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"People Don't Want to Be Teachers Anymore. Can You Blame Them" 

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"People Don't Want to Be Teachers Anymore. Can You Blame Them" 

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This New York Times article highlights the main reasons that people are steering away from being teachers. After the pandemic it has become crucially demanding for teachers. Teachers aren’t going into the profession because they think that they are going to make a lot of money from it. Teachers do want to know that they will have stability in their lives if they do go into the profession, and from what we’ve seen from recent years they aren’t getting that. Depending on the area that you work in, your district may not provide you with health care, a retirement plan, or supplies for your own classroom. Those are things that have to come out of your pocket. Most teachers are paying for supplies for their students out of pocket because they aren’t getting a budget to get the necessary supplies. If teachers are working in an area where parents aren’t financially able to afford supplies for their kids, teachers are paying for it themselves to make sure that their child receives the education they deserve.

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Opinion | People Don't Want to Be Teachers Anymore. Can You Blame Them?

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We're in a 'moment of really acute crisis' for the profession.

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"How the pandemic has changed teachers' commitment to remaining in the classsroom" 

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"How the pandemic has changed teachers' commitment to remaining in the classsroom" 

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During the pandemic teachers were held to an all time standard. They went from physically being able to see what their students were struggling in, to behind the computer screens. Then when hybrid classes came into play they were expected to be able to handle the students in the classroom and students online. Making sure that everyone is learning effectively. Knowing that it was hard to establish a connection with students through the computer screen, they were still put to the challenge. Teachers never really knew who was failing or who needed help because students were in the comfort of their own homes and had unlimited access to online resources. In early January of 2021 RAND ran a survey and they found that a quarter of teachers had the desire to leave their professions. After the pandemic, parents have become more fond of teachers because they were challenged with the task of teaching their children, realizing that they knew nothing about teaching their children academically.

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Around the United States there are less citizens wanting to become teachers. Being a teacher has become more and more difficult to be a teacher in the United States. Being a teacher goes beyond the scope of working the school day and then just going home. Depending on the type of teacher you are, shows the level of difficulty you would typically deal with from day to day. There's all these factors that go into the type of teacher that someone is. There’s the grade level that you're teaching, the subject that you're teaching, or even if you're a special education teacher.

There is so much more that a teacher has to handle besides having to care for your child at. There is hours long of lesson preparation that goes into the lessons that students are learning. They have to make sure that students are learning effectively and retaining the information that is needed in order for their students to move on to the next grade level. They have to make sure that students are not only taught but cared for because school is essentially a place where a child has to feel safe and comfortable.

Teachers are held to a high standard, which amounts to the work that they have to put in. But are they being fairly compensated for the time and work that they are putting in? Should they be able to teach a student about questions that they have or don’t feel comfortable talking about with someone else? These are the challenges that go along with being a teacher.

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Teachers are being forced to censor the things that they are teaching to their students. Real life issues that they would hear just about anywhere. From their friends, from their family, and basically just being out and about. Recently there was a bill passed called the “don’t say gay” bill. This bans teachers from having a discussion with their students about sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom. Supporters think that it is up to the parents to indicate the time when it is best to introduce the topic of LGBTQ. The law now gives parents the right to sue a school district if a teacher is found violating that law. DeSantis, the current governor of Florida, feels that teaching kids that they can be whatever they want is inappropriate. This law now puts students in a weird position if they don’t feel comfortable talking to someone at home about it. They now have no one at school that they can talk to.

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The Learning Policy Institute has highlighted the key factors that are offered in each state around the country. It includes the attractiveness of the profession. The starting salary and if there is wage competitiveness. The working conditions of teachers in various states and the qualifications that are needed to hold that position. The map is color coded by those shades. The darker the green is the more attractive the profession is to that state and the lighter that it is there is much need for more people to hold the position. New York has an attractive teaching market due it being one of the highest paying states, California then follows with the salary and having the most schools out of any state in the country.

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Jessica Grose, An American journalist and editor. She is an opinion writer for the New York Times. Studied at Brown University.

The Great American Teach Crisis, a short opinion dialogue for the New York Times.

People Don't Want to Be Teachers Anymore. Can You Blame Them?

Learning Policy Institute, Published July 27, 2023

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In this blog series, our Vice President of Programs, Jeff Rozelle, is talking with teachers around the country about their lives during this pandemic. They'll talk about what teaching entails in this new world, how their students are managing, and the unexpected challenges and successes they find. This interview was conducted on April 22, 2020 and has been edited for clarity and length. Click here Jeff: What was yesterday like for you? to see the other interviews in this series. J: Was there an inclusion teacher on the call with you to help provide those services?
Zoe Rothenberger teaches geometry at Meridian World School in Round Rock, Texas, where she also lives. She's a third-year teacher and 2019 Knowles Teaching Fellow.
J: You mentioned that you saw your fifth-period class yesterday. Is that the only time this week that you'll see them?
Zoe: On Mondays and Tuesdays, we're scheduled to have our check-in Zoom call with each of our classes. The calls include all of our students and we get to see all their faces, we tell them what's going on for the week, and teachers can choose to use that time to teach a lesson or provide some support. Yesterday, I did that for my fifth period. Then I had a break for an hour for my off period, and then I had another 45 minutes for my seventh-period class. In both of those classes, I have students who receive special education services, so that's been really interesting to try to figure out how to provide inclusion support over Zoom. I really feel for the special education department at my school, because they have had quite a difficult time because the students require and need so much support-typically that's done with face-to-face support and interventions-so it's been really hard to get that kind of access to their students.

Z: Yes. That teacher becomes a co-host on the Zoom call, so they can chat privately with the students that are receiving support in the class. I share my lesson plans ahead of time, so they can make sure they're modified or accommodated appropriately. Typically they also worry about grading and assessments for the assignments, but our school's decided to worry very little about grades, so the special educators are mostly just concerned about equitable access to the content. We have a pretty large population of students with special needs as well as many students who receive 504 accommodations.

Z: They are only required to come to one session, on either Monday or Tuesday depending on the schedule. On those calls, I asked them to turn on their cameras just so I can see their faces, and then I let them turn it off, because I don't want them to feel self-conscious about that. And then on Thursdays and Fridays, I open up the Zoom call for their period, and they can pop in and out and ask questions.

During this week's lesson, I did a Desmos activity which allowed me to track their work, so I was commenting and sending them direct messages. It was almost like I would do in class when they would work on a Desmos activity and I would say to them, "Hey, I noticed you put this answer. Can we go back and look at this?" So now, I was able to send private chats to the students on the Zoom as I watched the Desmos and it seemed pretty similar. Then I broke them into breakout rooms, and they did quizzes together on content they were supposed to learn last week. When we came back together as a whole class, I opened it up to questions for me and a couple of kids asked questions. From there, I introduced this week's lesson plan and opened that up for questions as well.

In between all that teaching, there's a lot of telling jokes. My classroom management is to be as friendly with the students as I can, to be positive and at the same time honest, so I was trying to check-in and see how they're doing, asking what's going on in their lives and the things they watched on Netflix this week. I think it's been really important to not only recognize and validate that this is scary and unusual and unexpected, and also that we can still try to have the connections we would have in class here. So we show off our pets and mess around with each other and, as you'd expect, some kids are engaged and some kids are not. I miss my students! I didn't know how hard it was going to be. I try to be funny in class, but all my students are on mute on Zoom, and when you tell a joke and there's no response-it's the worst! Honestly! I don't know how Youtubers can do it. And then one of them will say in the chat "Haha," and that's even worse. (laughs)
J: What's your sense of how your students are doing?
My school also took the initiative to split our students into different small cohorts. I have probably eight students in my group. I check in with those kids one-on-one weekly either via email or some sort of FaceTime or Zoom call, just to see how they're doing. It's not necessarily school-related or if it is school-related, it's me asking them, "What's going on in your classes? Are you able to turn in work? Are you confused about anything? Should I help you with anything? Do you still have food? Are things safe at home?"
J: Have there been some challenges you weren't expecting?
There are some students that I still touch base with even though they're not my check-in kids because I care about them. I have some students who are LGBTQ, and their home lives are not the best. There's still a lot of unacceptance here in Texas, even though we're in the Austin area. I guess it's probably everywhere that there's unaccepting parents. So with those students, I had to message them to ask some hard questions like, "What name do you want me to use in the Zoom calls? Do you still want me to use these pronouns because I don't know if you're using headphones or not?" which is just a weird conversation to have. At school, it's a no-brainer that I'd use the name that they gave me to use and the pronouns they gave me to use, but now that they're at home, I felt like I needed to have that hard check-in.

Z: They're bored. A lot of teachers are finding it is difficult to give work that's not just videos to watch, because you only have that 45 minutes once a week. They don't want to spend their time watching TV, because they've done that enough from having two weeks of spring break already! We're trying to encourage them to find new hobbies, but we also can't really provide them access to joining clubs at school, because we're not at school. We can't have the board game club or the chess club or the sewing club, and they don't have access to all of their art stuff so they can't do art at home. It's been hard, so they're just finding it sort of frustrating because they're used to learning in a specific way, or having access to all these really cool learning experiences, and they don't have access to that any more and they're just bored. They don't want to be assigned more schoolwork, more reading, or watching videos, but we're all kind of in this together.

We had a student pass away two weeks ago, and that was extremely hard because we couldn't grieve as a staff and as a community. While you never want to lose a student ever, it's difficult to not be able to be there to hug your kids and your colleagues and tell them that you love them. I wanted to. I went over to my friend's apartment who taught the student, and, from a distance, just waved and said I'd give you a hug right now if I could. But to not be able to provide that support to your community is really difficult.

We respected the family's wishes and kept it relatively private, and didn't make a whole school announcement. We told all the students in the grade level and those students also watched a video during their Zoom class of the assistant principal reading a letter. We didn't expect it to happen, and so we aren't sure what would have happened if we had been able to provide our normal support. It's terrible to go into what-ifs, but maybe we could have noticed something was off and been able to provide interventions but because we're on a video chat for 45 minutes three or four times a day with the kids, it's just really difficult to see everything that's going on. And so that's been extremely challenging, not being able to provide the counseling services to kids that we normally do, by telling them, "You need to go talk to the counselor right now. I can't let you walk away from my class without going to talk to the counselor." I can't force a kid to open up on a Zoom call, but I can walk them to the counselor's office.

It's been hard and I know a lot of my colleagues are suffering with their mental health, and we rely on each other a lot. In a normal year, you know summer is coming and we know to expect the build up to the final week. You cry, say goodbye to seniors, and none of that is happening. We just didn't expect that the last time we saw a lot of our students would be the Friday before spring break.

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Teaching in the Time of Coronavirus: A Conversation with a Math Teacher in Texas - Knowles Teacher Initiative

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Learn more about the life of Knowles Fellow Zoe Rothenberger through an interview with Knowles Vice President of Programs Jeff Rozelle.