After teaching in LAUSD for twenty-five years, I retired on January 1, 2021. I get why people don't become teachers. I get why people leave. I don't get why this is a big surprise. And what I really don't get are all these breathless stories about teacher shortages you see all over the news. For at least twenty of my twenty-five years every teacher I know was telling anybody who'd listen that this was coming. Now it's here, and everyone from big-shot reporters to little-town principals is waving their arms and wondering, "Where'd everybody go?" What a riot.
The Washington Post published an article on August 4 calling out a "catastrophic teacher shortage" nationwide. But rather than clearly identifying the reasons for this present education exodus (edxit?), the article avoids pointing fingers, opting instead to offer up hand-wringing explanations from loads of teaching-adjacent folks along with a cornucopia of mostly feckless solutions.
We hear from school administrator associations and superintendents associations and the superintendents themselves. We hear from teachers union officials. We even hear from a director of a health services tech company. You'll note the omission of actual teachers. I suppose that's understandable, as the solutions rest in the hands of the bosses, but if you really wanted to know what would keep teachers in classrooms, you might ask them.
As for the article, the general tone, as it nearly always is with these articles, is a smooth blend of astonished and scandalized. Not unlike the press reaction to a violent coup attempt and subsequent promises to give it another go, we the people are once again left suffocated in "some people say this, others say that" detachment and "How could they have let this happen?" sanctimony.
This latest from the Post is just one of the recent articles by Hannah Natanson that deal, directly or indirectly, with the teacher shortage. In July, she co-wrote "D.C.-area schools see spike in teacher resignations." Also within the year? Some places to look for answers:
"Va. set to finalize rules on ‘sexually explicit material’ in schools," August 3,
"After court ruling, activists push prayer into schools," July 26.
"LGBTQ clubs were havens for students. Now they’re under attack," June 28.
"Caught in the culture wars, teachers are being forced from their jobs," June 16.
"Schools face violent threats and lockdowns in wake of Texas shooting," May 27.
"D.C. students call for gun control; schools focus on security after Texas shooting," May 26.
"D.C.-area schools face rising covid cases, aren’t restoring strict rules," May 22.
"Virginia Dept. of Education releases report on student achievement," May 19. (Test scores, because that train is never late.)
"This Florida teacher married a woman. Now she’s not a teacher anymore." May 19.
"The next book ban: States aim to limit titles students can search for," May 10.
"Va. school board proposes telling parents how students self-identify: Some fear that teachers will be required to ‘out’ LGBTQ students to their parents," May 7.
"Teachers who mention sexuality are ‘grooming’ kids, conservatives say," April 5.
Did I say within the year? These are headlines for articles written or co-written by Hannah Natanson since April.
Then there is this beauty from the Times' Sarah Mervosh on July 31: s no more than 24 hours of training.
Trained, Armed and Ready. To Teach Kindergarten.
More school employees are carrying guns to defend against school shootings. In Ohio, a contentious new law requires no more than 24 hours of training.
Pile all that on top of micromanagement by bad bosses, twenty-five hours of work every twenty-four hour day, shitty pay, and a pandemic and one wonders why anybody stays, but there is no mystery about why teachers are leaving. The question for the New York Times and Washington Post and the rest of the fourth estate is, simply, "Why doesn't everybody know this already?"
From the August 4 Post article:
Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.
What is it with all the vague hedging? First, the article asks the question like it hasn't already been answered, like, many times. Then we get "Experts" "pointing to" some potential answers. Surprise! They're the exact same answers as teachers--and other "experts"--have been giving for millennia:
Reporter: "Why do you think so many teachers are leaving the profession?"
Teacher: "Well, it's a confluence of factors."
And "some educators' sense"? "little respect"? What the actual fuck? Look at the reporting in your own newspaper.
And, for once and for all, the "escalating educational culture war" is nothing more than a Russian-style invasion against a neighboring country, not a good-faith disagreement. These are murder attempts, not debates, and you should report them honestly. [Insert usual caveat that editors are craven climbers and can ruin a good journalist's reporting.] Moving on.
Lots of states are doing whatever it takes to get an adult human in the classroom. In Texas, some districts are going to four days a week to ease the pressure. To teach in Arizona you no longer need a degree as long as you're enrolled in college. Missouri lowered the passing score for the license assessment.
In Florida, free-thinking governor Ron DeSantis had the unconventional idea to staff schools with military veterans, perhaps expecting them to bring their own guns. Support for the proposal was not unanimous. From the Post article (emphasis mine):
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said the need for teachers in his state is dire: His association estimates there are at least 8,000 teacher vacancies this year, up from 5,000 the year before. But Spar does not believe the veterans program is “really a solution,” as it may lead to unqualified individuals entering classrooms.
“I think we all appreciate what our military veterans have done for our country in terms of protecting our freedoms both here and abroad,” he said. “But just because you were in the military does not mean you will be a great teacher.”
That's the president of the union actually having to explain that the notion of bringing in military personnel as teachers --even those with four years of service and two C+ years of college!--is a bad idea. What in the wonderful world of color would make someone look at experience in the military which has a very specific mission and then think about what goes on in a classroom full of children and say "Hey, you know what might work?" The cluelessness is breathtaking--and perfect.
Next on our tour we are treated to what in poker circles might be called a "tell." (emphasis mine)
Meanwhile, the school board and superintendent in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District are considering making up for a dearth of math teachers — the system is missing 24 of them, along with 102 other teachers — by sending a small number of students into online learning for part of the day. The district may hire virtual math teachers from a Chicago-based online education company, the Tucson Sentinel reported. The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.
There it is. We'll return to this at the end, but suffice to say that making teaching unbearable (when the remedies are known) is not an accident.
And finally we get to what I think is my favorite part of the whole article. It made me laugh so hard I spit out a third of a really good martini, and I hope it has the same effect on you. Again, the emphasis is mine:
In Wisconsin’s Madison school district, superintendent [sic] Jenkins said that, a month away from the start of school on Sept. 1, officials are still working to fill 199 teacher vacancies and 124 non-teaching positions.
But no children will lack an adult in the classroom come fall, he said, because the district has managed to recruit 269 qualified substitute teachers — primarily by raising substitute pay rates this spring. Jenkins said he hopes that, over the course of the year, the district can convince at least some of these substitutes to convert to full-time teachers.
“We’re just going to go after them,” Jenkins said. Initial enticements will include “some immediate supplies. Every teacher likes their calendar, right? So we’re providing calendars, little things for them — and we have some other things planned that I don’t want to reveal, because I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”
This reminded me of every end of every excruciating, debilitating semester when I just wanted to go home and sleep for three weeks, and instead we were called to that last meeting--in the elementary cafeteria!--and given erasers, or Starbucks cards, or little trophies (I shit you not). This was the level of understanding the bosses had for what we do in the classroom. To be fair, Superintendent Jenkins was doing what he knew how to do: Entice the subs to "convert" to permanent using the supplies they actually need to teach, and a calendar. Because "every teacher likes their calendar, right?" That should do it.
The Post article is one of hundreds from around the country. I'm sure you've seen them. Here's ABC in Nevada from August 4. Here's WLTX in South Carolina from August 4. This one from News 9 in Oklahoma is interesting as it includes reporting on a scholarship/ employment incentive bill passed in the Oklahoma legislature and signed by the governor in May. There are a lot of them.
Still, the local news reports on local staff shortages at least describe the problem. Dispatches from the giants read like the Post article, ingenuous and ambiguous, as if no one really knows for sure how we got into this jam, and no one has an answer to how we get out.
On twitter, Anne Lutz Fernandez solved the mystery for those who are still confused. About the teachers, she wrote:
As Sarah Kendzior reminds us: They feign shock to avoid accountability. None of this is new. There was a pretty severe teacher crunch in Los Angeles in the 1990s as enrollments surged, although the extent of the shortage is debated. There were lots of emergency credentials and permits among the teachers I joined in 1995. And back in 1990 we find the article "DIAL 1-800-45-TEACH" from the Post describing efforts by districts to recruit.
Then there's this 2001 article from the Post telling the story of teachers in D.C. who needed an extra job or two just to make ends meet. Then there's this one, from the Post a year later, describing the scramble to find teachers in Maryland ahead of ballooning enrollments and impending baby boomer retirements. From the Times in 2007 we have "With Turnover High, Schools Fight for Teachers."
Like I said--not new. But apparently so baffling that it persists today.
Thus we get pieces like this one from the Times in September 2000, in which the author, New York City Schools Chancellor Harold Levy, complained about the quality of teachers and worried about "an impending shortage of certified teachers." He cites the DOE which, according to him, "estimates a nationwide loss of 2.5 million teachers over the next decade as teachers born in the baby boom years reach retirement age"
He declares that "[w]e need to find more powerful means to attract the most promising candidates to the teaching profession" and recommends that to "recruit a higher caliber of college student into teaching, we must make it both more lucrative and more revered." Good thinking.
For a bit of dark humor, you can stroll through Richard Rothstein's "move along, nothing to see here" LESSONS column from the Times in 2002: "Teacher Shortages Are Usually a Myth" in which he offers this simple market solution: just pay teachers more.
Teachers have been saying this for decades, and loudly. Nobody listened and nobody believed us when we said we'd quit. "Where you gonna go?" was first. "We'll get somebody else" was second. Now there are lots of places to go and there isn't anybody else.
According to my own LAUSD sources, it's been virtually impossible to fill positions with living breathing humans, forget about credentialed and qualified. Instead, classes are supervised by out-of-classroom personnel, administrators, or covered by other teachers for weeks at a time. Anybody with a heartbeat and a credential will do. And it's worse elsewhere.
And in virtually every case it's the same usual suspects: "compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum." Shitty pay, high stress, bad bosses, lack of respect and autonomy.
The time to address this is not three weeks before school starts. These big-brains were in denial, pretending that they could roll over teachers and other educational professionals forever, take advantage of us because of our dedication to the kids and the mission, or because we really are not the sharpest knives just like the Hillsdale guy said in Tennessee this past July. Or maybe because we just really like our calendars.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Only thing is, maybe it's not going to matter. Nobody I know thinks this is an accident or even bad management. Paying teachers more, or offering them education and housing subsidies, or protecting them from bad bosses and ridiculous governors and parents seething and shouting at them for just trying to do their jobs, none of this stuff is unknown. We've known all this for decades. If we wanted to fix it, wouldn't it already be fixed?
This is not an accident. This is the culmination of a plan that started with Milton Friedman's "The Role of Government in Schooling," got its fuel from "A Nation at Risk," found allies in the Bush presidents and Clinton and Obama, and is just about to pay off bigly. This breaking of the public school system is the plan. And it's going to take everything we've got to stop it.
Update:
And how shitty is the pay? When I started with LAUSD in 1995, my starting salary was just short of $30,000. I just did a
Google thing and that translates to about $58,000 today. A quick look at LAUSD's 2021-2022
salary table tells me that teachers in the district start today at just over $56,000. Teachers have actually lost money in the last 25+ years. Furthermore, unless they take extra classes, it takes them seven years of step increases to surpass my 1995 starting salary.
If you are thinking, "Yeah, but teachers make up for it at the top end of the scale," and "stick around long enough and you make Hollywood money," you are incorrect. It's true that we have the opportunity to work our way up the scale, but it takes time and it's not as easy as it looks. For example, today's salary table (21-22) shows a top number of $89,245 after ten years during which the teacher completed an additional 98 semester units of study.
The table defines a semester unit as "a minimum of 15 contact hours with an instructor and 30 hours of outside preparation" which comes to an additional 4410 hours of work in ten years on top of, you know, your job. For you math enthusiasts out there, that's 441 hours or 55.125 eight-hour days per year. It's no wonder that teachers find ways to take easier classes or cut corners if they can. Still, that's a shit-ton of work. Is it worth it?
Short answer: definitely. A colleague of mine used to say to new teachers: Give yourself a raise. He said it to me but I didn't listen. It cost me.
Long answer: not as worth it as it should be. Assuming you work those years and get to the top of the scale, then you have to work twenty years at the top of the scale and get a doctorate to max out at the biggest number on the table: $98,176.
By comparison, in 95-96 the L.A. Times reported the recently settled contract paid $54,703 at the max. That's over $106,000 in today's money.
Teachers will always look for ways to augment their actual salaries. We take extra assignments and work extra periods. We mentor and teach during vacations. We work second jobs.
What we don't do is get rich from teaching. In fact, we're going backward and a majority of teachers here in L.A. can not afford to live in the neighborhoods where they teach. Schooling is expensive, but don't blame teachers. And don't blame teachers for leaving.
