Where Have All the Teachers Gone?
Most American readers will be familiar with the euphemistically-termed “teacher shortage,” often presented in the media as an out-of-the-blue consequence of the pandemic. But just as we saw with nurses and nursing home workers, the teacher shortage has been decades in the making.
Like nursing, teaching is both a profession and a vocation. The best teachers are “called” to teach (cf. derivation of “vocation” > Lat. voco -are, “to call”); their knowledge is acquired through university attendance, honed through teacher training, and later, professional development courses which committed members of the profession continue to enroll in throughout their careers. As the parents of school-age children who were at home doing virtual classes in the early months of the pandemic have realized, teaching is not a matter of showing up and handing out homework at the end of the day. It requires an incredible amount of mental energy – even for the “natural” teachers among us – and the 20 or 30 hours of in-class time standard for most primary and secondary school teachers are accompanied by as many hours again of out-of-class preparation and grading. It’s easily a 60-hour week for a conscientious teacher.
But most teachers gladly give of themselves – their time, mental engagement, dramatic skills (yes), because that’s why they entered the profession in the first place. They chose to contribute to children’s growth through the acquisition of “book knowledge” as well as “social knowledge” – a fair amount of school time in the primary years involves socializing very young children to the idea that there are other people in the world outside their family. It’s not easy.
Througg the middle decades of the 20th century, teaching was still deemed a middle-class profession; salaries varied considerably by state (considering both cost-of-living differences between states/regions and the fact that wealthier districts / states paid higher salaries than poor districts/states), but in most states a teacher could maintain a decent lifestyle, particularly when they were one of a two-person working household. Of the three options available to lower- and lower-middle-class women in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, it was the most secure.
Today, there are two major national teachers’ unions: the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) with 3 million members (it includes teachers and all others who work in education as well as future teachers and retired ones). The AFT (1.7 million members) has around 3,000 local affiliates and is currently led by one of the nation’s best-known public unionists, Randi Weingarten. Of the two, the AFT was from the outset a true union (militant, strike-ready), while the NEA began as a professional organization which only later acquired the characteristics of a true union (with collective bargaining, for example). Individual districts (recalling that there are 13,000 of these), when unionized, become “locals” – thus, the Chicago Teachers Union is “Local 1” of the AFT; that in NYC is the “United Federation of Teachers” (UFT). Since the 1960s, teachers unions have wielded considerable lobbying and ballot box power at the local, state, and federal levels.
But teachers and the unions which represent them are not without powerful opponents. To some extent this has always been the case, its origins going back to the mid-19th century when teaching shifted from the home and into the institutional setting of the school room – often, throughout the smaller towns and rural regions of the U.S., the one-room school house [note: our blog’s masthead features an early 20th-c. one-room schoolhouse in Central Illinois]. Young women assumed responsibility for imbuing a small group of children (aged 5-18) with sufficient “reading, writing, and arithmetic” to enable them to function in adulthood as farmers and laborers, but their tenures were short – only until marriage, when they were normally required to resign – their ambitions seen as non-existent, and their “vocation” a temporary one which terminated once they had a husband and family of their own. The emerging professional class (white, male dominated), in its effort to professionalize office work / management of enterprises both service- and production-oriented, looked down on the nation’s teaching ranks as inferior, largely due to the profession being dominated by young women, whom they saw as docile and obedient but not really up to the job of educating the country’s youth.
For the past generation or more, teachers have been attacked by numerous organizations which have systematically downplayed / downgraded their work and its results, and which have lodged an equal amount of vitriol towards their unions; while men began entering the teaching profession in significant numbers after WW II, especially at the secondary school level, much of the activism that led to collective bargaining rights, decent pensions, health insurance, sick days – all the benefits of white male private-sector unionism, in other words – was conducted by women, and two of the most powerful unions – the UFT and the CTU – are or were led by women in the 2010s.
Over the past 30 years, teachers have been systematically attacked by both political parties for the inadequacy of “outcomes” as these privately-backed groups began hacking away at the primacy of public schools through the introduction of the “Big Test,” VAM (value-added-model of teaching), charter schools offering parents “choice” if they were unhappy with their children’s outcomes in public schools, voucher (private) schools, online (virtual) schools, and home schools, of which the “pod” or “micro school” which gained some traction during the pandemic was but a recent variant.
When teachers themselves, their profession and their union are being assailed on all sides for decades, it’s hardly surprising that applications to schools of education decreased in the years leading up to 2020; in fact, what’s surprising is that applications didn’t fall even further. Deeds have consequences, and the consequence of late 20th and early 21st-century “teacher bashing” was that when the pandemic arrived, it was already estimated the system would be 200,000 teachers short by 2025 out of a required 3.5 million to maintain fully staffed classrooms.
As we enter Year 3 of the pandemic (apparently having decreed that it is at an end), U.S. school districts across the country are struggling, often unsuccessfully, to find staff. One reason is clearly the pandemic: teachers at or near retirement age, considered to belong to a COVID-vulnerable group, took early retirement. Others were forced to quit because of family obligations – caring for elderly relatives who were vulnerable themselves, or for young children who were at home due to pandemic school closures or COVID. Similarly, the ranks of substitute teachers shrank as many districts’ substitute corps is made up of retired teachers.
Other staff essential to operating and maintaining our public school systems similarly decreased in numbers throughout the pandemic, including classroom assistants (aides), bus drivers, cafeteria workers, crossing guards, and custodians. Many of these workers live in poverty, in communities hit hard by the initial wave of the pandemic in 2020, and in multi-generational settings with elderly relatives whom they were loath to expose to the virus.
How have states dealt with personnel shortages, which have not yet abated? Two states, New Mexico and Massachusetts, have called upon their National Guards to fill in for sick teachers (New Mexico) or for bus drivers (Massachusetts). Oklahoma has recruited police officers.
New Mexico holds the dubious distinction of having the highest child poverty rate and the lowest average teacher salaries in the nation (an argument could probably be made that these two data points are connected), although salaries are slated to go up 20% this summer. So the state, in collaboration with its National Guard, normally tasked with providing assistance in times of natural disasters and serving abroad in military missions, created the “S.T.A.F.” (Support Teachers and Families) program. The Guard was hoping around 70 of its members would step up; in the end, 96 did. This may not sound like many, but for some schools like those in rural areas featured in this NYT story, it meant that schools could stay open even when 10% of their staff was absent.
In Massachusetts, which in January had over 1,000 school employees out sick on an average day (20% absence rate in food/nutrition, 100 bus monitors, 30 bus drivers), hundreds of school administrative staff went into classrooms, including the Boston Public Schools Superintendent herself. When administrators and clerical staff must enter classrooms, their work doesn’t get done in a timely manner; often, those teachers still working are tasked with additional paperwork and quasi-administrative tasks which add to the burden without benefit to children’s learning.
In 2021, 37% of all teachers were considering leaving the profession earlier than they had planned. Between July 2021 and January 2022, teacher retirements and resignations jumped 85% in Chicago Public Schools, in addition to 72 resignations by principals and assistant principals. With a total workforce of 39,000, there were 1842 resignations and 524 retirements during the same period, up 50% from 2019-2020. Percentage-wise, the highest turnover was observed among principals/assistant principals. While the stresses on school leaders have been different than those on teachers, they’ve been no less severe: the initial shift to online learning, reopening (or not) school facilities, ensuring the safety of students and staff through mitigation measures, resisting anti-vax and anti-mask activists (mostly parents, not students), dealing with the repercussions of the annus horribilis 2020 for our country’s race relations, managing massive amounts of federal coronavirus assistance responsibly, confrontational school board meetings, critical race theory, book banning, and the list goes on.
But there’s more than the grievous effects of the pandemic at work here. We have often read about “teacher burnout” and “low morale” during the past two years, but teachers were burning out and morale was falling well before COVID-19. In a recent post, education writer Peter Greene suggests another name for the ill that has befallen our public school personnel: “moral injury.” He adopts the definition employed by Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project: “Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” Greene – a long-term high school teacher in Pennsylvania who recently retired – gives an example of one classroom practice which he considers as having inflicted moral injury, viz. “teaching to the test.” He estimates in another post that between 6 and 10 weeks a year were devoted to practice, preparation, and taking standardized tests – when you have only around 180 teaching days, and 50 of those have to be devoted to “the test,” that’s a lot of valuable real teaching time lost, to nobody’s benefit apart from the testing companies’ bottom line.
But there are many other aspects of teaching today which contribute to moral injury, i.e. the sense that what you are being forced to do goes against your values and indeed against the very reason you entered the profession in the first place.
It’s easy to say “Well, let’s just all pull together and agree on our values so teachers can inculcate them in our students.”
The thing is, our country’s values are fractured along very deep fault lines today. And inevitably, these fractures are played out in classrooms.
Teachers didn’t create them, but they’re paying the price in moral injury.
Next up: Governance & Education Policy in a Time of Pandemic. Lots of misbehaving and conduct unbecoming to adults – stay tuned.
Further Reading:
“Teacher Voice: Why We Are Being Driven Straight Out of Our Classrooms”
“The Blame Game: 100 Years of Teacher Bashing”
(Episode #84, Have You Heard Blog)
“Iowa Won’t Require Schools to Put Live Cameras in Classrooms after Republican Bill Dies”
“Who wants to lead America’s school districts? Anyone? Anyone?
“In Chicago Public Schools, More Principals and Teachers Are Leaving”
“New Twist on Pandemic’s Impact on Schools”
“‘We Are Losing Good Teachers and Staff Every Day’: Report Reiterates Pandemic Shortages”