Teachers are Quitting. Who Will Replace Them?
Teachers are quitting their jobs in record numbers. Consider this small sample of headlines from the past few years:
“Why Teachers Quit: Educators Share the Reasons Why They Leave” (weareteachers.com) “Why They Leave: New Book Explores the Reasons Teachers Give for quitting the Profession; Hint It’s Not the Students.” (the74million.org) “Why are Teachers Leaving Their Jobs?” (Education Next); “Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record.” (Wall Street Journal) “Teachers are Seeing Their Colleagues Leaving at an Alarming Rate.” (insider.com) “More than 40% of Teachers Leave the Profession Within Five Years.” (NEA) “Fifth of Teachers Plan to Leave Profession Within Two Years.” (theguardian.com) “Why so Many Teachers are Thinking of Quitting.” (Washington Post) “’Exhausted and Underpaid’” Teachers Across the US are Leaving” (theguardian.com). “Teachers are Leaving and Few People are Choosing the Field.” (edition.cnn.com) “Teachers are Quitting, and Companies Are Hot to Hire Them,” (Wall Street Journal)
In her February 2022 article, “We Can’t Blame Teachers for Leaving Their Profession,” Ashley Nguyen states that “an estimated 800,000 public school teachers quit their jobs between January and November 2021across the nation. A recent poll conducted by the National Education Association indicated that 55% of current teachers are considering doing the same.” Teachers are finding that their skills are valued in the corporate world where they receive better pay, a better work-life balance, and greater respect.
“Something about incurring massive debt for a career of backbreaking hours and heartbreaking lack of respect just doesn’t do it for some.”
Perhaps the wrong question is being asked. Rather than asking “Why are teachers leaving their jobs?” the question should be: “Why are they staying?”
Teachers quitting the classroom should not be a mystery. A 2018 cartoon by Joe Heller shows a beleaguered teacher bewildered at the offer of a pistol to protect students and herself from potential school murderers as she balances a host of other responsibilities in her arms: social worker, part-time parent, disciplinarian, referee, nose wiper, psychologist, abuse detective, nurse, and more. All this for meager pay and lack of respect from state governments, school boards, political pressure groups, and many parents.
The News and Observer reported that a North Carolina teacher with a bachelor’s degree starts at $35,000 annually or $2916/month. (A current ad for a Southern Pines Math teacher states that this “Teacher/Licensed Employee” will earn an “Employer Provided Salary of $35K.”) Deduct taxes, mortgage payments or rent, food, car payments and gas, perhaps childcare, and our teachers clearly must live on a barebones budget. Unsurprisingly, many NC teachers work second jobs. And many, though underpaid themselves, purchase classroom supplies: books, pens, pencils, printer ink, and frequently food for poorer students.
In recent years, NC has jumped from 45th in the nation in teacher pay to 30th this year. Though the change is sluggish, it at least points in the right direction. But coming from as far back in the pack as it was, NC is still 30th out of 50 states! Perhaps the recent compromise budget between Governor Roy Cooper and the General Assembly, which includes a 5% teacher pay raise and a $2800 bonus from the federal government will alleviate the financial pressures on teachers.
Or, perhaps it’s too little, too late.
Yes, thousands of teachers are quitting their jobs. The problem now is who will replace them? With more teachers leaving, and fewer college graduates entering the field, who is going to replace the well-trained, qualified, competent, and licensed teachers who quit because they were fed up?
One worrisome consequence of this teacher exodus is that school boards across the country populated by angry Trump-supporting politicians are exploiting the situation to facilitate the exodus of qualified teachers, specifically those identified as being progressive.
The N.C. Moore County School Board presents a microcosm of this problem. Like many School Boards across the country, Critical Race Theory is a hot-button issue fueled primarily by a minority trio of Trump-supporters. This trio has repeatedly denounced CRT and stoked division by falsely claiming that it is being taught in NC classrooms. They choose divisive behavior hoping to influence and eventually manage what is being taught in Moore County classrooms. These same divisive tactics are being used to intimidate those who might possibly resist them -- teachers antagonistic to “whitewashing” the K-12 school curricula to suit a far-right political agenda.
One third of this trio, Robert Levy, revealed his own attitude about teachers four years ago in a newspaper column where he called teachers attending a May 1, 2018, rally “Socialists.”
He said their rally resembled “workers’ holidays in China and North Korea.” He called their union demands “partisan” and suggested that their rally was an angry, red-fisted Marxist spectacle -- a “Communist International Worker’s Day.” He breathtakingly stated that the teachers’ red shirts suggested an “innuendo of socialism,” and evoked the “Bolshevik banners displayed during the Russian Revolution.”
Levy and his cohorts are now being supported by a vanguard of local extremists, many of whom participated in the January 6th insurrection in D.C. A recent Facebook post by one such 1/6 participant announced a campaign using informers and denunciations to compile an enemies’ list of progressive teachers. This Facebook post solicits, first, the “self-reporting of progressive teachers in Moore County Schools, like [name withheld]” who was “already on the list from parent reporting.” The third part of this program urges teachers to report one another: “Hope she sends her radical friends to my page to comment. We will identify them either way.”
Yes, neighbors are generating enemies’ lists based on (1) self-reporting, (2) colleagues reporting on one another, and (3) parents reporting their children’s teachers to local political extremists. (The third item is troubling since it suggests that children are being deployed as informers by their parents.)
Sound familiar? Of course! Tyrants and totalitarian regimes have used informers throughout history to denounce and persecute those who dissent from party dogma. (Side note from Quora: “the use of informers and denunciations had been the backbone of Nazi Germany’s internal security apparatus from the beginning.”) Now, here in Moore County, N.C., right-wing extremists are deploying informer/denunciation tactics against local public-school teachers.
Teachers who resist this incipient tyranny deserve admiration and respect. But those who decide to leave teaching because they are being harassed also deserve admiration and respect, even though their absence creates a dangerous vacuum. It is bad enough to be chronically underpaid and disrespected, but to be intimidated because your political views differ from some jacked-up right-wing neighbor is not only un-American, it also eviscerates the spirit of tolerance and intellectual curiosity at the core of education.
But if such fascistic scare tactics work, and the school curricula are successfully reshaped by extremists hostile to critical thinking and the accurate coverage of social and historical events, then what? At what point does such a school stop being a place of learning and become instead a place of indoctrination? At what point does a teacher stop being an educator and become instead an apparatchik?
If Moore County’s School Board and the NC General Assembly, follow other counties and states intent on imposing extremist agendas on school systems, citizens should expect more laws like the recent Florida law prohibiting “discussions around race and discrimination in public schools and private businesses that could cause ‘discomfort’ to white people.” Expect only gossamer variations on Governor DeSantis’ proposed feel-good curriculum hosted presumably by smiling white-skinned individuals whose teaching credentials have been thoroughly vetted by the local “gazpacho.”