When I left college and entered the workforce in the late 2000s, I was lucky enough to get a pretty laidback office job as an assistant magazine editor. This was during the height of the Great Recession, when jobs of any kind were hard to come by, so they paid me and my fellow 20-somethings next to nothing and constantly told us how lucky we were to have jobs at all. Anyway, the job had its perks and one of them was plenty of downtime to browse what we might think of now as Millennial Media—Buzzfeed, Vice, Mic, and my personal favorite, Gawker. All of these sites were fresh and funny and spoke to us because they bristled openly at the reductive media narrative that Millennials were lazy, entitled, self-absorbed, social media obsessed, overeducated, and “killing” off various industries by spending too much on avocado toast.

Needless to say, it’s a framing I’ve never quite accepted because while the narrative possessed some minimal truth, I suppose, it scoffed at all the root causes for our apparent sense of dissatisfaction. Namely, that we were being shut out of the grand bargain of the American dream we were promised by our parents’ generation: Go to college, get a job, buy a house, have a family. Instead, we got bank bailouts and a foreclosure crisis; spiraling inflation and a bum job market. Nobody listened to us, yet everything was our fault.

All that’s to say, I typically take any piece purporting to generalize an entire generation with a grain of salt. But when I read one recently, about a younger generation, it did admittedly give me something to chew over in terms of how today’s kids think, learn and experience their world. I’m not a doomer, but I am a little worried.

First, some context. A few months ago, I decided to go back to school to get my teaching credential, with the goal of becoming a high school English teacher. For any generation, the future always lies in the classroom, and for that reason, if nothing else, I’m happy mine does too.

As part of the credentialing process, I’m taking a slate of education courses, including one on the thoughtful use of edtech, which has been a highlight of the semester. The other day, memories of my Millennial heyday came rushing back to me when I read a 2019 article from the California Teacher Association (CTA) on the challenges of teaching Gen Z as part of a homework assignment for that class.

Now I realize Gen Z is aging out of the classroom, replaced by Gen AI or whatever. But outdated as the piece may seem—was there even a world before COVID-19?—it still left a queasy feeling in my stomach, as I read about the anxiety, isolation, depression, and discontent today’s youth are staring down. To the extent that things have changed, it’s not for the better. A recent Common Sense Media survey found today’s kids spend more of their screen time gaming and watching short-form video of the TikTok variety, and less timing watching TV shows and reading books. Attention spans are shrinking, along with memory retention. Meanwhile, social media algorithms have gotten even more insidious, addictive, and radicalizing.

But what if I were Gen Z? Would I take the same umbrage with a piece like this that I did all those years ago with Why Millennials are killing paper napkins? (This must be my generational self-absorption at work). The truth is, I probably would. So I reread the CTA piece and tried to pinpoint exactly what gave me that queasy feeling; and it wasn’t just the time on screens.

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Certainly the sixth grader who equated playing video games with friends as “technically hanging out” made me sad, though I doubt he’d see it that way. But he might more readily take the point about phones becoming a tragic feedback loop, trapping kids between validation, constant surveillance, unregulated dopamine highs, and social ostracization if they dare to opt out.

More to the point for teachers and future teachers, Gen Z is sketched out as cautious-to-a-fault in their decisionmaking. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls this their “moral dependency,” the idea that today’s kids have offloaded considerable amounts of their cognitive abilities to nearby adults and now technology platforms like AI that are all too eager to fix their problems before they’ve given them enough thought. Without a sense of productive struggle, we’re only feeding their anxiety, their sense of helplessness.

In a brilliant piece for Edutopia about advice teachers should ignore, educator Jay Wamsted tells us to resist treating students as too fragile. The classroom, he writes, is not a warm bath you need to ease into. There is structure, accountability, boundaries, expectations, and consequences—and these are all good things. A few weeks ago I read a social media post that really stuck with me. It noted that kids today don’t have the same respect for authority as those in earlier generations, because of cellphones. By sticking kids in front of screens, parents can get quiet in the house without discipline, which is having a drastic impact on classroom behavior.

I’m still thinking about how much technology I’ll permit in my classroom, and what types. I believe kids need to experience a sense of struggle and difficulty in order to learn, and shortcuts like AI defeat the purpose, even when appropriately scaffolded. I expect my class will be hard; students will have to work at their zone of proximal development and beyond without much help. “But Mr. Noonoo,” they will say. “What happens when we leave your class and have to use AI at our jobs and you don’t prepare us for that?”

To that, allow me to point out that two weeks after ChatGPT debuted, education influencers were already selling how-to guides on using it in the classroom. They were publishing e-books within a month. Is that because they possessed some magic algorithmic knowledge of prompt engineering or deep LLM expertise of the kind Meta et al. are now paying specialists 200 million a year for? No, of course not! They were leaning on their decades of hard-earned critical thinking skills and applying it to this new technology. We will never again live in a world with tech that isn’t user friendly and easy to learn (even if it’s hard to master). If teachers impart these skills, they should be able to pick up new tech in a weekend.

The fact is, I didn’t learn to write by copy/pasting or rushing off to the AI homework machine every time I had a deadline. I learned by banging my head against my keyboard over and over, straining for the next sentence, working and reworking my transitions, and by reading books and articles by much better journalists than me. If I had a dollar for every time I said “I have no idea what I’m trying to say ” halfway through a first draft—well, I wouldn’t be picking up teaching right now, that’s for sure. In fact, I’m doing it at this very moment. I don’t really know how to end this post, having spent so much time above talking about generational narratives.

I guess what I’d say is that I know firsthand that these sorts of stories don’t get everything right. Generalizations miss too many individuals, and they don’t always tell us why people experience the world the way they do. And like I said, I’m not a doomer. If I’ve learned anything so far, it’s that the job of teachers isn’t to accept these technological, cultural or generational obstacles to learning as fait accompli, but to find ways to reach students anyway, and to prepare them for an increasingly difficult life after high school—one where too often the land grab for their attention is given far more weight than their critical thinking abilities.

Here, complacency is dangerous. Because I want the same sense of productive struggle for my students that served me so well in my journalism career. I want them to work their way out of their apathy and anxiety the way literate humans have for thousands of years. That takes work. You won’t find any shortcuts to that on your phone. And a year from now, you won’t find any in my classroom either.

The more I learn about AI and writing, the further it falls in my estimation. Forget the education-specific tools, which I’ve found hallucinate just as much as their consumer-oriented counterparts, even the super-powered LLMs have never made my job any easier.

It’s not just that I don’t trust any of the information AI tools spit out (as the recent Google search dustup has proved), it’s more that while they can write faster, they aren’t any better at it than I am. And no matter how much they improve, they’re often considerably worse.

When I wrote headlines, subheads, and social-media copy for Edutopia, it usually took a reasonable amount of time to wordsmith something that was both interesting and aligned with existing conventions. (Keeping in mind Gerunds in headlines were very popular; subheads were punchy and informative). Despite my best efforts at prompt engineering, AI never really grasped things like that. My versions always won the day, even when I would slip in a few AI choices and let the top editors select what would ultimately appear on the site.

As for using it to help rewrite a clunky sentence, sure it often generated a few capable options, but I didn’t get into writing as a career to use technology to avoid the hard parts of writing. (Except perhaps when whiling away the days on YouTube).

It’s not much of a take to say that writing well is difficult. So is thinking critically. But, crucially, both endeavors help me better understand topics when I have to explain them for others. In other words, doing things on my own is the helpful part. So what are these tools doing in education beyond the marketing claims of “saving time” and “personalizing learning,” and what do we stand to lose?

A lot, it turns out.

Over the past two years, a glut of human-written words have been published on subjects such as these, and what AI might mean for the future of the teaching profession. Tools like ChatGPT are only getting cheaper and more powerful, upending our current system of assignments and grading. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a seismic shift, and it’s happening quickly.

AI tools are frequently marketed to teachers as time savers, even while students are told to use them ethically and responsibly with too few red flags being raised. It’s not going over well, and it gets even worse when you consider that all this just showed up one day, virtually out of the blue.

“The maddening thing about all of this is that these tools are being deployed publicly in a grand experiment nobody asked for,” Marc Watkins, an academic and AI literacy expert, said recently.

Watkins is one of the leading critics on AI tools being adopted, well, uncritically in education. Though these days, he’s got plenty of company.

Below are some of the best arguments I’ve seen against using AI in the classroom, but also for teaching students to think for themselves.

First up is high school teacher Liz Schulman who explains in the Boston Globe just what we’re losing in the age of unrestricted ChatGPT — namely, the very capacity for original thought.

ChatGPT eliminates the symbiotic relationship between thinking and writing and takes away the developmental stage when students learn to be that most coveted of qualities: original.

Isn’t originality the key to innovation, and isn’t innovation the engine for the 21st century economy, the world our students are preparing to enter?

You can sense the aliveness in the classroom when students use their imagination and generate their own ideas. Their eyes become warm. They’re not afraid to make mistakes, to shape and reshape their ideas. The energy shifts. I’ve seen it happen in their discussions and with stages of the writing process, from brainstorming to drafts to silly stories to final essays. They’re more invested in arguing their points because they’ve thought of them themselves.

Next, let’s check-in with Watkins over at Rhetorica, in a piece on subtly replacing teachers, on why AI is a credible threat to education—and why education is, of course, more than a means-to-an-end.

Yes, every teacher knows the learning is the most valuable part, not the letter grade or the degree. But does every standardized test maker know that? What about students or parents or school board members or edtech companies? (Or Sam Altman?)

A sizable number of people view education as an entirely transactional relationship—learning as a means to an end. For this crowd, using AI to replace traditional teaching or augment it is perfectly acceptable, even warranted. They don’t see learning as intrinsically valuable or think about the human relationships at the heart of teaching. Critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and contending with views different than your own aren’t on the agenda of a transactionalist view of education. Removing any barrier to getting a degree matters most to these folks, so too, does ensuring a student consumer likes the content they’re provided. And that is a much deeper problem.

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When you reduce education to a transactional relationship and start treating learning as a commodity, you risk turning education into a customer-service problem for AI to solve instead of a public good for society. Making my education my way might remove certain friction for some students to achieve academic success but at an immense cost. We’re already siloed by algorithms in social media, do we really want to create silos in education, too?

That reminded me of something writing instruction expert John Warner wrote more than a year ago in his classic essay, ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving, on why writing instruction is vulnerable to AI, but good writing instruction is not. Truly, teachers have their work cut out for them when it comes to working with students and helping them see the inherent value in learning how to write and think over shortcuts like using an algorithm.

Teaching in the age of AI might get even harder, and not the kind of hard that can easily be solved by prompting an LLM.

But the reason why I’m confident my pedagogy is not vulnerable to ChatGPT is because I do not only grade the end product, but instead, value the process it takes to get there. I ask students to describe how and why they did certain things. I collect the work product that precedes the final document.

I talk to the students, one-on-one about themselves, about their work.

If we assume students want to learn - and I do - we should show our interest in their learning, rather than their performance.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of my career, I did not have the time or resources necessary to fulfill the highest aims of my own pedagogy. The National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) recommends each instructor teach three sections of a maximum of fifteen students each, for a total of 45 students. I never had fewer than 65 students in a semester, and some semesters had in excess of 150.

High school teachers are working under even greater burdens, and in more challenging circumstances. If the system will not support the teachers who must do the work, we may as well let ourselves be overwhelmed by the algorithm.

Elsewhere, in another piece, Marc Watkins argues against the prevailing narrative that AI tools might be the ultimate time saver for teachers—the new silver bullet that will save them hours by streamlining everything. Because AI doesn’t think, it pattern matches. It can only “cobble together information from its training data into a competent output.” It doesn’t understand anything about pedagogy, students, or ethical decision making. So what exactly is being gained by offloading tasks to it?

Effective teaching requires intention—aligning objectives, assessments, and activities in a cohesive plan. AI struggles with this and requires a user to align these areas using their own judgment. This takes a great deal of time and human skill. Generative tools can create activities, but AI cannot grasp the pedagogical foundations to purposefully scaffold learning toward defined goals. That’s a teacher’s job. The risk of using these tools uncritically as time savers is students end up with a disjointed collection of tasks rather than a structured experience.

No AI tool truly can account for who your students are. Only skilled teachers can design lessons centered on their specific students' backgrounds, prior knowledge, motivations, etc. Used intentionally in this way, AI can certainly help augment a teacher, but again, that takes time and friction. AI alone can't analyze and adapt to a classroom's dynamics like a human being can. If we use AI like this, we'd be stuck with one-size-fits-all instruction disconnected from those human realities.

In other words, it can’t teach.

Edtech professor Evi Wusk also resists the idea that it’s simplifying our lives for the better in an essay for EdSurge. A common theme running through these types of articles is that an LLM can’t think, and thus can’t do our thinking for us. We all know that modern teaching is too time consuming and demanding. But there’s real value in not saving time using AI in the same way that there’s value in solving a tough Wordle versus looking up the answer online.

As AI becomes more mainstream, it leads me to philosophical questions, but on a practical level, I find it interesting that so many of the things I’ve learned that matter to me the most were hard. They took effort. They took time. Learning them was rewarding. 

I don’t want to forget how satisfying it feels to clear off a garden, to grow stronger at something through extended practice or to create something from scratch. I don’t want our schools to forget either. As Tom Hanks says in, “A League of Their Own,” “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

Reading through these pieces helped me gain a better understanding of what’s at stake. Writing this post helped even more, especially to organize a lot of thoughts I hadn’t really articulated to myself and to make connections between a bunch of different pieces I’ve hastily read and bookmarked over the past month or two.

And sure, I could have probably asked AI to do a lot of this pattern matching for me, and I might have even saved myself an hour or two.

But what would I have learned from that?

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Another great quote, which could have fit in above, about the “inevitability” of AI, i.e., that it’s only as inevitable as we make it (via @heymrsbond on X/Twitter).

📚 Independent Reading

Wall Street Journal (free link): It’s a themed issue around here this week apparently. Next up: Is AI any good at grading papers? Sometimes, maybe. But then again, “It should not be used for grading,” said Alex Kotran, co-founder of the AI Education Project, which teaches AI literacy. “It’s going to undermine trust in the education system.” This article then spends another thousand words detailing exactly how AI is currently doing just that, including tales of students asking teachers for higher grades based on the higher marks AI gave their work. Of course, AI grading, in the WSJ’s own estimation, is often all over the place. One paper run through different tools scored anywhere from a 62 to a perfect 100.

Hechinger Report: Emerging research shows humans are a bit better at grading than AI, but scores are close. Humans are better at giving useful feedback for improvement, though. “It was better than I thought it was going to be because I didn’t have a lot of hope that it was going to be that good,” said Steve Graham, a well-regarded expert on writing instruction at Arizona State University, and a member of the study’s research team. (Of course if students know it can provide great feedback, they surely know it can write a good paper too, he adds). At the end, writer Jill Barshay asks ChatGPT to grade her own first draft, and found the generated feedback either superficial or irrelevant—something I’ve noticed when asking it to judge my own writing. (AI did, however, provide a handy list of other writers with a style and tone somewhat similar to my own, which I greatly enjoyed.)

New York Times: I think we’ve all earned a bit of a reprieve from thinking about AI. How about the joys and challenges of being a male kindergarten teacher? Only 3 percent of the kindergarten teaching profession is male, but they can impact kids in ways big and small. Some great photos here too.

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Years ago, during his first year teaching, Tyler Hester distinctly remembers crying into a plate of pancakes over breakfast with his mother. Busy and overwhelmed, he had tried to beg off, but agreed to meet her at IHOP where he broke down when she asked, simply, “How’s it going?”

It’s a scene that might feel familiar to virtually any educator. Experienced ones might recognize the symptoms of burnout bubbling to the surface. Hester described the experience as the “emotional vicissitudes of being an early career educator.”

It might also illustrate a larger point. Many of us can picture the sadness and crying jags associated with burnout, demoralization and teacher dissatisfaction. But what does a happy, flourishing educator look like? Or, as Hester later came to refine it, how do you define teacher well-being?

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Like many of his peers, Hester isn’t in the classroom anymore—though he still works in education. A few years ago, after earning a doctorate from Harvard, he became a part-time administrator for a school in Northern California. While at Harvard, he began researching teacher well-being and started a company, Educators Thriving, which seeks to translate the research on what makes educators successful and contented with action-based courses that help them get there.

In September, the company co-published a report, Beyond Burnout, with the American Federation of Teachers that has sought to distill the rather nebulous concept of well-being into something tangible—by letting educators define it themselves. Starting with teacher focus groups, Hester and colleagues decided to flip the script a little. Instead of the kinds of questions I typically ask around how burnout looks and feels, they came up with new ones like, “What does it feel like when you get to the end of the day and you’re good-tired, not totally depleted?” and “Tell us about a colleague who’s really at their best.” The focus groups helped design a survey, which was ultimately taken by more than 1,200 AFT members.

While the research itself is a little esoteric—there are “predictive factors” and a 26-item scale—the major findings are straightforward enough. Flourishing teachers need things like growth opportunities and personal fulfillment outside of work, but they must also possess an adaptable or flexible mindset when dealing with change, along with a sort of zen acceptance to the fact that the work will always be somewhat challenging. Most of all, they need supportive administrators who take their concerns seriously, solve more problems than they create, set consistent expectations and trust teachers to do their jobs.

“We went through a long process to have educators define what well-being means for them,” explained Hester during a related session at the recent Education Writers Association annual conference. “I think the short version is, it means a set of personal dispositions that are drivers of well-being. But it’s also about the conditions that administrators create in the buildings where they work.”

All this is useful for educators and administrators, of course, in the sense that it’s helpful and affirming to hear what makes for happier teachers in general. But Hester’s company isn’t primarily a research group. Their stock-in-trade is professional development-like courses, which they refer to as “personal development,” that aim to grow stronger teachers by tackling specific traits and deficits one at a time. Thus, survey insights like the predictive factors are useful to them as market research in designing new teacher training courses that target these areas. (As a bonus, they can say the courses are rooted in “empirical evidence.”)

Here’s how it works: schools sign up for short courses on various themes—core values, relationships, prioritizing, developing healthy habits—which teachers take together like workshops. One course hones in on getting teachers to identify their existing strengths by listening to a presentation on related research and taking an assessment. They talk it over with the group and then come up with ways to use those strengths more deliberately in their work.

Through an ongoing partnership with AFT, the company has already worked with at least seven local associations (or “locals” in union parlance), as part of an effort to reduce burnout, increase retention and strengthen communal bonds.

The New Haven Federation of Teachers, for example, focused their trainings on teacher retention, given the reality that teachers were leaving both the profession and the area for districts with more resources. Along the way, teachers realized what they were really leaving was an unwelcoming school culture that was, at least partially, within their control. As one teacher put it in the report, “Instead of running toward each other, we were shutting our doors on our prep [periods], complaining about other people complaining, talking in circles about the teacher shortage, and just not really helping each other get out of this.”

The training helped them brainstorm concrete strategies for lifting the fog and making their schools feel more like a community: “This looks like warm greetings for students and staff in the mornings, leaving their classroom doors open more often, and turning complaints into proactive action to improve the school.”

Elsewhere, school leaders are turning to the courses to improve their own relationships with teachers, perhaps in recognition of the report’s finding that having supportive administrators was the biggest factor in determining educator well-being. Minnesota’s White Bear Lake Area Schools has already given the well-being survey—developed as part of the process in turning the research into an actionable program—to every principal in its district.

According to Alison Gillespie, the assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at White Bear Lake, administrators ultimately want to improve their relationships with teachers, meaning the program wasn’t much of a hard sell for them, despite what she describes as the obvious vulnerabilities required of school leaders asking educators to give their honest, anonymous thoughts on the leadership they experience.

“Just like any other profession, it’s scary to get feedback from people that you supervise,” said Gillespie. (I would argue that it’s far scarier to get feedback from the people who supervise you, but I digress). “To know that educators have a hand in creating this survey, it makes it extra meaningful for them.”

The action component here, once all the data has been crunched and group discussions concluded, is that principals now work directly with educators to address some of the specific leadership gaps that emerge during the process. There’s no silver bullet for solving these issues, but given that less than half of respondents in the AFT well-being survey agreed with the statement “My administrator takes my concerns seriously,” it’s a step in the right direction.

To former teacher Tiffany Dittrich, now president of the White Bear Lake local, it’s actually more than that. It’s a way to fight systemic demoralization by giving teachers both a voice and a way to help engineer the solutions.

“As educators, it can be very defeating to think, how do I fight against this system that is not working to serve my students or serve me?” she said. “It feels so big and so overwhelming, especially when my responsibility is to be in the classroom every day, serving my students, teaching them, loving them. This is a way that that I can do things for me, while also trusting that the union president, the assistant superintendent, the superintendent, the school board are doing the things they need to do to address those systemic concerns.”

Perhaps this is what educator well-being really looks like.

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Everyone can remember their best teachers, as well as teachers who were terrible at their jobs. In teaching, the crucial factor is the teacher—not a gimmick, a slide deck, a checklist or an office supply.

When you deprofessionalize a profession, you risk losing your best. While many dedicated teachers are choosing to stay and fight, it seems to me that the majority of us who are leaving are among the strongest and most beloved...But since veterans are often the most outspoken teachers, the cynical part of me wonders if pushing us out was the intention all along.

— Teacher Jennifer Mathieu Blessington, writing in the Houston Chronicle of her decision to switch districts over dissatisfaction with the policies of HISD Superintendent Mike Miles.

📚 Independent Reading

Hechinger Report: Last In First Out policies—which influence who gets laid off during cuts—hurt high poverty schools the most since teacher seniority is not spread evenly across schools, writes Jill Barshay. Experienced teachers tend to cluster at wealthier schools (and those with more white students), meaning they feel district-wide cuts the least. Research suggests higher teacher churn at schools that serve students living in poverty or those from minority backgrounds can hurt achievement. The solution might be to beef up protections from LIFO policies in those schools.

Adrian Neibauer: “Can teachers in their 20’s more easily engage and relate to their students? I posed this question to my own teenagers. My 17-year-old son relates to and respects his older teachers more. He’s obsessed the the 90’s and sometimes struggles to relate to his peers, or as he says, This generation. He loves learning and is pretty compliant with what is expected of him. My 15-year-old freshman hates school. He has always struggled academically because of his dyslexic thinking. Unfortunately, he has never really related to any of his teachers. My 13-year-old daughter cringes when her older teachers try to “relate.” She hates it when teachers try to talk about TikTok or pop culture. She swears that most of her teachers are condescending to their students. This could be more of a commentary on the culture of middle school, but her comment shows an important difference between relating and connecting.”

Adrian’s Newsletter

Have I Become Richard Vernon?

As of today, I have 8.5 days of school left in the year. I’m actually a bit amazed that I made it to the end of yet another school year. This year has been one of my most challenging, taking a toll on me, both physically and mentally. I’ve been inundated with thousands of…

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2 years ago · 26 likes · 8 comments · Adrian Neibauer

“Teachers are quitting,” the Wall Street Journal declared two years ago, “and companies are hot to hire them.” In my experience, that rosy spin doesn’t exactly align with the reality for many teachers. While it’s true more teachers are leaving for greener pastures these days, educators with only teaching experience on their resumes often face an uphill climb to new careers, as I wrote about in The American Prospect a few months ago.

For that piece, I charted the journey of teachers eyeing the exits with retooled resumes packed with corporate jargon more appropriate for the boardroom than the classroom, who still saw more than their fair share of rejection.

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But I also spoke with career experts who insisted that fulfilling new jobs in edtech and other sectors are out there, and that hiring managers see real value in former teachers. After all, former teachers know a thing or two about hard work, and they often make diligent, empathetic employees who learn fast and are eager to pass that knowledge onto others.

So what are the secrets of the highly-effective teacher job candidate? What really gets a former educator hired? And what actually moves the needle for hiring managers? Two of those aforementioned experts — Darin Enferadi, the vice president of talent at Kiddom, an edtech company that provides digital curriculum to schools, and Daphne Gomez, founder of Teacher Career Coach, which offers online courses and more to teachers looking to leave the classroom — spoke with me about just that, sharing advice for educators in a competitive job market.

Here are their tips:

Picking a career direction isn’t a permanent decision

Teaching is often seen as a “forever job,” in that teachers may move grade levels or change subjects but generally expect to stay in the classroom for their whole careers, with occasional promotions for some into administration. That’s not the expectation in the corporate world, Gomez says, where workers’ job titles are more flexible. And it’s something teachers looking to transition away from the classroom often struggle with. 

“Instead of applying to project management roles and instructional designer roles and sales roles and marketing roles, try and pick a very clear path so that you can go deeper—and you can really revise your resume,” she suggests. If it doesn’t work out in a couple of years, many companies will work with employees they like to revise their job responsibilities or let them apply for new roles internally. 

But targeting a specific role and making a strong case for why your skills are a good match can help land a coveted interview faster. For some teachers, it’s all about getting over that initial hump.

“There's so much stigma about their decision to change [careers], that it’s hard for them to just pick one path—and they kind of want to keep every path open,” she says. “Just because they’re really nervous to pick the wrong one, not realizing this isn’t necessarily the ‘Forever One.’”

For teachers, customer service positions are often the easiest transition into edtech

Any time companies need to work directly with teachers—typically to train them on a tool or to troubleshoot a problem—it’s better when a former educator is on the other end of the line, Enferadi says, especially when schools are trying a new curriculum or teaching method for the first time. 

“Teachers that can speak to that stressor or that difficulty tend to gain an advocate on the school side, because they showcase that they understand how challenging something can be,” he adds. “They use the same kind of coded language; they’re able to gain trust very quickly.”

Hiring managers know that teachers are good at explaining things and often draw from a wellspring of patience. That makes them well suited for training and user support roles, but also as account managers who work with existing customers and the salespeople that recruit new ones. 

“What hiring managers find valuable in teachers is high emotional intelligence,” Gomez says, along with “their ability to have empathy for the customers, their ability to make inferences from what the customers are needing, and being able to patiently walk step-by-step through all the information that the customer or client may need to make the best decision.”

Getting other jobs often means upskilling or getting a new degree

Many teachers have successfully pivoted into marketing, corporate training and project management, and Teacher Career Coach documents dozens of success stories. But most other roles require either a new degree or some dedicated upskilling. 

“What I have seen are teachers that often do a stint with [Teach For America] or a few years in the classroom and then they'll go back to grad school and get a specialty degree,” Enferadi says. “And those people tend to go into more strategic hires or roles where it requires some either very specific education or experience. That’s where you end up seeing teachers go into engineering roles, product management roles, design research, or partnership positions.”

Networking means finding people who can vouch for you

When teachers think of career networking, they often fill up their social media feeds with other transitioning teachers in the same boat. They might share job tips and offer each other solidarity, but connecting with former colleagues and even friends-of-friends working the types of roles they want can be a much better use of their time, Gomez says. 

Candidates often see the best results when they feel comfortable reaching out directly to someone in the company, which can also help you get a sense of the company culture.

“If you can find someone who can authentically vouch for you inside of that company, and say, ‘Hey, so and so applied, I think she’d make a really great fit’…it kind of bumps you up to the top where someone’s at least gonna scan your resume,” she says. “Most of the time, if you have the same qualifications as many of the other applicants, they’re looking for someone who's going to be a culture fit. They’re looking for someone who’s going to be coachable.”

Before an interview, do your homework

“Research is something that has no downside,” Enferadi says. “I've never once heard a hiring manager complain about a candidate who’s over prepared and understands the business too much.”

The other key is good storytelling, which also takes prep work. A good rule of thumb before any interview is to sit down and brainstorm three or four of the most common interview questions—Why do you want to work here? What are your longterm career goals?—and prepare detailed answers. Too often candidates don’t work on how to articulate their own stories, leading to answers that are less sharp than they should be. “Those are softballs, you should just tee off on every single time they’re answered,” he adds.

Make sure your resume truly stands out

Some teachers prefer more straightforward resumes, stripped of business jargon and corporate buzzwords, Enferadi says, rationalizing that it’s more honest. But writing a business-friendly resume can show respect for the corporate world and its culture. “It’s not ‘not telling the truth,’ it’s being an effective marketer.” 

Algorithms rarely disregard resumes without human oversight, he adds. Over the past few years, as Kiddom has grown in size and reputation, his company has gotten far more applications—sometimes hundreds for a single position—and each one must be quickly assessed. What Enferadi is looking for are resumes that stand out. “If you're not putting in a quality product, you can't expect a quality outcome,” he says. “The people who are really good at writing resumes also tend to have the skills and understand how to articulate the experience to get that attention.”

That’s not to say candidates need to write a new resume for every position they apply to (although they will likely have a few). Tailoring a resume with more targeted language, however, provides a chance to stand out in a crowded field. Gomez adds that resumes are an opportunity to showcase where the candidate has created special projects, shown relevant leadership and leveled up their skills. A teacher that designed their own professional development workshops and led their department can easily morph into a director of corporate training. In the long run, these details are more effective at getting a hiring manager’s attention than carelessly seasoning a resume with a few corporate buzzwords. 

“That's where we're seeing people making the biggest mistakes,” Gomez says. “If you read their resume, yes, they may have kind of translated it and put some corporate jargon in there. But ultimately, you might do a pass and say, ‘I have no idea what they're even applying for. I don’t know if it’s a project manager position or a marketing position. And from my perspective, it just looks like a teacher.’”

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👁👄👁 Show & Tell

“The shortage has been the catalyst on this, we are realizing we don't have certified teachers in front of our children, and that's a problem so I think we have realized we’re going to have to do something about it. We know the issue is conditions and pay and so we’re throwing money at the problem.”

—Sherry East, president, of the South Carolina Education Association on her state’s move to raise the starting teacher salary to $47,000 via WACHFOX News.

📚 Independent Reading

KFVS News: Student teachers in Illinois could see a new annual stipend of $10,000 as a bill makes its way through the state legislature. Teaching often requires substantial (and unpaid) classroom training from pre-service teachers, which has made the field less attractive to college students searching for a career path.

EdSurge: Researchers at Vanderbilt University and the Southern Regional Education Board are taking a close look at what it might take to attract more Gen Z students to teaching in the Southeast. Sure, they want better pay, flexibility and decent work-life balance, but as one Vanderbilt professor noted, students were likely paying attention to the lack of support they witnessed their own teachers struggling with. “It’s not doing us any favors to get more teachers.”

: OpenAI is marketing GPT-4o to students and educators, promising friction-free AI assistance. At one point during a recent demo, a presenter showcasing how students can get math help had to literally stop the software from solving the problem for him. Students may appreciate the cheat code dropped into their laps, but educators are almost certainly unprepared for the onslaught of ethical concerns this advancing technology will have on their profession. If the purpose of math class is to teach students independent problem solving along with numeracy skills that scale with age…who are these super tutors even for, and what is the point?

Are lawmakers and school leaders starting to learn from the recruitment and retention problems that have plagued the teacher workforce for the past few years? The answer—as always—might be: Yes, no and maybe. But there are encouraging signs that at least some of them are moving away from the failed status quo policies steeped in bureaucratic inaction that were driving teachers elsewhere. And in some places it’s getting results.

In order to solve stubborn teacher shortages, states and districts must get creative in terms of pay, licensing, and—importantly—making teaching an appealing and sustainable profession. So far, these nascent efforts have inched us back to a workforce approaching pre-pandemic staffing levels (not that those were anything to brag about), but the work is far from done.

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New data from ERS, a nonprofit that helps districts make data-driven decisions, reveals that 23 percent of teachers left their school (though not necessarily the profession) in the 2022-23 school year, “a slight decrease from last year’s turnover spike,” with high poverty schools experiencing the largest turnover. There’s slightly better news on the recruitment front in that the steady decline of students completing teacher prep programs—which has slashed the new teacher pipeline by nearly a third compared with the 2010-11 school year—started to stabilize during the pandemic, meaning more teachers are entering classrooms.

Whether they’ll stay is another matter.

Part of convincing new teachers to fill staffing gaps and stay in the profession is relatively straightforward, if not exactly simple, and is directly tied to how much we pay them. Research shows that paying teachers extra to work in STEM and special education (two hard-to-recruit disciplines) does reduce turnover. That solution is sometimes hampered by opposition from teachers unions who prefer to pull up all teacher pay together. Regardless, a number of states are making valiant efforts to raise salaries via legislative action, which in some cases means deciding to pay existing teachers more over adding new staff positions.

But it’s not all about pay. There’s another part to keeping good teachers in the classroom once they get there: making them feel valued and professionally fulfilled. Quality mentorship programs have shown particular promise in this area, particularly for new teachers, and can improve both teacher wellbeing and student achievement.

Above all, teachers want to be heard, and they want school leaders to help them solve all the little issues they feel no one is addressing. Lawrence Township, a suburban district near Indianapolis, is surveying its teachers with help from a local nonprofit to find “pain points” and spinning up creative solutions, such as flexible teaching schedules that reflect what teachers really value.

It’s a model more districts should emulate, but it’s not without its challenges. Namely, districts need to invest in robust data collection to find these pain points in the first place.

That’s true for South Carolina’s Richland School District One, which is taking an even more personalized approach. Admins there are anonymously surveying teachers, and tailoring solutions for individual teacher groups. The surveys have revealed, for instance, that some teachers were having a more difficult time managing stress. In response, the district is developing new professional development, but in the process, admins are learning that older teachers expect different solutions from their younger peers who value things like community building when new initiatives are deployed.

For Richland One, developing such targeted supports is huge, and previously unthinkable, as Kwamine Gilyard, a director in the district’s HR department, told me recently. Previously, everyone in the building had been fixated on student success. “This is a different mindset around what do we need to do for the adults in the building.”

Often, it takes dedicated work for school leaders to understand that teacher support is not a one-size-fits-all model. But as Richland One is discovering, targeting HR and professional development support by age, race and gender can prove helpful.

To that end, “gross turnover numbers may not be giving us as much information as we need,” explains Fleur Johnston, the CEO of PeopleBench, a company that helps districts make data-informed HR decisions around staff retention and workforce strategy (and is working with Richland One). The more granular a district’s data set, the better position it will be in to make targeted decisions.

Part of the approach favored by PeopleBench involves collecting data through surveys and measuring factors like resilience the way researchers might.

At one school the company worked with, a principal hypothesized that among his teachers, women who were later in their careers would be struggling the most with resilience. He was surprised to learn it was actually early-career male teachers, especially new fathers, who seemed most at risk for leaving. The school’s solution was to get them talking with administrators about the flexibility and support they’d need to stay. That’s the kind of data-driven decision making schools may need to seriously address an issue as complex as turnover.

From this vantage point, teacher retention is more about long range, structured planning around workforce—not unlike the Fortune 500 companies that hire psychologists and consultants to keep valuable talent from leaving for competitors. In fact, Johnston’s previous background in organizational psychology—she spent years advising Queensland’s state government on workforce strategy in her native Australia—has transferred well to U.S. schools.

“As organizational psychologists, we look at it a bit similar to how educators look at students,” she explains. “We approach organizations from a developmental perspective. We try and understand where they’re at on their developmental journey. And then we think about what they need next.”

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👁👄👁 Show & Tell

WSJ: Teachers Are Quitting. Some States Want to Pay More to Keep Them.

📚 Independent Reading

AP: Timely reading on the power of autonomy for Teacher Appreciation Week: “at this South Florida school, administrators allow their staff high levels of classroom creativity — and it works. A public school of 636 kindergartners to eighth graders on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, Henderson scored in the top 1% to 3% in every subject and grade level on the state’s latest standardized tests, with the exception of sixth grade math, where students scored in the top 7%.”

Chalkbeat: An inspired op-ed on post-pandemic reading realities from Mass. teacher Ian Hartigan: “Science teachers, math teachers, history teachers — we’re all reading teachers now.” Hartigan shares a brilliant professional development lesson where teachers read a passage peppered with nonsense words and then took a quiz to illustrate that readers need to be able to understand at least 95 percent of the words in order to even guess at comprehension.

EdWeek: The student cell phone crisis use has gotten so dire, teachers unions are starting to ask for bans in their collective bargaining agreements. In Wichita, Kan., union leaders proposed adding a ban into an upcoming contract, which led to the school board updating district policy on its own.

The teacher shortage had a good run in the press, but alas all good media cycles must come to an end. Have we actually looped around to a teacher surplus?

Of course not.

The numbers still tell of high turnover, driven by resignations and retirements, while too few college students are lining up to replace them. Locally, districts across the country are reporting shortages, filling gaps with virtual substitutes, under-qualified and under-credentialed teachers, and paraprofessionals taking over classrooms. Other places are sweetening the pot for new recruits with sign-on bonuses, dedicated housing, and mentorship programs in an effort to get good teachers in front of students.

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So, if you’re anything like me, you might be wondering just what is going on over at the opinion pages of The74, an education magazine cozy with the pro reform/school choice movement, and its recent headline, “With More Teachers & Fewer Students, Districts Are Set up for Financial Trouble.”

The piece, written by Chad Aldeman, an analyst formerly of the school choice strategy firm Bellweather Education, hones in on falling student enrollments and data showing an increase in the number of teachers hired by public schools (more on that in a minute) to make the case that schools are headed for trouble, even as their teacher-student ratios fall.

To be fair, student enrollment is dropping. Public schools lost around a million students from 2019 to 2020, and while numbers are stabilizing, some states, like California, have lost 5 percent of its student population since the pandemic began. Driven by learning loss and—yes—teacher shortages, some students have left for private schools, which have seen enrollment bumps, or for homeschooling. Others are missing altogether.

Meanwhile, National Center for Education Statistics data from the 2021-22 school year shows the number of overall teachers in the U.S. has actually ticked up slightly the last few years. Some experts attribute this aberrant stat to the windfall of cash schools received in the wake of the pandemic, which allowed them to keep hiring. But federal stats do weird things with their number counts, e.g. counting two half time employees as one full time teacher for statistical purposes.

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What we know about how the teacher shortage looks in practice is much different than that single NCES stat might lead you to believe.

Districts are having a hard time sourcing qualified teachers, particularly in math, science and English as a second language (noted, but buried in The74’s piece). Curiously, or not, The74 didn’t mention another NCES stat from the same time period that showed nearly half of all public schools were operating without a full teaching staff; 18 percent of public schools had one teaching vacancy; 27 percent had multiple vacancies. In light of that, counting two half time employees as one teacher and declaring a teaching surplus looks a little silly. Also, as the piece graciously concedes, “It’s possible that a district was understaffed in 2016-17 and remained so in 2021-22.”

Still, if you massage the stats just so, and take a teacher surplus at face value, you end up with a lower student-teacher ratio, since there are fewer students in the system these days. While this sounds like a dream to most people, I suppose it could be spun as dreadful and spendthrift if you see education only in terms of dollars and cents and not the nation’s children trying to learn against the odds while overtaxed teachers manage huge workloads.

The piece goes on to question whether lower student-teacher ratios are even a good thing—no, I’m not kidding—linking to a Chalkbeat research analysis that contained a few caveats but came to the not-very-surprising conclusion that, “Smaller does seem better when it comes to class size.”

The next line swoons over how expensive these lower student-teacher ratios can be—which just means they cost more than overcrowded classrooms in underfunded schools. The point, I suppose, is that schools could be in financial trouble when emergency pandemic funding tapers off and we revert to some underfunded status quo. I hardly need to point out how cynical it is to assume things must always be this way.

Articles like this are particularly insidious, blaming public schools for losing students, relying too much on emergency funding in a pandemic and for ending up with lower student teacher ratios in the process.

The point is to complain, to criticize, to question the value of public education at every turn and seed harmful and reductive talking points that can be hyperlinked by anyone looking to make similar points backed vaguely by “data.”

Already these and similar moral panics have seeped into the mainstream press, distorting the true causes of the teaching crisis.

Case in point: a new piece from opinion writer Jessica Grose at the New York Times on teachers struggling to hold students accountable in the face of bad district policies that are resigned to passing too many students along when no learning is taking place.

I have no doubt the teachers she quotes are seriously frustrated with learning gaps and students not completing work—and lack of teacher autonomy for holding them accountable. There’s a good story somewhere in there.

But Grose doesn’t just blame a broken system and poor policies, she bandies about a host of imaginary hobgoblins, including grade inflation (which I’ve argued is hardly as serious as its detractors make it out to be) and giving students 50s instead of 0s for missing work (zeros are often demoralizing for students and can hinder future learning) without even the context I just provided, save for a teacher who did the NYT’s job for them by arguing both sides in the same breath.

Grose’s piece is at least written under the guise of protecting public school teachers, but does so at the cost of eroding trust in the public education system itself. Now don’t get me wrong, many writers and journalists cover public schools critically because there’s plenty to be actually critical about, but it’s generally more substantive than “grade inflation.” I’m sure Grose would agree that public education can be both flawed and valuable, but you’d never know it from reading this piece.

Thus the reform talking points that originate in opinion pieces in The74 migrate to the opinion sections of major newspapers and, eventually, are laundered by the general press and taken as fact. But teachers are hardly leaving jobs they once loved over their districts’ policies over zeros or student-teacher ratios that are too low. The big issues like teacher pay get conflated with grade inflation. Public education can’t do anything right.

And just like that, homeschooling doesn’t look so bad. Is there a voucher for that?

📚 Independent Reading

New York Times: More from Jessica Grose on stemming the teacher shortage: “So the first thing I think we can do about it is make the cost of getting a teaching degree less onerous. I talked to the School of Education at Michigan State, and their program was going from a five-year program to a four-year program. They figured out a way to integrate that into the fourth year of college. And so that’s really going to cut the cost for future teachers. And there’s a number of levers that can be pulled financially to encourage more college graduates into this profession.”

EdSurge: A longterm paraprofessional shares his trying experience as a substitute teacher after New York’s DOE began allowing them to cover classes on their own. Faced with little support and little advance warning on when he’d be covering classes, he struggled to teach to the best of his ability. His solutions for improving substitute teaching include, “offering comprehensive training and ongoing professional development; increasing pay and benefits for substitute teachers; and putting a support system in place to foster a substitute teacher’s ability to develop stronger bonds with students and colleagues.”

Axios: “Public school teachers have long made less money than other professionals, but last year the gap hit its widest level since 1960, according to a new analysis of federal data..”

Another day another…. “nationally representative survey” on public education by the RAND Corp.

Per EdWeek, this new one is a little more generous toward teachers in that it actually surveyed them. (Last time, not so much).¹

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Centered around teacher perceptions of their workload and pay, the survey found 9 in 10 teachers work more than the standard 40 hours a week—compared with less than half of other working adults. According to surveyed teachers, they’re working around 15 uncompensated hours per week on average.

As for pay, only a third of teachers said they were happy with it. On average, respondents suggested raises of about 27 percent—possibly to compensate for all that unpaid time.

Low pay and high workloads are also contributing to feelings of stress and burnout. “The survey results suggest that low pay and long working hours are key reasons why teachers want to quit,” EdWeek says.

One thing I should mention is this is all self-assessed. Surveys such as these are susceptible to exaggeration or miscalculation. Nobody is following you around with a stopwatch after all. Some pre-pandemic research suggests that teachers work about the same as those in other professions, and work part time during the summer too, though I hesitate to use that research authoritatively. We all know demands on teacher time have increased in the past few years, as staff leave and students need more support than ever.

The solutions RAND gives are fine, if a little difficult to implement. Teachers should get paid more. Admins should take things off their plates. More support staff should be hired.

Last year Edutopia ran a story by teaching consultant Michelle Blanchet about simple but effective ways admins can improve teacher wellbeing, by doing things like holding meetings to figure out how to take things off teachers’ plates and using staff development days as catch-up time with no planned activities. The rest of the piece just encourages basic, empathetic leadership.

Neither Blanchet nor RAND hit on the obvious but somewhat more unconventional solution, which is that maybe teachers shouldn’t do so much work if it’s burning them out. Sounds nice, but papers still need grading and parent emails need responses, right?

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Yes and no. That grinding mentality isn’t a pass to take advantage of teachers, says educator and Teaching Habits blogger Paul Murphy in a 2017 post, called American Teachers Should Work Less, which I found thanks to some excellent SEO. In it, Murphy explores a sentiment I see suggested on social media every few months: Maybe teachers can and should do less.

It’s less glib than you think. Murphy acknowledges that individual teachers will have a hard time of it, since working hard is a core part of teaching culture. Work less and you open yourself up to criticism that you aren’t being passionate or invested enough in the job. Many are taught that being a teacher requires a certain amount of self-sacrifice.

It’s only when we start to see that line of thinking as a feature of a broken system, not a bug, that radical solutions seem to make sense.

On the other hand, large numbers of teachers working together — in union, perhaps — might move the needle.

If the only way a teacher can effectively do his or her job is to work an extra, unpaid 20 hours every week, then there is something seriously wrong with the system. 

And the only way to fix such a system is for teachers, lots and lots of them, to stop working so many extra hours.

I could quote half the post here, which is definitely worth reading, but I’ll let Murphy cook just a bit more.

The belief that teachers have “answered a calling,” as if we were somehow spoken to from some God of Teachers, is damaging. It’s this idea that we’re selfless martyrs who only exist to serve our students that has led to society’s unrealistic expectations for how we should do our jobs.

The need for solutions to reduce teacher workload is obviously great and is of interest to a huge percentage of the teaching population. Naturally, this being America, that means someone has found a way to make money off it. That someone is brand-name Teacher™ Angela Watson who offers the “40 Hour Teacher Workweek” program, which promises to impart nuggets of wisdom like, “The confidence to say NO to things that are low priority so I have time for people who matter more.”

The idea is to create boundaries around time and streamline miscellaneous tasks to reduce overall work. I shouldn’t be so cynical because the program does offer useful things like templates and PDFs that could save time, and it comes with access to a private teacher community dedicated to the topic. Watson & Co. even provide a professional development certificate for good measure, potentially saving teachers time later while they learn how to save time now.

The self-paced course runs $175, but a 6-week expedited course is $39. (The big money, as always, is in institutional dollars: A course for admin teams can run into the thousands.)

Perhaps it’s only natural that teachers need to unlearn ingrained work habits, given they are steeped in a culture that labels them as uncaring if they aren’t practicing self-sacrifice.

Mostly the glowing user testimonials attribute the program working exactly as advertised in that it grows teacher confidence. As a teacher named Erin exclaimed after taking the course, “My conscience is no longer plagued with work all weekend.”

Erin for one is working less. How can you argue with that?

¹ The survey in question — on the topic of teachers and learning loss — was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, using data co-collected by RAND.

👁️👄👁️ Show & Tell

📚 Independent Reading

EdSurge: A housing shortage is keeping home prices high in some areas. A teacher shortage is exacerbated by low pay. At the nexus of these twin crises, teachers find they can’t buy (or even rent) pricey homes in the districts where they work. My former colleague Emily Tate Sullivan is eyeing solutions to the problem, such as districts developing unused land they own to build affordable housing for staff. That’s what’s happening in Eagle County, Colorado, near Vail, and Daly City, California, south of S.F. It’s certainly not districts’ responsibility to solve community housing problems, but in many places they’re the only ones stepping up.

EdSource: A new survey report from the Center for Democracy and Technology finds that nearly 20 percent of students have submitted AI generated work in class, and 58 percent have used tools like ChatGPT. Yet schools seem shockingly unprepared to deal with the consequences. “Fifty-seven percent of teachers in the survey stated they haven’t had any substantive training in AI, while 24% say they have received training in how to detect inappropriate use of AI.”

Texas Observer: Houston ISD’s state takeover, under the new leadership of Mike Miles, a former charter school network founder, seems to be going well. Unless you count the hundreds of lost admin jobs, the host of new initiatives rammed into schools, the educator-student-parent protests and…the bizarre satirical musical that Miles directed, which teachers and students described as “propaganda.” Teachers say they’re being strong armed to get on board with the changes—or else. “Our hours will change. Our schedules will change. Our curriculum will change. But we have no input in it,” said one teacher.

If you like this post, please subscribe and recommend this newsletter to others. Thoughts? Suggestions? Reply to this email to reach me. And if you’re a teacher or former teacher with a story to share, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!

This week we have a guest essay by high school teacher Jay Schroder, author of “Teach From Your Best Self.”

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To Solve Demoralization and Burnout, We Need a New Approach to Teaching and Learning

By Jay Schroder

In education, it’s easy to see the direction in which things are headed. Educators are increasingly stretched, facing greater challenges. As a result, teachers are fleeing the profession while fewer people are entering teacher preparation programs. This is leading to teacher shortages, which in turn creates more stress and pressure on the teachers who remain. 

Meanwhile, cultural factors—be it culture wars or the breakdown of social systems—make the job harder while undermining the respect and appreciation that teachers deserve for continuing to persevere in this punishing, but critical profession. Already, K-12 workers have the highest rate of burnout in the nation.

Unless something changes, we are headed toward the collapse of education. 

What we need are new approaches to education that will allow us to avert this catastrophe. When teachers are stressed and burnt out, they cannot give their best selves to their students.

Clearly, we need a new vision for education, one that prioritizes teacher well-being, while decreasing the burden on teachers. Teachers need tools to maximize student learning through doing, not more, but less. 

A New Approach to Teaching and Learning

Over the span of my 24-year teaching career, I’ve been tasked with adopting countless teaching methodologies and tactics—new ones are introduced each year—under the guise of elevating student outcomes. Yet, when we scrutinize the results, both in terms of student achievement and teacher exhaustion, it’s clear that such methods benefit neither students nor educators. Persisting in this trend not only isn’t working, it’s undermining the foundation of public education.

Not only is the increasing teacher workload bad for teachers, it’s bad for students too. 

What I realized during my tenure is that both my mood and state of mind when I’m teaching make a big difference on how open and responsive students will be to my lesson. Whether I teach a class from a frazzled, stressed out state, or a state in which I’m calm, present, responsive, and relaxed, students notice and key off my energy. Experienced teachers know this. When we’re having an off day, things just don’t go as well, regardless of the quality of the lesson plans. However, when we’re open and clear—in other words in our best self—any decent teaching strategy is likely to work pretty well. 

Research backs this up. The first empirical study of the relationship between the emotional exhaustion of teachers and student achievement was conducted in Germany in 2016 and involved 1,102 German elementary school students. This study was designed to explore the association between teacher stress and student performance in mathematics. Controlling for factors such as the teacher’s gender and years of experience, as well as the students’ socioeconomic status and cognitive abilities, researchers discovered that teachers’ emotional exhaustion correlated with significantly lower student mathematics achievement. The negative effect of teacher stress on student performance was higher in classes containing greater numbers of language minority students. 

There are scientific reasons for  why more stress and pressure on teachers is counterproductive. One of them is the fact that when we are overwhelmed, our limbic system tends to trigger us into fight, flee or freeze mode, effectively shifting our entire nervous system from “learning and experiencing” to “survival.” From survival, our body shuts down anything that is not required to save our life. This means, pulling energy out of our thinking brain and pumping it into the muscles for survival. Good for running or fighting, but not so good when standing in front of 35 seventh graders trying to teach them how to solve for 𝑥.

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What we need are approaches that lighten the stress load on educators, so that they can stay in their best self brains. Because states of being are contagious, when I am in my most open, responsive learning brain, my students are more likely to engage in my lesson from their own best self brains. This, in turn, increases student learning while making my job easier, creating a positive feedback loop; as the easier my job becomes, the easier it will be for me to teach from my whole brain best self. 

In a Teach from Your Best Self training (the teacher-centered professional development program I run), one of the concepts we learn to integrate into our teaching practice is applying the economics principle return on investment (ROI) to teaching. 

ROI is defined as the ratio of an investment’s gain or loss relative to its cost. Just as investors want to invest the least amount of money for the maximum gain, teachers want their investments of time, energy and attention to maximally benefit students. A teacher’s time, energy, and attention are finite and precious; we want a big bang for every buck. 

All too often, teachers exhaust themselves by doing things that don’t matter, that don’t deliver a positive ROI, leaving them with little energy for the things that do. Examining our job through the lens of ROI helps us notice where we might be pouring time, energy, and attention into things that both drain us and yield negligible student learning. Once we identify what isn’t paying off, we can begin experimenting with an eye toward lower-effort/higher-impact teaching.

But bringing new approaches like ROI to teachers is only a half step. Policymakers also need to take into account the fact that teachers have only a finite amount of time, energy, and attention—and reform education around prioritizing teacher well-being so that teachers have an easier time bringing their best to their students. 

Unless we change direction and give teachers the support they need to show up for the job from their best self, education will continue its disheartening trajectory. However, innovative approaches that prioritize supporting teachers to consistently bring their best selves will both be good for students and empower teachers, who might otherwise suffer burnout and leave. 

Policy changes that take things off teachers’ plates so they are freed up to bring their best to their students can be the force that changes education’s current trajectory. And because thriving educators correlates with thriving students, supporting educators is also one of the best things we can do for our kids.

Jay Schroder has taught high school English and social studies for 24 years. He’s the author of “Teach from Your Best Self: A Teacher’s Guide to Thriving in the Classroom” and received both the OCTE and NCTE High School Teacher of Excellence Awards. He's an affiliate faculty member of Southern Oregon University and a Southern Oregon Regional Educator Network Implementation Coach focused on well-being and resilience. 

👁️👄👁️ Show & Tell

—via Las Vegas Review-Journal

📚 Independent Reading

Forbes: A study from the free speech nonprofit PEN America “finds that nearly 400 bills have been introduced that are designed to push self-censorship by teachers, creating a chilling effect in classroom across America. “Fear,” says the reports introduction, “is the new watchword in public education.”

Education Week: Karen Lauritzen was named Idaho’s 2023 teacher of the year, but politics drove her out of her job and the state. Parents weaponized her own beliefs and took issue with her curriculum, opting their kids out of lessons on global citizenship and called Scholastic News too “woke.” She wasn’t done being a K-5 teacher, but now she teaches incoming teachers at a college of education. “I couldn’t be the teacher I wanted to be any longer with the political climate in Idaho.”

CBC: Canada is facing its own teacher shortage for many of the same reasons impacting U.S. schools. COVID spiked retirements, jobs are too stressful, and pay isn’t up to snuff. Quebec and rural parts of other provinces are relying on under-qualified teachers to close gaps.

If you like this post, please subscribe and recommend this newsletter to others. Thoughts? Suggestions? Reply to this email to reach me. And if you’re a teacher or former teacher with a story to share, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!

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It’s not just you—the teacher shortage is getting worse, and now new data shows exactly how bad it’s gotten. The research is a collaboration between education researchers across several institutions, and represents some of the most thorough work to date. 

Looking at 37 states and the District of Columbia where reliable data could be sourced, the team found that teacher shortages had increased 35 percent since the 2021-22 school year. They now estimate around 55,000 vacant teaching positions and 270,000 positions being filled by under-qualified teachers—among other startling revelations.  

“Our results clearly indicate the majority of states are experiencing some degree of teacher shortages and teacher turnover surged during the pandemic with more teachers leaving the profession than ever before,” write the researchers in a new report, available via interactive maps and graphs at the aptly-named teachershortages.com.

Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor in the College of Education at Kansas State University, led this effort. He recently spoke with me about how he collected his findings, what they really say, and why they’re important. What follows is a lightly-edited and condensed sampling of our conversation.

Warning Bell: Were there any surprises in your research?

Tuan Nguyen: Over the next couple of years, there are other issues that are going to come into play. We're thinking about student enrollment, for instance. 

For some states, like California, they lost about a quarter of a million students during the pandemic. With ESSA  [Every Student Succeeds Act] funds, some districts are using some of that money to recruit more teachers. Potentially, you may see districts where they have a quote-unquote “surplus” of teachers, because now they have more teachers than they need. And yet you will also see states and districts where teacher shortage, vacancy and under-qualification will continue to worsen over the next couple of years.

Why did you and your colleagues decide to research teacher shortages? Did you notice that there just wasn’t a lot of good data out there?

So that’s exactly it. My work really revolves around the teacher labor market and teacher policy. I myself was a math teacher for seven years before going back to graduate school. I’ve seen a lot of news and reports about how there’s so many teacher shortages across the country. I thought: Hey, there’s got to be a source out there that’s collecting all this information so that we can talk specifically about the number of vacancies and under qualifications that we have in the United States. But lo and behold, nobody was doing that. 

This is something that the federal government should be doing so that we can have an informed picture to make decisions about education in this country. My team and I over the last few years have systematically collected all the information that we can on teacher vacancies and under qualifications in the United States.

Can you explain your methodology?

Sure. Let’s start with teacher vacancy. We have a specific search string that we use, and we rotated through different states. It would be something like “California teacher shortage;” “teacher vacancy.” And we would go through literally hundreds of pages to see: Do we have information on the number of vacant positions? We collect all that information and then we compare and verify. Do these numbers seem to match up? Do they come from credible sources? 

For some states, there just isn’t any information on a number of vacant positions over the last several years. For Oregon, we cannot find this information anywhere. For California, we couldn’t find any information for this year. We found some information for some districts, so that's why we have a lower-bound estimate for California. Some states just don’t produce this information. We don’t have any idea how many vacant positions there really are in California or New York. Some states do a better job of producing this information like Florida. They have a centralized data system that allows them to look at vacant positions.

The official unemployment rate is pretty low. Are your findings surprising in light of that?

We know that when the economy is in a recession, more people will stay in education because it’s seen as a sort of safe profession. You always need teachers. So when you have low unemployment, that means people have options elsewhere. I don’t have to be a teacher. I can use my skills as a mathematician or as a physicist or look for jobs in industry. So when we have low employment, we should expect higher turnover and fewer people who are interested in becoming teachers. 

The challenge here is that it’s not just about what’s going on this year. We have evidence now from my work and other people’s work, that there is a pattern of decrease in interest in the teaching profession. There are fewer people who are enrolled in teacher prep programs, fewer people who have finished all the requirements to become teachers over the last 10-15 years. This is an ongoing issue.

What about the teacher pipeline—how many people are training to become teachers?

We’re relying on Title II data here. So this provides you with the enrollment and completion for every state, for every institution of higher education that certified teachers in the United States—whether or not it’s the traditional route or alternative certification; for-profit as well as non-profit programs. What we’re seeing here is in the early 2010s, there were around 700,000 teachers enrolled in teacher prep programs. That dropped to a low of around 560,000 in 2018-19. That has gone back up a little bit—it’s around 600,000. But that’s still a substantial drop from what it was 10 years ago. 

The challenge here isn’t just the number of people who are enrolling, but those who are completing all their requirements to become teachers. We're seeing that there is a near monotonic decline in the number of people who are finishing their requirements to become teachers. So in terms of the supply what this is showing—and this goes hand in hand with our research showing the decline of the prestige of the profession—is there are fewer people interested in becoming teachers, and that pipeline is either stagnated or worsening over time.

So to put it another way, that's 30- to 40,000 fewer teachers each year that are graduating and completing their teacher prep programs.

Yeah. So on the one hand, you have this substantial decline in the number of teachers who can teach, and then you have more teachers leaving the professions, increasing to 12% and in some cases—North Carolina, for instance—up to 16%, and then you have more vacant positions. So that’s fewer people coming into the profession, more people leaving the profession, and a higher number of vacant positions and under-qualified positions.

What do you think is the takeaway from putting all this data together?

I think it serves a couple of different purposes. So for researchers, like myself, what we need to do is to dig deeper, because it's not just about the number of vacant positions, but it's also about where they're located and what type of positions they are. Do they tend to be located in rural areas or urban areas, are they tend to be located in majority minority schools or high poverty schools, do they tend to be in STEM subjects or elementary education? We need a really fine grained breakdown of what type of teachers we need in order to think of specific policy solutions that can address those needs. 

The second piece is this broader question of what is happening to the teaching profession in our country. I think a lot of this points to the fact that we need to change the narrative around what it means to be a teacher. We need to think about how to recruit people, how to create working conditions that compel people to stay and now just think about what we can do at a minimum to keep people from leaving. They need to have a better salary that is commensurate with the amount of education and expertise they have. They need to be respected as professionals.

👁️👄👁️ Show & Tell

—Florida AP Psychology teacher Robert Hovel via PEOPLE.

📚 Independent Reading

Washington Post: D.C. area teachers say that aggression from students and parents is on the rise, and it’s making it harder for them to do their jobs. “After two years, Tyler Johnson had seen enough. Fights had been starting more frequently at the Maryland school where he taught special-education social studies, and students were having verbal outbursts over what seemed like minor misunderstandings. Once, when breaking up a brawl between two teens, Johnson said he took a punch in the face.”

Education Week: More charts and graphs about the teaching profession. In 2008-09 there were 684,000 enrollees in teacher prep programs. Twelve years later there were just 431,000. Plenty of reasons are given, but it boils down to college students realizing that teaching just isn’t a particularly appealing profession these days and going in different directions. The outlook isn’t great, but it’s not quite as bad as it looks at first glance. “We don’t have to increase [teacher-prep] enrollment all the way back to [the levels of] 2009, because we don’t have as many students as we do in 2009,” said Penn State researcher and professor Ed Fuller. “If we just come partially back, it will help reduce the [teacher] shortage.”

New York Times: An effort to improve ventilation and air quality in schools could make them safer this winter. “The coronavirus is an airborne threat, and the incidence of Covid was about 40 percent lower in schools that improved air quality, one study found.”

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Welcome back from summer break. There’s lots of great stuff in store this year from Warning Bell.

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LaQuisha Bonner has had an unconventional path to the classroom to say the least. After earning a law degree, and considering a career in that field, she spent a few years in the South Carolina state government, working for both its Medicaid program and the Department of Employment and Workforce. 

Quickly, she realized the best part of her job was when she got to teach others how to successfully navigate the byzantine labyrinth that is so often local government. That led to years of trying to transfer into dedicated trainer positions with no luck. Then she realized there was a government job that would let her impart knowledge and help others full time—public school teacher. 

Bonner had some experience teaching grade school as an undergrad, so she thought the process would be relatively straightforward. And it mostly was. In December 2020, she began South Carolina’s Program of Alternative Certification for Educators, known as PACE, which provides a path to the classroom for those with degrees who hadn’t gone down the traditional college of education route. 

Perhaps due to the growing teacher shortage—there are nearly 1,500 current teacher vacancies in the state, per new data—the PACE program is not particularly onerous, requiring a handful of graduate level courses in education and the odd certification in areas like reading.

But it does require candidates to pass a Praxis exam, a licensure test used in 46 states that measures subject-specific knowledge. Last year, Bonner took and passed a secondary exam in history, but then had to pass yet another exam. 

The district that hired her, Cherokee County School District, in the north of the state and located between Spartanburg and Charlotte, N.C., offered her a middle school position, meaning Bonner had to take the middle school Praxis as well. That, she recalls, was a tall order.

“When I took the first Praxis, it was kind of simple—it wasn’t too much out of my wheelhouse, because I wasn’t long removed from U.S. history in law school,” Bonner says. But it had been years since she had taken middle school history and geography courses.

Studying sounded expensive, too, and she was under a time crunch to pass the exam before the school year started. Luckily, she was connected with an initiative called Keys to the Classroom from the studying resource site Study.com that provided her with free, targeted study materials that helped her pass. 

The program forms a small part of the “grow your own” movement, which seeks to recruit new teachers from the local community—turning those who plan to live and work in their local communities into quality teachers. (The Hechinger Report recently did a great profile of some of these programs.)

As Keys to the Classroom notes, alternative pathways are a great resource for helping teachers from underrepresented backgrounds—like teachers of color—but Praxis exams are too often a barrier to entry. The tests are time consuming, especially when candidates are working other jobs, and expensive to study for. The pass rates aren’t great either. As of 2019, more than half of all applicants for the elementary exam were failing their first attempt—with Black and Hispanic test takers facing even greater hurdles and slimmer odds. 

Of course, Praxis exams have long sold themselves as a way to make sure only quality teachers were getting in front of classrooms. That’s not always the case though.

A few years ago, in a story about a celebrated Black teacher who was in danger of losing her teaching license over difficulties in passing a Praxis-like math exam, Chalkbeat reported that “research has generally shown a positive but modest link between someone’s scores on standardized exams and their effectiveness as a teacher — but these exams may be less predictive for teachers of color.” In its own survey of over 4,000 teacher candidates in “grow your own” programs, Study.com found that 72 percent of aspiring teachers passed when given access to additional test prep materials, and both Black and Latino test takers passed at higher rates too. 

We are currently in the midst of a teacher shortage, with roughly 30,000 nationwide teacher vacancies. Understandably, ETS, the nonprofit test makers behind the Praxis, know an overhaul is long overdue. Pass/fail isn’t a metric that works well for anyone. ETS is now in the early stages of redesigning the test to be more responsive and supportive for candidates, according to EdWeek Market Brief. Social-emotional skills and classroom management may also feature more heavily in whatever ETS cooks up in the future. 

Bonner is now starting her second year as a full time teacher at an alternative school, teaching history, civics, and even life skills to kids in grades 6 to 8. In speaking with her, she sounds like a terrific educator who made the right call for her career. Already, she’s connected with supportive administrators and mentors, and encourages anyone with an interest in teaching to pursue the field. 

Fortunately for Bonner and her students, she had ready access to great resources, targeted supports, and encouraging school leaders. Too often this winning formula is missing, and great potential educators are left to fall through the cracks.

Best of all, Bonner was able to leverage her law degree to come in at a higher starting salary—though that was less of a motivating factor. “For me, it’s not something I’m doing essentially for a paycheck,” she says. “I could have gone into law and been making big money, but this is where my passion is.”

👁👄👁 Show & Tell

📚 Independent Reading

New York Times: “A teacher in an Atlanta suburb has been fired for reading a book to fifth-grade students that explores gender roles and identity through the eyes of a child who describes their shadow as purple, her lawyer said on Friday.” I don’t even have the words. Her lawyers are considering their options, for what it’s worth.

Related: The NEA has a breakdown of all the forced resignations and culture war drama teachers have been enduring lately.

Houston Chronicle: “The Houston Independent School District teachers union is considering legal action against HISD in response to a new district policy limiting what employees can post on social media. Union leaders are pushing back on the policy, saying the measure is meant to ‘silence’ employees.”

Hechinger Report: “You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach history without covering racism.” Florida has relented on its decision to curtail the AP Psychology course in the state, which the College Board was not prepared to do. But Arkansas is still feuding over the AP African American studies course, leading to a virtual ban.

✏️ Revisions

The lead story in last month’s newsletter, Teachers Push Back on Claim They Caused Learning Loss, was updated to reflect that the report was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, using data co-collected by RAND. The original newsletter misstated the report’s origins.

If you like this post, please subscribe and recommend this newsletter to others. Thoughts? Suggestions? Reply to this email to reach me. And if you’re a teacher or former teacher with a story to share, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!

We’re on summer break so news is light, but we’ll be ramping up as back to school season gets underway next month.

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Education Week is getting a lot of heat—and rightfully so—for its uncritical reporting of a shortsighted report* that used admin data and test scores to shift the blame for pandemic learning loss onto teachers.

As you might expect, teachers weren’t having it, taking to social media to point out how the flawed research cherry picks data to conclude that teaching deficits are responsible for test scores and student learning not bouncing back instantaneously. (The EdWeek Twitter thread linking to the article is an absolute object lesson in the art of the ratio.)

The now-infamous report was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and used data collected by that org and RAND. It looked at 5 (unnamed) districts and surveyed admins and leaders but no teachers. Instead of realizing that teachers have been incredibly resilient during the last few years, picking up new digital skills and adapting their pedagogy on a dime, districts blamed their teachers for not doing enough learning acceleration—as if that was the silver bullet all along. Near the top of the piece, EdWeek quotes the report calling teachers’ instructional methods “outdated and ineffective.” Yikes on bikes.

The districts did acknowledge interruptions to professional development, coaching, classroom observations (not to mention the growing exodus of high quality teachers from the profession) heavily contributed, which is kind of a self own if you think about it. Later in the EdWeek piece, the perfectly anonymous district leaders complain that teachers, struggling with burnout and the challenge of adapting their lessons, did not even want to attend long professional development sessions, assuming they could be ginned up on the fly in the first place. As if teachers are well-known layabouts.

With all these telling admissions, it’s hard to believe these admins could conclude that the test score drop is anything but an unfortunate consequence of the pandemic, or their own failure to adequately assist their teachers.

Meanwhile, other research is finding that factors such as equality gaps, school closures, disrupted daily routines, and depression and anxiety—things teachers have no control over—are what’s really fueling test score declines. Without significant investment and additional learning time, students may never make up their lost ground.

Most of the blame (there’s that word again) in this brouhaha can be ascribed to the original report and its narrow methodology being used to support sweeping conclusions. On the whole, I don’t have much of an opinion on RAND—which co-led the panel the data was collected from—as a think tank/research group. Sometimes they get things right, sometimes they don’t. (US News lists them as politically centrist, which sounds about right.) But the most generous thing you can say about this particular report is that it’s lazy. The worst? Well, suffice to say, Warning Bell is a family publication….

That goes for EdWeek too, whose quality often varies on the strength of the particular reporters and editors working that day.

This isn’t a media crit publication, so I’ll spare you most of my thoughts on EdWeek and reporter Caitlynn Peetz’s coverage. Except to say I’ve worked at similar outlets to EdWeek and I know that sometimes a report lands in your inbox and it seems like a quick piece you can pair with a saucy headline (in this case, the scorcher: “Teachers’ Skills Took a Hit During the Pandemic, Too, Report Says,” which is flat out hostile and misleading). For these stories, you interview some expert—in this case report researcher Robin Lake of the Center on Reinventing Public Education—and quote liberally from the report and move on with your life. It’s the kind of journalism that’s one step above rewriting a press release, but I’ve done it before myself, mostly early in my career, though rarely to such opprobrium.

These days, I’d probably use it as a jumping off point to talk to teachers about their perceptions of their time teaching during the pandemic and after, and about the problems associated with relying too much on before/after test scores. In other words, there was a lot of nuance to the issue that neither RAND nor EdWeek bothered to get into.

One teacher noted on Twitter that teachers are not miracle workers, though they’re often expected to be. When teachers must supply this context themselves, in place of the media and researchers who should know and do better, they can be forgiven for adding a little snark. But on the whole, they were remarkably restrained, it seemed to me.

After all, as teachers know, someone has to be the adult in the room.

*Updated to reflect that the report was authored by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, using data co-collected by RAND.

ICYMI

Edutopia: Who should evaluate teachers? In many schools, it’s admins, but a growing body of research suggests that when experienced teachers do the observing, they move the needle further. Adding video, coaching, and even student feedback can help too. Admin observations, on the other hand, might be scaled back in favor of shorter checks relating to things like classroom management.

Chalkbeat: A new Chalkbeat analysis of 15 states confirms a sad truth: “Every single one showed an increase in teachers exiting the classroom, compared to the year before the pandemic. A number of individual districts have also reported jumps in teachers leaving.” Texas, for example, is losing around 3.5% more teachers each year than before the pandmic.

CBS News: “Today, education is an afterthought for many college students, who are more likely to study business, engineering, and even the visual and performing arts, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Even as the population of college students has increased by 150% since 1970, the number of bachelor's degrees in education has plummeted by almost 50% — a steeper drop than that for English, literature and foreign language majors. Meanwhile, schools in all 50 states report teacher shortages in at least one subject area last year, according to the Brookings Institution.”

If you like this post, please subscribe and recommend this newsletter to others. Thoughts? Suggestions? Reply to this email to reach me. And if you’re a teacher or former teacher with a story to share, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!

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In case there was any lingering doubt, teachers are still far more stressed out than other professionals—and more than half of all teachers still report experiencing burnout and frequent job-related stress, according to one new survey.

The good news? Fewer teachers reported stress, burnout and a desire to leave their jobs than during the previous two years, indicating some return to normalcy following the height of pandemic chaos.

Still, nearly one in four teachers indicated they were likely to leave their jobs at the end of the school year—with Black teachers significantly more likely to express a desire to leave than their peers of other races. That tracks with similar data collected in 2021.

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The data comes courtesy of RAND’s annual State of the American Teacher report for 2023, a nationally representative survey of 1,439 K-12 teachers. In its report, RAND contrasted the results with a separate survey of workers across professions—which found much lower levels of job-related stress (33 percent of workers) and burnout (45 percent).

In 2021 and 2022, more than 70 percent of teachers (!) reported frequent job-related stress (it was 78 percent in 2021). Last year, 59 percent of teachers said they’d experienced burnout.

So, what about those teachers who are looking to leave? The report offered a few clues as to why, and most cite the typical litany of justifiable grievances. The stress and disappointments of the job aren’t worth it. The pay stinks. And the hours are unreasonable.

There were other challenges too.

We’ve discussed both the teacher shortage and the difficulties of teaching through the culture wars in this newsletter—and all the attendant stresses it places on current teachers. And interestingly enough, the survey directly asked about politics: 16 percent of surveyed teachers said the “intrusion of political issues and opinions in teaching” was a significant source of job-related stress. (Forty-six percent cited student behavior, making it the top stressor).

Yet nearly all teachers are dealing with the political and cultural fallout anyway. A quarter of teachers said they have been asked by admins to “limit discussions about political and social issues in class.” But about two-thirds said they self-censor when it comes to such topics.

Here’s where it gets interesting—or at least telling. Half the teachers surveyed said they limit discussions about political or social issues because they’re not sure school leaders would have their back if parents complained. Also:

• 36 percent said they’re afraid of verbal or physical confrontations with parents; and

• 32 percent said they’re afraid of losing their job or teaching license.

We’ll end with a note from the report about the mental health supports teachers say they’re receiving: “Three-quarters of teachers reported that they had access to at least one well-being or mental health support (e.g., mental health care) in 2023, but only slightly more than half of all teachers indicated that these supports were adequate.”

Show & Tell

More on the RAND data from EdWeek:

“This is something that is very concerning to us,” said Elizabeth Steiner, a policy researcher at the RAND Corp. and an author of the report. The data, she said, is “a pattern that plays out in real life. Black teachers do turn over [and] leave their jobs at higher rates than white teachers.”

…

“Black teachers might have different financial considerations or pressures than teachers of other races and ethnicities,” Steiner said, citing student loan debt, which past research shows disproportionately falls on Black educators.

But also this:

Becker later says that admins are worried over “simply getting kids to school. They are worried about teacher turnover. They are worried, literally, about getting the busses to run on time. They are working their asses off.” (Twitter)

Independent Reading

A state commission in Georgia approved watering down teacher training rules to eliminate “fraught” terms like diversity in favor of say-nothing words like differences. “Changing language does change intent. Replacing the word ‘diverse’ with words like ‘different’ and ‘unique’ implies that there is a norm, a sameness, which excludes those who do not fit in,” said ACLU First Amendment policy advocate Sarah Hunt-Blackwell at the meeting. (The 74)

California’s teacher shortage is particularly acute when it comes to high poverty schools. That’s why the state is trying new initiatives around community schools and—yes—paying teachers more to work at them. A program that gives prospective teachers $20k toward their training if they work at high-poverty schools for four years, called the Golden State Teacher Grant Program, has already seen around 11,000 commitments. (CalMatters)

A former award-winning journalist, Alba Mendiola, switched to teaching and was the recent recipient of the News Literacy Project’s Alan C. Miller Educator of the Year award. Mendiola began a bilingual broadcast journalism class at her Chicago high school. (EdSurge)

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Amanda Jones was an unwitting participant in the education culture wars.

Named School Library Journal’s 2021 School Librarian of the Year, Jones spoke up at a board meeting last year in her Louisiana parish decrying censorship and book bans. Soon after, she became the target of a harassment campaign from conservative groups who trolled her online and in person, calling her unspeakable names.

“For 22 years, I've been an educator at the same middle school that I attended as a child. I live in a very small town, two red lights, everyone knows everyone,” Jones said at an Education Writers Association panel on the chilling effects of the culture wars that I attended earlier this month. 

After that board meeting, though, everything changed.

“Just for being a librarian, I’ve been called a pedophile and a groomer. I haven’t done anything differently in 22 years… From speaking with librarians across the country, there’s just this hatred and this idea that every school librarian out there is somehow pedaling porn to children.”

The attacks, she added, were motivated by a desire to silence her voice, and discourage others from speaking out. The harassment escalated and Jones said she was called a pervert at her daughter’s school play. So she decided to take legal action and sue her attackers. She’s lost some initial rulings but litigation is ongoing. 

Jones had no interest in centering herself in the culture wars embroiling schools through book bans, identity politics, and attacks on trans students. As with many other educators, it found her anyway.

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At this point, it’s hard to imagine anyone on earth more sick of the culture wars than teachers. Forget the ones who have already been fired or resigned due to the never ending headaches that come with hanging inclusive flags or reading books on race or equity—thanks to cautionary tales like Jones’, educators are now afraid to engage with parents and school boards about topics that weren’t particularly controversial a few years ago. 

Of course, that was before a cynical right-wing outrage machine began latching on to teachers and curriculum as easy targets in a quest to score political points by weaponizing children. 

“The narrative of education right now has been hijacked by one side of the story,” said another panelist, Michelle Cottrell-Williams, an equity specialist for Fairfax Public Schools and the 2018 Virginia Teacher of the Year.

To be fair, teachers have lost their jobs over sharing any number of opinions across the political spectrum. A Washington Post analysis found just as many teachers had been fired for sharing conservative views as those with liberal or progressive ones. In general, any kind of political speech by public servants is frowned upon and educators get no special pass. (Of course, several speakers and journalists at the EWA panel noted that recognizing students’ identities or telling them that those identities matter is not political speech so much as affirming their basic human rights.)

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Another panelist, Heather Harding, jumped in to the culture war fray more willingly. Harding is a former educator who’s now the executive director for the Campaign for Our Shared Future, an advocacy nonprofit that fights culture war attacks in schools through community building. 

“This is not about teaching and learning or educating young people,” Harding said about attacks on schools. “This is about motivating and scaring families that their educators are not on their side.”

She also pointed out something that teachers (and the rest of us) likely know, but which is all too easy to forget: All this tedious drama is fabricated by a small, vocal minority. In fact, most parents actually like what schools are doing. Last year, an American Federation of Teachers survey found 74 percent of parents thought teachers were generally doing a good job sticking to an appropriate curriculum- and skills-based education. Just 21 percent thought teachers were pushing a “woke” agenda. 

Of course, no culture war panel would be complete without hearing from the other side—that is people who benefit from or at least tolerate this kind of extreme and divisive rhetoric. That thankless job was rather ably taken up by Robert Pondiscio a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—which the New York Times has described as a “center-right think tank,” whatever that means. Pondiscio, to his credit, has a background in both K-12 education and journalism and was smart enough to equivocate whenever possible to keep the conversation moving and sound somewhat reasonable given the background and experiences of his co-panelists. 

What did that look like? Well, when it came to book bans, he mentioned there’s technically no such thing as a “banned book,” since kids and parents can get them elsewhere even when they’re taken off school library shelves. Many banned books are sold at Barnes & Noble, and if the books were really banned booksellers would go to jail, he said. Though there was no mention or followup on Florida school book bans that threaten felony convictions and $5,000 fines for teachers displaying books that don’t meet the state’s rather ambiguous guidelines. (To be fair, I didn’t catch it in the moment either.)

I don’t particularly want to pick on Pondiscio, because there was plenty of lively real-time pushback by the educators and advocates in the room, and I’d rather let them do the talking. But I suppose people like him get paid the big bucks to sit on panels and say things like well, actually there’s no such thing as a banned book, and the following, which came in response to a question from moderator Nicole Carr of ProPublica about the idea of politicizing public education. I want to quote it in full because I think it’s a good insight into how “center-right” pundits and intellectuals rationalize and downplay the ugliness of the culture wars. 

The idea that somehow the culture war has found schools is remarkable to me. This is what schools do. This is what schools have always done. They are literally institutions that we have built for cultural transmission, which is arguing over it. And it’s fine. I mean, we should be arguing about this. We should do it civilly, obviously, and no one should feel unsafe. But the idea that somehow there should be this kind of culture war free zone called the school just betrays the whole purpose of the institution.

The bar is low but you’ll notice he stops short of saying culture war attacks on teachers are a good thing; yet he also argues that politicized discussions of what they do in the classroom are healthy for schools because that’s what schools are for. They’re places to…talk about things. (Again, technically true, but if everyone was calmly sitting around discussing it like a segment on Meet the Press I doubt there’d be much of an issue.)

Instead of talking about a right-wing hijacking of the school narrative as some panelists did, Pondiscio added that the explosive growth of such discussions today are a natural result of parents peering into the “black box” of classroom life during pandemic remote learning. It’s at this point that Amanda Jones cut in to talk about her experiences being called a pervert and groomer for the first time in her life. As if to say, sure, tensions are running high after the pandemic, but c’mon.

Heather Harding, who I should add was also trained as a journalist, had a response as well, and it sums up a general sentiment I’ve seen in education these days. It’s certainly worth reading and reflecting on, considering this is unlikely to be the last time we hear about educators being vilified for simply doing their jobs.

Educators are public servants. And the part of this that’s important is that public education is a political act, and we will have to manage culture. But if we allow a political strategy to undermine that trust over and over and over again, none of us will be better for it. 

This, I think, is really animated by Amanda’s…story. She’s telling a story about how she has approached opening young people up to great literature for the last 22 years. People trusted her in her small town. And now that is not possible. It is not the pandemic. 

Yes, people are disgruntled because they may have seen things that they didn’t know about in a Zoom classroom, but this is an orchestrated attempt to scare people into thinking that teachers and educators mean them harm. I think we really need to understand what’s happening there, because what we need to get back to is the place where you bring your child to the kindergarten reading room and they sit down. It might be one of their first opportunities to meet someone of difference.

The relationships that have meant the most for me and my children have been [where I was] working side by side with an educator, working through disagreements around that conflict, collaborating. Not yelling at them, threatening them. I mean, there’s something different happening here. And I think that it’s really, really important to uncover.

Show & Tell

Interesting discussion on how those in education see the difference between the terms teacher and educator, for all who’ve wondered. (Twitter)

Independent Reading

How a Scratch-Off Lottery Ticket Helped Me Become a Homeowner at 22. Something told me she was going to be a teacher before I even clicked the link. She was an elementary paraprofessional, actually, earning $9/hour while studying for a bachelor’s degree—a job she had to quit for a better-paying gig at a call center to even qualify for a mortgage after winning a $50k jackpot. Now she earns a living from making viral TikToks. This is the new American dream. (New York Times)

How a New Jersey school board meeting devolved into attacks and misinformation after right-wing activists showed up to protest climate change being taught in schools. Before speaking, one teacher was “so nervous she visibly shook.” (Mother Jones)

A Dallas-area district, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, has seen a 40 percent increase in teacher resignations fueled by burnout, low pay and culture war attacks. One award-winning teacher who identifies as queer left the district after a brouhaha that started when she gave a student a book featuring a cross-dressing character. Almost a quarter of the district’s teachers have complained about the school board. (NBC News)

Nearly one-fourth of SFUSD teachers not fully credentialed, grand jury finds (SF Chronicle)

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For years, headlines and researchers have warned of a coming teacher shortage that would plunge education into existential chaos.

According to the prediction, current teachers would begin leaving the profession driven by low wages, irritating red tape and poor working conditions, while college students wouldn’t bother training as teachers at all.

Back in 2016, Linda Darling Hamilton’s research group Learning Policy Institute wrote about it in depth, envisioning many of the problems that became impossible to ignore during the pandemic.

Whether or not the worst case scenario has arrived is up for debate (the shortage varies by state and district). But in recent years several LPI predictions have come to pass, including an over-reliance on under-credentialed teachers and, in places where the shortage is particularly acute, students who spend hours in auditoriums and gyms receiving little to no instruction because no one is there to teach them.

Perhaps it’s enough to know that influential (though left-leaning) groups from the Economic Policy Institute to the country’s largest union, the National Education Association, now take the teacher shortage for granted.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does too. According to federal jobs data, local education payrolls, which include teachers and other workers like bus drivers, are down 3%—or 247,000 jobs—compared with pre-Covid levels.

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That would be bad by itself, but it’s worse when you consider there are around 300,000 job vacancies nationwide in public education. One economist told Bloomberg the staggering loss of jobs is largely down to underpaid, burned out workers leaving for private sector gigs.

Last weekend, NEA president Becky Pringle joined EPI president Heidi Shierholz to talk about the teacher shortage at a panel hosted by the Education Writers Association (and sponsored by NEA), which I attended.

For Pringle, the shortage is simply the predictable result of decades of inaction, particularly in regard to the new teacher pipeline. “When we talk about the impact of students making the choice not to go into education for two-and-a-half decades, here we are,” she said. “And when you have students who do make that choice, they are saddled with overwhelming student debt.”

The reality, she added, is that teacher shortages hit under-resourced schools the hardest, particularly ones that serve students of color. The result is a vicious cycle. By the time they reach college, potential teachers who endured under-funded schools plagued by teacher shortages when they were kids don’t see a future for themselves in education. And really, who can blame them?

Those who do make it into the classroom are apt to burn out quickly. Here’s how she put it:

When we have those [unequal] systems that are impacting our education system, we’re going to have more teachers of color who are making the choice to leave our profession, because that’s where they teach.

The challenges they face are huge. The gaps they have to stand in are increasing. The reality is that they come into the profession too often from families that have gone through decades of poverty. They can’t afford to stay and raise their families or buy a house. And so when we think about educators shortage, we have to think about it from that interconnected place.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, pay is a big part of it. Heidi Shierholz, the EPI economist, noted the teacher pay penalty continues to grow, putting an even larger gap between teachers and other working professionals. In 1996, teachers made about 6 percent less than similarly educated workers in other fields. That’s unfortunate, but perhaps not dire. Today the pay penalty stands at a whopping 23.5 percent.

Last year an EPI report broke down exactly what that looks like in dollars (emphasis mine).

The average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted only for inflation) increased just $29 from 1996 to 2021, from $1,319 to $1,348 (in 2021 dollars). In contrast, inflation-adjusted weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,564 to $2,009 over the same period—a $445 increase.

“I feel like sometimes in [the press] you just see them not really digging in on pay and instead looking for some other reason that may be causing the shortage,” Shierholz said. “Even though it maybe seems run of the mill, it is what it is.”

There were a handful of suggestions for improving things bandied about during the panel, including a greater focus on community schools, which send strong signals to teachers through a focus on wraparound supports and social services. Fitting for an NEA session, there was plenty of talk on the power of collective bargaining. And Pringle called out North Carolina’s Teacher Cadet program that recruits and mentors teacher candidates from under-represented backgrounds starting in high school—and which has a solid track record when it comes to retention.

The panel also featured a middle school teacher, Carol Cleaver, who in her own teacher-like way lightly pushed back on Shierholz’s assertion that pay was single-handedly driving the shortage. Cleaver took turns bemoaning the state of education funding in Florida, where she lives, as well as the state’s voucher system that leeches money from public schools. And of course she reserved special ire for the culture war backlash that’s eating up more of her time these days.

Of the panelists, Cleaver’s in the best position to witness the impact of the teacher and substitute shortage—and she came with receipts. A coworkers daughter was recently taught high school chemistry by a rotating cast of substitutes. She’s had to crowd more than 40 students into her classroom by lining up barstools in the back. And she’s seen whole classes of kids sit in the gym for hours being babysat by subs or admins because there aren’t enough teachers.

Worst of all, she doesn’t see things getting better any time soon.

“I’m very flummoxed why parents are not standing up and outraged about something like this—versus things like banning books and playing culture wars,” she said. “The teacher shortage is very real and and present for us every day.”

👁👄👁 Show & Tell

Source: Twitter

🎒 Extra Curriculars

ISTE is taking place in Philadelphia at the end of this month (June 25-28). I’ll be there and will share more thoughts about the event as it gets closer. I anticipate it will be very AI-heavy because that’s what people will be expecting, and ISTE loves to hype up new edtech while covering its bases by urging an appropriate amount of caution and responsible pedagogy. Should be a blast.

📚 Independent Reading

For now, teachers will be the only Texas state employees to not receive raises this year. The legislature killed the bill after squabbling over school vouchers, which Democrats and rural Republicans both oppose. (It may happen later at a special session). Instead, they passed bills aimed at putting armed guards in every campus, banning “sexually explicit books in libraries” and boosting teacher residency programs. (Texas Tribune)

To get teachers to stay, schools should show them what they can offer in terms of mentorship and support. If nothing else, there are a few practical takeaways for schools here. (EdWeek)

A novel way to get teachers from underrepresented backgrounds into the profession: pay them. Student teaching is still largely underpaid, but a handful of teacher prep programs are taking (modest) steps to change that. Think: $20/hour for tutoring, stipends for residency programs. Better than nothing, I guess. (EdSurge)

“Recent studies find little evidence that school vouchers improve test scores—in fact, they’ve sometimes led to score declines,” Chalkbeat says. Research into a number of factors is more favorable when it comes to targeted voucher programs versus larger scale rollouts. (Chalkbeat)

That’s all I got. Until next time.

If you like this post, please subscribe and recommend this newsletter to others. Thoughts? Suggestions? Reply to this email to reach me. And if you’re a teacher or former teacher with a story to share, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!

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Welcome to Warning Bell, a new newsletter on the teaching profession, and on teachers themselves, which will attempt to catalogue just how difficult being an educator has become.

Why start this newsletter? Well, I grew up in a household where education was important. My mom wasn’t just a teacher, she was my teacher for 3 years in high school, where she taught authentic science research (a topic she reflected on in an essay a few years ago). Many of the close family friends I grew up around were teachers, and I never needed to be reminded to treat them with respect (OK, maybe in middle school).

Which is why when we started hearing from teachers and running hugely popular stories at EdSurge on burnout, demoralization and the importance of mindfulness strategies to simply stay afloat, I started paying attention. After all, it wasn’t always the case that a quarter of all teachers experienced symptoms of depression—or that three-quarters of them experienced frequent job-related stress (compared with just a third of other working adults). Any reasonable person would rightly see that as a symptom of a broken system and a cry for help.

Last year, as part of a 6 month project, I spoke with more than a dozen former teachers who had recently left the classroom for a longform story that ran in The New Republic. The teachers I spoke with told me about a mental health crisis engulfing their profession that was receiving far too little attention. They talked of panic attacks, sleepless nights, depression, anxiety and desperation. They shared harrowing details about their internalized guilt, but also about schools and systems that didn’t value them as professionals, or even people. There were culture war attacks, tone-deaf requests from administrators, nonsensical post-COVID policies and never-ending workdays that sapped their enthusiasm and eventually their ability to do the job they were trained to do. One teacher, whose story I ultimately didn’t end up writing about, called me frequently whenever she remembered a fresh horror story. In that light, the growing teacher shortage makes a lot more sense.

This is not normal, and it’s certainly not fair to teachers. The political climate has become increasingly anti-teacher as the classroom gets dragged ever deeper into the culture war morass. Thanks to reactionary new laws and policies, which vary by state, teachers now get in trouble for some of the dumbest things imaginable, even as they endure stagnant pay and surging workloads.

Recently, a trio of education researchers wrote in Education Week about the popular media narrative that “equates good teaching with sacrificial teaching.” Teachers told these researchers about the many sacrifices they made for their jobs—everything from their time and money to their sleep and personal relationships. That too is unfair. Elsewhere, a teacher friend of mine has written eloquently on the collective trauma endured by teachers and students over the past few years, and of the need to flock together—and to resist.

It’s my intention for this newsletter to talk openly and honestly about these issues, mixing news, commentary, essays and original journalism as part of an effort to catalogue the real experience of today’s teaching profession.

I’ll leave you with one final thought. Over the years, I’ve observed many, many teachers hesitate to complain about the very real problems in their profession as they talk earnestly about loving their students and wanting to love their jobs. It’s an unfortunate and unconscionable reality that too often their jobs simply do not love them back.