Thompson: Why Teachers (& Bees) Are Disappearing
The explanation of why bees are disappearing is complex. The question why teachers are leaving the profession is not.
Teaching is a tough job, especially in the inner city. But, especially in high-challenge classrooms, it would be hard to find a more wonderful career. If teaching in urban schools is the calling for you, only a fiasco as bad as the contemporary school reform movement could drive the joy out the job.
The latest discussion about the disappearance of teachers was prompted by the New York Times Motoko Rich. Rich, in Teacher Shortages Spur a Nationwide Hiring Scramble (Credentials Optional), explains that California has to fill 21,500 teaching slots, and the state is issuing fewer than 15,000 new teaching credentials a year. She also reported on efforts in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Louisville, Ky.; Nashville; Oklahoma City; and Providence, R.I. to staff their classrooms. NPR's Diane Rehm adds that enrollment in teacher preparation programs across the U.S. fell by around 30% between 2010 and 2014.
I can't imagine what teachers in Charlotte-Mecklenburg feel when recalling their district's past integration efforts, and the loss of the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of a real civil rights movement - where school desegregation promised kids and adults such rewarding and life-changing opportunities. Seeing their system move from a pioneer in social justice to being a showcase for "reform" must have been devastating.
But, I can comment on Oklahoma City where recruiters have traveled to Puerto Rico and Spain to fill classrooms. When I entered the inner city neighborhood school classroom in 1993, my John Marshall High School had more great teachers than I could have imagined. I had never encountered such teaching excellence. The faculty had stuck out the violence of 1970's bussing and the 1980's crack and gangs epidemic. But, soon, the reform mantra would be that these awesome educators' "low expectations" and their "excuses" were to blame for the low performance of high-challenge students. So, teachers were told to all "get on the same page" in teaching the same tested material at the same rate, or get out of the inner city.
Our school went through bouts of dysfunction when violence and disruptive behavior spun out of control, and we had funerals for far too many students, but we also produced an astounding amount of academic, artistic, musical, and athletic excellence. It was test-driven, competition-driven reform, not the failures of our school's educators and students, that eventually transformed us into the lowest-performing high school in the state.
It was not just NCLB and Arne Duncan's accountability-driven reforms that sucked the oxygen out of our school improvement efforts and drove out our best teachers. Top-down reform robbed us of our professional autonomy. Eventually, those of us who stood and fought for our kids' right to engaging instruction found ourselves losing battle after battle and most tearfully left for easier schools where they had more freedom to teach in a holistic manner.
As these national stories bring the exodus of teachers into the political consciousness of nonThis Week In Education: Thompson: Why Teachers (& Bees) Are Disappearing:-