The Network for Public Education posted this article by Mark Perna, which originally appeared in Forbes.
Mark C. Perna: Why Education Is About To Reach A Crisis Of Epic Proportions
If you missed this widely shared article the first time it was burning around the internet, here’s a chance to catch up. This piece by Mark C. Perna for Forbes lays out just how bad the current crisis is.
In order to reach and teach students effectively, teachers must forge a human connection with them. Today’s younger generations simply will not move forward in their education and career journey without that connection. This is a non-negotiable; it’s just who they are.
The vast majority of teachers truly want to forge that meaningful connection with students. In fact, for many it was the driving force behind their decision to enter the profession. But, understaffed and overworked as they are, many simply have no time to show students that they see, hear, and care about them. Survival mode—where many teachers have lived for the past two years—doesn’t allow much room for relationship building.
This creates a vicious cycle. Students aren’t performing, so more burdens are placed on teachers to help students hit the mark, thus decreasing teachers’ time and bandwidth to forge a human connection with students that is the basis for all learning. Teachers’ legs are cut out from under them, yet they’re still expected to carry their students across the finish line. It’s a gridlock.
What’s the fallout of all this burnout and lack of connection? We’ll see significant drops in three vital areas:
A drop in young people entering the profession, a drop in education quality, and a drop in graduation rates are three problems Perna predicts. Follow this link to read the whole piece.
You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/mark-c-perna-why-education-is-about-to-reach-a-crisis-of-epic-proportions/
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Virginia model for charter schools is identical to the Michigan model, which shouldn’t surprise anyone since the same echo chamber ed reformers designed both.
One would think ed reformers would look at Michigan charter governance, which is a disaster, and not repeat their errors in another state but that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Add Virginia to Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania to the states where ed reformers developed lousy privatization schemes and never adjusted or improved them but instead just replicated the same exact formula. How is this “innovation”? Is this what we can expect when they reach their goal of privatizing all K-12 schools and systems? The same people design the same privatized systems and plunk the model down all over the country, whether it’s at all successful or not?
The public was told these privatized school systems would be nonprofits. They’re not. Is anyone in the echo chamber ever going to address the yawning gap between what they assured the public and what has actually transpired? or do we just keep frantically privatizing and ignore it?
Virginia – under the last 2 moderate Democratic Governors – did one of the best jobs of any large state in protecting public education and keeping charter schools from taking over the state. Moderate Dems have sometimes been even stronger supporters than progressives, who should never spout the language of reform when they talk about public schools but too often do (although they are getting better).
Chiara, are you talking about a new Virginia model?
Really a shame if that is happening and a lesson that if we, the folks who support public education, don’t loudly push back on false narratives – even when they are made in passing – those false narratives become truth and empower the right wing privatizers in the Republican party.
a “progressive spouting the language of reform”-
May I nominate a contender for the position?
Ivy League-educated Ravi Gupta (former speech writer for Susan Rice), who is credited with the first charter school in Mississippi and a few charter schools in Tenn.
Sara Sirota at the Intercept describes Biden’s domestic advisor, Susan Rice, as owning(ed) $1,000,000 in Netflix stock. Reed Hastings is partnered in a charter school chain. He called for an end to elected boards of education.
Btw- I doubt that Susan Rice’s son fell far from the tree, despite the propaganda that says he did. His father reportedly has a lot of inherited wealth.
Ravi Gupta created a firm, Arena Run, which “supports progressive political candidates and reforms.” The Arena team, “convene, train, and support the next generation of candidates and campaign staff.”
If Biden wants Dems to win in 2022 and 2024, he should rid the admin of ivy leaguers, including Gates’ Josh Edelman.
Linda,
Thanks for the interesting information.
That pretty much twists the definition of the word “progressive” into something utterly meaningless. Are those “Arena Run” candidates progressive in other ways?
I do think there are real progressives who do not support privatization and do support public schools (when the subject comes up), but they use the language of reform in a way that legitimizes reformers instead of marginalizing them.
In 2016, Bernie would say things like “I support public charter schools.” But by 2020, Bernie would point out that charters can pick and choose the students they get, they don’t have the accountability of public schools, public money should go to public schools. That is NOT the language of ed reformers – hooray! But then he would still say things like he would freeze all private charter school funding which reinforces a very powerful narrative that many progressive and moderate voters believe without question — that there are “good, public charters” that should be supported and only “private” charters are problematic.
And it’s true there are some very good independent charters, but there is no reason those schools shouldn’t become lottery schools that are part of the public school system. Central Park East – Deborah Meier’s school — is part of the public school system, not a privately operated “non-profit” charter misleadingly referred to by too many people as a “public” charter. It would nice if the pro-public school progressive Dems could educate the public to understand that school “choice” can and should be real public school choice. School choice never has to be school “privatization” where parents and kids have to give up their rights to a school that is accepting taxpayer dollars but being run for the benefit of the few.
Taxpayers shouldn’t be gouged which is what happens when monitoring systems have to be developed to oversee private sector schools. The sole beneficiaries of tax-funded private sector schools are grifters/profit takers, racists, Christian nationalists, and tax avoiders.
Public schools are like blue plate specials, nutritional, serving the general population and as a bonus the place that serves the meal, unifies the country. If a parent wants his kid immersed in religious dogma and /or served filet mignon in a rarefied setting, that parent should pay for it himself.
Linda– “Like.” AMEN.
Good morning Diane and everyone,
In a previous post, I gave some ideas for how retired teachers might be lured back into the profession either on a full or part time basis. But now I just say, “Stay retired! And look to do something else if you want. You’ve paid your dues and done your time so enjoy yourself now and don’t look back. Why bring the stress back?” I’ve taught for 30 years so I’ve seen a lot come and go. It’s a blur of constant change with what seemed so important one year fall by the wayside the next. And none of it helped and none of it made sense. So much of my teaching career was meaningless except for the teaching that I did. The meetings, the evaluations, the new protocols, and all the other superfluous “stuff” – pretty much all of it was a waste of time. I’m coming to the end of this career and I’m glad. I’m ready for something new. I’m ready for the craziness to end. I would say, fo me, these were the things that took the most toll on me:
1. The constant change and even changes that were done mid-year. The schedule changes, more duties and useless work.
2. The disrespect that students show to teachers. I had one student tell me the other day, “Why don’t you just teach French and not be a mask Nazi.” And the discipline problems rage on with administration having no answers. Add to that the constant phone use and profanity. I mean, stuff I imagine you’d hear in a porno movie. And the ubiquitous attitude of students just doing the minimum to get by and constant complaining about the workload – especially in college in the high school classes. That’s a whole other story.
3. The lack of prep time and number of preps.
4. The constant interaction with students is tiring for me.
5. Teaching the same material over and over again. The energy for it has just left me for the most part. There’s really not a lot of room to grow in teaching given all the other useless “stuff” to do and the lack of time to prep.
6. Having no say in pretty much everything that happens in the school.
There’s more but I’ll stop there. Covid has changed the way people want to work. I think people are going to want more flexibility in their jobs and teaching doesn’t provide that. More people may want to work from home or want flexible hours. Teaching isn’t going to change anytime soon. So, there’s a lot to think about if you want to attract intelligent, creative people to this profession. I don’t see it happening.
Thank you, Mamie. Your students were lucky to have you for 30 years.
Thanks Diane. That’s very nice of you. But also I feel very sad that I know so many good – very good teachers – who are breaking under the stress of some of the issues I mentioned and others as well. They love teaching but just can’t do it anymore and are trying to find ways out of teaching. Many are just miserable at their jobs. So much of it didn’t have to be this way. I truly worry for this country and for future generations of kids who are going to need a good education to face their own problems and the problems of this planet. Teachers are the very foundation of our ability to function as a nation. My education, although it wasn’t perfect by any stretch, means everything to me. I’m grateful to my teachers – even the terrible ones I had (and there were some). They taught me just as much as the great ones. I really worry for what is to come if we can’t remedy this situation and make teaching a creative, interesting and rewarding career.
Yes!!
Thank you, Diane. That’s very kind of you. I have a further comment on this that is stuck in moderation.
Great comment.
Mamie, this part is so true for me too: “I’ve seen a lot come and go. It’s a blur of constant change with what seemed so important one year fall by the wayside the next. And none of it helped and none of it made sense.”
However in my case the families and students where I teach, and the grade I teach keep the joy in the job. It’s everything else that makes it so difficult to want to stay in the profession.
I hope you are able to retire soon and start the process of healing and recouping.
recouperating
I started out teaching French in a junior high school, and I found it a tedious, uninspiring grind. I am not blaming foreign language teachers for the problem. I think the problem is that there is no intention to take the study of foreign languages seriously in this country. We start too late, and it is mostly a minimum requirement. Most of the top students drop it in order to take more advanced math and science courses in high school. I got a master’s and a job in TESOL, and the difference was monumental. I was providing young people with an essential tool for living in this country. I also found a deeper connection with my struggling students than the middle class foreign language students.
Mamie, you left this for last but it’s probably the key to all the rest: “6. Having no say in pretty much everything that happens in the school.” Responsibility without authority as long been recognized as the primary cause of job stress.
No doubt, these really are the main causes for the crisis: way overworked teachers and the heavy emphasis on completing the material to be covered in class.
At any age, students get interested in a subject if they feel the teacher cares about them and their learning.
Yes!!!
“a human connection with students that is the basis for all learning”
This is what Education Deformers do not understand.
For which two things are essential in education: small class sizes and respect for teaching that includes autonomy, collaboration, and pay.
Amen!
Amen II
and definitely a fact which the Tech Gurus cannot grasp
The REAL crisis in education?
“The causes of problems can be described or
explained in many ways. The choice of
description or explanation, usually
determines the nature of the problem’s
resolution.”
Problem: Students aren’t “performing”,
they’re not “moving” forward, they’re
not “hitting” the “mark”, they “need”
to be carried across the “finish”
line.
Enter Institutional “thinking”, the
embedded patterns of perception and
interpretation, the social constructions
of reality, spawning the alienated
institutionalization of life.
Moving forward, hitting the mark, the
“finish” line, as predetermined by
institutional definition, a ceremony of
ordering, ending NOT in objectivity,
but subjectivity.
Where does effective propaganda begin,
if not where objectivity ends?
How can the subjective nature of
institutional “thinking”, be cured
with another, more “connected” dose,
of institutional “thinking”?
“Survival mode—where many teachers have lived for the past two years—doesn’t allow much room for relationship building.”
Ah, he was wrong about the “past two years”. Many teachers have been on survival mode for a lot longer than that.
I was on survival mode near the end of my 30 years of teaching. It’s called burn out and/or PTSD. My anger at politicians and district administrators was so toxic, it was poisoning my mind, affecting my health, and it took a lot of effort to keep teaching instead of faking it.
Damn, it was hard to get up each day and drive in to that toxic environment. The students weren’t responsible for that environment. It was some parents, too many politicians, and district admin. Every morning when I parked in the high school parking lot an hour or two before my first class, I reminded myself I was there for my students, the ones that were there to learn, and I erased the frown and plastered a smile on my face, for them, for my students.
I knew teachers that burned out and some stayed in the classroom because of the paycheck. They weren’t really teaching anymore. They were just going through the motions. They had bills to pay. They wanted to eat. They wanted to retire with the retirement benefits they were so close to.
One teacher I knew that couldn’t take it anymore, left to sell real-estate. Another one, retired at 55, as early as possible, to escape the stress and he was a Vietnam combat veteran who was in heavy combat.
A third loved teaching and said he’d stay until it wasn’t fun anymore. He left at 70 after 42 years of teaching because he burned out, too.
One small study of one middle school in Texas reported that about a third of the teachers had PTSD from the stress of teaching [in this country].
The stress of teaching in the United States is a horror story for many teachers, yet many keep getting up and going to work because they love the kids, they love teaching them, they love working with them, and they hold on to the belief that they can help make a difference.
But they don’t love all the political crap that keeps getting dumped on them. Eventually that crap buries them and they burn out and lose the passion that may have carried them for a couple of decades or more before they crashed.
Teaching is the hardest/harshest job I ever had, and I’m a former US Marine and combat vet that worked in the private sector for 15 years before I went into education as a teacher in my 30s.
I’ve been retired from teaching since 2005, and if I had to go back to work and find a job to survive financially, I’d rather volunteer to sacrifice myself as a walking human bomb and blow up some domestic traitors and/or foreign terrorists than go back into the pressure cooker that many of our public schools have been for decades.
There can be an element of emotional abuse that I have not seen in the 2 other jobs I had before teaching – or at other businesses or family and friends workplaces.
There are some good analogies in this clip to what is being done to children…. are policy makers and admins the “Evelyn” to the public school “Jakes”
HOW PICKING ON TEACHERS BECAME AN AMERICAN TRADITION
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/01/history-of-spying-on-teachers.html
I think the nature of pubsch teaching itself has changed a lot over 50 yrs. I’ve been on its fringes so you in the trenches can correct me. But it seems to me there is a lot more now of the type of thing that friends of mine in social work have always had to put up with, i.e., so much more ‘govt bureaucracy’ of the type that interferes with doing a good job, causing one to either burn out, or become less caring, or become cynical. It takes an unusual sort of person to persevere and make a real difference for kids under such circumstances.
I’ve met a few. Long ago I was a foster parent for an adolescent group home [lasted exactly two years]. The woman in charge of the program was such a person: laser-focused, direct, assertive, understanding her mission precisely, able to prioritize and negotiate as she walked the tightrope between what needed to be accomplished and what could be. I remember, as I met with her, thinking, ‘ah, so that’s what it takes.’ It was a sort of caring/ loving that is all action, cutting through ego and sentimentality. My sister is another such person, a longtime SpEd teacher, now hisch admin: she has the same instinctive understanding of how to communicate with and help struggling children whether autistic or ‘delinquent’ or whatever, with a drive to push aside obstacles to that mission, and the communication skills to make it happen. An inordinate amount of energy is required.
This is not sustainable or attainable, considering the vast numbers of teachers required. Such people do not grow on trees and you can’t just train them up. The system has to change in order to accommodate regular humans. #1 on Perna’s hit parade alone would go a long way toward the change needed: “Take stuff off teachers’ plates.”
In the mid 1960’s around 15% of all adults in the US had a college degree. This was the result of a surge in college enrollment brought about through the post WWII GI bill provided for veterans of that war. We now have a populace of between 30-35% that is college educated. Meanwhile, high schools also provided technical training for skilled labor. As jobs in skilled labor left the US and the Information Age took hold, more entered post high school programs to participate in jobs that did not equal the pay provided by mid-twentieth century industrial labor. More or less 25% of students matriculating through high school had a preparation that could get them through college while the rest either participated in vocational programs or muddled through with little preparation for meaningful work and thus a negative view of their schooling. College graduates have always been the minority of the adult population, yet their preparation dominates high school curricula. We now have a political environment where most college graduates support progressive government. However, there is a cynical element of college graduates, evidence the current Republican cabal of Ivy League grads, who exploit ignorance through misinformation for corrupt means. When I first began teaching High School in the mid 1990s it struck me that many of my colleagues saw dropping out as a positive for some students. I would like to think that this was a minority view, but the national data at the time revealed a drop out rate of around 30% and the arrival of the “Standards Movement” weaponized privatizers who, led by supply side economists such as Milton Friedman, were openly out to dismantle the public schools. The education establishment, through a “one sized fits all” instructional mindset provided the bullet for the assassination. We are in dire need for true educational reform, but not in the way that predatory capitalist disruptors advocate. If the public schools are going to survive, then those within the public school establishment have to understand that building a teaching force with significant autonomy and professional support, including pay, is the most important step. The ability to do this is fast disappearing. We have to build a school house that is desired by its participants. Only an autonomous, well prepared, and resourced teaching force can do this. Universities, supported by federal and state governments, have got to get off of the sidelines and understand that nothing else will do. The Democratic Party now is predominately supported by college educated adults who represent a minority of the electorate. The Democratic Party, and most college grads, have been complicit in the development of public school policy that has dismissed the majority of our citizenry. The only way to change this is to influence the one entity, the university community, that would still listen. We’re running out of time.
Paul Bonner– I’m having trouble with your stats supporting this analysis. This one is perhaps a quibble: Statista.com says 37%-38% of US population had 4yrs or more of college in 2020 [not 30%-35%]. Regardless, as you show, the # roughly doubled between 1960-2020… But that stat is always going to be diluted by older, less-educated generations still living—thus still a minority.
It seems to me if you want to look at what hisch curriculum should be offered, you need to use the stat on how many hisch grads have been enrolling in college over those decades. In 1960 it was about 46%, in 2019 it was 66%– a % that rose more or less steadily in those 60 years; it has been above 60% for over 30 years. So we cannot conclude that we have been building a schoolhouse that is not desired by its participants.
I’ll grant you that offshoring & associated econ policies have been thwarting the ability of many college grads to earn much more than mfg employees did in the mid-20thC— but that’s about the downsizing of the opportunities/ wealth of the middle class. Our current [since ‘90’s] paradigm is the one our kids are living in– and it gives degree-holders a 66% (women)-75% (men) advantage in lifetime earnings over those with just a hisch diploma. So 2/3-3/4 of our students are in fact looking for college-prep curriculum.
The point that needs to be made is: what about the 1/3-1/4 who are not being adequately served? Which helped usher in, as my contractor brother advised me 15 yrs ago, 1-1/2 generations missing from the trades [filled in by immigrants]? Vo-tech disappeared from our hischs during the 1970’s, only gradually to be replaced with regional/ county vo-techs, many of which are hanging on by their fingernails, and are less available in rural areas. We are grossly behind Europe in this regard, both in hisch and post-secondary systems. There are models—notably Poland, Slovakia, and a few Nordics— which offer amazingly flexible ed systems including everything from lo-tech-tech (like barbers) to hi-tech-tech and everything in-between, starting toward late hisch and extending for yrs beyond, and offering the ability to change/ upgrade laterally midstream. And other Euro’s like Germany whose ed systems are nearly as good. All of them working with unions and industry at the natl level to fine-tune.
I disagree it’s the university community we have to appeal to. They are locked into too-high costs for needed degree programs, thanks to lack of fed & especially state contribution to tertiary ed programs, exacerbated by loose/ predatory student-loan programs that are a feature of bank dereg (among other things). Successful European ed systems are supported by all their country’s taxpayers through age 24+, and are the product of fed-level planning with industry and unions. [We barely even HAVE unions!]