Who Will Teach America’s Children After Mass Exodus From Education?

ACROSS AMERICA— The end of the school year is marking the end of the careers of hundreds of America’s teachers, who are quitting ahead of retirement age in a mass exodus the leader of the National Education Association says has reached crisis-level proportions.

As many as 55 percent of educators said in a National Education Association survey in February they were thinking about leaving education, up from 37 percent in August. The NEA is the nation’s largest teacher labor union.

Teachers of all ages and at different stages of their careers are leaving the profession, education groups say.

NEA President Becky Pringle said in a news release that educator shortages “a five-alarm crisis” that is denying the nation’s K-12 public school children “the one-on-one attention they need.”

Teachers quit in droves at midyear, leaving schools in a lurch, according to Education Week, an independent news organization that has covered K-12 education since 1981. The COVID-19 pandemic burnout may be the driving force behind the teacher exodus, but other factors come into play, too.

Some teachers taking early retirement or leaving the profession early blame culture wars playing out in state legislatures and, ultimately, America’s classrooms, with legislative edicts on what they can teach.

‘Denounced And Publicly Scolded’

Illinois teacher Tom Stukel wrote on Patch that he’s quitting because of a shift in district philosophy about homework (it’s not scored), open-ended dates on assignments and assignment do-overs, and artificial limitations on the number of students he can give failing grades.

Stukel, who has taught for 24 years, 17 of them at Lyons Township High School, wrote he was quitting because “it is my opinion that it is immoral to teach the way LT teachers are being asked to work.”

Stukel said he’s spoken out against the district policies but was “denounced and publicly scolded” by the administration, which he said engaged in a campaign to discredit him by “compiling notes on anonymous accusations that could not be proven as fact.”

He was warned he would be fired if he didn’t follow the policies, Stukel wrote, and when he appealed, the school board backed the administration.

‘Current Events Don’t Belong In Classrooms’

Next door in Iowa, school districts surrounding Des Moines, the state’s largest city and its capital, are seeing an exodus of about 500 teachers, Axios Des Moines reported.

Among them is Nick Covington, a high school social studies teacher in Ankeny, Des Moines’ largest suburb, who turned in his keys after 10 years with the district. The tipping point was when his building principal told him discussions about political campaigns, elections and other current events do not belong in history classrooms, Covington wrote on Medium.

His trouble with the district began after classroom discussions about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as it was happening. He was accused in an anonymous phone call — falsely, Covington wrote — of denigrating supporters of then-President Donald Trump and encouraging students to follow his social media, where the caller said he was doing the same thing.

In the coming months, Covington wrote, he would be forbidden to refer to the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in advanced placement European history classes examining Brexit and the rise of white nationalism in Europe.

That isn’t directly in conflict with a new law in Iowa that prohibits public school teachers from teaching certain concepts, such as that the United States or Iowa is systematically racist.

The Iowa law doesn’t specifically mention critical race theory — a decades-old legal theory examining how the legacy of slavery continues to influence American society — but legislation is changing how teachers teach.

Some teachers take umbrage with what they call legislative overreach because they’re required to address critical race theory.

In her letter of resignation from a teaching position in Englewood, New Jersey, Dana Stangel-Plowe wrote that “the school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood.”

“They must locate themselves within the oppressor or oppressed group, or some intersectional middle where they must reckon with being part-oppressor and part-victim. …

“As a result, students arrive in my classroom accepting this theory as fact: People born with less melanin in their skin are oppressors, and people born with more melanin in their skin are oppressed,” she continued. “Men are oppressors, women are oppressed, and so on. This is the dominant and divisive ideology that is guiding our adolescent students.”

Conservative School Board Strategy

Covington’s clash with district officials began before last November’s school board election, when a trio of conservative candidates — including one who had the blessing of the state’s Republican governor — won seats. A mandate that students wear masks for COVID-19 mitigation, in defiance of state law, was a driving force in the Ankeny school board election.

The same thing happened across the country as conservative Republicans saw local school elections as a battleground for campaigns against critical race theory, free speech and science. As of May, the nonprofit online political encyclopedia Ballotpedia had identified 771 school elections in 41 states where candidates took a stance on critical race theory and the discussion of race, coronavirus, or sex and gender in schools.

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In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed the “don’t say gay” bill that limits discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the state’s elementary schools, and restricts how those topics can be discussed with older students. About 20 states so far this year have introduced bills that would censor LGBTQ curricula, according to MAP, or Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that researches equality issues.

Some school districts have been on a book-banning spree — about 41 percent of which are tied to directives from state officials or elected lawmakers, according to an inventory of banned books compiled by Pen America, a nonprofit group that works to protect the First Amendment and free expression.

In an unspecified nine-month period in the 2021-22 school year, 1,145 book titles were banned in 1,586 separate instances, Pen America said. Typically, the organization said, book bans are initiated by local community members who take exception.

This school year, Pen America saw “an unprecedented shift” away from local complaints to legislative directives about what books can appear on school library shelves.

“Book banning, as a form of censorship, implicates First Amendment prohibitions on the ability of government entities to ban or punish expression, making these documented efforts by lawmakers all the more concerning,” Pen America said.

‘Integrity Under Attack’

Also driving teachers from the classroom is a flurry of legislative proposals in conservative states that range from putting cameras in classrooms to requiring teachers submit their lessons and curriculum for public review so parents can pull their kids out of lessons they find objectionable.

“The prospect of being monitored like criminals and questioned about every educational decision they make will likely be the final straw for many educators waffling about leaving the profession,” Miriam Plotinsky, an instructional specialist and author of “Teach More, Hover Less,” wrote for The Hechinger Report, a news outlet that covers innovation and inequality in education.

That’s why Neal Patel, a middle school physical science teacher in Johnston, Iowa, another Des Moines suburb, quit at the end of the school year.

“I think the thing I’m most frustrated about is that my professional integrity is under attack, that teachers are not trusted as professionals anymore by politicians,” Patel told news station KCCI.

Jake Miller is a 2016 National History Day Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year award winner who was selected a year later as a National Education Association Global Fellow to China. He quit his job at Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg on March 1.

The workload was egregious — he covered more than 90 classes for teachers who were absent, causing him to spend another 15 hours outside his normal work week to prepare for his own classes, Miller told Education Week.

He also said that after a semester of online learning at the start of the pandemic, he felt less like a teacher and more like a babysitter whose job was to remind students to put on their masks, turn in their assignments and behave in the classroom.

Equally demoralizing, he said, is plummeting public trust in educators and education systems.

“We cannot win right now,” Miller said

Problem Pre-Dates Pandemic

School districts don’t know how bad the teacher shortage is going to get. Administrators in a Missouri school district just 10 miles from the state’s flagship university told Education Week earlier this year they hadn’t received a single qualified application for a couple of positions, and have had trouble finding elementary teachers.

That’s typical, Hallsville School District Superintendent John Downs told Education Week.

“We have a strong reputation as a district as a great place for teachers to work and students to learn, and yet we’ve still seen an increased challenge in filling the vacancies,” Downs said. “It’s concerning to see the number of applications declining. … How bad could it get down the road?”

In a national EdWeek Research Center survey of school administrators and leaders, nearly half said they struggled to hire enough full-time teachers for the 2021-23 school year.

It is not a new problem, and it was predictable before the pandemic.

The number of high school graduates going after teaching degrees and certificates has declined by a third since 2010, according to a 2019 analysis by the Center for American Progress.

States that saw enrollment declines of at least 50 percent during the eight years covered in the analysis included Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

And along with Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, enrollment dropped by more than 10,000 students in four other states: California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio.

At the same time, enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs increased.

In most colleges, enrollment in teacher prep programs stayed about the same during the pandemic, according to a recent survey by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. However, a fifth of institutions surveyed said new undergraduate enrollment declined 11 percent or more.

The Fix: Pay And Support

Teacher pay is a big reason high school graduates are looking at other professions. A recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that on average, teachers earn 19.2 percent less than workers with similar education.

Schools increasingly have to compete with private sector companies recruiting teachers, according to the Society for Human Resources Management, or SHRM.

Cliff Carlson Sr., a recruiter for CompanyCam in Lincoln, Nebraska, told SHRM that teachers are ideal candidates for marketing, inside sales, business development and customer success positions because they typically have above-average verbal communication and presentation skills.

Also, teachers are used to working with limited resources, “so they are very good at working with what they have,” added Alexis Monson, co-founder of the San Francisco-based greeting card company Punkpost. “The teachers we work with are incredible, and I am always blown away by their kind and gentle yet get-it-done attitude.”

Megan Boren, a program manager at the Southern Regional Education Board, told Education Week that teacher shortages will increase without “the right interventions.”

Increasing teacher compensation is one way, Boren said.

But teachers also want supportive working conditions.

“Teachers have never minded doing a hard job; but now that we are fighting a losing battle against those who actively seek to destroy the work we care so passionately about, the rewards of teaching are far less discernible,” Plotinsky said in her essay for The Hechinger Report. “Educators are tired of seeing our efforts erased like a blackboard.

“Unless lawmakers and politicians stop attacking the very people who so staunchly advocate for children, the consequences are foreseeable: The end of educators.”