If you put frogs in a pot of boiling water, they instantly jump out; but, if you put them in a pot and gradually heat the water instead, as the old fable goes, they won’t notice until it’s too late.
That’s the situation that many teachers found themselves in this year. As the long-warming waters of education were put in a pressure cooker of pandemic- and culture war-related upheavals, things finally became hot enough to cause alarm. Yet teachers, unlike frogs, noticed. Thus, as we head into the fall, a big question remains: Will the teaching profession bounce back?
Before the pandemic, state officials across the country were expressing concern about having trouble filling teaching positions. In 2015, as teacher preparation programs faced a shortage of candidates, many state-level commissions were created to study the “crisis.” Georgia anticipated a need for 14,000 teachers but had only 3,500 education majors. Of the 115 school districts in Idaho, seventy-eight have reported a total of 894 unfilled positions. A decade ago, we were already suffering from what Tim Slekar, director of the education preparation program at Muskingum University in Ohio, called a “teacher exodus.”
Several factors were part of that growing heat. From No Child Left Behind to the rise of Common Core standards, teachers were increasingly required to deal with the effects of high-stakes testing, with schools—and teachers themselves—judged by student scores on a single, large, standardized reading and math test.
Schools shifted instructional focus exclusively to items on the test, with other subjects, and even recess, being cut to provide more test prep. Testing itself, including pretesting to measure readiness, ate up weeks of the school year. Instead of helping the whole child enjoy a broad and deep education, teachers felt the pressure to simply get good test scores out of their students.
From nonresponses to school shootings to a COVID-19 strategy that now relies primarily on pretend everything is normal again, many teachers feel exposed and unprotected.
In some schools, the extreme focus on testing led to micromanagement, with districts purchasing canned, scripted, and “teacher-proof” education programs. Teachers soon found themselves unable to apply their own professional judgment and autonomy. Just do this test prep, they were told, over their own objections. But as Harvard University testing expert Daniel Koretz observed in his book The Testing Charade, “Not only is bad test prep pervasive. It has begun to undermine the very notion of good instruction.”
Education historian Diane Ravitch has highlighted that test scores were also used to feed a narrative of “failing schools,” with teacher inadequacy being blamed for the alleged failing. Teach For America pushed the idea that any college grad with five weeks of training could do a better job. Charter schools, pushed by both Democrats and Republicans, were sold as a way for students to “escape” public schools. And by 2017, Betsy DeVos—who had no previous experience with public education, but nevertheless characterized it as a “dead end”—was running the U.S. Department of Education.
It’s unsurprising that, at many turning points in the last two decades, teachers have repeatedly felt beleaguered and attacked.
By 2020, the water was already pretty hot. Then the pandemic hit.
At first, teachers were heroes, doing their best to deliver education through distance learning systems set up on the fly. Then their workloads doubled as schools tried to craft some combination of in-person and virtual instruction.
And, even though most parents—78 percent, according to one poll—were satisfied with how public schools handled the pandemic, the disgruntled minority turned out to be loud. It became clear that there was political capital to be raised by going on the attack. Schools should be open, critics said, and it was the unions’ fault that they weren’t.
“Teachers are vital public servants. Time for them to start acting like it,” declared an op-ed headline by Matt Bai in The Washington Post. Bai’s rhetoric was typical of the anti-teacher mood at the time, which hinged on chastising educators for not getting back to in-person work quickly enough, regardless of whether their schools were capable of providing a high level of protection against the spread of COVID-19 or not (and many were not).
The battle over masking policy centered on schools, and then, suddenly, morphed. The supposedly grassroots group Moms for Liberty was co-founded in Florida in January 2021 by the wife of a well-connected political operative, who told The Washington Post that it had been designed to get young women involved in the Republican Party. Members of the group started out by opposing masks in schools, but quickly pivoted to objecting to the use of particular books in schools.
Moms for Liberty became just one of many pro-censorship groups that emerged during the pandemic. In early 2021, Christopher Rufo elevated critical race theory (CRT) into a national crusade against, in his words, “the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” The “white” was silent.
The uproar over CRT spread rapidly, leading to various gag rules in many states, all of them vague enough that teachers had no clear idea where the line might be drawn. To discuss racism—or even the existence of LGBTQ+ people—became a risky prospect for teachers. Schools were forced backward on issues of diversity, required to do the opposite of addressing the racism embedded in too much of the system. Lawsuits began to crop up, like one filed at the beginning of the summer in New Jersey charging that a school discriminated against white students.
Rumors of teaching CRT were enough to scuttle employment. In 2021, Cecelia Lewis, a Black educator, was chased from one job before it could even begin, and followed to her next job by the same white Georgia parents. School board meetings became angry mob scenes. Hanging a rainbow flag in a classroom was no longer a matter of supporting students, but a dangerous political statement. By June, more than 160 teachers had lost their positions over “political debates.”
In November 2021, Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race after harping on CRT throughout his campaign, and it took roughly fifteen minutes for other rightwing politicians to jump on the “parental rights” bandwagon. Since then, the rhetoric has steadily accelerated; it is no longer unusual to find teachers being called pedophiles or “groomers.” For the first time in modern memory, it has become politically advantageous to attack public education.
More recently, in May of this year, the mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead, was followed by the usual talking points, with Republican officials in states like Ohio indicating they would not try to curtail the proliferation of guns, but rather support arming teachers instead.
From nonresponses to school shootings to a COVID-19 strategy that now relies primarily on pretend everything is normal again, many teachers feel exposed and unprotected.
For teachers, this was all background to what my friends in education call the toughest year ever. Students returned to school stressed and, in some cases, traumatized by the pandemic; many had simply lost some of the skills needed to “do school.” Organizations like consulting giant McKinsey & Company and test manufacturer NWEA released ominous research about “learning loss,” leaving students, and their families, with the impression that they were terribly behind, and school officials with an urge to buy new software programs.
In April, the National Education Association released a report showing that teacher salaries have decreased over the past decade, when inflation is factored in. A Gallup poll indicated that K-12 workers have the highest burnout rate. In March 2020, that rate was 36 percent; it is currently 44 percent. (The rate for all other workers is 30 percent.) This finding should raise concerns, not just about how many teachers will join the Great Resignation, but also how many burned-out teachers will stay in the classroom because they cannot find an exit.
A survey commissioned by Merrimack College found that teacher job-satisfaction may be at an all-time low. Teachers, the survey suggests, feel “overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.” In June, NPR ran an article under the headline, “We asked teachers how their year went. They warned of an exodus to come.”
The number of teachers who say they are thinking about getting out of teaching is high. A 2021 survey by the RAND Corporation found that nearly one in four teachers were considering leaving their profession early. An American Psychological Association survey from about the same period found that nearly half of teachers want to quit.
A 2021 survey by the RAND Corporation found that nearly one in four teachers were considering leaving their profession early.
But similar numbers appeared in pre-pandemic surveys, too. A Phi Delta Kappa International survey from April 2019 also found that half of teachers had seriously considered getting out. All of this data suggests that, while we know it is bad, we have no idea exactly how bad.
State lawmakers, meanwhile, are not helping. Instead, they’re making it worse. North Carolina officials are pushing a new merit pay system that will make teacher pay dependent on student test scores and student surveys. In Pennsylvania, Republicans are joining a parade of officials in other states trying to pass teacher gag laws, while state Senator Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in this year’s election, is proposing to eliminate real estate taxes, which would cut school funding to less than half of its current level. It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that some folks want to dismantle the public education system and replace it with vouchers and religious private schools.
In my thirty-nine-year teaching career, I faced one dark night in which I seriously contemplated getting out. I was the president of the local union during a strike, and for several evenings, I took phone calls from people I knew, even former students, who had called not to scream at me, but to explain in calm, measured tones how teachers weren’t that important and really didn’t deserve to make any more than people working minimum wage jobs in the community.
When you teach, you become aware of a kind of background buzz, a faint hum of people who have little respect for the work you do and the institution that you serve. You close your door, cool yourself in the joy of teaching students, and keep your eye on the many people in your community who support and value what you do. You push the rest out.
But with my position in our strike, those negative voices were amplified. That’s where we are now. Everything from social media to hopes for political gains to the bad, amateur-led policy choices of the past two decades is amplifying the negative voices and turning up the heat.
So how do we begin to cool things down? The vast majority of people who approve of their public schools must step up to defend them. Public education is easy to take for granted; it’s easy to assume that nothing will threaten it. We should aim the activism of these supporters at all those who would chip away at public education—from charter school operators to voucher advocates to U.S. Supreme Court Justices whose decisions allow tax dollars to be spent on religious private schools.
In the meantime, teachers need respect and support. They need the kind of pay that can support a family and a career. They need accountability systems that are meaningful and related to the actual work of teaching. They need to be treated as professional educators and not political targets of opportunity.
I found my way back to a commitment to teaching by deliberately focusing on the work and my students, but the community helped as well. Kindness, support, and engagement help teachers lift themselves back up. It makes sense, because these are the same things that lift up any human being, and, after all, teachers are human beings, not frogs.