realization I came to. It’s difficult to convey how much I loathe testing of any sort, but especially the standardized sort.
I’ve been lucky the past 13 years to be teaching 12th grade social studies, which in New York State does NOT have a Regents Exam. And, I’ve had a college credit course, too.
I actually volunteered to teach a section of 8th grade U.S. History back in 2015 rather than getting another assignment doing the 11th grade U.S. class, which has a state exam. (The principal made that arrangement for me, and I was actually enjoying the younger kids until the pandemic and a new plan in the school took me off that middle school assignment last September.)
I taught state Regents exams for years and years and years earlier in my career so I know of what I write.
How much do I DESPISE standardized testing?
I had an A.P. class for a number of years and I still cringe when I hear those letters and think about that exam. “P” I can get by usually without….but the letter “A”….that’s a tough one given its frequency of use in the English language.
I’ve been hanging in there teaching to 1.) support my family, including my own kids and 2.) on behalf of the wonderful students I have in school and also 3.) because I get a huge kick out of registering students to vote and other civic-like things that are big part of 12th grade in NYS.
But the threat of assigning me to teaching a Regents exam class during the depths of the pandemic summer of 2020 was it. I can’t in any way, shape or form justify participating or enabling the nutty, harmful regime of testing. No more. Not me.
I don’t like puling out this ethical argument since I certainly don’t deserve a ride on any “high horse”. And, I actually avoid talking about retirement if I can help it because I don’t want to bore or annoy colleagues who have years and years of very hard work ahead of them.
But, there it is.
And, all I can add is, thank God for the people on this blog for sustaining me through the dark and dreary years of No Consultant Left Behind and Race to the Zaniest.
I owe you all.
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I hope, John, that you enjoy your retirement as much as I do.
I followed this practice in my classes: I have lip service to the standards and the testing regime as necessary to administrators, while constantly reminding them of how invalid the tests were, and then closed my door and ignored them as much as possible. Same with the mandated textbooks and curriculum outlines, which were mostly garbage.
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cx: gave lip service*
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Thanks, Bob.
I had a retired superintendent tell me the same basic idea years ago.
What’s odd (and troubling) is how the nature of teaching history and government has changed lately.
I’m going to be looking for a job doing something very different, whatever that ends up being. It’s exciting and daunting, too.
See you.
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Well, John, once you retire, you will have no excuse for not getting online and sharing more of your delightful prose!
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As I said above, teaching a tested subject would have sent me out of the field years ago. For years I taught geometry, which came late to the testing in Tennessee. Then they started common corpse and testing. I would see the tests through the questions of the children and just seethe at the way they were presented. Then I got a chance to teach world history after all those years of training myself to teach math. It too was not tested. Still isn’t.
I really enjoy teaching world history. Thursday I get to begin a non-credit course on human genocide. Still, it is time to go. I will hang it up in May. Maybe I will re-form old guitars. Will that make me a Martin Luthier?
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“Common corpse”….yeah….that’s a good one.
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A Martin Luthier. LMAO!
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If you reform Elvis’s old guitars, you would be a Martin Luthier King.
https://www.guitarworld.com/news/elvis-presleys-sun-sessions-martin-d-18-sells-for-record-dollar132m-at-auction#:~:text=Often%20referred%20to%20as%20Presley's,many%20photographs%20from%20the%20era.
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Spot on.
And I just read this ed. from the WAPO about Florida teachers leaving in droves:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/11/florida-teachers-covid-quitting-desantis/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F34f161b%2F61645d409d2fda9d41095cf9%2F5ecd62149bbc0f3a78bd8348%2F17%2F72%2F61645d409d2fda9d41095cf9
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I have taught for many years and recently took a part-time coaching job. Teachers have become powerless to fight back against the ridiculous amounts of paperwork, that adds to the stress of the job. None of this paperwork does anything to enhance the performance of a teacher. Instead, it pulls attention away from the students and allows Administrators to sit in their office and look at data instead of getting out and visiting school buildings. It’s time for Superintendents and Administrators to be accountable for the failed programs they force down to the classroom. If you want teachers to teach, get out of the way and allow the process to happen.
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Amen
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“It’s time for Superintendents and Administrators to be accountable for the failed programs they force down to the classroom.”
And there’s the rub. What do you do when you are part of system that is small and ought to be nimble to meet the needs of its students? But has a super who is a master bad policy implementor with a willingly pliant democratically elected school board? And a teacher’s union that can’t look beyond its own immediate constituency (kind of like a big city Fraternal Order of Police)? Literally no one holds them accountable. Certainly not the parents or the electorate.
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