“I’ve dreamed of having a career as a teacher my whole life. I put in the work to get my degree and I was hired into a school where I am a perfect fit. I love my students. I’m passionate about what I do for them. When I am teaching in my classroom, I feel that it is the perfect place for me to be—that I’m serving the purpose for which I was put here. Yet, I also feel like my job is killing me and I’m becoming convinced that I won’t be able to do it much longer.”
That is pretty much a dead-on paraphrase of a conversation I’ve had with more than one new teacher lately. I’m talking about the cream-of-the-crop kind of new teachers. I’m talking about people who should be looked at as up-and-coming superstars in their field. They are torn between doing what they love, and not being able to afford to do it. They have so much extra stuff (crap) beyond teaching their students put on their plates that they have to put in incredibly long hours outside of their contract time just to keep their heads above water. They are required to continually create new, rigidly structured lessons, collect and record assessment data on all their students, analyze that data in order to segment their students into groups based upon their individual abilities and shortcomings, develop new lessons to meet those specific needs, re-teach, re-collect, and re-document, and on and on and on. That is a lot to put on a veteran teacher who has many years worth of lessons and experience upon which to draw to help them streamline these processes, but a new teacher comes in armed with little more than an innocent, naive optimism and the clothes on their back. They are thrown into the choppy seas of our current high-stakes standardized testing accountability and forced to swim or sink. If they are to survive those first few years, they will be forced to work harder and longer than veteran teachers for a fraction of the compensation.
Most teachers get maybe 45-50 minutes of preparation time built into their schedules each day, and even that can be quite tenuous. Many days, teachers are asked or required to give up their prep time for one reason or another, so an average teacher might get no more than two hours per week of paid time to prepare. That would be a scant amount of time even if all they were required to do was prepare the week’s lessons—but now they are asked to do so much more than that.
New teachers are telling me that they are looking at other jobs they never thought they’d consider just to provide what they want to for their families. Many new teachers are just starting their families. The stress of having to put in so many extra, unpaid hours at home just to stay afloat at work is harming their ability to give quality time to their young children. One new teacher told me that she and her husband would love to start trying to have a second child, but have had to put that on hold because of the time restraints and the financial burden. Another new teacher confided in me that she and her husband would love to be able to travel with their daughter over the summer vacation, but they just can’t do it financially.
“I am being forced to consider leaving the profession I was put on this earth to do because of all the extra stuff. I can’t afford to put in all those extra hours at the salary I make and still have it make sense for the good of my family.”
The answers aren’t simple and the blame isn’t on any one person. It’s been a long, slow descent to where we are now. It started with state legislatures deciding more than a decade ago that teacher pay raises should not be guaranteed on a schedule based on experience but should be determined by a convoluted formula based on students’ performance on totally inequitable and subjective standardized tests. Working under the dark shadow of the dreaded potential state takeover of “failing schools,” administrators were forced to push outrageous demands on school staffs. Everyone from the top down began to have to fight for their professional lives. Stress levels went through the roof and staff turnover became a perpetual and growing problem.
I began writing about this years ago, trying to warn anyone who’d listen about the impending doom.
Well, the doom is here.
Somebody somewhere is going to have to stand up before the powers that be and say enough is enough. We have tons of bright new teachers who may not be here next year. What’s more, they are telling their prospective teacher friends and family just coming up through the schools of education to run for high ground. More and more, administrators are forced to spend most of their summers scrambling to replace vacated classrooms. How much longer before there is nobody waiting outside their offices to be interviewed?