Silencing Teachers Leads to Crisis
Teachers feel exploited and silenced and they're ready to leave - for good
Around the country, tales of a teacher shortage crisis abound. While reports of teachers leaving seem dire, the question of why they are leaving remains. Seeking to understand the exodus from the profession could offer a path forward - a solution that will attract new people to the field and keep existing teachers. However, education journalist Jennifer Berkshire tells us the situation is complex and multi-faceted.
Here are some key points from her piece that highlight the nature of the current crisis:
“The pandemic is exacerbating teachers’ feelings of being silenced,” Dunn says. “They feel like they have no voice in what happens in their classrooms and no say over policy implementation, even in a public health crisis.”
Not just about money:
For many teachers, the experience of working through a politicized pandemic has been equivalent to a pay cut. That’s because, as researchers have found, some teacher compensation comes in the form of what scholars refer to as “psychic rewards”—the feeling that they’re making a difference in the lives of kids and doing work that’s important to society. When teachers are painted as enemies of the public good—as leftist indoctrinators or tax-funded loafers—it undermines those psychic rewards, according to Jack Schneider, an education historian at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “Their checks may look the same every month, but their total compensation has been affected,” Schneider says.
Exploitation:
As Guerra-Vega took stock of her long hours and ever-expanding workload—one that included monitoring the progress of 107 students with an array of special needs—she settled on a word for what she was experiencing: exploitation. “This is why you’re losing teachers, because you won’t pay them and the work is unsustainable,” says Guerra-Vega, who resigned right before Thanksgiving. A state in which teacher shortages have been a problem for years—district and charter schools report more than 6,500 vacancies—had just lost one more. “This system is going to crash,” she adds, “because more teachers are going to leave.”
READ MORE on why teachers are leaving and why there’s an empty pipeline when it comes to replacing them.
Missouri districts move to 4-day weeks to save money
The Springfield News-Leader reports that 1 in 4 Missouri school districts are now operating on 4-day weeks in order to save money. That is, schools don’t have sufficient funding to stay open 5 days a week.
Marshfield is one of at least nine Missouri school districts planning to switch to a four-day week this fall.
Together, they will push the total number of districts on a truncated schedule to a record 128 — 25 percent of the state's school districts — and more are contemplating the move.
School funding notes in Tennessee:
In Tennessee, School= Daycare. Teachers are low paid and have high stress. We are expected to be teachers, therapists, attendance clerks, standardized test administrators, hall, bus, and cafeteria monitors, etc. Is it any wonder that teachers are leaving the profession? I speak for myself only and no organization.