Anyone who is confused as to why there is a “teacher shortage” has likely never spoken to a teacher (yelling at one doesn’t count).
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Antiwork/Work Reform
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I thought about becoming one years back. An acquaintance of mine was a teacher at my old high school and offered to let me shadow him for a day so I could see what it was like.
The real revelation was lunchtime. We hung with all the other teachers and he introduced me to a bunch of them. They all joked “are you stupid or something?” or “you should run.” Then they all detailed their plans to exit the profession. Every one of them had made up their mind to go, and had a different path to some other career.
This was exactly my experience. Worked as a sub while considering going into teaching... everyone told me to get out, do anything else.
I became one for a while at an older age. I knew it was shit, but you know food costs money + existential angst.
It's not just the money, it's not just the unpaid hours, it's not just being thrown in at the deep end with little to no training, it's not just teacher education often being divorced from the daily reality of schools, it's not just parents, it's not just behavioural issues, it's so many things, ...
Teaching is (perhaps surprisingly tiring) emotional labour for an often ungrateful audience (students, administration, parents, society as a whole), and because old forms of authority no longer exist (and have been replaced by new forms of authority like online influencers), the odds are high that you become an overqualified babysitter for grown-ass kids who have already failed, know they have already failed, and know the educational system and the political system you work for and represent are responsible for that failure.
And because turnover is so high, and because so many people hate their jobs, colleagues and superiors have often given up on retaining the good teachers and don't support each other.
You're setup to fail, and when you fail you will hate yourself, or grow to hate the very kids you got into teaching to help.
Honestly, go clean toilets for a living. You'll get plenty of movement, you get to relax at the end of the day, you work hard and see immediate results, and people are less critical and more grateful. Depending on where you live, once you factor in the extra hours you have to put in to become a teacher, it's not impossible you'll also earn more.
The same is true for nurses. There is no shortage of nurses. Only a shortage of nurses willing to deal with shit staffing and pay.
I know three public school teachers personally.
One left teaching all together for a corporate job that paid better and had better benefits without dealing with helicopter parents. Straight up loved teaching, loved her kids, but the parents can fuck right off.
Another is a special needs teacher with twenty years experience and is seeing her budget slashed because the school district just built a huge new high school to consolidate three other school buildings into. Fancy sports complex, too. Oh and she has 20% more kids next year without a teaching assistant.
The third is resigned because they had a kid who has some behavioral issues and has grabbed her breasts and buttocks multiple times without the administration supporting. I’m sure there’s a lawsuit brewing there.
So at any point, feel free to attend your school board meetings and vote for school board members… it won’t fix funding or senior level leadership issues. State governments will reneg on funding when a new administration gets elected, and we’ll continue to get property tax levies to shore up the budget shortages.
The third is resigned because they had a kid who has some behavioral issues and has grabbed her breasts and buttocks multiple times without the administration supporting. I’m sure there’s a lawsuit brewing there.
Not normally this extreme, but teachers are actively prevented from maintaining basic decorum in the classroom. In much of the country this isn't an issue, but when there is a critical mass of parents in a district that don't give a shit about their kids, it presents an existential issue to the entire idea of teaching and learning in that district.
Yea, my wife teaches. She loves the teaching part. She says the worst part of her job is the administration. They’re callous, unresponsive, and unsupportive. She also has to do a ton of work outside of contract hours and gets paid beans for it.
As a former teacher, yeah, I agree. I quit because I had office staff who regularly screamed at me over administrative bullshit. It just wasn't worth it.
I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I made 2x or now 4x the money by working in my field rather than teaching my field.
Teacher shortage from what I can tell really means:
a) Nobody wants to teach in poor districts; and
b) Young teachers don't want to teach in red states
I think b) is getting more attention than a) but b) ought to at least be fixable - Florida can get enough teachers, it just has to pay them more, just as they can continue to have flood insurance as long as they pay through the nose for that. (this is common for doctors, e.g.; working as a doctor in rural Oklahoma pays like double what working in NYC does, and with better hours)
The real problem with a) is that on top of all of the reasons poor districts historically had difficulty attracting teachers, now they've also got to deal with pandemic learning loss, which hit poor districts especially hard, and all sorts of horrifying new mental health issues to boot; given the choice between teaching in a poor urban district where they can teach whatever books they like and a rich suburban one where they can't, an awful lot of teachers will pick the second option.
Plus after growing up and living in a red state (NC, mostly purple but gerrymandering dropped a can of red paint over the state), I'd also add that very, very few of my classmates were even considering getting a job in education, and if they were, they were going into it knowing they were not going to get rich. I went to a decent high school after my freshman year, but yeah, working at a poor/rural school is kinda risky and often not worth the effort. One of my aunts works at the local somewhat rural/poor high school, and today I heard her make an offhand remark about how when she retires, she will have to get a supplemental job.
The issues with education mostly boil down to how the current field is pretty much scorched unless a decent amount of money is involved. I went to a middle college after my freshman year, and I know a lot of those teachers were paid pretty decently for the area. That is mostly because our scores majorly boosted the avg for the county, so some better funding and support was provided. Even then, I remember hearing about the work/life balance of grading student work and kind of accepted that it wasn't for me.
Somewhat related, the same thing is happening in pharmacy right now with pharmacists and technicians. 2019 was a huge purge of older registered pharmacists in favor of the doctoral pharmacists getting pumped out of schools with the promise of a growing field and accepting offers at about half of what they should. Then came vivid and pharmacies doubled down and just added more duties to whoever was left.
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