Leaders Must Address Teacher Well-Being With Action, Not Just Self-Care Talk
By listening to educators and building supports that reflect their genuine needs and concerns, these leaders are shifting school cultures in ways that go beyond lip service.
August 16, 2024
(published in Edutopia, online magazine from the George Lucas Educational Foundation)
A little tardy, but I saw this article posted on Bluesky (July 8, without comment) by Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social and, having received numerous attendance medals and leadership coffee gift cards at dozens of doughnut parties throughout my career, I thought I'd read it, you know, for laughs.
Instead, I teared up a little, just like at the end of It's a Wonderful Life when everything works out just like it's supposed to--even brother Harry flying safely through a blizzard and right down to the little bell ringing at the perfect moment. There are some things that just seem right. Maybe I cry because of that. Maybe because it's never like that.
For the article, author Paige Tutt developed her thesis by talking with school administrators, instructional coaches, professors, consultants, and motivational speakers, several of whom were identified as former teachers. I know I know, and don't even get me started on the elementary-centric focus, but wait, there's good news!
At least these educators and education leaders appear to have actually talked and listened to actual teachers, and getting the truth from teachers second-hand is better than nothing, which is what we usually get.
And through the process of being (former) teachers and listening to existing teachers, these education professionals have come up with, and Tutt has distilled, the following to-do list of ideas for saving teachers' careers and sometimes their lives in schools:
START WITH TEACHERS.
TREAT TEACHERS LIKE PROFESSIONALS.
That's it. That's the list. Within these rather mushy principles, Tutt does detail some concrete-ish recommendations that the "education professionals" shared, and I'll write about them next time, but I want to encourage you to read the article. This is how it's supposed to be.
This article is good and I'm all for going beyond "lip service." And the ideas, such as they are, are fine. And in my 25 years in a classroom, it was never like that. Why?
There is absolutely no doubt that implementing these ideas would make the job more sustainable and teachers healthier and more effective. These are, in fact, the same things that teachers themselves ask for every single day but never seem to get. Instead, it's doughnuts and gift cards. "That doesn't make sense!" some might say. "Why don't we do the good things and skip the goofy stuff?" What's the deal, right?
Once again, the answer to all your questions is money.
***
I've written a fair about about "teacher morale" and burnout and how to keep smart, young teachers in the profession. After retiring I even wrote a book trying to help teachers old and especially new sort and survive the bullshit. In it, I wrote down why I think these commonsense, humane answers to "teacher well-being" never happen.
We think that the bosses who make the rules want what we teachers want: healthy, happy students who leave smarter than they came and have a fighting chance to find and make the life they want to live. It's not true.
The concerns of Administrators are not the same concerns that teachers have when they plan a lesson, create an assessment, read an essay, or wonder why a student has been losing weight or has become surprisingly quiet.
Administrators care about keeping their jobs, first and foremost. They care about their mortgages and their promotions so they can have bigger mortgages. To be fair, they also care about sending their kids to school, often to "better" schools than the one the Admin works in. Their work in schools is a means to an end, and the end is centered on themselves and their families. They could just as well be working as a store manager at Walmart.
"But teachers have mortgages and car payments, too!" Yes, but any teacher worth their credential centers their work on their students, with the people they work with every day. They, too, want to keep their job of course, but it's so they can do their job. It's not a means to an end; it is the end. The two are not the same.
So when an Administrator challenges you on a "sick day" or questions your test scores or gives you coverage or packs your room with 40 students, they are just following orders. They are trying to solve a numbers game in a way they can explain to their bosses without getting into trouble.
Things like how many hours in a work day, how many sick days in the contract, how many students show up for English 9, how many instructional minutes in a year, how many rooms in the school, how many schools on the same campus, how much you get paid, are mostly out of their control. Attendance medals are what they have, a pathetic plea from a boss who has no good subs to take your place when you're sick.
This is not to say it was always as horrific as it is now. It used to be better when the incentives were different and the pressure was graduation rates and dropout rates instead of numbers on mysterious Big Standardized Tests (h/t Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social ), numbers that mean nothing except you and your students are fuckups. (Astonishingly, missing from Tutt's list is any mention of perhaps the most debilitating debilitator of all: testing.)
So this handful of educators and leaders in the article is all for the good ideas teachers have been advocating for, sometimes begging for, for decades. That's good, right? And I'm happy the one or two actual active principals interviewed appear to be on board with these "innovations" and I'm happy they are in the unusual position to be able to be. Happy for them. Ecstatic for their staffs.
You know who's not on board? The thousands of Administrators just paying their bills, following orders, and handing out doughnuts.
"Leaders Must Address Teacher Well-Being With Action, Not Just Self-Care Talk"
Must they, though? Really? Do a quick search on teacher morale and you'll find similar conversations going back decades. This NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATION STATISTICS report, from 1997, specifies "Administrative support and leadership, student behavior and school atmosphere, and teacher autonomy" as critical.
And this one, by Francis S. Chase in the Phi Delta Kappan from 1951 (!), identified working conditions (including work load), autonomy, teacher voice in policy, and professional status, as significant drivers of teacher morale and job satisfaction. Also on the list: money.
These elements all sound achingly familiar, and the fact that they haven't changed over time is evidence of a broken, disconnected incentive structure where the concerns of teachers are increasingly dismissed and the concerns of Administrators are narrowed to two numbers: attendance, and a mysterious set of numbers generated by a tech-infected testing regime. Suspensions used to be a thing, but those have mostly disappeared. Instructional minutes!
A few principals in a few elementary schools is nice, but the system is broken. It has been broken by the testing-industrial complex, the politicians who use it for a punching bag, privateers hunting for new sources of revenue, and reformsters pretending they are acting in the interests of "the children."
What makes me sad is it doesn't have to be this way. The way things are is a choice we've made. This article describes the way it should be. Maybe I cry because of that. Maybe I cry because it's never like that.