"Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore" is an Ambie Nominated, Award-Winning, 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus.
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Those Who Can't Teach Anymore presents a segment from the podcast Those Who Can't Do, hosted by Andrea Forcum. In this segment, Charles Fournier talks with Andrea about teacher attrition, absurd dress codes, and what not to do in your classroom.
To hear the whole episode and more episodes from Andrea's podcast, check out Those Who Can't Do wherever you get your podcasts.
Bonus: Presenting This Changes Everything
Season 1
Wednesday, July 12, 2023 • Duration 46:19
Those Who Can't Teach Anymore presents the award-winning episode, "The Kids Are Not All Right," from This Changes Everything, a Cascade Public Media/Crosscut podcast. In this episode, producer and host Sara Bernard explores how the pandemic has exacerbated the mental health of students and teachers. In a moment when students and teachers are in need of support, the questions remain: What is being done and is it enough?
Think about your favorite teacher. What were they like? What made them your favorite? Now, imagine if your favorite teacher quit their job before you had them in your life. What would you have lost? Think about what future generations of students will lose if more teachers leave because teachers don’t feel valued or trusted or fairly compensated. If things don’t change, more teachers will leave because they are realizing that they can. In this episode, we hear from former teachers who left education and are happier for it.
“Fireworks” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license.
“Faster, Sons of Vengeance, Faster!” by Doctor Turtle is licensed under a CC BY-NC license.
6: Those Who Stay
Season 1 · Episode 6
Wednesday, February 8, 2023 • Duration 38:01
The first step to solving the problem of teacher attrition is to admit that there is a problem. Some groups have already taken this step, and they are listening to teachers in order to create solutions that will retain teachers. These programs make a big difference, but their approach isn’t the norm. In this episode, we hear about successful efforts to keep teachers in education, and we’ll ask the question: Who should have the responsibility of keeping teachers in education?
Imagine that you are hiring a new English teacher. None of the people who apply have any of the qualifications to teach English. No teaching degree. No English degree. No experience in the classroom. Would you hire any of them? Probably not. Now here is the irony. Many of the people making curricular and legislative decisions about education don’t have the qualifications to be hired within education. This is a problem. In this episode, we hear how standardization, high-stakes testing, and policy decisions made by non-educators may be contributing to teachers’ decisions to leave education.
“Press Conference” by is licensed under a license.
4: Why Are We Here?
Season 1 · Episode 4
Wednesday, January 11, 2023 • Duration 42:04
What’s the purpose of education? If you were to ask 10 different people this question, you may get 10 different answers. Education shouldn’t be this complex, but getting people to come to a consensus on anything right now is a challenge. This can be a problem. If teachers are expected to meet ambiguous goals, it can lead to burnout and frustration. In this episode, we hear how conflicting values in education may be contributing to teachers’ decisions to leave.
The most easily recognized teachers in our culture are on the big screen. So when we think about good teaching, it’s almost impossible not to think of Robin William’s character in Dead Poets Society standing on a desk and inspiring his students. This might be part of the problem. When teaching is associated with unrealistic Hollywood characters, it can create impractical or ridiculous assumptions about what teachers do. In this episode, we hear how the stereotypes of teachers may be contributing to teachers’ decisions to leave education.
“Room With a View” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license.
2: Inheritance
Season 1 · Episode 2
Wednesday, December 14, 2022 • Duration 40:35
Many of the problems modern teachers are facing aren’t new, so we’re going back in time to find out how our education system became a system that teachers are currently fleeing. Come to find out, modern teachers inherited low pay, limited respect, and a system that strips communities of their cultural traditions. In this episode, hear how Indian Boarding Schools and the American Industrial Revolution have left traces on modern education, and how these traces are contributing to teachers’ decisions to leave education.
We are witnessing a mass exodus of teachers from education. My wife, Jennie, is one of those teachers that left. She, like many educators, was tired of not being treated like a professional. Even for me, a high school English teacher, the job is getting harder. So I go in search of answers. In this episode, we hear from Jennie and two other former teachers about why they left teaching. From struggles with mental health, to low pay, to a lack of autonomy in the classroom - they give insight into why we are losing good teachers across the country.
“Machinery” by eddy is licensed under a CC BY-NC license
“So Far So Close” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license.
“Patriotic Songs of America” by the t is licensed under a license
Season Trailer: Those Who Can't Teach Anymore
Season 1
Friday, September 23, 2022 • Duration 03:12
Brilliant teachers are leaving education in droves, and they will continue to leave unless something changes. In February of 2022, the National Education Association reported that 55% of teachers were thinking about leaving education earlier than they had planned. The history and politics surrounding education, portrayels of education in pop-culture, and difficulty of teaching conditions have been feeding into why teachers want to leave. If we don't take time to listen to teachers and work towards fostering an environment that makes them want to stay, great teachers will continue to leave the profession.
A quick warning, this episode discusses sexual abuse.
During the quarantine, I received an anonymous letter from a former student that had since graduated. After pleasantries, the note says “I’m writing you now to thank you for things that you never knew you did when I was your student.”
And then they go on to explain that though I would not have known this, they had been sexually abused by their father, and they had just found the strength to tell someone, cut ties, and start the healing process. They said that my class was a space that made them feel safe, heard, and respected. They wrote that I helped them quote “understand that there are good men, ones that deserve to be fathers.” end quote
They were intentional in saying that they didn’t know if I would figure out who they were, but regardless, they wanted to thank me and let me know that I played a part in helping them get through the abuse.
Every time I read this letter, it breaks me. I hate that this student had to go through this. I hate their father. I am humbled by the fact that I could be a source of support for this student, and I hope so badly that they can heal.
No kid should ever have to experience this, but they do, and because they do, they need adults, teachers, in their lives that can support them, even if those adults are unaware of that support. We need teachers who are themselves supported and happy and in a space that values them, so that they can be as wholly present as possible for students.
But at this moment in time, many teachers, so of the people that students need most, don’t want to teach anymore. And that fact is devastating.
We’re at the end of this series. We’ve explored a variety of things contributing to teachers leaving the profession - feelings of being devalued, a lack of autonomy, struggles with mental health. We’ve looked at why teachers might be treated the way they have been, from pop-cultural stereotypes to an odd historical inheritance …to having unclear expectations of what education is for. And we’ve even looked at some solutions and where they come from. All of this to make sense of why teachers might be leaving, and to draw attention to the fact that without authentic and relevant change that is not the burden of teachers, teachers will keep leaving.
Today, we will hear teachers who left education explain how their lives are now, and we will explore some resources available to teachers who are looking to leave education. And from what I’ve heard through interviews and people reaching out to me because of this podcast, a vast majority of teachers that have left the classroom are much happier. So, if nothing from this season has convinced you that we need to do something to keep teachers in education and something real, maybe this episode will. I am not saying this as a threat, but from the perspective of a realist. Think of it as a natural consequence. Refuse to address and take genuine action to keep teachers, or they will find their way out of education because they can. And in this present moment, they will likely be happier for it.
This is the finale to Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier.
Here is part 7: “Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore”
Camile Lofters reached out to me in the early stages of this project. Camile was a high school English and journalism teacher in south Florida. She left teaching after 15 years in the classroom , and she was one of those people that felt destined to be in the classroom.
Camile Lofters: I feel like teaching was in my blood. My mom was an early childhood education major and taught preschool, and, you know, lower elementary school. So I mean, I grew up watching her, and wanting to emulate her. So I would line up my stuffed animals and like, I had a little pointer, and I would teach them things. And when I graduated, I was so excited to start teaching that it was like everything to me.
But like most of the people that shared their stories throughout this podcast, Camile left. And even though she is from Florida and most of the other folks I’ve spoken with are from Wyoming and the west, Camile’s reasons for leaving were the same. She pointed to not being trusted or seen as an expert, to politicians that oversteps their role in education, to low pay, to being undervalued, and the list goes on. And like the other teachers, Camile still values education.
Camile Lofters: Even though I did leave the profession, I still love teaching, and I still think it's one of the greatest professions. But as we all know, in our country, education system is a little broken, maybe it's a lot broken is a better way to say it. So, I feel like when the pandemic happened, it sort of broke everything wide open forever for a lot of people. I mean, it's not like it's just me.
We haven’t addressed the pandemic much throughout this series. Not because the pandemic didn’t have a significant impact on teachers deciding to leave, but because the reasons teachers are leaving didn’t start with the pandemic.The pandemic forced teachers to reflect on what they’re willing or not willing to accept. Camile reflected on whether she could teach for another two decades.
Camile Lofters: And the answer used to be yes, I'm going to teach until I’m 60. And when it started to become like I don’t know, and then it was like, definitely not. And I was like, this means I need to do something else. You know, if I'm feeling that way, it's not fair to myself, my family, but also I think to the students. They deserve to have teachers that are really excited to be there. And yes, I am a good teacher and I could go back and still I think do a good job, but I just feel like mentally I would be falling apart and that's not that's not really fair to anybody.
You’ve heard this throughout the series. Many teachers are leaving because they know that they aren’t doing their job as well as they want to, so they leave. The pandemic contributed to this. More teachers thought about what they could and couldn’t do anymore. The pandemic made the job more difficult. Skepticism of teachers rose, student and parent behaviors became worse, everyone’s mental health seemed to get worse, and more expectations were placed on teachers. Teachers know this, but when more is put on a teacher’s plate, it’s usually not taken off.
Camile felt this, and she also had a daughter in the middle of it all.
Camile Lofters: That 2020-2021 school year was just really, really difficult. And so then by the time my daughter was born, you know, in June 2021, I was like, No, this is this, I gotta find something else.
So she started the process of looking for something that she could transition into. And she was looking for something that would allow for more financial opportunities. On top of having a daughter, feeling all of the frustrations and stressors of teaching and the impact of the pandemic, Camile wanted to be paid better.
Camile Lofters: Pay was a big part of it. It's really disheartening to work so hard for so long and never see an increase in your salary. I graduated from college with all my friends, we were all making about the same amount of money. And now most of them are making double, if not triple you. You know what I'm making. I worked really hard to be a good teacher and constantly doing professional development and looking for new strategies. And so I think it's disheartening to not have that come with any sort of raise and compensation. So I will say that that was definitely a factor when I realized that if you account for inflation, I had basically never gotten a raise, like ever.
And her only prospect for a raise was to become an administrator, despite all of the extra work she’d done like designing curriculums.
Camile Lofters: And I hate when people say, “Well, you didn't go into teaching for the money.” Well, of course I didn't, but I'm a human being that needs to survive, I have a family and I would like to be able to provide for them.
Pay matters, so Camile left teaching and transitioned into a new career where she feels better about the pay.
Camile Lofters: So, I've been making a little bit more money, not a ton, but a little bit, and it does matter to me, because there is the potential for me to make more money. In my job, I have the potential to earn more, And there's a lot of room for growth. And so that was very appealing to me, to actually be in a position where there could be more upward movement in my salary.
Camile acknowledges that she now has to pay her own health insurance which means her take home pay is about equal to what she was making as a teacher, but that doesn’t matter to her.
Camile Lofters: I’m so much happier that it feels different. It feels like I'm making more money.
And her transition out of education allows her to continue working with kids, which is something many teachers point to when deciding whether or not they will leave.
Camile Lofters: I am the photography manager and sales representative for a school photography company, I was a yearbook teacher for eight years. So the company I work for, actually, I used to be like, a customer of theirs, like I was the teacher, and they were my photography company.
And her transition to her new job has been pretty smooth.
Camile Lofters: And I love it. It's a great job for me. I use a lot of skills that I already had as a teacher. I already knew part of the business because I was a customer, so I already know the customers want, what they need, that sort of thing.
Part of what made her transition smooth was her willingness to learn. The people that I have talked with that successfully left education did so with humility, knowing that they had a lot of great skills, but that they also had a lot to learn.
Camile Lofters: So learning the business side of things, I am literally always just sitting in my boss's office whenever possible, just like listening to him talk about the business, because it's just mind blowing to learn.
Camile Lofters: And I'm still learning because obviously our company's since it's a school photography company, we follow the school year, and each phase of the school year brings something different. But yeah, I'm really excited about it. I think it's cool to always be learning something new.
So Camile left teaching, but she still gets to take part in the things that she enjoyed about teaching.
Camile Lofters: And I get to work with teenagers all day long at a really exciting time in their lives. They're doing, you know, they're seeing your pictures and their, or their school pictures. And they're usually pretty excited about that. So just making them feel good. You know, like, establishing a rapport with a teenager is hard for a lot of people. It's not hard for me. It's something I did all day long. So it's been really cool to use my teaching skills in a new way.
But the things that are different about education are well worth it.
Camile Lofters: I have just a lot better work life balance, now. So my schedule is flexible. If I need to leave early one day, I can just schedule to have an early day or come later or you know, be closer or farther away from home. So that's really nice. I also get to actually speak to adults during the day, which is great. That's always nice. You know, really silly things like I can use the bathroom whenever I want to.
And the common rebuttal for why teachers shouldn’t complain about their jobs, you know, summers off, Camile doesn’t mind not having her summers off.
Camile Lofters: There have been several people still to this day, who are like, “Oh, well, don't you miss having the summer off?” and different kinds of things like that. And I think at the end of the day, having a summer off is great, but if you feel like you're only living your life in those two months of summer vacation, and then the rest of the year, you're miserable, then like, what good is that?
She has more financial opportunities and she feels happier. And contrary to any stereotypes, her leaving education doesn’t mean that she hates kids or that she is anti-education. She has this to say to teachers who are struggling with that aspect of leaving education.
Camile Lofters: So I would just say that and that, if you are thinking about leaving the classroom, that doesn't make you a bad teacher. That it's normal to have those thoughts, and that's okay.
Camile advocates for teachers as much as she can, and she feels like being outside of the classroom gives her some opportunities to be a little more vocal - especially in Florida where teachers have been egregiously attacked through politically charged legislation like the don’t say gay bill, the stop woke act, the overall rejection of AP African American history, and sadly the list goes on. She uses her social media platform to share her voice.
Camile’s sense of relief and happiness upon leaving education is not unique. This shouldn’t be the case. And teachers aren’t quitting to sit around, they are going into other careers, which may make it very difficult to lure them back to the classroom. If we want teachers to stay in education, education needs to be more appealing than the other options available to them.
Jaye Wacker, who we heard from in the first episode, left teaching after being in the classroom for three decades. He is now a Senior Public Information Officer at the Wyoming Department of Administration and Information. Like Camile, Wacker feels like life is better.
Jaye Wacker: I work for a director, who is one of the themes in Administration and Information that she keeps hammering is work life balance. And I don't feel like teachers have work-life balance in the slightest. Well, yeah, it's balanced, but it's balanced one way you know it. And that's tragic. That's no way to live. It's no way to draw great people into the profession. There has to be a balance. There has to be a…there's something more than the paycheck.
Wacker uses the portrait of a single day to explain how his life is different since he left teaching.
Jaye Wacker: Sundays, I was the worst person to be around, hard to be around. And whether I was working on my lesson plans for the week or trying to devise something, or even just putting it off, because I didn't want to deal with it. Waiting until Hannah was in bed Sunday night, and then sitting right there at the end of that dining room table, with my books, holding back the curtains and trying to figure out what's the best way to reach and meet the GVC.
As a reminder, the GVC, or Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum, is the effort to standardize education, and acts like a middle-man to the Common Core Standards. So, for Jaye, his quality of life on Sundays is better because he isn’t having to use Sundays to prepare for the week. He doesn’t get those Sunday Scaries anymore.
Jaye Wacker: I can do whatever, and then just go to work the next day. I go to work, and the sun's up. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've sat in the room and watch the sunrise.
And like Camile, losing out on summers wasn’t a big deal, contrary to the cultural stereotype that teachers only work for the summer.
Jaye Wacker: I'm a firm believer that June, July and August are not the three best reasons to be a teacher. In fact, they're probably the three worst because people who think they're the three best, they're miserable nine months out of the year. And so I really kind of stressed about how am I going to deal with summer. And last year, I didn't even notice. I didn't even notice. And this year, the only thing I know is that, oh, my daughter's not in school anymore. And I just go to work and it's chill, and I work with good people. And I used to say teachers worked 12 months and nine. It's more.
Wacker misses some of the people, he misses the kids, he misses the conversations, he misses the books, but he doesn’t miss how he felt. He still has some leftover traces of being a teacher ingrained in him.
Jaye Wacker: If somebody's in my office, and we're just having a conversation. I feel a little bit of panic. I literally do. Because I have that feeling like I need to be doing something else. I don't miss the pressure. It is and it's gotten geometrically more pressurized in the last few years. I don't miss that a bit. I and that's part of what I couldn't take any more. I couldn't take the pressure anymore
The pressure and stress Wacker was feeling was keeping him from the people that matter most to him. Now he gets to spend more quality time with them.
Another aspect of why teachers left teaching was being trusted. For Stephanie Reese, the opportunity to make more money and to feel respected was huge in why she changed careers. We’ve heard from Stephanie several times over the course of this podcast. She was a PE teacher and she left teaching after eight years. She is now the general manager at Black Tooth Brewing Company in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Stephanie Reese: I have a fantastic boss, but I'm basically my own boss, because I'm here in Cheyenne. And they're up in Sheridan. So I'm trusted to make decisions. And I don't have anybody breathing down my back. And, you know, I think the trust is the biggest thing.
With that trust, comes a feeling of being valued, which equates to getting paid better.
Stephanie Reese: When my boss offered me stock in the company, like having a part of something, being a part of something because you earned it, and being promoted like that was definitely like, Oh, this is not education. And yeah, I mean, I'm definitely surprised each day. I'm like, wow, this is so much better than each day because you're just not enduring the shit that goes along with everything, like you can actually do your job. Right? So many more distractions when you teach or, like expectations, or having to juggle this, this and this, or do all of this without any support. And you're expected to do this. And so with this job, like, I can just do my job. It's a really good feeling.
And if this isn’t clear, Stephanie’s quality of life is much better. Not only does she feel satisfied in her work, she is making more money than she did as a teacher. This has been a theme, many of the people that talk about a pay increase also express a feeling of being valued more in their new jobs. Stephanie explains that her job is not without stress, but it feels different.
Stephanie Reese: I can tell, okay, all this work I'm putting in the stress is worth it, because we're making money. And so I love that aspect of it. Teaching in a lot of ways is you give and give and give and give and give and give a whole lot more. And then, oh, here's a $5 gift card to Starbucks. Thank you so much for all of what you do. Like that, to me in a nutshell is teaching. There's no appreciation for it. Really, maybe superficial, but not individualized.
Stephanie was adamant that teachers that are suffering and not enjoying their work need to reflect on what they want out of their life because change is possible, and it might not be worth waiting for the system to change around them.
Stephanie Reese: Life is too short, to waste time or thinking about, well, if this happens, then I'll be happy. You've had to figure that out now, because it's just way more important. The positive is driving it, especially me quitting it, it definitely was driven by wanting more positive in my life rather than negative, and it is worth it to change. So if you're scared, or if you feel like you need more help, there's so much out there so many people, especially nowadays who have been through the same thing.
And as you’ve heard, people are transitioning into a variety of different careers - all resulting in better qualities of life. They transitioned into careers that fit them best. Stephanie manages a bar, Wacker works for the state, Camile works for an education adjacent company, and Ron Ruckman, who we heard from a few episodes back left teaching after 23 years to work in construction.
Ron Ruckman: My mental state has always been that way in the summer, like any mental state is so much better. I'm so much happier and so much less stressed. Because I go to work and we have fun and we joke around and we do our thing and we all we kind of work together and everybody respects each other and we know that each other can do the job, but I go to school and I always kind of feel like, there's always somebody watching me thinking like somebody is constantly evaluating every second of everything I do, which they're probably doing construction, but it doesn't feel like that for some reason. Why, I don't know?
Ron is happy not to have to manage the emotional baggage of teaching. He doesn’t have to manage other people’s emotional wellbeing in construction.
Ron Ruckman: It just builds. I don't have that with construction. You know? If so and so wacks their thumb, you're like, Well, that was dumb, move on, you know, or whatever. Or they got a rough family life, that's your deal, dude. We're gonna get back to work. Yeah, we got things to do.
It’s hard to make non-educators understand the level of relief people feel when they leave the profession. For Ron, it was the ability to not feel so emotionally overdrawn.
For my wife Jennie, who left teaching after 7 years to pursue her MBA and Pharmacy degrees, it’s a matter of feeling valued and being fairly compensated for the work she does.
Jennica Fournier: When I told people, I just I can't do education anymore. I can't do the parents. I can't do the administrators and everything. People said, well, you know, patients can be really rude to pharmacists. And pharmacists don't have it easy either. And they work really long hours, and they're on their feet all day. And I just thought, yeah, that is all the same things that I'm going through, but I will get paid two to three times more than I would as a teacher. And that's significantly different. And I feel compensated, but not just like a monetary compensation. I would also get respect in the community. People would respect my opinions more. You know, if I ran for office as a pharmacist, I think that I would get respected more than running for office as a teacher. So I think you get more reward than you do. I guess you get more benefit compared to your risk.
This goes back to the need to value educators. That means seeing them as human beings, not martyrs, not saints, not slobs. It’s not allowing stereotypes to dictate how teachers are treated or viewed. For Jennie, she felt a clear difference in how she was treated outside of education.
Jennica Fournier: So some of the MBA events, just the networking that happened and the high level conversations that you were able to have with other people that didn't focus around children. I suppose the first time that I was at a networking event. I felt very much like respected and I felt interesting. That was kind of the moment where I was like, Wow, I'm outside of this upstanding member of society realm. I mean, as of as a pharmacist, do I still have to be a professional and live my life? In a, in a good way? Yes.
Jennie is happy to be away from the unrealistic expectations of being a teacher. These are the stereotypes that we discussed in an earlier episode.
Jennica Fournier: To be a good teacher, it means that like, I'm pure, and I'm thoughtful, and I'm helping and I'm a martyr. It's not like she's teaching to the highest level of her degree, and she has all the best training to be a teacher. I don't really feel like that's what people think of when they think of a teacher. Like she's teaching the top notch science, the highest level science that she can and the newest things. That's not what people remark about with their high school teachers. They remark about how friendly are they?
And this shift out of education has done wonders for how she feels about herself.
Jennica Fournier: My self-esteem is incredibly higher than it was before. I get a lot of positive affirmation, and I get it from my peers and my teachers in this setting, and I feel very accomplished here.
I want to pause here for a moment. You might be thinking, Charles, this is starting to sound kind of repetitive. Well that’s because it is, because I cannot stress enough that teachers are leaving their jobs, and when they leave, many of them are happier. When I asked former teachers what it would take for them to return to education, a few said they would consider returning if their new career didn’t work out and education had tremendous reform. One said a quarter of a million dollar salary. And most said they would NEVER consider returning.
Shane Atkinson is one of the people who is much happier after quitting teaching. He is now working in government and he feels like he’s valued and trusted. Shane is the person in the first episode that explained how education was like an abusive relationship. Being in a new career only highlights how glad he is to be out of teaching.
Shane Atkinson: Every morning, I start work at 9am. If I drive to work, it takes me three minutes. I ride my bike almost every single day. Takes me 20 minutes to ride my bike. So quality of life wise, I've been sleeping better than I have, in my entire adult life. I sleep so well, I wake up feeling refreshed, I wake up at the time that I would have had to be at work before. And I sit around, I read the news, I listen to some music, I drink coffee, just have these nice, leisurely mornings.
For example, Shane compares what it’s like being late at his new job versus what it was like to be late as a teacher.
Shane Atkinson: I was five minutes late, one day, probably two weeks into starting at this office. And I did not have a sense of doom. I didn't feel like my boss was there and you know, walk in and she's like, Hey, how's it going? No, no big deal whatsoever. I remember multiple times administration would be sitting by the door where teachers come in, basically keeping notes who's here two minutes late.
And in this new career, he feels like he is receiving what he needs to feel sustained and supported.
Shane Atkinson: The other thing where I work now is just incredibly supportive. My boss, my immediate supervisor, my head boss, they actually seem to value you as a human being. It's crazy, I didn't even realize that was a thing. And I'm sure it's probably not everywhere. But I just feel absolutely valued.
If I said, I had a really hard day today, and we have those hard days. And I just need some time. Great Take, take tomorrow, take a mental health day you've earned it, you know, would be the narrative. If I get off a very tough call, or a rough meeting, right, we deal with some pretty sensitive things, sometimes people even more so than education, but I can hang up for that call. And I can go for a while. I'm not ruled by the bell schedule.
So, all of these former teachers left education, and are happy with their new careers. And I know this is a small sample of teachers - 5 teachers don’t represent all teachers, but their stories and their experiences cover the gamut of what I’ve heard from teachers across the country. Based on my experience, a majority of teachers that have left education are happier. If we want to keep good teachers in education, teaching has to be more appealing than alternatives. Because right now, folks are willing to go back to school, jump into completely different fields, work in the service industry, work constructions, lose out on the retirement plans and insurance plans, in order to get away from being a teacher.
And those that don’t like their work but remain in education, may have a variety of reasons for doing so. Shane speculates on why folks stay when they don’t want to be there.
Shane Atkinson: I'm here because I have to be here because I need my health insurance. I'm here because I need a steady paycheck. I'm here because this is a big one. What else am I going to do? Who else? What experience? Do I have to go out and do something else? Right? And it's, it's actually really difficult. I read a lot about this when I left, because I had no clue what I was going to do.
That last piece of what Shane is getting at, the “I don’t know what else I can do” is a big hurdle for lots of people. Many teachers have spent every year of their lives in school either as a student or as a teacher. Many don’t know anything else, so transitioning might be terrifying. They may have also bought into the rhetoric that teachers aren’t able to do anything else, “Those who can’t do, teach,” which I think we’ve established is a ridiculous saying that should go the way of the dodo.
And if you are among the folks that think teachers are only able to teach, and nothing else, you are gravely mistaken. And that assumption is tied to why teachers are treated poorly. The assumption that teachers are stuck could be contributing to why teachers aren’t being valued. To make sense of this, here is a quick example. One of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens has this line, “Death is the mother of beauty.” So without death, we might not recognize beauty. Now, when thinking about teachers, without the threat of teachers leaving, teachers might not be valued like they should be. It’s a catch-22. When teachers quit, they are valued, but teachers are quitting because they aren’t valued.
So, in order for teachers to be valued, it might require more teachers to leave the profession. And for folks who want to leave, but don’t know how to make the transition, there are people who help teachers figure out how to transition out of education. Meet Daphne Gomez. Daphne is the Founder and CEO of the Teacher Career Coach, a company that helps teachers transition out of the classroom.
Daphne Gomez: So if they don't make changes to how much we ask of teachers, how much we pay teachers, it's gonna continue to get worse. It's not worth it for people to be in a position where they're being beaten up.
Daphne helps teachers leave education. She is not the reason teachers want to leave education. She is not responsible for teachers that are overworked, payed poorly, treated poorly, and devalued. She is someone who tells teachers that it’s okay if they want better for themselves. Teachers are not limited with what they can do. And from what Daphne has seen, folks that are leaving are doing well.
Daphne Gomez: We have to lower class sizes, we have to be able to improve our funding for teachers salary, we have to make changes as far as that goes, because right now teachers are hearing stories of people who are leaving. I can say 85% of over 300 teachers that I surveyed just last week, have either matched their salary or increased their salary with whatever position they took after leaving the classroom following my resources.
Teachers have a lot of skills that can translate into new careers. This is a reality that non-educators need to be aware of. And teacher attrition will only get worse because teachers are seeing their former colleagues leave, make more money, and feel happier in their lives.
Teachers are tired of being beaten up, so they are leaving teaching because they are realizing that they can. I don’t blame them. And there are times when I envy them - when I hear how happy they are or when another bad piece of legislation or policy is voted in, I think, “I could do something else” and feel pretty good about it.
As a former teacher, Daphne is well aware of the difficulty of being a teacher and the struggles of trying to leave the profession.
Daphne Gomez: For me, when I started thinking about leaving the classroom, I was breaking down, sobbing on the way to work. I was going into the hospital, not every day or anything. But there are about three different times that I went to the doctor and he said, these are weird, stress related illnesses, it does something to your body. But something about it did not work for me anymore. And when I started to tell my coworkers I am not going to a different school district, I'm just gonna find a different job and see if that helps me heal, everybody's first sentence out of their mouth was, “You can't leave. You're a good teacher. Children need good teachers.”
The people that said this to Daphne were not bad people. I heard this when I stopped coaching. It’s not that people are trying to guilt teachers into staying - it’s that they want good teachers to stay, but they have nothing to offer except “you’re good at this.” It goes back to that stereotype that a teacher should just continue the job because they are doing a good thing, but again, teachers should be treated like martyrs. And being good at something isn’t enough of a reason to continue doing it. Daphne wants to change this view of leaving education.
Daphne Gomez: There's really never been that discussion of it's okay to walk away from it. Even if you're good. Even if you're happy. You can be the best teacher in the world and very, very happy. And then someone offers you something that's $10,000 more, and you absolutely can leave for it. But we've never had those discussions.
Daphne Gomez: I think that there is a system of emotional blackmail and gaslighting that's been going on in the education system for a really long time. And I think that they know that they can hold children above teachers' heads. They can use that year over year over year.
But as we heard from the teachers earlier in the episode, many of them left even though they liked to teach or they enjoyed the kids. None of them left and said, “I hate kids.” This is an easy way for people to demonize anyone that thinks of leaving and to guilt teachers into staying. This isn’t a healthy way to keep teachers in education. This is that abusive relationship that Shane pointed out at the start of the series. Part of what has allowed this rhetoric and guilt to work for so long is the fact that teachers didn’t think they had a choice. But they do have a choice. Part of what set Daphne on the path to create The Teacher Career Coach was to address the problems she had with leaving education. She reflected on her own experience in order to help others. She started by asking questions about her experience.
Daphne Gomez: Why was that so hard on me? Why did I feel this need to stay in a career where I was truly breaking down? And why was it such a hard decision for me to actually leave? And how can I help other people who are struggling with that?
For Daphne, some of this starts with addressing the guilt teachers have when trying to decide to walk away.
Daphne Gomez: I've seen the guilt, where people are offered positions, and they've said, I can't do it. I want to stay one more year because my grade level team and I have a lot of work. And I think where a lot of this comes from is because we went into this position because we want to help others. Every single thing that you do in teaching impacts children that impact students, it is something that you're super passionate about. So every time that you sacrifice three hours of your own personal life after you're done working, that students leave, you're done working, quote unquote, done working, and then you sit down and you do something for three more hours.
Teachers care about their students, and so much is put on teachers’ shoulders that it can be hard for them to make self-serving decisions. But being selfless is not often sustainable nor healthy.
Daphne Gomez: But then at some point, you reach this breaking point of I have to put myself first and that is not something that you have done in this position. I've heard of teachers, you know, staying in very extreme situations or the guilt getting so bad that they talked to therapists for five years and the therapists really were begging them you are not doing well mentally in this role. You have to leave and they would just push back and push back and say I can't leave. The students need me. I can't leave.
But they can, and they are, and for many of them, the decision is better for their mental health. Still, that doesn’t make leaving easy.
Daphne Gomez: We're going to hurt our coworkers, we're going to potentially hurt students. And for people with huge hearts that go into this, to help other people that is, you know, the biggest hurdle to get over is knowing that your ACT may be selfish people may think of you differently, everything that you've done as a teacher for, let's say, you were in the classroom for 10 years, the second you decide you want to leave and become a project manager, everybody's gonna say, Oh, she's selfish. And that's hard for us to really deal with mentally.
The ability to leave education might be getting easier though. The rhetoric around leaving this “forever career” is being challenged and teachers are calling out the stereotypes. More teachers are leaving because more teachers are realizing that they can leave. This means that the guilt of ‘doing it for the kids’ isn’t enough to keep teachers in. Culturally, we need to recognize that guilt is not a good teacher retention plan. Teachers are seeing successful examples of people leaving education all around them.
Daphne Gomez: The correlation between how people are talking about teaching, and that it's okay to leave teaching, and people actually leaving teaching in mass quantities cannot be ignored. I think that it was something that was supposed to be your forever career. The second you go into teaching, you are there for 30 years, there's not a career trajectory. And besides becoming an admin, This is going to be like what you do until you are retired.
With the language around leaving education changing, mass amounts of teachers are hearing that it’s okay to leave an unhealthy work environment and find work that will better serve their well-being. So there will be more openings and less teachers to fill those openings, which means that education will suffer. And hopefully nobody wants that, but that’s where we are headed. Teachers are realizing that the burden of staying in education isn’t theirs alone, and if education suffers, it is because of a larger failing of the community and government to value education and the those who work in education So until the burden of keeping teachers in education gets picked up by non-educators, this will continue.
And Daphne is trying to make it easier for folks to see their options, not by just challenging the rhetoric around leaving education, but by providing resources and services to help teachers leave. Daphne’s company has created a variety of resources to help teachers adjust and market their skills for outside of education. They have developed a Podcast, Courses, and even a jobs board to help teachers find a good fit for a new career. There is so much her company does to support teachers, and I asked her, based on her experience helping teachers transition out of education, what she has noticed teachers struggling with.
Daphne Gomez: It's not a valid one, but the self doubt, and even the lack of career preparedness isn't the right word for it. But I would say, the lack of experience with writing resumes and interviewing this is somewhat unique to teachers. They don't have the experience of working in corporations. So there's a lot of upskilling that needs to happen.
Daphne wants teachers to have a growth mindset. There will be a learning curve in this transition, and she encourages teachers to remain humble. Yes, teaching is a difficult job, and teachers have a lot of skills that will translate well into other careers, but there will still need to be some learning, as Camile pointed out earlier in the episode. Daphne doesn’t sugarcoat the reality that leaving education can be stressful but it’s important to be honest and express a willingness to learn while highlighting how teaching translates into the role they’re interviewing for.
The voices from earlier in this episode all had pretty clear paths to new careers. But there are teachers that just want out. Daphne warns against flailing and reaching for any opportunity, but she does emphasize that this transition doesn’t have to be a forever career.
Daphne Gomez: And then once you get your foot in the door at a company, if it's a large enough company, or something that you're really passionate about, after a few years, you can always use that as a stepping stone to pivot into a different department and get an internal promotion. It's so much more common outside of the classroom than people realize. They think that whatever this next career is, is going to be, you know, the end for them. But you're not picking your next forever career. You're picking your next starting point.
When thinking about the former teachers we heard from at the start of this episode, many of them relied on some of the skills they had as teachers, but some of them leaned into the skills and interests that they had outside of education because they are dynamic human beings. Ron went into construction. Jennie leaned into her love of science, but the soft skills she developed as an educator has helped her tremendously with interacting with and explaining things to patients.
Like Daphne pointed out, the thought of leaving education leaves me with a sense of guilt. The thought of working in a different career feels a little intimidating, but I know that what I’m doing now is not sustainable.
It’s been close to a year since I wrote the grant to start on this podcast, and in the development of the series people suggested that my conclusion should include a big reveal, like my declaration to leave education. That sounds cinematic, and if we’ve learned anything, it’s that education is not a movie. I don’t have any insight into what my future of teaching will look like. All I know is that I am hopeful that education can get better, but I know that unless something changes, what I’m doing now can’t last.
So instead of a reveal or a declaration, I’ll leave you with my advice if you want to keep people like me in the teaching profession. We need good teachers to want to stay in education, and it is not their sole responsibility to make education a place they want to stay. We need a cultural shift that values education and values educators. So, talk to teachers. Let them know you appreciate them. Listen to their stories and experiences, and don’t rely on unrealistic stereotypes.
Push back on the anti-intellectualism that Ray Bradbury warned us of 75 years ago. Listen to experts. Make informed decisions based on facts and evidence. Come to terms with the fact that education should serve a diverse population of people, and if you are not okay with that, find an alternative to public education. And lastly, Vote for people who value education. Speak out against legislation that does not serve all students.
And if that sounds too difficult, then know that more teachers will quit. Teaching vacancies will mount, class sizes will grow, the teachers that remain will get stretched even thinner, and rushed solutions will put unqualified people in front of your children. The diverse population of students in our country will lose out on opportunities and the education they deserve. And public education, as it was established in the US, to create a well informed populace so that we may have a thriving democracy, will suffer, which means democracy will suffer because it’s far easier to take advantage of an uninformed, poorly educated populace than one that is well informed and willing to challenge and question and speak up. And it will happen not out of spite or teachers trying to prove a point. It will happen because it’s a natural consequence of the current conditions people are in. So be an active part of the solution, not the problem.
If need be, start small. Think about my motto from the road trip class from a few episodes back: Just try to not be an asshole.
As always, thank you so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of. Word of mouth has done wonders for getting this podcast to people who need to hear it. You can also follow us on instagram at those who cant teach anymore.
This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Jennica Fournier. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Camile Lofters, Jaye Wacker, Shane Atkinson, Jennica Fournier, Stephanie Reese, Ron Ruckman, and Daphne Gomez for sitting down to chat with me. If you want to follow Camile Lofters on instagram, you can find her at in literal color. If you are interested in Daphne Gomez’s podcast or any of her resources, check out teacher career coach dot com. And As the season is coming to a close, I want to give a special thanks to my brother Cody and my nephews Finn and Ollie for traveling around Wyoming with me to collect interviews. To the Josie family for letting Jennie and I stay with them for a month and for setting up an office for me in their basement. To my Uncle Richard and Aunt Pattie who let me set up a workspace to produce the 4th episode while we stayed with them over the holidays. To Jennie for coming up with the name and logo for the podcast and for always being my sounding board. And to Fund for Teachers for providing me with the fellowship that got this project rolling.
Again - thank you for listening, and don’t be afraid to advocate for teachers so that we can keep brilliant teachers in education.
My third grade teacher had a phone booth in his classroom. It was a full size, glass booth that was mostly sound-proof. The phone booth was the choice place to spend any indoor recess, but during class, it was used as the equivalent of a time-out. Our teacher was a mustachioed man who called his facial hair his “cookie duster” and wore tinted-glasses and thick collared polyester shirts, If a student was misbehaving, he would point that student to the phone booth, and that’s where the student would remain for the rest of the lesson.
Discipline reigned in his class. I’m not sure if this is a quality of 3rd grade teachers in general, but both of the 3rd grade teachers at my school at the time were strict, and my parents loved it. I appreciate some of it now, but at the time I thought it was downright oppressive - especially disciplining groups of kids together, which I’m still not a fan of.
There was a week-stretch in particular where our class lost out on several recesses because a core group of kids were acting out. I don’t remember what they were doing, but I remember the sinking feeling of losing out on the chance to play tetherball or football or to climb on those tractor tires that were half buried in the ground and always had a faint smell of urine. We were stuck indoors.
I complained to my dad about the injustice when he picked me up from school. I ranted about inequity and being punished for something I didn’t do. And I remember his response clearly. He asked me if I was part of the problem or part of the solution. He had to explain what “solution”meant, and then he told me that I needed to think about whether I was helping or hurting the situation.
I realized that even if I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I still might not be part of the solution. Like a whole gaggle of my parents’ other truisms that I didn’t want to hear at the time, this has stuck with me.
We’ve spent the last 5 episodes looking at what factors, what problems, might be contributing to teachers leaving education. Over half of all teachers are considering leaving the profession, but there are teachers who are staying, some of them stay thanks to efforts made by organizations to convince teachers to remain in education. So, today, we’re going to think about solutions that keep brilliant teachers in education, but we’ll also ask the question, whose responsibility is it to keep teachers in education?
This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier.
Here is part 6: “Those Who Stay”
Elizabeth Smith: I brought mimosas. I hope you don't mind.
I met Elizabeth on the back patio of the Middle Fork restaurant in Lander, Wyoming. If her voice sounds familiar, it’s because we heard from her earlier in the series.
She wore a blue dress with flower print and she carried a binder and a tote bag. The binder had a copy of her research thesis about retention of teachers on reservations and from the bag she pulled two flute champagne glasses, a jug of orange juice, and a bottle of champagne. Elizabeth is a veteran teacher, she loves teaching, and part of why she loves it might have to do some with her background. As we drank mimosas under the shade of a tree, she told me about her unique upbringing.
Elizabeth Smith: I have a very, very crazy back story. I was raised in a cult. And I dropped out of school in seventh grade. And I never went to high school. And we were raised in a situation in which we didn't have television or outside influence. So I was very isolated and programmed to believe a certain way. And so I got my GED when I was 19, the same year, I got my driver's license, I ran away from home twice, and was successfully out of the house and the religion, the high control, the second time that I left, and so my understanding of educators is completely different.
A quality of early American education that we learned about in the second episode was the idea that teachers would be taught in the education system themselves and so the education hierarchy would be ingrained into them – it was almost a pre-teacher training. Elizabeth didn’t go to public school, so some of these stereotypical expectations aren’t perpetuated in her teaching practice, which might contribute to why she loves it.
Elizabeth Smith: I love what I do. I love teaching, I have high respect for myself, in the work that I do. I know the mistakes that I make, in reflection, for the most part, I'm sure there's some that I'm unaware of, but I enjoy helping people understand themselves, you know, because it's been a huge chore of mine to be able to get to the point where I have undone all the programming that I have experienced in life.
And because of her youth, she was drawn to a sense of spirituality she found in teaching.
Elizabeth Smith: Coming from a really hardcore, high control, religious background. I feel like I suffered spiritual abuse. And so disconnected me from myself, in a lot of ways. And so my whole life, like I told you has been spent trying to figure out who I am. And one of the things in teaching that you'll, especially if you read my research, you'll see that the spiritual connection with making relationships with other people and knowing that what you're doing is valued is a big part of spirituality.
The research Elizabeth points to was tied to her Masters Thesis. She focused on why teachers stay, especially non-native teachers, in reservation schools. What Elizabeth found is that those who stay feel a sense of acceptance, a sense of appreciation that what they bring to a community is valuable. And this is why Elizabeth stays too. She feels like what she does matters. She feels a connection to her students and, for the most part, she feels valued as a teacher.
Elizabeth Smith: I've only taught on reservation schools. So I've only taught in Indian country and there is a cultural perception from Native communities that really value teachers. So that's one of the reasons why non-native teachers decided to stay and have such longevity in reservation country because there is an old school respect for teachers.
I want to be transparent here. Elizabeth isn’t totally satisfied with her job - we’re drinking mimosas because she just finished up the school day and wanted to wind down. During our conversation, Elizabeth pointed out her frustrations, which echo many of the frustrations that we’ve heard in this podcast. She explained situations where she felt devalued or not listened to or stretched thin. She admitted that after teaching for 20 years, the thought of leaving education has crossed her mind, but she said that as long as this year feels like things are getting better, she plans on staying in education.
And this is worth pointing out - even teachers that are staying in education by choice have frustrations. I say by choice because there are the teachers that feel stuck because they are close to retirement, need the insurance, or need the immediate income. Part of what’s keeping Elizabeth, even when she has frustrations, is the fact that she feels like what she does matters and that she feels valued in her community.
Those things might seem small, but we’re at a point where many teachers are frustrated and feel neither value nor purpose.
I have felt that. The past few years especially - it didn’t feel like anything I did in my classroom mattered, and too often when I met someone new and told them I was a teacher, they’d tell me a story about how bad their kid’s teachers were or how they had chewed out some teacher for something that, when they explained it to me, was just a terrible reason. They acted righteous and I felt devalued by association.
What picked me up was this project - the one that you’re listening to right now. A podcast that explores why teachers were leaving education was a thought I have talked with my wife about since she left teaching, but I never pursued it. Not until I saw and applied for a Fund for Teachers Fellowship, which is a grant for teachers who want to create their own form of professional development. This seems small, but it’s kind of mind-blowing and has made a world of difference for me.
Stephanie Ascherl: Teachers don't usually get a lot of choice. Professional development is determined for them, it's very top down.
This is Stephanie Ascherl, she is the Chief of Staff at Fund for Teachers, and she’s worked for the organization going on 18 years.
Stephanie Ascherl: What's unique about Fund For Teachers is that we empower the teacher to tell us, no one at Fund for Teachers will ever tell you what you should do to be a better teacher because we really trust that you know yourself and your students better than anybody.
Stephanie was not a teacher herself though she wanted to be a teacher when she was younger.
Stephanie Ascherl: I wanted to be a teacher until I was in high school. As you can tell I’m soft spoken. And I had a teacher who just was like, You're gonna have to learn how to talk a little bit louder, or find another way to give back.
When she started with Fund for Teachers, she really loved it, and I can see why. What stands out about Fund for Teachers as an organization is that they listen to teachers. Even though Stephanie wasn’t a teacher herself, she does exactly what we asked of legislators last episode, she, and the rest of her organization trust educators.
Stephanie Ascherl: I think, you know, here in Houston, we see think tanks, you know, may have a conversation with a group of teachers that then they take what they think they heard to the state legislator who then makes policy change, but why can't the teacher just talk directly to the legislature, like there's, we don't need all these middlemen, we need to invite teachers to the conversation and to participate actively in and with the people who are making decisions, and maybe how we're choosing the people who make decisions also needs to be looked at.
Fund for Teachers is not a government organization. They are a non-profit, and Stephanie acknowledges they can’t be the saviors of the American Educational system all on their own, but she knows that they are at least making a difference.
Stephanie Ascherl: I'm not naive, I know, there's bigger problems that we don't have control over. But I do hope that the, you know, we award about 350 to 400 teachers a year that those 300 to 400, people feel like they can do it another year, that they can keep moving forward, not just for their students, because that's what we hear so often is I don't want to leave the kids but that we really make them feel like they can do this for themselves. And that there are people that care, there are people that are invested.
I felt this tremendously. This fellowship did so much to make me feel valued, that there was someone out there who was rooting for teachers, and it makes a difference in teachers wanting to continue teaching - even if it’s just for one more year.
Stephanie Ascherl: In a very small study we did regionally that teachers who received Fund for Teachers, fellowships are more likely to stay in the classroom than their counterparts who did not receive a fellowship. And this study is incomplete. But it also showed that teachers who just applied so people who could feel like there is opportunity, there is hope. And even just thinking about their practice, maybe in a different way. That even they stayed a little bit longer.
Even with their positive impact, Stephanie pointed out that people in academics or other educational bodies have been somewhat dismissive of what Fund for Teachers is doing for educators.
Stephanie Ascherl: Somebody referred to us, like as a warm hug once and I was like, You know what, I don't even care because we are a hug, and people need a hug. And people need that encouragement. And that's not going to make everyone happy. But I care about those three or 400 people I interact with a year, and that's really my priority.
For a teacher feeling burned out and devalued, a hug is pretty dang nice. I needed that acknowledgement that I am a professional and enough of an expert to recognize what I need to be happy and successful in the classroom for another year. Policymakers, School Boards, Districts! Take note! When trying to solve the problem of teacher attrition, think WWFFTD. What would Fund for Teachers Do? Start by listening to teachers, let them decide what they need, and be encouraging and supportive - teachers need both a metaphorical and literal hug right now.
Acknowledgement is validating, and it gets at the heart of what Fund for Teachers wants to do despite how teachers are being treated across the country. As we’ve heard before, teachers haven’t been treated like professionals. Stephanie thinks it is in part because non-educators don’t want to think about it.
Stephanie Ascherl: I just think that, generally, as a society, we choose not to understand what happens in schools.
Stephanie Ascherl: People put their blinders on. And they don't want to acknowledge that there is an issue that needs to be solved. And they don't want to know any different because then you'd have to take action. When there's this kind of like, monolithic, almost problem. It's almost like you just don't know where to begin to help. And so you don't know what to do. And then you're almost frozen to inaction.
For Stephanie, for Fund for Teachers, this shift towards action and treating teachers as professionals to be valued begins with valuing education, which means inviting teachers to the table when decisions about education are being made. They are doing this by awarding grants for projects that are created by teachers. To get teachers feeling invested, they need to be involved, they need to be invested in.
Stephanie Ascherl: Fund For Teachers, invests in teachers, and we invest in their self designed professional development. Why should we treat teachers any different than any other professional. If I want to go learn more about marketing, or how to engage my board or things like that, I can do that. And why would we deprive teachers of that opportunity? And districts aren't meeting that need? And that's where fund for teachers kind of comes in?
Along with giving teachers the resources and freedom to design professional development that is individualized, Fund For Teachers also puts a lot of faith in what teachers get out of the fellowship. Remember a few episodes back when we talked about authentic experiences feeling superficial once they are measured? A part of why Fund for Teachers helps keep teachers in education and excited about learning is because they remove the barriers that teachers typically run into: like a lack of autonomy, feeling devalued, and being held to inauthentic standards
Stephanie Ascherl: We're not really into data. So we're not some we're not, we're very different from a lot of organizations that, you know, while we're trying to get there, it's never really been about improving test scores. It's really about what your problem is today, and how we can help you solve it. And so when we talk about impact, it can come in many forms is a teacher feeling renewed, and recognized for their efforts, and they want to stay in the classroom for another year. That then it kind of morphs into students seeing what could happen if I had my own agency, if I took control of my learning, what kind of change could I make in my community or my, just my school or my life. So it has this this wide like spectrum of benefits. And they're really dependent on the teacher themselves in the project that they did.
In simpler terms, Stephanie said their organization wants teachers to feel good about themselves, which is an absolute need for teachers at the moment.
Stephanie Ascherl: But I think holistically as an organization, we want teachers to walk away feeling trusted, respected, and encouraged because we know they're not getting that.
I’m proof - this approach works. But again, they're a small non-profit organization. What Fund for Teachers is doing, is not a national solution to teacher attrition on their own, but it could serve as a model. And Stephanie hopes that’s what happens.
Stephanie Ascherl: I really look forward to the day that Fund for Teachers doesn't have to exist, because that would mean that teachers are getting the resources they need. And professional development that is meaningful and authentic is just happening. It's not this really unique thing, because Fund for Teachers is the only organization in the country that allows teachers to design their own professional development.
But until schools have the funding and willingness to give teachers the freedom for authentic teacher-driven professional development, Fund For Teachers will be here, and they can be a spark or a lifeline for teachers that want to stay. And even if they’re that warm hug for teachers, they’re a warm hug that offers resources too. Here’s what Stephanie has to say to teachers that might need that something extra to keep their morale up and to keep their interest in teaching.
Stephanie Ascherl: We're offering you up to $5,000 an individual to do something during the summer that you know is going to make you a better teacher. And that's going to have a great the greatest impact on your students and school community. And we'd really encourage you to take advantage of that. Not only for yourself, but for your students.
As Stephanie pointed out, the fellowship gives teachers a ton of freedom - more than I’ve ever experienced as a high school teacher. I got to choose what I wanted to do. So, I focused on research, writing, and activism through podcasting, so that I could create authentic units tied to each of those things back to my classroom. And it has been an amazing experience. It feels so good to be trusted as an expert and a professional. So much so, that I got emotional when I told Stephanie this. The start of this year was the best I have felt coming back to school in several years. I had a sense of confidence and purpose that are a direct result of this fellowship.
Other teachers who have received their own fellowships reported similar reactions. They were thrilled to be treated like professionals. And these kinds of experiences can translate to effectiveness in the classroom when teachers are trusted to apply what they’ve learned into the classroom. When teachers feel confident and trusted and excited about what they do, that has a direct result on the experiences of students.
Lindsey Freeman, a former High School Agriculture Teacher, has a great example of the impact teachers can have on students when they feel good about what they are doing.
Lindsey Freeman: And when you're traveling with students, you've got to make sure that they're fed and watered and taken care of, and it's a little ag pun
Ag can provide those unique opportunities for lots of adventures, field trips, and activities because they are often associated with the Future Farmers of America, or FFA, which is a club that has events and competitions that kids can take part in.
Lindsey Freeman: So that's a lot of pressure for the teacher to make sure that not only they have their basic needs taken care of, but they're having the experience that maybe I had when I was in their shoes. And so we went on a trip one time, and I had some students with me, and I can remember I'm driving the suburban, and I'm just thinking, like, we're listening to music here. But these kids aren't really talking to each other. Are they having a good time? I don't know if I'm doing my job, right. And then so we go, and we do our thing. And then we come back, and we're on our way back. And this kid is sitting in the passenger seat, and he says, This has been the best week of my life.
This has stuck with Lindsey as a highlight of her teaching career. And for this student to have had the best week of his life, he needed a teacher like Lindsey who felt supported in her role and who had the resources to take her students on an adventure.
Lindsey liked teaching high school, but she took advantage of an opportunity to work at the University of Wyoming on a whim. She is still active in Wyoming education, and when I sat down with her, she had just been hired on as the Ag Program Director at Laramie County Community College. We sat in her new classroom surrounded by Cow Anatomy Flip Charts and diagrams explaining different pork and beef cuts, and Lindsey pointed out that as we work towards change that will help keep teachers, it can’t just be policy-based.
Lindsey Freeman: I think policy can go a long ways to help do some things, but it can only go so far. And so I think we have to think beyond policy to try to find, and because there's many factors to the problem, there's probably many solutions to the problem.
As we heard multiple teachers point out throughout this series, there isn’t a single factor that is pushing teachers out of education - it’s a layering of factors. So, Lindsey thinks there needs to be a multitude of solutions.
Lindsey Freeman: I don't think you can pinpoint one thing. And I think that maybe we're kind of spinning our wheels where we're trying to combat this teacher shortage, is we're trying to pinpoint the one thing, or the handful of things.
But there are a few things that would help. Lindsey kept coming back to one thing that could do a lot to help teachers want to become teachers and to stay once they are teachers.
Lindsey Freeman: I hate to say that it's all about the money. But it's hard even to recruit young people to enter the teaching profession, when they could go with the same set of skills and competencies and make a lot more money. I don't think teachers go into teaching to get rich, but they have to they have to be able to maintain a decent lifestyle, or they're gonna go do something else. And then and then they can so I don't think it's, I don't think it's realistic to expect teachers to, you know, live in poverty and continue to do this job.
Every time the call to pay teachers more comes up, we hear the rebuttal, “Well, where will that money come from?” and Lindsey acknowledges that that is a problem that needs to be solved.
Lindsey Freeman: Because like, where does that extra funding come from, to, you know, support, teacher salaries. But I totally understand that, that if there was an easy solution, we would have probably found it by now.
With this said, there are efforts to raise the wages of teachers at a national level. Most recently, Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson introduced the American Teacher Act, which would raise the minimum starting teacher salary to $60,000 and adjust for inflation. To put this into perspective, the United States’ average starting teacher salary, according to the National Education Association in the 2020-2021 school year, was just below $42,000. This Act, if passed, would help.
Lindsey pointed to one more adjustment that needs to occur as we recruit and train teachers.
Lindsey Freeman: We have to do a better job of showing young people how hard teaching is, and still encouraging them to pursue teaching as a profession in spite of that, because it's not going to be easy. And I think maybe that's part of the reason why we lose so many teachers early on, is because they're, we didn't we were upfront with them and honest with them about how hard it actually is because, like, personally, for me, I'm afraid that they're going to not want to teach after like I, you know, tell them and this is hard, this is hard.
People go into education with misconceptions about what teaching is going to be. Like we talked about in an earlier episode, teaching isn’t a movie. Lindsey wants to have a system that helps people recognize just how difficult teaching will be and to support and help teachers through the difficulties of teaching. Lindsey has been working with a group of people trying to address these difficulties in teaching.
Lindsey Freeman: Yeah, so I've been working at the University of Wyoming, with a group of faculty and well, a large group, actually, that they're developing a Wyoming Educator Mentor Corps. And so there's a lot of work going into mentoring. And hopefully, that can eventually and we might have to be patient, but hopefully, that can eventually trickle down into helping early and mid career teachers. Not just survive, you know, but actually be successful in like their job.
The Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps is a program designed by the University of Wyoming to, quote, “foster teacher excellence and provide expert support for emerging teachers.” The idea behind the program is that teachers, especially new teachers, need support, and veteran teachers often want to take a new step in their career. Currently, if a veteran teacher wants to progress their career that usually means becoming an administrator. This program hopes to give veteran teachers some agency and purpose by helping other teachers.
To learn more about the Teacher-Mentor Corps, I met up with Colby Gull, who is the Managing Director for the trustees education initiative in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming, and is a part of the Mentor Corps.
Colby Gull: So really, the idea behind the Mentor Corps is we want teachers to be happy in their job.
Colby has five kids, and he explained that he wants his kids to be with teachers who are happy and who love them.
Colby Gull: If they get teachers who are unhappy and feel unsupported and don't love their jobs, and don't love the kids, because they don't love the work, then that's not a that's not a good place for anybody. And so we hope that the Mentor Corps can help provide that support, so that teachers do feel supported and loved, and they do have a place to get additional support. And they can so that we will build a community of teachers who can support each other, whether you're in the same school or the same district or the same state. We want to have that support system built and structured.
Colby was a high school teacher, a principal, and a superintendent. He has a good idea of what it feels like to be an educator, and he wants a system that would have supported someone like him who felt overwhelmed when he got into the classroom.
Colby Gull: And then I got in the classroom, and it wasn't what I expected. And the kids weren't all eager to learn and excited for me to be there, they did not love me and think I was amazing. And I would just, I would get home, I'd wrap up the school day and just feel downtrodden.
Because teaching is hard. This is a theme. Colby emphasizes the difficulty of education because it isn’t something that seems to get a lot of legitimate attention. For Colby, we can help prevent teachers from leaving education by starting in teacher preparation programs, which might need a little adjustment themselves.
Colby Gull: In teacher prep programs, our faculty are like, they went through a teacher prep program, they were classroom teachers, and this is how it's been done. So somebody's probably gonna get mad at me. But we've always had this same mindset of this is how it's done. But I think fear, I think, discomfort on students part on teachers part on parents part. Well, that's not how we did it. This, that's not how I've ever done my classroom, why would I change now. And the legislature wants a little more control over things than that. And it's easy, it's easy to measure, seat time, it's a little harder to measure some of the other things that we're trying to measure.
So Colby wants to see a shift in what we value, maybe this would mean a shift towards the joy of learning, like Chris Rothfuss said last episode. This is where the Mentor Corps will help.
Colby Gull: I think that when we're new in a position, we don't know what we don't know. So we don't know what questions to ask. And having somebody that has some experience that has some training in mentoring. We will be helpful to just preemptively say, here's something that's coming up.
When I spoke with Colby this summer, they were just getting ready to train a cohort of teachers to be mentors. In many of these episodes, we’ve discussed the value of expertise. When thinking about what teachers need, it’s worth speaking with teachers. With this said, in order to train mentors to help other teachers, the Mentor Corps has sought the expertise of entities outside of education to address some of the issues educators are having within education.
Colby Gull: And we're not focusing on any K-12 skills that you would technically think about as K-12 . But we're going to focus on how to communicate effectively how to talk to somebody, and how to listen to somebody so that when you're sitting with your mentor and mentee having a conversation, it's meaningful, and there's good feedback going both ways, which is another skill we're going to work on is, is giving and receiving feedback.
Along with better communication, the program will help train mentors, with the help of Leadership Wyoming, to find a better work-life balance, which is a major struggle for teachers.
Colby Gull: We get out of balance really easily. And I think to a large measure that is to the detriment of our mental emotional health. And so we have, we have a strand on work life balance. And so we'll get introduced into that. And then we'll do a little piece about friendships and building relationships and having a trusting relationship, and confidentiality so that when they walk away, they'll have an introduction, all of those skills. And that's what we'll focus on over the 18 months are those skills and how they develop them.
So mentors will work through the mentorship program over the course of 18 months.
Colby Gull: And that's what our funding is for is for those three cohorts of mentors. So by the end, we'll have trained 60 mentors, 60 or so mentors. And then we'll develop a model of how that gets spread down through the state. So we can have a bigger impact than just 60. Because there are 350, some odd teacher opening jobs in Wyoming. So we need to have enough mentors to support all of those new teachers.
The goal of the Teaching-Mentor Corps is to help teachers support teachers. They want to give teachers some agency and help construct a support system that will hopefully help both new and veteran teachers stay in education. This is a noble goal.
Fund for Teachers and the Teaching-Mentor Corps won’t solve teacher attrition on their own, but they will help keep some teachers in education. But as Lindsey pointed out, we still need solutions that result in valuing teachers, which means paying teachers better.
When I asked Colby if the mentors participating in the Teacher-Mentor program will be paid for their mentorship of other teachers, he said no, not at this time. The program is a pilot and they could only get enough funding to pay for the training for the mentors. This is no fault of Colby or the program. I think this program is wonderful, and I would encourage anyone in Wyoming interested to apply to become a mentor.
But I do want to pause and draw attention at the larger reality this points to. When it comes to keeping teachers in education, the burden often lands right back on teachers.
The solutions to keeping teachers often requires more work, more time, and more stress, all for minimal to no compensation. Whether this is mentoring other teachers, going to legislative sessions or school board meetings, being on committees or task forces, writing for grants or fellowships, or making a podcast, it all takes time and almost all of it is done during a teacher’s “free time.” When will the burden of keeping teachers in education fall to non-educators? Will it be when enough teachers leave? Will it be when teacher attrition gets to a point that becomes inconvenient for non-educators?
I honestly don’t know that we’ll get to this point because people that teach care so much - that might be their tragic flaw. Several of the teachers that I spoke with over the course of this project were working on their own projects or going back to school to try to be part of the solution. And they do it because they care. These are people like Gary Martin who taught on the Wind River Reservation and went back to school for education. His dissertation is looking at how student trauma is being transferred to teachers and contributing to their attrition rate.
Gary Martin: Well, the attrition is crazy, because it's like, there's no stability, like teachers are staying like one or two years. And then next, you know, they're going to another district and I don't know about a lot of the students in, in other areas of state, but it's just like, students in general need, like stability. I mean, it's, the stability factor is lacking, especially when teacher that attrition is so high.
He knows that teachers leaving is hurting kids, but the onus should not be placed on teachers to stay so that kids aren’t hurt. That rhetoric is used often, and it’s tremendously manipulative. The programs that are trying to support teachers need to be funded and supported, and the burden of keeping teachers can’t be placed solely on teachers.
Meanwhile teachers are realizing that they have a lot of really great skills that can be applied in other careers - contrary to the thought that those who can’t do, teach. So if we want to keep teachers from leaving education, it might mean shaking up the way things have been done and taking some notes from groups like Fund for Teachers or the Teacher Mentor Corps who are actively trying to help teachers by asking teachers what they need, so that maybe we can have a system where teachers want to stay.
Or, teachers will keep leaving because they can. Next time, we will be hearing from teachers who have left teaching, how they left, and how their lives are now.
That will be next time, in the conclusion of Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. With only one episode left, we want to hear from you. We want to hear your reactions to the podcast, or personal stories about education. If you are interested, please record a voice message that includes your name, background, and message, and send your recording to those who can’t teach anymore at gmail.com for the chance to be included in a bonus episode.
As always, thank you so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of. Word of mouth has done wonders for getting this podcast to people who need to hear it.
This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Jennica Fournier. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Stephanie Ascherl, Lindsey Freeman, Colby Gull, Elizabeth Smith, and Gary Martin for taking time to sit down and chat with me. If you are interested in applying for a Fund for Teachers Fellowship you can find their website at fund for teachers dot org. If you are interested in learning more about the Wyoming Teacher-Mentor Corps, there is a link in the transcript to this episode, and I will provide a link on our instagram page @thosewhocantteachanymore. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.
I used to listen to the Dixie Chicks’s song “Wide Open Spaces” before wrestling matches because I would get too wound up. It helped me slow down my breathing and relax.
In junior high and high school, I was fixated on winning and losing. I’d get a pit in my stomach, psyche myself up and out, all to my detriment. I was terrified of failing, of being a disappointment or an embarrassment.
Then I went to college. I walked-on to the University of Wyoming’s wrestling team. During my meeting with Steve Suder, the head coach, he told me, “You know, you’ll be walking into a room with a bunch of state champs. Are you worried about that?” I told him, “No, I’m not” because those were the guys that I wanted to be wrestling against. I was a two-time state placer and I had nothing to lose. Suder said, “Good,” and then told me that he never won state either, but he ended up being an All-American for the University of Wyoming, so there was hope for me.
During our conversation, in between adjusting this chewed up yellow cushion he used as a back support, he told me that I was like the pretty girl’s funny friend at a party. I’m not someone he noticed right off the bat, but once he got to know me, he was happy to have me around. He meant this in the best way possible, and I didn’t mind.
I made the team, worked my butt off, won some matches, and lost more than I won. And I hate losing, but it felt different. I was excited to be wrestling, not nervous. Suder made it clear that his expectations were low, but he was happy to have me. I focused on gaining experience and the process and growing as a wrestler and a person. And I got to wrestle a guy named Brent Metcalf, who is the only person I wrestled that had a documentary made about him. When someone asked Metcalf why he didn’t celebrate wins, he said, “I don't want to give my opponent the satisfaction of watching me celebrate, which would make it look like a big deal that I beat him.” This dude is a monster.
It was an extraordinarily humbling match. I had no control of my own body - his fingers were in my mouth at one point, but I learned what it was like to wrestle the best. It was eye-opening.
My tenure as a collegiate wrestler only lasted that year,but I remained in contact with Coach Suder off and on until his passing in 2019. And I had changed. My priorities shifted from valuing product to process.
When I became an assistant high school wrestling coach, the head coach had also wrestled for Coach Suder, and so we continued his tradition of emphasizing process. And what I noticed is that the wrestlers felt less pressure. They only tried being better today than they were yesterday. And when they have that mindset, success, though not guaranteed, is more likely. They are wrestling to compete and to score points. And even if they don’t have success, they do the best they can do at that moment, and that’s always worth being proud of.
In education, we focus on the product, on assessment. There is an obsession with passing or failing and we seem to have forgotten the value of process, which is where many teachers live. So today, we are going to look at how a structure of education that values standardized assessments could be contributing to teachers deciding to leave the profession, and because some of the frustrations with standardized assessment is a federal issue, which is too much to address here, we’ll explore a possible solution to the high stakes assessment issue in Wyoming, which would hopefully keep teachers in education.
This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier.
Here is part 5: “Education has a Tourist Problem”
Mark Perkins: I do think that for a lot of teachers who are leaving, and this is speculative, but I think it's reasonable to assume that if you alleviated some of the assessment requirements within their schools, their satisfaction would increase. I don't think that that's a jump.
This is Mark Perkins, he is an Assistant Professor of Education Research Methods at the University of Wyoming and he is talking about the survey results he gathered about teacher attrition in Wyoming. So many teachers, both teachers leaving and teachers staying, reported that they were not happy with assessments.
As we’ve heard from teachers that left teaching, there wasn’t one thing that pushed them out of teaching. It was the layering of factors. And if we want to keep more teachers from leaving, it would be worth trying to address some of the most consistent factors. Aside from overall well-being and feeling supported, assessment is one the most consistent teacher frustrations.
Now before we get into what specifically teachers don’t like about assessment, I think it’s important to think about why education currently has assessments, and this goes back to what we talked about last episode: the purpose of education and needing to be able to measure success for whatever that purpose is. Simply put, we need to reflect on what we want kids to know and how we can measure what they know. Mark explains.
Mark Perkins: And so what does school success really look like? That sounds like an interesting, easy question. It's like, Well, kids know how to do math. Well, okay. What does that look like? Well, they can add, subtract, divide. All right. So what? When you start drilling into the actual requirements to exist and inhabit the world, the factors become much more latent than what we measure. But we fixated ourselves purely on content.
During our conversation, Mark explained that there are a ton of other things that we want for students: self-awareness, identity development, civic consciousness, the ability to have some gumption and as Mark phrased it, drag a horse through the mud. But none of those qualities are easy to measure, which means it’s more difficult to measure a teacher’s overall effectiveness. This brings us back to the focus on content.
Mark Perkins: But all of the focus has been on reading math, science and somewhat government. How does a teacher who navigates let's call it the multivariate universe of being an educator. How do you evaluate teaching for the holistic aspects of the job? While we don't?
It would be difficult to assess students and teachers in the Multivariate Universe of education, as Mark puts it, so we assess a few content areas, and only a few things in those content areas. Many mission statements want to acknowledge the whole student, but we only assess a fraction of the student.
For example, I have a grant application unit for my sophomores. They do research and write a grant to receive hypothetical funding that they can use to address a real problem within our community. I don’t limit students on what kinds of problems they want to address, so students have looked at drug use or homelessness or access to sports or social justice issues.
When students submit their grant applications, we go through a selection process. Students read each other's grants anonymously and identify ones that meet all of the grant requirements and would, in their minds, best serve our community. By the end of the process, all of my classes vote on the one grant that should receive the hypothetical funding. Every year I’ve done this, the grants that make the final vote, the ones that all of my students have pushed forward, are philanthropic and genuinely kind. And I tell my students this, usually as I tear up, that this project gives me hope for the future because through their research, writing, discussions, and voting, they prove that they are empathetic humans.
I learn much more about what my students can do through this project than any standardized assessment that I’ve been required to administer. And this is a frustration echoed by teacher after teacher. If the thing that is used to reflect a district’s success is a bubble-sheet test, that can feel pretty disheartening. Because from the teachers’ perspective, the results of those tests, the results that are reported in the paper and raise community questions like, “What are they even teaching kids in school?” those tests lack validity. They’re not the best way to measure whether the kids are alright, and Mark has questions about how well these tests show what kids know and how well they predict the future success of students, which is often how standardized tests are used.
Several teachers pointed to the frustration that rather than getting students ready for life beyond high school or to be a life-long learner, they are forced to think that the be-all-end-all was the ACT or SAT. So engaging and authentic instruction gets replaced with teaching to a test. From Mark’s research and work in assessment, he sees that those assessments might not be worth the time we are putting towards them.
Mark Perkins: And I have a suspicion that the predictive validity of these tests is not that good. And my suspicion comes from a very large body of literature that has looked at ACT/SAT versus high school grade point average and college level English math and general college grade point average. And yet, we invest an amount of time, pressure and money on these measures.
What this means is that a grade point average, though imperfect in its own right, is a better predictor of future student success, whether they are college or career bound, than a standardized assessment. So what a teacher measures in their classroom is a better indicator of future success than what a standardized assessment shows.
And if this isn’t enough, the amount students are tested is tremendous. This saps their energy and the energy of teachers who have to say, “I know this is the 573rd test, but you’ve got this.”
Mark Perkins: We need to simplify and make assessment parsimonious. We do need to assess, but we certainly only need to take our temperature one time and evening, maybe two, when we have a cold because we know that it's going to say the same number every time. Measuring is not teaching.
I want to reiterate what Mark just said - measuring is not teaching. I also want to clarify something about assessment. Teachers use informal assessments all of the time. And these are different than the high-stakes standardized assessments.
Good teaching makes use of valid and authentic assessments often. When I was writing this episode, I got talking with my wife, Jennie, about assessment, because this is what you do when you marry another teacher. When she taught Advanced Biology, she created these elaborate group tests that students would get excited about. She used assessment as a learning tool. Her thought is that you don’t know what you know until you need to apply your knowledge.
This is why I like the writing process because it's an act of creating and synthesizing. It’s a great form of learning.
So the right assessment can be an informative learning tool, but the high stakes, fill-in-the-bubble, standardized assessments that teachers are frustrated with are not that. Mark explains that in order for those standardized assessments to be more valid, there should be some adjustments.
Mark Perkins: I think that we could more wisely use measurement, and education. I think one of the first problems with high stakes testing, is the fact that the majority of these tests have no impact on students. Now. You don't have to be draconian about it .But we make intelligent decisions based off of test scores. And we provide students with logical and rational incentives.
From the teacher’s perspective, it’s hard to convince students that the tests matter because students don’t see how they are relevant to their lives. I try to give students some perspective before tests, like “No it doesn’t impact your grade, but if you go through and randomly click answers to finish early, the people who care about these tests will think you’re not learning anything, and then they will change curriculum and make you guys only learn from a textbook. Do you want that?”
They usually shake their heads no, but that doesn’t mean they care any more about the test. Many teachers struggle to care about the tests as well. They don’t like the kind of standardization the tests force that does not allow for freedom in the classroom. Shane Atkinson, who we heard from in the first episode, left teaching after 13 years, and part of his decision to leave had to do with a lack of autonomy, some of which is tied to standardization. He pointed out that there are some districts that are so standardized, their days are mapped out in a binder.
Shane Atkinson: This is what you do, then you do this, here's the question you should ask, have them fill out this worksheet. Day two… I think that's been done under the guise of equity. You don't want a kid in this classroom at this school to get a much different or better education than a teacher in the classroom next door. And I get that. So the idea is, well, to keep it equitable, they should be doing the same thing in both of those classrooms during that period of their US History class. Again, you're making decisions based on a minority and applying them to everybody, even if you're doing good work. That does everybody a disservice.
The hope is that every kid will receive the same quality of education, so teachers are expected to stick to a curriculum, and in some instances, stick to a script. Much of the push towards national standardization came from the George W Bush Administration’s, 2001, No Child Left Behind Act. Jaye Wacker, whose voice we heard in the first episode and who quit teaching after 31 years, felt like the No Child Left Behind Act did a lot to undermine public trust in education. And it did it through standards.
Jaye Wacker: No Child Left Behind set impossible targets. And basically year after year after year, it undermined public confidence in education. So then we needed the standards we needed to prove that we're doing something and yeah, I get it and I agree with it. You know, let's prove what we're doing. But this homogenization that we've talked about _____ High School in their curriculum, the most diverse curriculum in the state, and their kids are outperforming all these homogenized curriculums.
Part of the impossible targets from the No Child Left Behind Act included a 100% proficiency rate for all students by 2014 - this meant that all students would be able to perform at grade level by 2014. This sounds nice, it is great rhetoric because of course no one wants to leave any kids behind, but this goal disregards so many variables. Many students are below grade level because of severe physical and or learning disabilities, and some will never make it to grade level. This doesn’t mean an effort to get all students to proficient is a bad goal, it’s a great goal, but not reaching this goal made it look like schools were failing. But the Act made it so schools were destined to fail. Though this Act has since been replaced, along with the unrealistic proficiency rates, its negative impact on the view of education is still present.
Wacker also pointed to the reality that homogenized education doesn’t necessarily produce the best results. This is a pretty common view of standards. A teacher who wanted to remain anonymous said."On a societal level, I think standards are the worst thing about education, and that’s a wide-open race... In my opinion, standards have lead to a homogenization that is stunting our growth, and solve problems that don’t exist. I don’t want education to be the same everywhere; I want to be a local restaurant, not a McDonald’s."
For a more scientific point of view, my wife, Jennie, who left teaching after 7 years compares standardization to evolution.
Jennica Fournier: So I think that standards homogenize things. So I don't know if your high school teacher was too afraid to teach you about evolution. But in general, we evolve best as a species if we have a really diverse gene pool. Basically if our education system was a gene pool, we’d be fucked.
So from an evolutionary perspective, species that are standardized or homogenous, don’t survive adversity very well. Diversity is necessary for survival, and this includes diversity of curriculum. Jennie explained that we might struggle as a country to solve problems when everyone has been exposed to the same standardized curriculums. Jennie points out that there would be benefits to having students prioritize local issues.
Jennica Fournier: So essentially we need kids to have a set of skills that match their environment at a local level in order to solve problems at their local level versus everyone in the US only knowing how to solve a generic set of problems.
So many teachers see standards as an impossible bar to be reached that stifles their ability to be creative in their classrooms. Another part to the frustration with standardization and standardized assessments comes from the preparation required to take them and the pressure associated with the results. This is preparation and pressure that Mark, who discussed assessment earlier in this episode, says might be unnecessary. Molly Waterworth, who we heard from in a previous episode and who left teaching after 8 years, explains how frustrating that process of preparation was.
Molly Waterworth: ACT/SAT prep, hated that. Totally hated it. And I never really figured out a way to do it super meaningfully. It just felt really meaningless because I just couldn't connect it to anything relevant. I just have to say to the kids, “I'm doing this so that you know the format of the test, and that's why we're doing this.” It's not fun. There's no way to have a discussion about whether or not somebody answered the correct question on ACT/SAT practice. My biggest motivator and the thing that brought me the most joy in teaching English was discussion and parsing through complexity and finding our collective way through something big and doing ACT/SAT prep just didn't ring that bell.
Having to teach towards a test that doesn’t seem valuable, or to work towards standards for the sake of standards can leave teachers feeling powerless. I don’t know that anyone likes to feel powerless, to feel like their hands are tied behind their backs. Several teachers decided to leave education for jobs that gave them more autonomy, where they didn’t feel like they were jumping through hoops.
I personally have never been a fan of doing things just because. If I am required to give a test, I want to know that it matters. I do the same for my students, I want all of their work to feel relevant beyond the classroom. Most teachers are the same. They want to know that what they are doing is relevant, and many don’t feel like the layers of standardized tests are relevant.Students, like most other humans, want to feel like what they do matters.
At least that’s what Anjel Garcia wanted from her education.
Anjel Garcia: Kids just don't have any respect or like reason to care about school, and I think that connects back to they don't know what they are doing there.
Anjel took my college-level English class and graduated last year. She is a phenomenal artist - I have one of her paintings hanging in my classroom - and she is going to college for art. For Anjel, she thinks school should help students find a direction for their lives.
Anjel Garcia: I think it's to find a passion and to find something that you want to pursue in life. But we're at the point where you're only doing it so that you can cram and learn that information, and then forget it the day after the test. They're not actually doing it in a way that's teaching kids how to find interests.
Which is something that many teachers enjoy. Engaging students in the joy of learning to find their interests is such a gratifying part of the job. And helping students identify interests means teachers would be able to individualize education for students. As we heard last episode, this is what many students want in their education - individualization. So a shift in the mission and a deprioritization of standardized assessment could create a structure that ends up valuing individualization. If we don’t make this shift, we will continue with a structure that devalues individualization and does not promote the joy of learning. This is what that feels like to Anjel.
Anjel Garcia: It's kind of extreme…with the prison system, they treat everyone the same way. They treat them like animals. They aren't treated in a way that rehabilitates them to be better people or to be prepared in the world, and I think that sort of connects to school.
Students shouldn’t feel like this, and teachers often feel powerless when it comes to assessment. To ease student pushback they rely on the district, state, or national mandate. The “Sorry guys, we have to do this.” So a shift to prioritizing the joy of learning will be a positive shift not only for keeping teachers but for making education something that students find joy and value in.
Still, despite teacher frustrations and the possible lack of validity of standardization and standardized tests, they are present because there has been a historic problem with equity in education in the United States. This is why Marguerite Herman sees value in standardization. Marguerite has a master’s degree in education, has some experience teaching, and served two terms as a School Board Trustee. And she agrees that there are some downsides to the standards, but she was pretty adamant that they are necessary.
Marguerite Herman: To standardize things, you lose a lot, but you also have these assurances that again… I use the term bean counter. I don't want to be dismissive of that responsibility - bean counters have to answer themselves to others.
I’ve known Marguerite since I was in Kindergarden - she used to help with religious ed when I was little, and I went to high school with her kids. When she was on the school board, I could always count on her to attend events I put on for my students - author visits or student projects. Marguerite is involved and someone I knew would be well-informed and honest with me about her role on the School Board and about education policy.
When I told her that teachers are frustrated with standardization and assessments, she acknowledged teacher frustration but defended assessments because they offer quality assurance and a way to make educational funding decisions, even if the standardized assessments are imperfect.
Marguerite Herman: You know, with funding comes accountability. And to some extent, people want a number, especially legislators who are not educators. They want to know, what's your competence here, what's whatever you're proficient in. Anytime you index a number, there's just a lot of data that's lost because you're reducing, you're obscuring, a lot of nuance. You don't get any nuance, frankly. It's imperfect, but you need something, and I’m not challenging that.
Marguerite explains that something is needed to ensure that all students are benefiting from their public education. And her job as a Trustee on the School Board was to ensure that.
Marguerite Herman: Well, once again, the statute kind of lays it out. At the school board, we are elected as trustees, and let me just dwell a moment on the word trustee, which is that you have undivided loyalty to a beneficiary. That word was picked. It's not like a delegate and something like a representative. You don't represent a sub constituency. You represent every child in this district - they are the beneficiaries. So everything you do, you should have in your mind, “I am using all the possessions, the assets of our district, to provide for the educational benefit of every child.”
I want to pause on this definition for a moment because there has been some divisiveness on school boards across the country. Marguerite’s definition is succinct - Trustees serve their beneficiaries, so Board Members serve kids. This means the tribalism that has moved into school boards across the country should get left at the door. School boards serve students and no one else. And when I say students, I mean all students across the religious, racial, sexual, gendered, intellectual, and political spectrums. This is no small feat to serve such a diverse spectrum of students, but that should be the goal despite what interest groups think or who is in the capital. And this is why Marguerite is adamant that even if our current system is imperfect, we need something.
I agree, we need something, but I don’t think what we have currently is that something. And Marguerite explains that the data that the legislators want don’t come from what a teacher sees.
Marguerite Herman: The feds want their numbers, and the legislature wants its numbers. “This is the teacher’s honest opinion of the learning that went on” and said, “Yeah, that's fine. But you know, show me the test score, show me the performance I want to see”. And so, you know, we dance to a lot of different bean counters.
So the people that want to track progress, as Mark pointed out earlier in this episode and Marguerite reiterates here, don’t necessarily want to hear what a teacher has to say about a student’s success - even though a teacher is an expert and is highly aware of their students’ capabilities. And even though, as we heard Mark explain earlier, a student’s gpa, made up of teacher grades, is often a better indicator of a student’s future success than the results of a standardized assessment. But teachers aren’t trusted. The feds, the legislature, whoever it is that is running quality assurance wants an easily read progress report that covers a few content areas.
Remember the idealism about the purpose of education from last episode - it often fizzles at the feet of a standardized structure that takes the word of a test over that of a teacher, the human who actually knows the kid. Idealism and authentic learning and genuine human growth are harder to measure than the few content areas that can be measured on a bubble sheet. Still, I know Marguerite is right - the assessments and the standards are a way to document, in an easily measurable way, that an effort is being made to assure an equitable education for all. That does not mean the way we assess nor the assessments themselves are valid, good for kids, or good for teachers.
So let’s change them! Let’s make our purpose of education, our assessments, our measurements good for kids and good for teachers! Right? It should be easy! We know that kids want to feel like what they do matters, that they want curriculums that are more individualized. Right? So we need to talk with someone who understands how these things work, and how changes could be made to the current system.
Here’s Chris Rothfuss. Chris has been a college professor, he has run a college summer program for high school students, and he is the father of kids in the public school system. He is also the Senate Minority Floor Leader in the Wyoming State Senate and a member of the Joint Education Committee. Chris was one of two Wyoming legislators to get back to me, and the only one who agreed to meet with me.
Chris Rothfuss: The intent of that Accountability Act, as it ended up looking, was to figure out which districts and specifically which schools were struggling, and then provide them with the resources, a system of supports, to build them up and make them better.
The Wyoming Accountability in Education Act was adopted in 2013. It took over federal accountability requirements established by the No Child Left Behind Act and preceded by the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA. ESSA requires states to give annual statewide tests in reading/language arts and math to every student in third through eighth grade and once when they are in high school, and in science at least once in each of grades 3-5, 6-9, and 10-12.So the Wyoming Accountability Act, through the Legislature and Wyoming Department of Education, interprets federal requirements and sets goals for student and school achievement. So what assessments are used, how students are assessed, and how many assessments are given beyond the federal requirement is dictated by the state. And Chris acknowledges that there might be an issue with assessments.
Chris Rothfuss: We may be overtesting. If there were a way that we could do sampled testing if we could be a little more thoughtful about how we're doing it, if we're not using it as a direct educational instrument, then we don't need every student tested, we really just need a statistical representative sample.
But at this point, testing for a statistical representative sample is not how assessments are being used. Federally we have to test every student in most grades at least once a year, but many students are tested much more than this. Even so, I like the idea of shifting to a statistical representation especially if it means less tests. Statistical representative sample testing is already used at the federal level by the National Center for Educational Statistics - an entity of the US Department of Education. The National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP tests, also known as the Nation's Report Card, are given every two years to randomly selected fourth and eighth graders to test English and Math. So we already have a model for using these statistical representative sample tests, and it might be worth seriously considering how to do this - to quit overtesting. Chris calls the amount of tests part of the unintended consequences of standardization.
Chris Rothfuss: So we in Wyoming adopted some world class standards. The unintended consequence, though, as you set that as your mission, teach all of these students all of these standards, is that you've only got so much time in a day. And you've got more standards than you're capable of teaching in a school year. So when that becomes your priority, and you know, you're going to be tested on your knowledge of those standards, and you know, you're expected to improve your knowledge of those standards. As you're thinking through our well, what are we going to do with each of our days, you don't think head to the mountains?
I think about heading to the mountains on a daily basis, but that doesn’t mean we get to go to them. These unintended consequences of standards and assessments are a reality. The individualization of instruction and the exploration that teachers talked about last episode are often a casualty of an overwhelming amount of standards that must be covered. But a move towards individualization, and less emphasis on standardized assessments is possible. But it will require a legislature that is informed and understands what adjustments should be made in education.
Chris Rothfuss: I don't think there's necessarily a misconception that the folks that are making decisions about education, don't understand education. That's regrettably probably accurate.
Chris points out that many of the people with the power to make policy decisions about education think they are qualified to make decisions about education because they once went through the education system. Many of these people want to run education like a business, like a factory. They use words like stakeholders and incentivize, and they want annual progress reports. These are people that don’t necessarily acknowledge or make decisions about education based on best practices.
Chris Rothfuss: I spent the first I don't know how many years of my time in the legislature trying to ensure that our Wyoming education model did not utilize that pay for teacher performance. Because the literature makes it very clear that that is the wrong approach. Best Practices make it very clear that that's the wrong approach. But policymakers so often choose that approach because they don't take the time to really understand why it's an awful approach.
Folks like legislators disregarding best practice or research-based practice is a foundational aspect of why teachers are leaving education. Teachers are experts in their field, but education has a tourist problem. You know, those people who are close enough to education to feel like they are a part of the system, but the actual educators, the educational locals if you will, don’t see it the same way.
And teachers are tired of being dismissed or treated like they aren’t experts. The educational tourists assume that their time as students makes them an expert in education - policy is put into motion by folks who aren’t informed enough about education to be making decisions.
This is so frustrating as an educator. Nothing irritates me more than a non-educator, upon finding out I’m a teacher, starts telling me how I should do things. It’s almost as bad as sitting next to an arm-chair quarterback trying to explain how Josh Allen should be throwing the ball differently.
Chris is aware of this frustration of having unqualified people making decisions about education, and he is at a loss as well.
Chris Rothfuss: Education is certainly not a business. But at the same time, imagine you were a business and you were hiring for the job. Instead of electing for the job, you would immediately eliminate the entire slate. And this would be true of so many of the things so many of the positions, so many elected officials. If it were a list of applicants and you were the hiring officer, you’d just be like not qualified, not qualified, not qualified. How did we get to the point where our elected officials And the folks that we put in charge could never even get a job at the institution they're being put in charge of.
Think about that. Many of the people in positions to make policy decisions about education do not have the qualifications to be hired within the education system. Why do we accept this?
When the people in charge of the institution aren’t involved in the institution, they aren’t informed enough to be making decisions that are in the best interest of those people, the students and teachers and administrators, that are in that institution daily. This results in bad policy or policy fueled by animosity towards education or animosity towards any federal institution.
Chris Rothfuss: We've moved away from having a supportive team of pro-education legislators on the education committee that was struggling and working to do what was best for K-12 public education and really working hard to now over the last few years, embracing this mentality that our public schools are failing, and that somehow, for profit, religious charter schools from out of state will solve our problems, or decreasing funding will solve our problems, or belittling teachers and calling them out. Maybe holding them responsible for tiny actions or making them post everything that they're doing every single day online for parents to nitpick is somehow going to help. We haven't really in the legislature seen anything that I would call a strong positive pro education proposal in probably the last four years,
But what we have seen are policies that attack educators or education as a whole, and this is exhausting as a teacher. For many this adds to the feeling of being disrespected. If our elected officials, people who are seen as community leaders, are attacking education from an uninformed platform, it perpetuates a devaluing of education, thus a devaluing of teachers. And teachers are tired of it, and it’s contributing to why they are quitting.
Chris Rothfuss: We have some of the least informed policy makers shouting the loudest about their beliefs in education, that they're entirely unqualified to bring forward and promote. And yet, by being the loudest voice in the room and an angry voice, it's just easy to generate a mob mentality of support behind you, and to advance what is effectively bad policy and bad legislation, so we're seeing that.
And what’s scary is that these poorly informed policymakers are in positions to make policy change, to make lasting impacts on education that will further ostracize teachers, hurt students, and likely make more teachers leave the profession.
Marguerite gave an example of a policymaker putting a footnote in a budget bill that tried to reject teaching Next Generation Science standards, which, as Marguerite put it
Marguerite Herman: Which is like modern science. We hear about evolution, you know? I think we kind of got that one settled. Let’s question gravity, shall we? Okay. I'm making fun of it, but it was, teachers had no idea it was awful. That's what happens when the legislature, which is politics, let's face it, folks, gets into the curriculum, they do not have the expertise. And then Pollock's politics doesn't always produce the greatest results, let's just say.
Chris had examples of bad bills too.
Chris Rothfuss: Teachers Not in Legislature In fact, when we hear when we when we bring legislation when we got some horrible bill that's coming before us in the legislature, like the horrible bill we had last year that would have required everything that teachers were doing, be posted on the web. Awful bill, bad premise, and certainly awful motivation. As far as I can tell, the only motivation is, you know, we don't know which books to burn if we don't have a full list.
So that awful bill, we didn't have a lot of teachers come up and provide public testimony against that bill, you think the whole classroom would be full, right up until you realize that no, all of those teachers were teaching at that moment in time, and would have had to take time off from teaching to come provide testimony against that lousy bill. So we don't hear the chorus of voices from the expert educators, we hear the chorus of voices from the folks that have the free time to come and yell at us.
This is a great irony. Teachers who would have strong opinions about such a bill and who would be impacted by the bill, are not able to advocate in person because they are doing their jobs. And at a moment when substitutes are in short supply, leaving school to attend the legislative session is even more difficult.
Still, teacher advocacy was something that both Chris and Marguerite pointed to in terms of making a difference in policy. Policy includes curriculum choices and assessment choices. But for a teacher to speak up about assessment or curriculum requires a level of vulnerability that many teachers don’t feel comfortable with.
Chris Rothfuss: Well, it's certainly understandable that when the teaching community has its strong supportive views for diversity of educational materials that are and that view is effectively contrary to a school board that again, is usually not expert, or particularly proficient in pedagogy or or education. It's going to be disconcerting for the teachers to step up and advocate because again, they're in fear for the protection and preservation of their job, and it's a flaw with our system.
I have felt this constantly over the last eight months as I’ve interviewed folks, researched, written, and produced this podcast. I don’t know who I might offend or upset - Wyoming has a mighty small population And I don’t know what impact this series could have on my job. It’s a risk, but dammit, I’m tired of seeing teachers at the end of their tethers. I’m tired of being a teacher at the end of my tether. Something has to change. We need to fix this.
We need to listen to the experts, to teachers who know what they’re doing, who know what good assessment looks like, who know what engagement looks like, who know the power of relationships, and who know that teachers are stretched thin. And Chris says, teacher voices could make an impact.
Chris Rothfuss: And public testimony does make a difference. And believe me if those 250 educators were able to show up and weren't obligated to be teaching at that point in time. That'd be very compelling.
Beyond speaking up in legislative sessions, part of the solution to retaining teachers, might require some reflection on the roles of everyone in the multivariate universe of education.
So my question to both Chris and Marguerite was if teachers should have more of a role on school boards. I asked this because many teachers point to the reality that school boards are made up of non-teachers. Not many other professional boards are run by people outside of the particular field.
Marguerite was adamant that teachers should not be on school boards - she explained that’s not how the statute is written. And Chris worked through the question in a very diplomatic manner, but he acknowledges a problem with people getting on school boards who are there for the wrong reasons.
Chris Rothfuss: This gets back to the question of who should govern whom and how. You'll have some people on an average school board, typical school board, that know something about education, hopefully. And then you've got people that are just mad about education. And then you've got people that are pointedly trying to slant education towards specific interest groups interests, that might be fully counter to K-12.
Chris sees value in teacher expertise, but like Marguerite, he points to the possible conflict of interest with having teachers on the board.
Chris Rothfuss: It is hard to have someone on a governing body that is in the role that the body is governing as a voting member, although that can be dealt with, you can have some votes that they're there for, like the policy decisions they are included in, but maybe not the personnel decisions, there's a lot of possibilities there. So I'm one that certainly is concerned that we do not have anywhere near enough expertise on our school boards. There's no obligations for qualifications. So a lot of the problems we have stem from that lack of expertise. And ideally you want to balance.
Having some balance is a step towards a system that will retain teachers. In order to keep teachers in education, it will be important that teachers have a voice in education policy and decision making. Teachers shouldn’t be a scapegoat when things go wrong, nor should they be excluded or put in positions where they exclude themselves from decision making positions because they fear retaliation or because they are so busy that they can’t make room for something else.
We need to reimagine and consider the roles of everyone tied to the education process because right now, the teachers working with kids and engaging in the education process are often left out of the conversation. Dylan Bear, a teacher we heard from a few episodes ago, had the best analogy for how we should think about everyone’s role in education.
Dylan Bear: Imagine, a fence, you know, like a round pen for a horse. The respect has to come from all angles for someone to learn. And you have to have the community showing respect of the education system, you have to have parents showing respect, you have to have the students show respect to the teacher showing respect for that. And so this ring of respect has to be there, of the education system. Or else if one of those falls out, like have a parent, dad or mom say, I'm not dealing with my kid at school, I call the principals and then once that happened, that kid got out of the pen because now he goes the path of least resistance to leave the education system.
The key image that Dylan is presenting here is the ring of respect that requires everyone associated with education to have a role, and trusting each other to cover their role. And for Dylan, even though he points to an analogy of a horse pen, he says this could take place anywhere.
Dylan Bear: And it doesn't have to be four walls and bricks and the fence at the school. I think that's such a weird way to learn. I love going to the mountains and going on trails where now you're vulnerable, and you want people to respect you and trust you. You look at the different environments for education, so different. But yeah, trying to get what needs to change to me is you have to have communities that value teachers that don't want to use that negative language. You have to have kids who value it.
So education has to be a collective of support with and around kids. To gain that support and trust and collectivity we need to have a clear purpose of education - this echoes last episode. Right now, we base the purpose of education on how we evaluate students or how we can cover a tremendous amount of material.
An unintended consequence of having so much material to cover is that education might feel like a grind to students. A grind without a sense of purpose makes it difficult for students to care. So to shift what is happening in the classroom and to create a structure in which roles are clear and supportive of one another in education, Chris thinks legislators should start by listening to teacher concerns.
Chris Rothfuss: So when we hear from our teachers, what their real concerns are right now, and when they come back to me as a legislator and say, mental health is the problem for both students and teachers. We should listen. And we should adjust because at the end of the day we're not these rulers that are supposed to be at a distance and making proclamations. Our job is to listen and to learn from folks that know what they're talking about. And then try to put in place policies that affect change that enable everyone to do what they want to do and are trying to accomplish. And particularly in the public education system, we have that constitutional obligation to provide this high quality education for all.
For Chris, the role of legislators is to seek out experts to inform their decisions about policy that will impact those experts. So, for policy about education, legislators ought to speak to educators. And to do so in a way that is welcoming and doesn’t just put more work on teacher plates. Chris also pointed out that to help mental health, which would contribute to keeping teachers, he thinks there should be a push to shift our priorities away from developing workers, which ideally means a shift away from high stakes assessment.
Chris Rothfuss: Honestly, if our first priority was joy in learning. As job number one, just imagine how much more we would learn. And that's the message that comes if we want to set it at the legislative level, we want to set it at the school district level. It does come from the policy leaders setting what is the mission? And right now our mission is develop workers.
Chris explained that the role of legislators is to set the education mission, which could be seen as a purpose of education. And he thinks, especially at this present moment of teacher attrition and teachers and students both struggling with mental health, that the mission should prioritize the joy of learning. And if that mission is set, evaluative practices and accountability models can be adjusted. This will then dictate how school boards will work to achieve the new mission’s objectives. It’s a top-down shift, but if the top (legislators) consult the bottom (teachers and students) then it’s more of a down-top-down shift? Whatever it is, it might help.
Chris said that he would even be willing to take a drop in proficiency if we have happy kids and happy teachers.
Chris Rothfuss: My absolute ideal is to heavily prioritize joy in the classroom, and to focus our efforts, our resources, our activities, and our prioritization towards building joy in the classroom, with the expectation that with that joy, you would be addressing mental health issues, both for the teachers and for the students. And I'd love to see where that takes us. And what that means is ratcheting back this prioritization to build robots and the prioritization of score high on tests. And I'll take a 10% less proficient happy group. I will. At the end of the day, they can learn a little more math later. And if they're happy about education, then I think they'll have an opportunity to learn a little more about math later.
This mission would also shift the roles of us, the collective us, parents, teachers, administrators, legislators, community members, everyone, to not think of our K-12 experience as the only time we should be learning. If there was an assumption that learning was a lifelong process, Chris believes that we might have a cultural shift that results in valuing and enjoying learning, which would have a major impact on how teachers are viewed.
Chris Rothfuss: We think that you have an education phase in life. We've built a system around the idea that you have an education phase, phase one. Phase two and beyond never get any more education. Avoid, if possible. I would love a system where everyone just kind of keeps going back to school.
The move towards life-long learners that Chris is proposing would be a conceptual shift, but it could be supported concretely by a move away from overtesting or overemphasis on testing. Because our current system requires testing, this might mean we reimagine what testing looks like all together. Could it be a conversation? Something more authentic than a bubble sheet? Federal regulations have some flexibility there. Either way, the amount of attention given to Summative or End of Course testing is focusing on a product and not the process. Focusing only on the product is not creating a culture that loves learning - it’s kind of the opposite. It’s creating anxiety and pressure around learning. So if we can lessen the stress by drastically cutting back the amount and pressure of assessments, maybe we can focus on process and create a joy of learning.
So, by shifting priorities away from high stakes testing, we can stop structuring education in a way that prepares only for tests. This might mean loosening the grip on what curriculum can look like or what courses can be offered. For example, I once taught a course at the University of Wyoming called the history of Swing Dancing. We looked at the correlation of historic events and their impact on popular culture. When the class ended, a group of girls continued their final project and created a club on campus called Real Women Real Bodies. This class encouraged students to continue learning beyond the restrictions of the semester.
When I proposed to create this class for the high school setting in my district, it was declined because it didn’t fit within the Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum. So a shift might allow us to create new, novel courses that might inspire students to continue learning and growing well beyond the course. Such a shift will likely reinvigorate teachers who almost all have unique expertise and would love to incorporate such things into a course.
So, as Chris pointed out, to adopt a new educational direction, it must start with a shift in mission at the legislative level - hopefully fueled by teacher input. And I think it can happen, especially in a state like Wyoming that wants to be a national leader in education - it even says so in the Wyoming Accountability Act. So creating a mission that prioritizes the joy of learning by focusing on process over product could happen.
Then how the decision is implemented should trickle down. Hopefully, this would result in teachers wanting to stay in education. And if all of this happens, if we can make that allegorical ring of respect and support that Dylan mentioned, just imagine how much better the education will be for our students. Students will ideally feel that joy of learning and feel like what they do in school has purpose because that’s what many of them want from school.
This is idealistic. But when making changes, we need to strive for idealism and not be guided by fear. Because what we have now is not working. Many people are aware of this and are already taking steps to make changes that will hopefully make education better and help keep teachers in education.
Next episode, we’re going to take a look at what people are doing to help keep teachers in education. This includes Task Forces, Mentoring Programs, Fellowships, and more.
That will be next time on Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of.
This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Jennica Fournier. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Anjel Garcia, Mark Perkins, Shane Atkinson, Jaye Wacker, Jennica Fournier, Marguerite Herman, Chris Rothfuss, and Dylan Bear for taking time to sit down and chat with me. If you are interested in seeing Mark Perkins’ full report, “Teacher Attrition in Wyoming: Factors to Consider”you can find the link in the transcript for this episode and on our instagram page @thosewhocantteachanymore. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.
Transcript:
In the spring of 2016, Julian Saporiti, the guy that made the theme song for this podcast, asked me if I wanted to help him teach a summer road trip class for the University of Wyoming. It was easy to say yes, and this class ended up being one of the most influential educational experiences that I’ve ever had.
Many of our students felt the same way. One of them, Sam Mallory, even talked about it in his graduation speech.
Sam Mallory: Two years ago about this time of year, I was officially enrolled in the most influential course in my college experience
And what made this class so significant likely had to do with the fact that we valued experience over product, which is a pretty non-traditional approach to a college course..
Books: Jack Kerouak’s On The Road and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie
Music: Songs and lyrics for sing-alongs
Assignments: This list included items like helping a stranger, keeping a journal, and dancing in the moonlight
Safety Measures: Information about bear country, how to react if lost, and how to create a cross-draft in your vehicle to fart rather than holding it in and risking feeling sick
Traveling Recommendations for Women: A list focused on hygiene and affirmations created by wife, Jennie, who is a brilliant traveler but opted to stay home to plan for classes and manage our new ornery dog
Lastly: “Be Amazed. Be Present.”
We set out for two weeks across Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. We danced to music by firelight in the Tetons under the Milky Way. I taught a pair of girls how to build a fire and when they asked what I thought about feminism, we read parts of The Vagina Monologues while lighting things on fire- one of those girls just wrote an award-winning screenplay. We observed the wildlife of national parks and saw some animals as well.
I love this model for education. A kind of structure of non-structure that gives students a chance to grow autonomy and learn on the go. It was an experience, and the students were, if not changed, greatly impacted by that course. Julian and I were too.
I tried to apply some of the elements of this course to my high school classes the next school year. I wanted kids to sit around a fire and have conversations, to worry less about grades or tests, and to focus on collaborative experiences that result in knowledge acquisition.
Then the school year started. My fire pit idea was struck down, and the weight of standardized assessments, and everything else settled into place. My idealism was smothered by bureaucratic reality. There’s nothing quite like having your grand plan for the new school year get deflated by October. And this brings me to a question that I have continuously returned to as a teacher when this happens - What’s the point of education? Why are we here?
The answer is ambiguous, and that uncertainty has led to conflict and confusion in education. So on the show today, we will ask “What’s the purpose of education?” Because if we can’t come to a consensus, teachers will continue to be expected to meet all of the competing thoughts about for what education is for. This is frustrating and adds to the stress and burnout that is leading teachers to find careers that might have more clearly defined parameters.
This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier.
Here is part 4: “Why Are We Here?”
Why we educate kids seems like it should be an easily answered question. But in my conversations with all levels of people involved in and around education, there wasn’t a clear consistent answer:
Gary Martin:We have to work on their cognitive skills, you know, the critical thinking.
Christy Chadwick: I think we have this idea that the purpose of education is to raise the next generation. But now, it sort of feels like a control factor. It feels like we're just controlling society through education.
Caskey Russell: Fostering creativity in the students, critical thinking, removing kind of cultural blind spots, providing kind of an equal access all across the board, regardless of class race, getting an idea of community, American community as the kind of multicultural tapestry.
Lindsey Freeman: I mean, that's a big part of it is workforce development. But just citizens, I mean, our government or politicians, like everything that our world needs to continue starts in the classroom.
Jaye Wacker: Oh, my gosh, to protect a democratic republic. You know, pure and simple. We have to be educated, we have to be able to see through the bullshit, you know.
Jennica Fournier: I thought my role was to teach students about chemistry and biology. But I think sometimes there's the expectation that you're babysitting them. or that you're keeping them safe.
Shane Atkinson: I really tried to make it about the human connection.
Elizabeth Smith: The purpose of education is to train our people to be worker bees, and to have the skills necessary to devote their entire lives towards the betterment of a few elite versus the greater good of all.
It’s a lot, and that can be a problem. And there is a split between the ideal for what education is for and the reality that often stifles idealism. What we do know is that an educational system is inherently political because it reflects a country’s values. But what is valued in the US is continuously evolving and hard to pin down.
Education started in the Americas as a way to teach kids how to be a part of their community. Then it started to shift with colonization. Education went from being morality focused - teaching literacy so that people could read the Bible. To Democracy and assimilation focused - forcing people to fit a standard ideal while emphasizing being an active citizen. To worker focused - creating industrialized systems to set people up to enter the workforce. To academic and standards focused - standardizing curriculum with the intent to compete on the global scale.
But now, as demonstrated by the crazy political climate, what we value as a country is unclear, so what education should look like is also unclear.
This lack of clarity is landing at the feet of teachers. And having a job with no clear and agreed upon objective is frustrating. Should teachers be focused on standardized tests, on learning, on mental health, on social health, on morality, on graduation rates? It’s not clear.
But what is clear, is that having more of a shared value system would be valuable. A shared vision of what education is for. This would give teachers a clear objective that does not leave room for the petty arguments that are at the heart of so many educational dilemmas that are driving teachers out.
I think we can get there. I spoke with people from all over the political spectrum for this podcast, and I am certain that we can get to a shared set of values.
Juan Laden: Fundamentally, we need to make available within our teaching environment the understanding of other people and the possibilities for children to do so many things.
Juan Laden sat down with me at the Lander Bake Shop. I had set up a microphone and taped up a sign with two questions: Why are teachers leaving Education? And What is the Purpose of Education? Because I don’t want to hassle folks, I sat quietly with my dirty chai and waited for people to come to me. Juan sidled over in a dutch cap, still chewing on a pastry, and starting answering questions before he even sat down.
Juan Laden: I think they're good teachers, and that's why they're leaving. And so that's, are you recording this? Good, good?
Juan is a lot of things. He has never been a public school teacher, but he was an experiential climbing instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School or NOLS, he has traveled around and lived in Europe, he is knowledgeable in many things including plumbing and photography, and he knows a lot about pedagogy, this is a word educators use to talk about the method or practice of teaching:
Juan Laden: And basically, I think the concept in America of education is filling a receptacle, and that is not what it's about.
What Juan is referring to is also called the banking method - the idea is that a student’s educational experience is to get packed full of information, and that’s it. The banking method is not a popular pedagogy because it lacks a need for critical thinking and creativity and disregards the fact that students come to school already possessing knowledge. Many folks I spoke with push against this focus of education - to pack kids full of information. Juan agrees, and he explained that he thinks education should feel more like caving.
Juan Laden: I'm a caver and talk about exploration. Most people don't like the idea of caving. I tell them they just had a difficult birth and never got over it. But you know, it's like, what a trip. You're exploring to the max. When you find a new cave…the dream of all cavers is to find the big, going cave, like, “Wow, there's a hole and you go in there, and it goes, and it goes, and there's more.” The idea that you're actually going where no one's been before, and that's what exploration is. It is a very deep drive in all humans to start out with - that curiosity, that emotional need to explore is driven by curiosity.
Exploration was a tenet of that Road Trip class, and something I wish my high school classroom had more of now. We gave the students the freedom to choose where they wanted to go and how they wanted to get there. This is how we ended up at a hot spring called Chicken Soup in Idaho. Idaho wasn’t even in our original plan.
The desire to explore was also an ideal across many of my conversations with teachers about what education is for - to help students jump into a metaphorical or literal cave. But the reality of teaching in a public school setting is that this ability to delve into curiosity is often devalued by what is required in the curriculum, community pressures, or a lack of resources. And the breadth of information that needs to be covered in a curriculum sometimes does not allow for depth or the chance for student exploration.
I know of several projects that students would learn from and enjoy that were dead on arrival because they did not meet a curricular requirement or wouldn’t work for a specific standardized assessment. Such limits can take away from the joy of teaching and we’ve already seen that it can lead to teachers quitting.
Exploration is something worth valuing, but based on how our system is currently structured, it isn’t valued enough.
To get another idea about this question, we’re going to take a step back and start with what an educational jack-of-all-trades says about the purpose of education.
I met up with Colby Gull at his office. Colby is the Managing Director for the trustees education initiative in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming. I asked him what the purpose of education is:
Colby Gull: That is too complex of a question for your podcast, probably.
This shouldn’t be the case. To me, this is part of the problem. I wish education could be simpler. For instance, for their final project during the road trip class, a pair of students designed and printed a t-shirt for the class. And they created a slogan for each person in the course. Mine read “Just trying to teach people not to be assholes.” And you know, that sums up my pedagogy pretty well.
But Colby’s right. Our country’s current view of education is very complex. We can’t easily say that education should be for exploration like Juan says, or that education is trying to teach people not to be assholes like my t-shirt motto says. And our system might be too complex. We might be trying to layer in too much.
And Colby, who was a teacher, principal, and superintendent, is aware of that. Here he is again with another answer that tries to better address the complexities for what he sees as the purpose of education:
Colby Gull: I think we have to help our students to gain some basic knowledge, some basic skills around academic areas. We want them to understand how to read and to ask good questions. And we want them to understand some mathematical things and solve problems. But we also want to give them opportunities to explore new ideas and new ways of thinking about things and to analyze their own thinking, and , ”Why is my opinion that? Maybe it should be something else?” But I think the purpose of all of that is to help students to be prepared to go out and reach their potential, and to do great things and challenge thinking and make things better for themselves and for the people around them.
Colby’s answers show his expertise. He is a guy that spends his life thinking about education and helping to train and retain teachers, and through all of his roles, he has had to deal with the bureaucracy and politics of education more intimately than most teachers ever do. What a teacher might value does not include the political nature of education
And this is where the conflict comes in. Something like the Road Trip Class, is my ideal education structure because it also reflects my values. But that does not work in public education. Teacher values and idealism often collapse against the layers of the education system’s bureaucracy. And it’s disheartening. So we end up with statements like Colby’s second answer.
It covers a lot but it is also pretty generalized. It sounds like an institutional response to the question, or a mission statement - their purpose of education proclamation. To compare, here is the mission statement from the United States Department of education:
“The United States Department of Education’s mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”
And here are a few more mission statements to compare to from districts across the country. Try to guess where they’re from:
“We ensure equitable access to a transformative educational experience grounded in the assets of our students, staff, and community.”
Here’s Another:
“To ensure high levels of learning for all students. To continuously develop our capacity to function as a collaborative culture.”
One more:
“Our commitment is to prepare each student to become a career and college ready citizen. We will partner with families and the community to provide an engaging and challenging education in a safe and positive environment.”
Each of these mission statements, from the US Department of Education to districts from three different time zones across the US have similar and vague declarations. They feel like a fortune - “You are about to rediscover a lost connection to your past.”
I get why the mission statements are vague. They are meant for a diverse population, and each family within that population should be able to see some value in these mission statements because public education is for everyone.
But this is also where we can run into problems. The way I read “preparing each student to become a career and college ready citizen” is unique from what the administration, or students, or parents, or even other teachers may think. Do I think a person needs to avoid spaghetti straps to be a productive citizen? Not really, but I do think knowing how to work towards and meet a deadline would help.
So why does a vague purpose of education lead to teachers leaving the profession? Because many educators are finding that their interpretation of these missions and goals are in conflict with those of the administration, school board, or community. Values are not aligning. Which creates stress and sometimes forces a choice, do what they believe in and create conflict, or compromise their values and feel miserable.
Every now and then there are times when idealism aligns within the classroom, which can create amazing moments.
For Allison Lash, who was an art teacher in New York City that we heard from last episode, building community and learning in her mind require providing students with new experiences and opportunities.
Allison Lash: That's the kind of thing that I love bringing to kids like these little snippets and experiences that they might not get in the classroom.
When her second graders were learning about rocks and gemstones from books, Allison organized a field trip to the Museum of Natural History because she knew they had an amazing collection.
Allison Lash: And I took all the kids out of the Bronx and into Manhattan. And as we're and I rev them up, like for the field trip, and I told them we're leaving the Bronx, we're leaving the Bronx because so many of them have never left the Bronx are there. So many of them never left like many of them lived in the projects, the building. And so they only traveled from the building to school a block away in the supermarket like this. These like four streets, basically. And the kids when we were driving over the water and on the bridge to get to Manhattan, they were all screaming when they said we're leaving the Bronx. So I love, I love being able to do that.
The ability to leave the space of the school often creates authentic learning experiences for students. These are experiences that connect students to their communities, which is a common value presented in school district mission statements. But there are limiting factors to leaving the space of the school. This is where idealism can be deflated because much of the modern purpose of education is now tied to keeping kids safe. This is why we practice having lockdowns.
Lauren Schumacher spoke to me about how fear and wanting to keep kids safe impacts how we view the purpose of education.
Lauren Schumacher: And I think, sadly, with all the violence, you know, the school shootings situations, continue to make our country want to fence our buildings in and put doorbells on and all that which I understand. But in the same breath, we need to be removing them from the fences and getting them out into communities. I think that is more of the direction we need to move education.
I was really excited to talk to Lauren. I set up an interview station outside next to the Valley Bookstore in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I didn’t meet Lauren first, I met her whole family. Her daughter saw my signs about teachers leaving and said, “My mom is going to want to talk to you” before she ran back from the direction she came to get her mom.
Lauren was on vacation with her family. She is an administrator in Florida, and she had previously taught in both Missouri and Florida, but everything she talked about matched what teachers in my home state brought up.
In terms of the purpose of education, Lauren echoes the idea of wanting more experiential learning that gets kids into their communities.
Lauren Schumacher: I think we need to step away from the traditional brick and mortar, and get our kids out and learning.
But, as Lauren pointed out earlier, with threats of violence in schools, education might be moving the other direction.
I hate this. We desperately need to be moving towards mobility and freedom and exploration - not away from it. When I reflect on that road trip class, there were elements of risk - absolutely - but we didn’t structure our educational experience around fear. Nor did threats feel looming like they do in modern education.
When I answer my classroom door, I always have a pen in hand - it’s the sharpest object in my room, and I look through the window to check who is at my door, and what is in their hands before I let them in. Every time I answer the door, I play through a scenario of an active shooter. Our doors stay locked and shut because the statistics show that locked and shut doors save lives, and we value student lives. But this is the setting in which we are trying to teach exploration and wonder. It’s hard to have idealistic values and believe the purpose of education is for exploration in a locked room. So I have to return to the question, “What is the purpose of education?” Because if it’s to protect kids from violence and shootings, this is a heavy burden to ask teachers to carry. And the weight of it is becoming too much for many educators.
Such expectations make teachers feel like their job descriptions have shifted. And this is where more complexity comes in. Rather than being facilitators of learning, critical thinking, and exploration, teachers are having to do any number of things.
Ron Ruckman: I think that's the awesome part of teaching is that you get to be all those things, you know, but it puts a huge mental drain on teachers.
This is Ron Ruckman, we heard a little bit from him in the second episode. Ron taught for 23 years and quit to run his construction business that he has with a friend. A business that does not require Ron to have to engage with much other than completing projects. Part of why Ron left had to do with a purpose of education that required too much from him.
Ron Ruckman:That's the problem. I think that for me that that has finally just kind of wore me out. The needs of kids beyond way beyond science, just the stuff I teach my subject matter. I do so much more. I spend so much time and it seems like I've spent more and more time as my teaching career has gone on. Kids seem to be a lot more needy of that kind of attention, and then we have one counselor. She can only do so much. She's got a line at her office most days, and it's like, you just have to wear all those hats to be the teacher, be the counselor, be the be mom and dad. That's the reality for some kids.
Ron recognizes that these kids need more than content. Mental health matters, even more so with the pandemic. In 2021, the CDC reported that nearly half of teenagers reported feeling sad or hopeless over the last year, and schools are a great resource for students who are struggling, but most school counselors are constantly busy because they have so many students needing help. Some of that overflow lands on teachers. For some teachers, who are not qualified or professional counselors, this is too emotionally taxing. So is this the purpose of education? To support the mental health of students? If it is, how does this match the structure of our education system?
For Ron, he knows students need support, and he also believes that education needs to focus on things that are relevant to his content.
Ron Ruckman: It's important that we keep teaching critical thinking.
My district recently held a professional development day where local business people explained what they want our schools to prepare students for. One of the things they pointed to was the ability to think critically and problem solve. Another was the ability to value and communicate with other people. To actively engage in a civilized manner and recognize not everyone shares the same perspective.
Ron Ruckman: If you're not willing to feel cognitive dissonance, if you're not willing to feel that uncomfortable feeling of what you thought, and then realizing that maybe that wasn't the truth. I had an uncle that always taught me you can learn something from everybody. And that includes every little fifth grader that I've ever had come through my room. Every single person I meet, I learned something from. That's what a teacher should be doing is teaching kids that you need to make your own opinion, but you need to consider all the data and all the opinions of others and put it all together and then make your own educated opinion.
Ron values critical thinkers that have a growth mindset. He does not want learning to stop for people once they graduate. For Ron, if the purpose of education is to grow an active and informed citizenry, which harkens back to what the founding fathers wanted of education, then learning should be lifelong.
Ron Ruckman: It's okay to change what you believe in. When you consider more evidence, you know, and as you go through life, you learn more things and you see more things and, you know, and that I think a lot of people don't like that. We can't just be stuck in one way of thinking all of our life, otherwise, you're just gonna be very unhappy.
So through science, Ron was helping students think critically and communicate with one another and form opinions all while addressing students’ other needs - which ended up wearing him out by the time he left his job. For Ron, the purpose of education isn’t finite, and it became too much for him to continue.
One last thing about Ron. When considering the purpose of education, there is some speculation that teachers are using education as a place to spew a political agenda. Ron is adamant that this is incorrect.
Ron Ruckman: Well, and that's part of the part of my, just kind of my disgust with the public right now is the image of teachers being, you know, we're out there to indoctrinate kids or whatever that bullshit is. And I'm sorry to use that word, but that it is, it's bullshit. That one will get me fired up more than anything else, you know, we're there to just teach them about the subjects that, you know, that we're in, you know, and we're not out there to indoctrinate.
No teacher that I spoke with or know of is actively trying to indoctrinate students. That is not the purpose of education in their minds. Some teachers even joked that they wished they could indoctrinate students - then maybe students would do their homework and turn things in on time. But this fear of indoctrination from non-educators is a problem, making it more difficult to define the purpose of education simply.
In my ideal for education, I get to act as a facilitator of curiosity. I help students explore their interests by guiding them towards relevant resources, and I feel like it’s my job to not be offended. I want students to be able to ask honest questions about whatever they’re interested in. And at no point will I stop a curious student and say, “I’m sorry, you cannot address that in this room. This room is for English content only.” or “That does not fit within our mission statement.”
I want to be able to stray from content in my classroom, but it does not match a view of education that is content specific and easily measured. There seems to be a fear that anything outside of a content area is indoctrination or a deviant plot to warp the minds of children - muwahahaha. It’s asinine and disregards the fact that expecting teachers to only teach content and nothing more is missing a big part of what education is.
Ron Ruckman: I think the expectation, honestly, is that that's all you do is teach your subject, and that's all you should ever, you know, and what they don't realize is, these kids need so much more. And I think there's so much more on our plate as a teacher than what the public thinks is there or even expects us to do, but we don't have a choice. We, you know, we would have, you know, we'd have no, we'd have utter chaos. You know, if we didn't wear all those hats
Going into a classroom and only trying to teach content, while addressing nothing else, rarely works. This is why guest speakers sometimes flounder - they assume their expertise is enough to engage students - and they get eaten alive.
But the focus on content can’t be dismissed. Standards and standardized assessments are a constant quality of modern education. Is this what we value? Content that will be assessed on a standardized assessment? In reality, assessments are the main measurable expectations that are placed onto schools. And for many teachers, if the purpose of education is to only have students do well on a test, then that is enough of a reason to quit teaching.
Teachers are having to balance teaching content that students will be tested on with their values and ideas about the social, emotional or cultural things that are harder to measure but necessary for a well-functioning classroom. And having to be responsible for a list of ambiguous immeasurables is draining and pushing teachers out.
Ron Ruckman: I mean, now we are basically caretakers of those kids.
We met Rachael Esh last episode, she left teaching to write children's books, and she felt like the foundation of her teaching experience was based on relationships:
Rachaeel Esh: And even when you learn when you go into teaching, you know this. The number one thing they teach you is relationships, build relationships, don't worry about the content until you have the relationships because we know they're not going to listen to you if they don't respect you or care about you to get that other information. So you've got to build that. You've got to have your expectations.The purpose of education, I mean, it's just, it's all encompassing. Raising a kid takes a community and I feel like teachers are a big part of that community.
Rachael wants to foster kindness and curiosity and empathy. This sounds like it would fit the tenets from the mission statements from earlier, but what stands out to me is her point that content is secondary. Many teachers recognize that without a relationship, it’s very difficult to teach any sort of content. Relationships are part of what made that road trip class so successful. Relationships are what those guest speakers are lacking. I’ve even heard kids specifically say, they will refuse to do work or try to learn from a teacher they don’t like. So to get to content, some of these other things are having to be addressed, which adds to what teachers are already doing and are hard to measure or track.
There are also a few differing views on what makes up content. Several teachers drew a line between content tied to learning and exploration and content for standardized assessments.
Rachael Esh: So just being like, hey, good job on all your hard work. We're number one for our scores again, and it's like, I don't care. And so if that's what we're celebrating, I don't really want to work here. Because that's not what's important to me. And so like, how about we celebrate this the teacher that tried a new lesson and fell on their face? Like Good job family? Because that's what we teach our kids. But do we let our teachers fail? No. So I just don't agree with it.
Rachael wanted to teach in a space that allowed for teachers to experiment in their classrooms. To try things and fail, but she felt like the test scores were what her district valued. They prioritized high scores over experiences and what Rachael thought of as authentic learning.
I understand this. Getting a taste of a structure like the road trip class that allowed for authentic learning because it was exploration based makes it really hard to go back to prioritizing high scores.
Rachael Esh: I cannot stand another freakin meeting talking about. But does the standard say that? What does modeling mean? What does this mean? I don't care. I'm sorry, I don't need to break down the exact definition of a word in order to teach the general concept. And I am going to make time to teach what these kids really need to know in life, which is not that.
The focus on standards hasn’t always been the norm. As I said earlier, education has shifted its focus as our country's values have shifted.
And part of the confusion could have to do with modern education holding onto outdated values for public education. Values that don’t match a modern world or modern ideals. Though that may be true, teachers are still having to work in this environment that lacks clear objectives. This is stressful.
We often hear, just do what’s best for kids when it feels like bureaucracy is getting heavy. But what I think is best for kids might include calling them by their chosen name, holding them accountable for their actions, pushing them to reach high expectations, or providing them with various pieces of text that give unique perspectives.
These might sound great, but for each of the examples I just listed, I have had a situation where a parent, student, administrator, or fellow teacher disagreed with me to the point that we needed to have a meeting about our perspectives. And the reality is, I can’t say who is right or wrong based on our educational system, there’s no clear answer. For many teachers, having to defend why, in their professional opinion, their view of education is valid, is just not worth it. And being accosted by parents or administrators or school boards gets old really quickly.
Ron talked about the lasting impact of these conflicts:
Ron Ruckman: Yeah, it's scary to me still, I mean, parents, parents, I, when I have parents get in my face, I hate it even now. And most of the time, and well, like, I would say, 99% of the time parent goes away happy. And I sit there and dwell on it for the next five days, you know, and it totally wrecks my whole mental state for a long time. You know, and I just don't think parents realize, you know, they come in, and they're fired up, because they hear one story from their kid, and then they come in, and they're all fired up, and they leave and they're, they're fine. But I've, you know, it's, it's almost like, you know, you're almost traumatized by it for a little bit, you know, and that I know, that sounds dumb, but that, that is something that just kind of happens, you know, and I feel like because I like to make everybody I'm kind of a people pleaser, you know, I like everybody to be happy with me all the time.
Every teacher I know has a getting chewed out story - when a parent cornered and then screamed at them in their own classroom or demanded retribution because they refused to believe their child would ever lie to them so the teacher must be lying. These moments leave scars And this shows that even if there isn’t a shared view for the purpose of education, there might be a consensus that devalues teachers making it acceptable to treat them this way.
And when it comes to making changes to keep teachers, I don’t know what the answer is. But I know that valuing teachers and education would help. Because I do know that a lot of teachers that left education love teaching, but many of them didn’t feel like they or their work were valued.
I also know that education is for students. So to identify what the purpose of education should be, it might be worth asking students what they need? What do they value?
Jonah Zeimens: I feel like education has lost real world application in a lot of things.
This is Jonah Zeimans. Jonah was a student of mine a few years ago. He took my college level English course, and we’ve stayed in contact since. Jonah is currently going to college to become an Ag teacher. He was a high achieving student. He was involved with FFA at a national level. He even spoke at graduation. And with all of these accolades, he still wishes his high school experience could have been a little different.
Jonah Zeimens: I wish it was a lot more individualized. What I don't love about our school system right now is that we're so standardized and trying to get everyone to meet the same requirements every step of the way. And I can understand maybe while students are younger, the importance of that, but once folks start figuring out what they want to do with their life a little bit more, it'd be nice to have a little bit more experimentation there. I think about this a lot going, the ag education, I would have loved to have taken more ag classes while in high school.
Jonah hit on an issue many teachers talked about in frustration with standards and standardized tests. Students value individualization. With individualization comes exploration and the ability to get excited about their futures.
Teachers love fostering this work, and if we look back to the mission statements from earlier, individualized instruction meets several of their requirements. But this is not feasible in our current approach to education. Even if teachers want to create individualized instruction, they often run into the issue of navigating standards, or having time, or managing huge classes.
But what Jonah is saying is an ideal. I would get behind a purpose of education that focused on students’ individual goals, and I know of a lot of teachers that would do the same.. But a few things would have to change to make this approach feasible and not burn teachers out. Teachers would need smaller class sizes. Building in-depth individualized learning plans for 150 students isn’t practical or healthy. So if we value teacher well-being and individualized learning, education needs funding for more teachers and more facilities so classes can be smaller. That would be a start to reaching a consensus on what education is for.
I spoke with another recent graduate about the same issues. Landon Trujillo was a wrestler of mine. I coached with his dad for several years, and when Landon graduated he gave me a picture from state wrestling. Someone caught the moment when Landon melted into my chest right after he won the state championship. The picture frame says family on it. It’s on my desk as I work on this podcast.
Landon didn’t love the structure of school.
Landon Trujillo: Um, I'm a pretty social person. So I really liked the social aspect. And just a bunch of friends there people to talk to all the time. Some things I didn't like is like, how, by the book, everything is. 90% of teachers teach the same, in my opinion. It's just work for a grade, and then get your grades and that's pretty much it.
I can see why Landon thinks education is about getting a good grade. As a teacher, this is disheartening. When working towards standards is the priority, the things that foster the joy of learning feel like they get pushed aside. Grades become more valuable than experiences or individualized instruction. These are the times when I look back to that road trip class I told you about and think about how far away I am from that wonderfully structured course. From the things I value as a teacher. From being in a setting with a shared purpose - to explore and not be assholes.
If teachers do not think what they do has purpose, it will be hard to keep them in a job. Part of what gives teachers purpose is autonomy and trust and an ability to explore authentic learning experiences. Things that everyone I spoke with values. But teachers are having to prioritize things that are considered measurable.
Assessments and standards are used as tools of measurement, but the things I and many teachers value are hard to measure. I could not measure the impact that roadtrip class had on students in any tangible way, but I know it had an impact. I can’t measure my relationships, and if I tried, they would feel superficial. This is why some education feels superficial, because it values measurement over authenticity.
And teachers are leaving this system, but our country can keep teachers if we shift our values to what teachers and students already value, which does not include high stakes testing or standardization.
Next time, we will take a look at the impact standardization and high stakes testing have on the classroom, and how this impact plays a role in teachers’ decisions to leave education.
Chris Rothfuss: They switched to a standards oriented approach where they were targeting competency and individual standards as their evaluative structure for student success, as opposed to a grading format. And I think that's a more sophisticated and more thoughtful approach to evaluating educational needs and educational accomplishment.
That will be next time on Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of.
This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Jennica Fournier. Voice Acting by Chris and Haylee Brayton, Britni Shipman, and Ben Zoller. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. Road Trip songs were performed by the Great American Roadtrip class of 2016. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Elizabeth Smith, Juan Laden, Colby Gull, Allison Lash, Lauren Schumacker, Ron Ruckman, Jonah Zeimans, Landon Trujillo, Gary Martin, Caskey Russell, Jaye Wacker, Jennica Fournier, Shane Atkinson, Lindsey Freeman, Christy Chadwick, and Rachael Esh for taking time to sit down and chat with me. If you are interested in hearing more about Rachel Esh and her books, check out our instagram page @thosewhocantteachanymore to see a video of her. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.
Movie Clips:
Freedom Writers (Paramount Pictures)
Dead Poets Society (Touchstone Pictures, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
School of Rock (Paramount Pictures)
Ferris Bueller (Paramount Pictures, United International Pictures)
Transcript:
Episode 3: “What Would Robin Williams Do?”
There is a picture-day-esqu photo on my parents’ fridge of me sitting on my dad’s lap. I am wearing a tie-dye shirt and my orange hair is in its natural state of an Eddie Munster widows peak. My dad is in a blue button down and has on a tie. My cheeks crowd my eyes, my smile is so big. My dad, who doesn’t always smile for pictures, has a cheeky grin.
This picture was taken around the same time that my dad squatted down to eye-level with me and said: “When people ask you where you got your red hair, you tell them the milkman. Okay?”
He didn’t make a big deal about telling me this. It was just a directive, and I said okay. I figured, yeah, that makes sense.
So as adults would come by, ruffle my hair and say things like, “Oh my, what pretty red hair. Where did you get hair like that?”
I’d look up at them, smile, and tell them, “The Milkman.”
They would guffaw, cough down a drink, blush, and I’d try to explain, “You know, because he delivers things.”
And they’d laugh out an “I’m sure he does!” and find my dad who would have a grin settled between his bouncing shoulders as he muffled a laugh, and my mom would say something like “G-uh, Darcy Joe”
Not to be heavy handed, but the stereotypes of what a milkman may or may not do when visiting people’s homes is what makes the joke land. This joke was lost on me until high school. I didn’t understand the baggage associated with being a milkman.
Language matters. Words like milkman have connotations - they carry weight or have stereotypes attached to them. That’s why I can’t flip someone off and say, “Why are you upset,this means joy to me.” There are too many representations of middle-fingers that situate the digit as a symbol of the obscene. Repetition and representation give meaning.
The middle finger or terms like milkman or teacher, carry a history of expectations and stereotypes. Last episode we heard about the historical inheritance of teachers, which is significant in how we view modern teachers. But history isn’t the only thing that impacts how we view teachers. Today, we’re going to look at the teacher stereotypes in pop-culture and how these stereotypes can be contributing to teacher attrition.
This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier.
Here is part 3: “What Would Robin Williams Do?”
Molly Waterworth: I've gotten to the point where I see any TV show or movie where some sort of plot device hinges on the inspirational teacher. And I just roll my eyes.
This is Molly Waterworth. We heard from her last episode, and she just left education after teaching English for 8 years. She points out a stereotype of inspiring teachers in media:
Molly Waterworth:I just can't. I can't stomach it because it's so saccharin. It completely obscures the fact that these inspiring teachers that are either drawn from real life or the product of someone or someone's imagination, it completely obscures the fact that their inspirational teaching is very likely the outgrowth of massive mental health deficiencies. And like a complete imbalance of where they spend their time and where they're getting like their soul fed. Inspiring teacher stories make me feel awful.
That shouldn’t be the case, right? Inspirational teacher movies should INSPIRE. And they can and they do - they inspired me - but what Molly points to is a nagging reality in many inspirational teacher stories.
Dead Poets Society Clip
As you can hear in this scene from Dead Poets Society, Mr Keeting, played by Robin Williams, pushes his student, Todd Anderson.. And in this unconventional way Mr. Keeting helps Todd start to gain some confidence and see his potential. Similar scenes occur in other famous teacher movies, like Mr Holland’s Opus, or Freedom Writers.
These movies project a fantasy of heroism onto education, and people love it. Inspirational teacher movies are usually underdog stories: A teacher rails against convention and inspires and does amazing things for others no matter the personal cost. We are attracted to this as a culture. We want heroes that are selfless. We want to see ourselves as capable of being like Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society.
And the way these movie teachers influence kids…man, that’s the dream. But, several if not most of the teachers in those stories that inspire don’t have the healthiest work-life balance. They give everything to their students - time, energy, love, inspiration. And these movie teachers inspire in the public comments like, “We need more teachers like this” or “I wish teachers would be more like (whatever movie teacher).” But we need to ask, what is expecting teachers to fit a stereotype asking of real teachers?
Think of Freedom Writers, a movie based on the real-life Erin Gruwell, who is played by Hillary Swank. She is the epitome of the inspirational teacher stereotype. Halfway through the movie, her husband leaves her because she is spending so much time focused on her students,
Freedom Writers Clip
The film creates a feeling that the husband might be unrealistic. As an audience, we’re rooting for Erin Gruwell because she does amazing things - her husband points this out. And don’t get me wrong, Ms.Gruwell is phenomenal and her story is amazing, but there might be danger in presenting this story as a precedent for what good teaching looks like. Yes, she is a good teacher, but at what cost? In most other films about different careers, it’s likely the main character would realize that work is taking too much and family is more important, but not in inspirational teacher movies. Expecting teachers to do what Gruwell does is expecting teachers to forfeit their own lives for students. It’s expecting martyrdom. This is a stereotype.
And the reality is different.
Molly Waterworth: We're not martyrs, and we're not perfect. And there are things that can be said about the profession as a whole and certainly about individual teachers that needs improvement, absolutely. But I think a lot of it maybe stems from just this sense that teachers aren't entirely human - that we are saints. And so therefore, we shouldn't worry about all of these factors that are making our jobs harder, because we have this big calling on our lives that turn us somehow into people that don't have needs.
This language that surrounds teaching is significant. It feeds the stereotype of selflessness, which in turn has an impact on how teachers are treated. Right now teachers are feeling burned out because this stereotype is unrealistic - it’s creating an expectation that makes teachers want to leave education.
I met up with Rachael Esh at Welcome Market Hall in Sheridan, Wyoming on the eve of her very last day as a teacher.
Rachael Esh: It's a bit of a stereotype with teachers. It’s like, Oh, this has been your calling since you were this age, or since this teacher impacted you.
This idea of a calling is that you don’t teach for the money, you do it for the kids because it is what you were meant to do. It is your destiny or purpose. A quote unquote “calling” can create a sense of guilt in teachers when they realize, crap, I’m not getting paid enough for this, which is in contrast to the narrative surrounding teaching like Molly points out:
Molly Waterworth: People don't get into this for the money, why would they? But they're in it for the kids, and they're in it for that sense of purpose and mission. That's like, “Yeah, but I also would like to be paid.”
So to have a calling is to feel like teaching is more than a job, more than a paycheck, it is a clear directive from some higher power for the direction your life should take in service of others. Rachael didn’t feel like that stereotype matched her experience.
Rachael Esh: And I don't feel like that's usually the case. It's more of a roundabout zigzag pattern.
This surprised me. I grew up wanting to be a teacher because, as Rachael said, I had some amazing teachers leave an impact on me, but I never thought teaching was my calling. It was something that sounded cool, and it was made cooler by movies like Dead Poets Society. I wrote the movie’s motto, “Carpe Diem” on all of my notebooks. And I liked reading and writing and teaching people, and teaching would give me a chance to coach. Not once did I get the sky part and shine a light on my career path. It wasn’t a calling, and of the 30 teachers that I interviewed, hardly any of them felt like teaching was their calling either.
For Rachael and Molly, they had different plans with where their lives were going to go.
Rachael Esh: So my undergrad I actually got at Ohio University in environmental biology, and so I thought I was gonna maybe do field work or something like that.
Molly Waterworth: I declared my major as geography, but I did it with the intent of being able to go into the forest service. But I found out pretty quickly that I really didn't care about any of my classes. And I found out that I was going to have to take calculus and I wasn't interested in doing that. So I kind of bounced around into various humanities areas.
And both Rachael and Molly landed in education because they each had a summer experience in college that put them in front of kids. Rachael took an internship teaching environmental education and Molly went to China with a group from college and got to help kids with their conversational English. They both found their way to being educators because of positive experiences teaching kids.
Rachael Esh: So I knew I either wanted to go on to park service or education after working with kids then. And so it kind of just worked out that getting my degree in education was just more accessible, and I kind of wanted to separate my fun time, which was like outdoors, from my work. So I decided to kind of go into education. And I mean, the kids are never boring. So you're like, well, heck this. This beats an office job any day of the week.
And when Molly returned from China, she declared first as an elementary teacher.
Molly Waterworth: I think that when I envision myself being a teacher, I thought of myself reading with kids, and talking about literature and talking about books and big ideas and stuff like that. And so at that point, I had the very obvious revelation that I should be a secondary English teacher because that would afford me that opportunity most often. So that was kind of my meandering path into into
There was no bright light for either of these teachers, no calling. Nothing so profound. Like most people, they stumbled onto their desire to do a job because they took advantage of an opportunity and realized, “Hey, this isn’t bad.”
And Teaching wasn’t a last option for either of them. They weren’t failing at other things in life, which is tied to another stereotype of teaching. If teachers aren’t depicted as martyrs, they’re often seen as selfish or deviant or lazy or dumb or boring, like in Ferris Bueler’s Day Off.
Ferris Bueller Clip
And this image of teachers perpetuates the idea that teaching is a last ditch option for people that can’t do anything else. This stereotype often leads to a willingness to discredit teachers as experts in their field. Not being seen as experts in their field is a major reason teachers gave for leaving teaching.
For Molly or Rachael, they became teachers by choice. They didn’t need to fall back to something easier. It wasn’t a School of Rock scenario, where Jack Black’s character, Dewey Finn, hits rock bottom before becoming a long term sub proving that someone with no qualifications can be a better teacher than trained and dedicated teachers - a trope that we see over and over again.
In the film, Jack Black’s character even draws attention to a common saying that is tied to education.
School of Rock Clip
Dylan Bear is a PE teacher in Pinedale, WY. We sat at a picnic table in front of his house with a view of the Wind River Mountain Range, while we drank coffee, snacked on a loaf of banana bread he was gifted from a student, and talked about these sayings and images surrounding education.
Dylan Bear: I think another thing, we've gotten a lot of quotes, like funny quotes in the society, like, oh, teachers, they take these jobs for June, July and August. I think that's something that needs to stop.
What Dylan has noticed is the negative lens with which culture and Hollywood has viewed teachers. Like I mentioned earlier, we stereotype teachers as good or bad, the marty/savior type that saw teaching as a calling or the boring/lazy person who saw teaching as a backup plan.
But, Dylan, like Molly and Rachael, didn’t see teaching as a calling. He didn’t see teaching as a fall back career either.
Dylan Bear: So I started off as an engineer, and those were just not my people. And I was looking more for a little more social environment, a little more high energy versus analytical, consistently, day in and day out. And so I went from engineering to math in secondary math education because I liked working with kids. And then after a few years of that three years deep, looking at all the papers all the time, I just couldn't do it, so I switched from math. I was actually sitting in Prexy's Pasture and Laramie. And the special ed teacher came and sat down next to me and she said, What are you thinking about? Instead, there was my longboard. I said, I don't know if I can do math the rest of my life. Would you rather be teaching math or out playing a field, you know, and I thought like instantly.
Dylan would rather be out in a field. Teaching was a good path for Dylan - not a calling and not a last ditch option. He takes his job seriously, and he is someone that plans on teaching for some time. And when Dylan started feeling a little burned out, he moved towns and got a change of scenery, so that he could keep teaching. He isn’t naive to the reality of burning out or how difficult the job is, nor is he jaded in thinking that anyone could do this job.
The key word here is reality. The reality of a teacher is that teachers are human, not a stereotype. We make mistakes and we have successes and we make some profound impacts on kids and we make some mediocre impacts on kids.
Dylan Bear: Some teachers are really good, and some are really lazy. And some kids are really good, and some are really lazy. So it's like, we don't want to paint a broad brush over everybody. And I think sometimes we do an education because there's so many people in education. It's like one of the leading job forces out there. So you hear these stories that are negative about one or two teachers, and then you say all I'm doing the same with kids. I hate when people say, kids are always on their phone. It's like, no, no, some kids are on their phones. Some of them are waiting for you to talk and give them a good lesson. I think education gets those broad brushes which devalue people. And that's a dangerous world.
Dylan recognizes the need for grace and the danger of broad generalizations of any groups. He recognizes the fact that people are human, but sometimes we only get a snapshot of education, which creates these generalizations that feed into the stereotype of teachers as either good or bad. Dylan experienced this first hand when he had a student continuously refuse to take off his hat.
Dylan Bear: I was like, This is absurd. So I'm a climber, and so he was playing badminton, and I popped his hat off and ran up and jumped up the basketball hoop and climbed in the rafters and hung it from like, the highest point in the gym, like, 50 foot up. And yeah, not very smart, but it was like, I didn't think about it, but kids Snapchatted it. And all the kids came like, “Oh, we saw you but it was out that was so funny. That it's like you have to be aware of that.”
The snapchat of Dylan only includes his climb. It doesn’t include the warnings he gave the student from that day and previous days. It doesn’t include Dylan’s positive relationship with the student and the students’ family, or all of the normal/positive interactions Dylan has with his other students, or the mundane aspects of his job that he does everyday. The Snapchat lacks context, and this is how stereotypes begin and are fed. A single image becomes the representation of the whole - even if it is a fragment of the reality.
This is the kind of thing that becomes an overgeneralization - a stereotype of teachers. These stereotypes are on social media and in movies and they contribute to cultural narratives about education that are unrealistic. Some of these glimpses and snapshots might be part of what teachers expected education to be, which is misleading and could be contributing to the disillusionment leading to teachers quitting. Here’s Molly again.
Molly Waterworth: I think that the image probably came from a couple of places, a selective memory of my high school and middle school classrooms. So thinking back to those good experiences that I had as a student, I was like, “Okay, I want to create that for other people.” But I also had it in my head, the the image of the cool, thoughtful, worldly literary teacher that you see in like Dead Poets Society or any number of other movies like that - opening up doors and exploring identity and figuring out who we are all along the way.
Dead Poets Society Clip
I love Dead Poets Society, and Freedom Writers, but I remember telling my wife, after our first week in real teaching jobs: “This sure as hell isn’t Dead Poets Society.” I had been fooled with what teaching would actually be, and this is also an image of what the public seems to see of educators. They want the engaging classroom, the teacher that inspires, and don’t we all. Or they expect the lazy, boring, slacker who got into teaching because their real goals didn’t pan out. But education is more complex than a movie.
Molly Waterworth: The crushing reality of grading was something that I hadn't quite prepared myself for. I think that I knew going into teaching, because obviously, you know, that you're going to have to grade and that's part of the job. So the grading part was overwhelming. You never see in movies, like staff meetings, or having to figure out the copier or the deeply existentially difficult process of figuring out the culture of the building in your first year. Just the kind of mundane but deeply tangible on a daily basis struggle of making sure that everything fits in your lesson plan. Like that's not glamorous. But it's, it's the part that makes or breaks you as a teacher of just balancing the day to day and making sure that you're hitting your standards and teaching the stuff that you don't care about, but you have to do anyway. Like, Robin Williams isn't gonna do that.
I would love to have a b-roll version of Dead Poets Society where Robin WIlliams’ character, John Keating, sits for 4 hours grading papers, intermittently standing up to stretch, get a coffee, shake his head and mumble things like, “I swear we went over that.”
Molly Waterworth: You never see an inspiring teacher movie where they are tracking missing assignments. You never see them answering the onslaught of emails at the end of the semester, asking how to get my grade up. You never see that. You see the inspiring parts and that's it. Never the work that it takes to get there.
So we see teachers that either act as martyrs like Keating who, don’t forget, gets fired at the end of the film after a student kills himself, or we see teachers that make real teachers cringe.
Molly Waterworth: I remember watching Glee when that was out. And it was not just unrealistic, but it was just so I thought it was insulting the way that the teachers were showing their like, as just unserious. Too involved in teenagers' lives. And, like, really, really concerned about both of those things. That I was just I couldn't do it. I couldn't put up with it.
And again, why does this matter? Why does it matter that depictions of teachers are unrealistic? It honestly wouldn’t matter if these depictions didn’t seep into how teachers are currently being treated. If the cultural view of education remained realistic. But this is how stereotypes work. We may recognize a stereotype as wrong or dangerous, but they can still seep into our behavior.
And they influence what parents expect from teachers, what students expect from teachers, and even what teachers expect from themselves. If teachers buy into the stereotypes, they may be striving for a sense of perfection and martyrdom that is unhealthy and unrealistic. So it’s up to us, all of us, to push against these stereotypes. Like any other cultural stereotype, we need a massive cultural shift in how we think about teachers, which often starts with how we represent and talk about teachers.
Unless we become conscious of our biases or of these stereotypes, things won’t change, and in the context of teaching, teachers will continue to quit.
The misconceptions surrounding teachers and education are very much influenced by what folks see on a consistent basis. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been realistic depictions of teachers. I love Tina Fey’s character in Mean Girls. She was quirky and smart and imperfect. Her character felt more real to me, but this is an outlier in teacher representations.
Stephanie Reese: Culturally, I think the media shows teachers as “Man, they just work tirelessly.”
You might recognize Stephanie’s voice from last episode. I met up with her at Blacktooth Brewery in Cheyenne, she’s the general manager there. Stephanie taught PE from kindergarten to college, and she left education after 8 years.
She points out how some of the perceptions of education bleed into the expectations placed on teachers.
Stephanie Reese: They just love what they do so much. They love kids. They're willing to put in all these extra hours, because they just love what they do. And they're okay with that. And, and that doesn't actually give teachers a voice. And that, to me is bullshit because teachers are tired, they're exhausted, they're stressed to the max there. Some may love it. And fine. If you have that intrinsic motivation to love something without getting anything back. That's amazing. You are a superhero.
When being a teacher is associated with loving kids as Stephanie points out, does that mean that leaving education means a loss of love for the kids? Or that not wanting to put in the extra hours is because teachers don’t love the kids? This rhetoric is dangerous and it isn’t helpful when thinking about why teachers are leaving. When teachers decide to leave education, they often hear, “You can’t, you’re so good for the kids” or something to that effect. This is said in praise, but it actually ignores what teachers are dealing with and it pushes this cultural stereotype that teachers ought to be willing to give everything for the kids. The reality is, the list of what teachers do, the extra work teachers have, is tremendous and all of that work rarely makes it into films.
Here’s Dylan.
Dylan Bear: It’s funny when you asked me to do this, I looked up, like, what are the job requirements for teachers and there was like, on the, on the description, it was, like 30 bullet points. It was incredible, like, lift 50 pounds, walk 100 yards. When Does anyone do that? We think teachers are just this, like square. But it's not, it's this open ended job that you can work your tail off forever, you know, or you can do the minimum and you still get paid the same. So it's like, I think a lot of people want to know, like, here's your job, and here's what you're gonna get for it. And that's not the case in teaching.
And that list of job requirements is long and ambiguous and continuously added to. A big portion of what it means to be a teacher isn’t simply “to teach” or “to inspire.” It’s to manage a huge amount of expectations, which doesn’t often get included into the stereotype of teachers, and if it does, it’s only for a moment. Stephanie had strong thoughts about what teachers are expected to do.
Stephanie Reese: This isn't going to be a positive one, Charles, I hope that you're not like, brace yourself, right? I'm not gonna sit here and say, oh, yeah, teachers are here to inspire teachers are here to you know, try to spark some sort of love or interest in something and help every single kid and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all that sugar coated shit. Fine. That might be the case. But to me, and I know a lot of teachers who agree, it's babysitting. So our roles are just sit tight, do your best, try to get in something that's worth value. Or maybe try to teach his kids to be decent human beings.
The stereotype often clashes with the reality of teaching. Still many teachers try to live up to the inspiring teacher stereotype, which can be contributing to the sense of burnout lots of teachers are experiencing.
Many teachers, whether they intended to or not, have wrapped their identity around education, which is kind of a cultural expectation - they are one with the school. This can make being in public and trying to have a personal life kind of awkward especially in small towns.
Rachael Esh:Anywhere we would go. I'd be like, I can't go there. All my kids are gonna be there, you know? Or like, do you want to go bowling? No, I don't want to go bowling. So I have to talk to seven of my students online, like no, like, you know, so there's just places that I don't even want to go because I just get bombarded with children. Which is, I love them. But you know, you want to like, be away from work for a while and you're like, I've done this all day. I want adult time. It's adult time now. they'll walk by when I'm having a beer. I'm like, don't, don't you look at me.
The teacher advocating for healthy boundaries or focusing on mental health in a genuine way is not a common teacher stereotype in pop-culture. This has only started bubbling up more recently on social media with teachers and former teachers drawing attention to their struggles in the classroom. There have even been some new television shows that have started to address what teachers are struggling with. They are pushing against the stereotypes. This kind of representation can help restructure how we think about and discuss teachers.
Seeing teachers as stereotypes either creates standards so high it is absolutely unrealistic or we are creating a villain to be a scape-goat for all of our worldly problems. Both of these images are contributing to teachers leaving the profession, and both of these images are very common cultural tropes. To break free from stereotypes, we need to first recognize they are there and how they are working.
I teach about stereotypes when I teach rhetoric. One of my favorite lessons to teach is about binary opposition. We get to address stereotypes and how we, as humans, often categorize ideas and language into this or that, and how such categorization is often a logical fallacy. Here’s a quick look at how the lesson goes.
I start by asking students what a binary star system is, then draw it on the board. Binary stars are two stars that orbit each other. They rely on each other for survival. If one dies, the other dies. In this binary, one star is larger than the other, it carries more weight. Even so, if the other star dies, the larger star will also die.
How we categorize language and ideas is similar. Things are good or bad, and we often privilege one side of that opposition. And we wouldn’t know good without bad. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “Death is the mother of Beauty,” which means, without death, we wouldn’t know beauty.
At this point, a few of the students are nodding, others are usually staring, but as I move around the room, their eyes all follow me. This is when you know that you’ve got ‘em.
Now, I move to the board again and ask the students to picture the perfect and stereotypical 1950s couple. I give a few seconds - they don’t need long. Then I ask, “So, who are they?” Right away, students establish a white, able-bodied couple, made up of a man and woman. This is when I turn my back, marker ready, and say, “Okay, tell me about the woman.” They yell over each other rattling off the same image of a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman with a light color poodle skirt, wearing minimal makeup. She cooks, cleans, and takes care of children. Her only vices are gossip and the occasional cigarette. I then have the students describe the man. He’s tall, has dark hair, wears a dark suit, and works in an office. His vices include drinking, smoking, fighting, and adultery.
In less than two minutes, my students always describe Don and Betty Draper perfectly. Then we continue with other opposing stereotypes under men and women. We agree that these are stereotypes as a class, but I point out that they came up with these opposing lists in about 5 minutes total. It takes that long because I can’t write as fast as they yell out ideas. I tell them, even if they don’t believe in these stereotypes, they are ingrained in their brains because of the culture in which we live, and if they’re not careful, they might unconsciously let them dictate their behavior
At this point, I pause the class and take a different colored marker and circled qualities on both sides of the list. Then I tell the students, these are things that make up who I am. I have a lot of qualities under both men and women circled: I cry more than my wife, I am emotional, I like to cook, I’m terrible with vehicle maintenance, but I am also a woodworker, I was an industrial ironworker, I’ve been in fights, I was a college wrestler. We talk about monoliths, and the reality that in a binary, most people live in the gray. We’re not one or the other, and that doesn’t make us less-than.
Even so, we tend to categorize ideas based on binary opposition.
Thinking back to the binary of men and women, I ask the students who is good and who is bad. Kids argue and defend, but we don’t have a consensus. Then I ask who wears what on a stereotypical wedding day. Men wear black, black is associated with bad. Women wear white, which is associated with good, (which is problematic in its own right).
Inevitably one of the students says this isn’t fair.
They’re right - it isn’t. That’s the danger of binary logic, of assuming things are either good or bad. It creates an all or nothing scenario and double-standards.Binary logic is a fallacy.
Now, if we only think of teachers as either good or bad, we are forcing them into unrealistic stereotypes.
When teachers are associated with being martyrs, saints, nurturers, or people following a calling, and if all of this is seen and represented as good, then as soon as a teacher doesn’t want to give their life to education or be like the teachers in the inspirational movies, then there is a cultural damnation that they must be bad or selfish or deviant or lazy or mean. It sounds ridiculous, but teachers are either leaving because the expectations for being a teacher are more than what they’re willing to give, or they are seen as lazy and unintelligent. Either way, teachers are leaving as a result.
As my students point out every single year, binary logic is simplistic and unfair and most things aren’t simple enough to be one or the other. But, this is often how we interpret the world, it’s good or bad, Democrat or Republican, wrestling or basketball. You get the idea.
So what can be done? As I said earlier, we need to first recognize that there is a stereotype and why that stereotype might be dangerous. Then, the next step would be to listen to real teachers and be able to differentiate stereotypes from reality. The way teachers are talking about leaving education is not cinematic, it’s real, and it’s happening.
Unlike the stereotype, real teachers are listening to their friends and family.
Molly Waterworth: And I was talking about it with Ryan, and he was like,” Molly, you cannot keep teaching. You just can't because it ruins it ruins you emotionally.” And I'm like, Yeah, you're really right because I live for months with just dread, dread, and exhaustion. And you don't want to see anybody that you love feel that way. And it sometimes it takes that external viewpoint of like, No, this is wrecking you to to actually recognize that like, Oh, this isn't just something that I feel internally terrible about. It's obvious to other people. So this is a problem.
They realize that education doesn’t have to be a life sentence of martyrdom.
Rachael Esh: I've given this job and these kids everything that I have, and I don't have anything left. And that's just the reality. And it's like, I had to pick myself over them. And it's, it's like, I love them dearly, and I care about them. But I can't put my mental health on the backburner for the rest of my life.
When people decide to become a teacher, I think everyone thinks like, oh, my gosh, you're a teacher, and you're going to be my kids teacher. And you're going to be a teacher forever. And like, that's your, that's your identity.
I've always felt like this wasn't necessarily my forever career, like some people have. I was like, I'm gonna do this and I want to see how it goes. And the first few years, I was like, yes, like this is, this is my jam. I'm learning so much. I just started thinking I was like every year is just the same. I'm like a permanent sixth grader, and I was like, I am not the kind of person that can stay in a job for 30 years if I don't have any room to grow in it. I just started seeing that cycle. And, when summer comes, it's like, such a huge relief. And then when you start going back to school, just the anxiety about thinking about that already. I was like, no, I would rather have a job all year that I am not going to be completely stressed out about.
What I heard teachers tell me is that they are dynamic humans, not cultural stereotypes. I feel that too. Teachers live in that liminal gray space in-between, just like everyone else. They are neither wholly good nor bad. So it would be great to see a cultural shift, teachers included, in how we discuss teachers - it can start by framing them as complex humans rather than cultural tropes. This will include allowing teachers to voice concerns they have about the profession, so that things can be addressed and we can keep great teachers.
Now, a common cultural reaction to this last statement and to teachers airing their grievances in general, is to say that, “Well, they’re just whiners.” So, if this was your reaction, it is a good time to review that lesson on binaries. If you thought the teacher sharing a concern was a whiner, then it seems like you would prefer that teacher to remain silent. To, in essence, be a martyr. But just like binary logic, expecting teachers to be martyrs is not helpful and is based in stereotypes.
So it would be worth reflecting on our own stereotypes about teachers, and try to humanize them. They really are just humans.
But if folks continue to struggle to separate real-life teachers from the stereotypical, dramatized, fictionalized, news-worthy, or social-media teachers, we’ll continue to struggle with holding onto brilliant teachers who won’t fit into the restrictive categorization.
Next time, we will talk about the purpose of public education. Many teachers are leaving because our country cannot reach a consensus on what public education is for and who it’s for.
That will be next time on Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of.
This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Tennesee Watson. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Rachael Esh, Molly Waterworth, Dylan Bear, and Stephanie Reese for taking time to sit down and chat with. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship. With movie clips from Freedom Writers (Paramount Pictures), Dead Poets Society (Touchstone Pictures, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures), School of Rock (Paramount Pictures), Ferri Bueller (Paramount Pictures, United International Pictures)
I had a band teacher once hold me after class and force me eat a beef and bean burrito. He sat in front of me on the piano bench to make sure that I ate it. I was a freshman, in the middle of the high school wrestling season, and I was cutting weight for my first varsity tournament – where I’d end up getting my lips knocked off. My teacher, Mr. Duran, was short, wiry, wore jeans with a braided leather belt and a button-down shirt. He had round-framed glasses, combed his hair to the side, and more than once told me to listen to the greats like Chick Webb and not just the white guys that made it on the radio.
He was in his 30th year of teaching, and he was not shy about giving advice. While I ate the burrito, Duran talked about playing baseball in college and how abruptly a life of sports could come to an end but how long a life of music could last. This was mature guidance, albeit, guidance that I see more value in now than I did then.
Duran would garnish each class with stories that worked to guide us towards being kind human beings. There were days in Jazz band where he would sit in the center of the tiered room, legs crossed, saxophone neck strap still on, and tell us about his past.
When Mr. Duran was in college at the University of Northern Colorado in the 1960s, the Count Basie Orchestra went through town and stopped at the university. UNC was known for its jazz programs and one of Basie’s saxophone players dropped out and they needed a replacement. Count Basie was one of the most influential musicians from the Swing Era – he was like a swing minimalist. Duran jumped at the opportunity. He got to travel and play with the band and experience life as a musician – more specifically as a musician of color. One time he and a buddy from the orchestra went into a diner and were refused anything more than water. Duran was Mexican and his friend was Black, and it was the middle of the 1960s. In protest, they sat in the big window of the diner for 3 hours, sipping their water, putting themselves on display for anyone who walked by.
I love that story – this man, my teacher, saw inequity and faced it with defiance.
Duran’s lessons were eye-opening. I didn’t realize that those stories served as parables on ethics and kindness until I became a teacher and started telling stories of my own to serve the same ends.
Duran used his history to help us become better humans. And isn’t that why we turn to history? Well, today, we’re going to take a lesson from Duran and examine the history of education in the U.S. And because the history of education is tremendous, we have to narrow it down. So we’ll focus on two aspects of history that set precedents for modern education, for the current system from which modern teachers are exiting.. We are going to start with Indian Boarding Schools, and then we’ll take a look at the American Industrial Revolution.
This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier.
Here is part 2: “Inheritance”
Caskey Russell: I'm going crabbing this weekend. I own a boat with my brothers. And yeah, we go out and catch crab. And there'll be salmon season soon. So I kind of got back into the ocean style lifestyle.
This is Caskey Russel. I got to catch up with him over a zoom call this summer. He is the Dean of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University. He grew up in Washington and is from the Tlingit tribe. I know Caskey because he taught for 17 years at the University of Wyoming, he was a dean of American Indian Studies, and he was my thesis chair and educational guide when I was at the university. Some of Caskey’s research for his PhD program dug into the history of Indian Education, specifically Indian boarding schools.
Caskey Russell: My grandmother and her brothers, aunts and uncles, all went to Chemawa Indian School, in Salem. And it was a mixed bag.
If you are asking yourself, wait, who’s this Caskey guy and what do Indian Boarding Schools have to do with teachers quitting? Here’s how. We know that historical atrocities leave a trace on modern institutions, so we need to recognize that Indian boarding schools have left their mark on modern education. They are a part of the system of inequity modern teachers have inherited. Indian Boarding Schools are an example of the deculturalization that has occurred in education. One of many. Attempts to strip communities of their cultures happened with just about everyone in this country at some point that didn’t fit into the male, able-bodied, straight, white, Anglo Saxon Protestant category. Traces of these inequities remain in education, deculturalization still happens, and teachers working towards inclusion in a system that was based on exclusion often run into roadblocks – think book bans or accusations that teachers are trying to indoctrinate kids - and these roadblocks are pushing teachers out of education. So to better understand the inequities in modern education, this thing that is frustrating teachers to the point of quitting, we need to look at where some of those attempts at deculturalization originated. We need to look at Indian Boarding Schools. And we need to listen to someone like Caskey.
Caskey Russell: They liked the sports. They like some of the music, but my uncle Stanley Pradovic, I remember he said, “I used to dream of feasts, seafood feasts that they had in Alaska.” And my grandmother was able to keep the Tlingit language because she didn't go to boarding school, but her brothers did not.
You step back and look at the whole system and how destructive and just kind of the cultural genocide aspect. My grandmother would say she didn't know her brothers because when she was born, her brothers were gone away from her earliest memories. And so she didn't get to know her brothers right away. It did break families up. And I was just chatting with my mom last night. My mom said the other family had no control over what it was determined for them. And again, not having control over that seems to be the key to it, nor having input in the education nor valuing…and then having a different model, different cultural notion of success. And then the military and the Christianization, all that together, just adds problem on top of problem, instead of being empowering and enlightening, that really becomes conforming, sort of thing.
What happened to Caskey’s family was a result of centuries of efforts to deculturalize tribes. Early European colonizers of the US set a precedent of trying to assimilate tribes into a single monolithic culture. Colonizers disregarded tribal traditions and languages and failed to see that tribes already valued education for their youth. So the assumption that public education started with Horace Mann in 1837 is an assumption that values eurocentric education over the public education that was already in the Americas.
Part of this is because the purposes of education differed. Many Native communities saw educating children as a means to pass on generational knowledge and teach children how to be a successful part of the community. 17th-century Plymouth settlers specifically saw education and literacy as a method to keep Satan away. Children needed to be able to read so they could read the Bible. A pilgrim minister explained:
“[There] is in all children, though no alike, a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon” (42).
But tribes did not beat down their children, did not read the Bible, and were able to survive and thrive in what Pilgrims saw as wilderness. So Pilgrims worked to impose their educational priorities onto tribes as a way to cast out Satan, and ultimately gain control of Indigenous people. This effort to assimilate and control only compounded over the next few centuries
By the 19thcentury, congress was also making efforts to deculturalize and assimilate tribes. Thomas Jefferson who had a big role in the removal of Native Americans from their lands also had a One Nation idea when it came to Native Americans – an assumption that required assimilation through education.
In 1816, Jefferson explained the value of education:
“Enlighten the people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. Although I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the world, yet I believe it susceptible of much improvement, and most of all in matters of government and religion; and that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is to be effected” (101)).
Jefferson believed a democratic, not a moral education which was what kids were getting at the time, was essential to democracy and he’s right, but his One Nation idea required a monolithic ideal that did not value other cultures. He wanted tribes to conform to his image of being American. This focus on conformity was baked into the American educational philosophy.
The Civilization Act of 1819 saw Thomas McKenney, the first head of the Office of Indian Affairs begin a process of Native American deculturization – they created a tribal school system run by white missionary teachers hoping to gain control of tribes through the power of education and assimilation. When Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, he saw some of the educational progress made by tribes as dangerous to America’s goals of gaining control of lands.
So, in 1830, America passed the Indian Removal Act, which brutally uprooted tribes and relocated them. Thirty years later, the Indian Peace Commission began reservation schools or day schools. But again, the cultural genocide that all of these acts and efforts had hoped for weren’t as effective as the government Wanted. This is when the government stepped in again. Paired with the Dawes Act of 1877 that worked to split reservation lands into private property began the start of the boarding school movement in 1879. Each step was a process working towards killing cultures in an attempt to control land, people, and ideas – all largely through some form of education. The start of the boarding school experiment can be attributed to Captain Richard Henry Pratt.
Caskey Russell: Pratt actually had a number of prisoners of war under his charge at St. Augustine, Florida. Besides being given military uniforms, they would teach them. And so the way he sold the first boarding schools was that instead of being at war with natives, you can educate them. The US could educate them, and kind of eradicate native culture through educating towards whiteness.
Caskey explained that the thought was that education would help the government avoid the expenses of war.
Caskey Russell: So there are a group of Plains Natives that were transported to St. Augustine, that was his kind of first experiment. And then he was able to go to Congress and get some money. And he took them to The Hampton Institute and eventually to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
So Pratt’s experiment led to the establishment of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879. This was around the same time that Pratt made a famous statement to congress:
Caskey Russell: He says to Congress, “You have heard Sherman say the only good Indian’s a Dead Indian. I would agree with this one kind of difference that you can kill the Indian save the man.” That's what education can do. That's the motto. And so, there was based on military kind of military boarding school style, and they opened up across the country. And they were often religiously affiliated, and religious institutions given them control of them. Which, you know, was another part of the boarding schools was the religious education, the eradication of tribal cultures, tribal religions, and the inculcation of Christianity, the various sects of Christianity across the country.
Each step taken by congress, in the name of education, was an effort to prioritize one culture over others, one idea of success over others - often through religious means, because again, early education was morality based. And they did this through legislation and through educational policy. Even though many of these efforts are pretty old, we still feel the educational effects of prioritizing a single culture or single idea of success.. Elizabeth Smith, a veteran teacher of 20 years who teaches on a reservation still sees this today.
Elizabeth Smith: Even though I can count on my hand, the number of students that I've taught that have graduated and have a white culture, sort of experience with what would be known as success, quote, unquote
Caskey sees this idea in what is tested or valued as a bottom line in public education. These are things that dismiss differentiated cultural values.
Caskey Russell: Did the schools reward students let's say for instance, this the schools Wind River reward students for knowing the traditional clan system, speaking Arapaho or Shoshone for knowing traditional ways, whether it's kind hunting, traditional use of land, traditional plants respond medicine, knowing being prepare, or being an apprentice for ceremony, none of that none of that culturally important stuff that was really important to Native people, especially young people they could dream of, you know, I'm going to fulfill these goals, these roles, these social roles one day, none of that's important, it seems like an American school system, right? When you're going to take the SAT or the ACT, are they going to value the hours you spent with your grandparents trying to learn the language or learning stories or learning traditional ways? Of course not.
This is a part of the inheritance of modern education, something teachers have to grapple with consistently. How can we educate students to be a part of a community that through legislation or policy doesn’t seem to value all traditions and cultures within that community? Or how to reach a measure of success that isn’t culturally misaligned or based on morality?
Caskey Russell:A handful of them might be successful in kind of the white American ideal. But that's not the only measure of success, nor is it maybe a healthy measure of success, right, for Native people. It would be wonderful to let other ideas of success, community success, success as a human being within a community flourish in the school setting.
This question of how to honor a diverse spectrum of students lands on teachers in the classroom. Though legislators and school boards may make efforts to dictate what can and can’t be taught in the classroom, the reality is it’s teachers and administrators who are working with kids – and kids from a wide spectrum of communities who have often been forced into a specific, standardized idea of success, which might not be culturally conscious. This is exactly how Indian boarding schools started, they forced kids from diverse tribes into a standardized idea of success initially using arguments for morality to do so. We recognize this as bad now, so why are forms of it still happening?
A big concern of some of the teachers who have decided to leave teaching was the start of limits and restrictions about what can and can’t be taught in the classroom. Many of these limits originate from argument about morality that are backed by religious groups that want to dictate what is happening in the classroom. Think of Mr. Wacker from last episode who is still frustrated with the banning of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for moral arguments or Mr. Atkinson who felt his curriculum being squeezed by people who didn’t appreciate class conversations about varying cultural perspectives on current events.
And, as we saw with the history of Native American education, this is not new – even though many founding fathers, who were deists themselves, advocated for the separation of church and state and were adamant that education focus on democratic values rather than religious values.
John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:
“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”
John Adams does not reference education and say study the Bible. And fellow former president James Madison did not mince words in a letter that pushed against church use of government land, which would later include schools:
“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”
And these beliefs worked their way into legislation with the inclusion of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson said was “A wall of separation between the church and state.” And though we know Jefferson’s view of education wasn’t very inclusive, if we combine this idea of the separation of church and state with a modern inclusive reading of Jefferson’s thoughts that education is to “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty,” We get a pretty good idea that education is a means to inform a free-thinking, diverse population that has different belief systems.
The founders knew the danger of letting religion seep its way into government - they just broke free of a country that allowed that to happen. So to have a system of education that would inform the whole mass of people without perpetuating the deculturalization we saw with the Indian Boarding schools, which have their origins in religious schooling, that system would need to accommodate the diversity of that mass of people.
This means that teachers would need the trust of the public and freedom to use their expertise to do their jobs, which would likely include selecting a wide range of materials to accommodate a diverse student population. This freedom and trust is not something being granted to modern teachers. There is currently a trend of parents, legislators, and school board members criticizing teacher efforts to support diverse student needs, often through moral critiques. Which stems from a lack of trust and the same morality based fear that sparked early deculturalization efforts in the United States. So, this isn’t new.
This is another part of what teachers have inherited from previous generations of educators, a lack of professional respect that translates to a lack of autonomy in the classroom, low pay, and a smattering of other things that are driving teachers from their jobs.
Here’s Elizabeth again:
Elizabeth Smith: And let me clarify, you know, when I say I love teaching, I do love teaching. To say that I love where I'm at right now, no, I do not. I am not satisfied with the way my job is going. I'm not satisfied with the way I feel inside every single day coming home from work. It's like a battlefield. It is intense. It is stressful. My family has noticed it and made comments on it, you know, and I don't have the patience to deal with my own children. And what am I going to do if I don't do this? I've got 20 years of expertise invested in this. And I've spent a lot of time learning how to do the things that I do and I enjoy improving it.
As of now, she is planning on staying in education. And all of those 20 years have been spent teaching on reservations. She attributes this in part to why she loves her work so much, why she’s planning on staying. There is a different level of respect that she sees in these schools and a higher level of appreciation, which goes a long way. But this doesn’t mean that there still isn’t a lack of professional trust or respect that she feels from being a teacher.
Elizabeth Smith: There's so much micromanaging and so many expectations that are put on us that are really insulting, actually, to our intelligence and to our professionalism. And I understand that there are teachers who are unaware of the ways that they're doing things are unprofessional and unintelligent. So I get the admin has to make some allowances and come up with some plans for how to deal with teachers that are not as aware of themselves and their skills as they should be, you know, so I understand that but the blanket statements..
To address where these blanket solutions may originate from, we are going to take another look at history through a little different lens than what we’ve been using so far.
When I asked teachers about what pushed them out of education, they echoed Elizabeth’s frustrations. Lack of respect was a major reason people left. But this is not new, like the history of inequity in education, the lack of professional respect has been a thread through public education’s history. So we are going to pull on that thread and look at the tradition of not valuing or respecting teachers.
Stephanie Reese: As a teacher, you're going to be marginalized, and you're not going to be taken seriously.
Ron Ruckman: I think a lot of administrators, They just don't have any idea there, and they don't really think of us as professionals, you know, they don't really think of us as being able to do our job.
Christie Chadwick: As a teacher, we're managing all these expectations. And I think that that's not acknowledged by the general population.
Teachers want to be seen as professionals. This came up in interviews in reference to being trusted to make decisions about curriculum, in being more autonomous, and in getting paid better. When thinking about why teachers have inherited a lack of professional respect in the present, it might have to do with the American Industrial Revolution:
Colby Gull: We were built on an industrial model. Get them in, stick the widget on him and get him out the other side of the door. Right. And that's just not how humans work.
This is Colby Gull, he is the managing director for the Trustees education Initiative in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming. Colby has been a teacher, a coach, a principal, and a superintendent. He’s run the educational gamut. And he points out that the structure of education does not necessarily promote the growing and sharing of ideas.
Colby Gull: And we live in now the idea economy. And we're still not teaching in the idea economy. We're teaching in the industrial economy where you buying and selling goods. But our economy now is based on ideas and sharing of ideas and debating and discussing, and I don't know, people make a lot of money with their ideas.
And this structure of education, this factory style model, which looks similar to the military approach seen with Indian Boarding Schools, started and gained popularity during the American Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19thcentury. Along with this more industrial model the precedent for the amount of respect teachers received was set. I see several ways in which history has handed down a dismissive attitude toward teachers.
As Common Schools gained popularity in the mid-19thcentury, young women were also moving to cities for better economic opportunities. And these women were hired as teachers in droves because they could be paid substantially less than men. This compounded since teaching was seen as respectable employment for women - it matched the stereotype that women were naturally nurturing. Both the image of teachers as nurturers and the trouble with pay is consistent with what we see today.
Here’s Stephanie Reese, a former PE teacher who left education and became the general manager of Blacktooth Brewing Company.
Stephanie Reese: Absolutely money matters. I was in so much debt. You know, with loans, whether they're student loans, or just credit card, or whatever it is, I had a lot in college, had a lot while I was teaching. and teaching just doesn't give you that opportunity.. And level increases are a fucking joke. Unless you've been in, you've been in I call it like, like you've been in the pen. You've been in for 34 years, you've given one kidney, you have four degrees, master's degrees, preferably doctorate even better, and you've given up your will to live, and those those things will give you more money.
Part of the consistently poor pay has to do with the hierarchical structure in education. After the Civil War, the first iteration of the department of education was created, in order to track what the nation’s schools were doing. So there was an expectation for the availability of public schooling. Once the American Industrial Revolution hit towards the end of the 19thcentury, factory jobs boomed. More people flocked to cities meaning there were more kids and more of a need for teachers. With more men transitioning to better paying factory jobs, even more women were moving to the classroom. The large number of women serving as teachers was accepted at a time when women weren’t given many professional opportunities. Administrative roles – principals, superintendents, and the like – were held by men. And many high school positions were still held by men. So a hierarchy that prioritized male control and male decision making was very clearly in place. Mark Perkins, a former teacher and administrator and current parent and professor of Educational Research methods at the University of Wyoming, points out that this hierarchy has remained even if the original gendered reasons for its creation haven’t.
MarkPerkins: I think there's a power hierarchy. And I don't think that teachers have been empowered enough to express their professional expertise. I think that teachers are approached as a service industry. And so, we want teachers to parrot curriculums. We want them to be experts in their content, as long as their expertise doesn't contradict with our preconceived notions of reality. So I think there's a sociological phenomenon that goes on in schools. I think it's a common phenomenon.
The system of becoming an administrator in some cases was once based on seniority. So the most senior teacher would inherit the role of principal. This changed when a degree was required to become a principal or superintendent, which also prevented women from gaining access to these administrative positions by making them require a degree because women weren’t often able to access such an education. So these days, some administrators are in the position without having had a tremendous amount of time in education, which can make administrator impact or insight into the classroom difficult. Ron Ruckman, who just left teaching after 23 years,explains that the lack of experience can be glaringly obvious for some administrators who are disconnected from the teachers.
Ron Ruckman: You know, and then there's other administrators that just don't want to have anything to do with your classroom, you know, and they want to make decisions, but they don't want to, they don't communicate with you or ask you things. There's a lot of that especially in rural districts. We've spent so much time and money in this district doing initiatives and buying products. And, you know, I can't imagine how much money we've just wasted, you know, buying stuff that, you know, on, based on a good salesman that convinced somebody that they needed it. Whereas had they come and asked us would have been like, no, no, that that would be a really dumb thing to do. That's not going to work. You know, but there's just that kind of an apt idea that teachers really are, you know, don't really know what they're what, you know, they don't really know anything other than their subject. And we're, we're pretty smart. Most of us, you know. (Beeping)
This was perfect timing. That beeping was for a fire. Ron is the Battalion Chief for the Pinedale fire department - he has a lot of roles in his community because he is intelligent and capable and because of not being respected for being intelligent and capable, he quit teaching to pursue the other things he’s good at.
Some of the ways teachers are not seen as capable has to do with how education is standardized. In the late 19th century, as cities got larger and more and more kids were put into schools, urban schools started to split students into grade levels. Around this time and into the early 20th century, there was a development of what historian David Tyack (Tie-yak) described as the One Best System of education – this saw a focus on specific, easily assessed, and easily sequenced subjects of study. This also did more to highlight non-academic items like good attendance, behavior, and willingness to follow directions, which all aid in creating people who would fit into an industrial economy. This structure was useful when more and more students were placed into a class. And by the early 20thcentury, politicians and administrators were seeing schools as being a solution to the nation’s woes. Traces of these industrialized values are very present in modern classrooms, and it makes Allison Lash, who taught art in New York City and Austin, Texas, sad at what she sees.
Allison Lash: A friend of mine had said one thing about why he's doesn't like education is just that you go to school to learn how to work, basically, to get you ready to go out in the world and work. And that's sad. Like, I just want to live. I don't want to worry about working and how to make money and pay your school loans and your bills.
It used to bother me that kids would get rewarded for being in school every day. And it's all about money. It's all about how many kids are in their seats every day for the school district to make money. And it was sad, it was sad that kids would win awards for like, being their everyday awards. Like who really cares? They're totally ignoring mental health and even if the kid is sick, you stay home. It's really sad when you go into elementary school and you see the kids quiet and lined up in a line and like “shhhhh,” and I remember teaching that and I know that I guess order is not wanted, and I don't know if needed is even the right answer. Teach kids to be a good person.
The rise of industry during the American industrial revolution also saw a rise in unions and strikes. Because teachers were mostly women, and many of the strikes of the time were more militant and potentially violent, women were less likely to take part in strikes and efforts to gain better pay. This was not helped by the fact that men held leadership positions in education, so they did not make efforts to better the work environments of teachers because these men just weren’t affected. The National Education Association, which was founded in 1857, wasn't just for teachers, so administrators, men, were also in charge of Union happenings. It wasn’t until 1910 when Ella Flagg Young was elected as the NEA president that the union started taking more steps to help teachers. But the difficulty in changing and revising educational structures is still present. Chris Rothfuss, a parent and Wyoming State Senator and member of the Senate Education committee, knows this all too well. While we have a coffee in Laramie, Wyoming, Chris explains that change may require a cultural shift inspired by younger generations .
Chris Rothfuss: I think a large part of the reason why we develop into what we are really is the way this country industrialized and grew and had a middle-class work ethic through the mid-20th century, that shaped a lot of the way things are done. And the philosophy about why things are done, the way they're done, where there is a common viewpoint that I think is handed down from generation to generation that if you just work hard, put your nose to the grindstone, that you will be successful, and things will go your way, and you'll have a good life. I think part of what's changing that, is that this emerging generation is realizing that while that may have been true, a lot of what allowed that to be true, was frankly, taking on debt that is generational debt and handing that debt down to the next generation. So effectively exploiting the future for the benefit of the present. This younger generation isn't enthused about that as they're learning more about it, and rightly so. And they don't see a path to a traditional life as being what they aspire to.
A potential reason for major shifts not having occurred in the past might have to do with economic uncertainties. For every economic depression and war to occur in the 20thcentury, money was pulled from education to help the war or economic problems, but that money was not necessarily given back to education. Teacher pay was often cut when other unionized jobs like factory work was not cut because there was an assumption that teachers, being mostly women, would not need to support their families. During WWII, when more women went to work in factories, those women who were still teaching saw how much better the pay was for the women who went to work in factories. The impact of war and economic troubles also resulted in a more factory-like structure in the classroom. This was often a result of trying to accommodate a larger student population with less resources, and it was also an easier way to measure student achievement. This created an educational structure that overwhelms teachers, which makes best practices more difficult and stretches teachers thin. Molly Waterworth, who just left teaching this year after 8 years in the classroom, explains the reality of being overwhelmed as a teacher.
Molly Waterworth: The reality is that if you have 150 kids, there's no way that you're going to grade all of their work in seven and a half hours that you have with them during the day. There's no way. It's just a mathematical impossibility.
The truth is, teachers have inherited being paid poorly, being overworked, and not being treated with respect. Sadly, much of this is associated with the trend of women in the profession within a patriarchal society. And the teaching profession is still dominated by women. The NEA reports that about 3 quarters of teachers are women, and teachers still get payed about 74% of what equivalent degreed professions earn.
So, teachers are leaving education, but the reasons they are leaving are a result of problems that have been percolating since the start of public education in the United States. Efforts at deculturalization seen with the Indian Boarding Schools have left an impact and pattern on modern education, just like the treatment of women and industrialization of education has left an impact on how teachers are currently treated.
This does not mean that public education needs to end, but like any inheritance, we need to acknowledge and deal with the problems. We need to see that there have been attempts to address inequity in education with efforts like Brown v Board in 1954, Title IX in 1972, and the disabilities act of 1975. But continuing to return to a standardized, one-size-fits-all approach that matches an industrial structure of education just does not work – it doesn’t value teacher expertise, nor does it meet the students with unique cultural backgrounds or needs where they are. And because teachers have been tasked with addressing these inequities with limited freedom and trust and resources, many are calling it quits. This needs to change – teachers need to be able to disclaim this inheritance for their sake and for the sake of their students.
Next time, we will look at how the perception of teachers might be influenced by pop-culture.
TEASE: “Robin Williams isn’t going to do that.”
That will be next time on Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of.
This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Tennesee Watson. Voice Acting by Rory Mack, David Whisker, Rick Simineo, and Markus Viney who also offered editing help. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Elizabeth Smith, Caskey Russell, Stephanie Reese, Ron Ruckman, Molly Waterworth, Christy Chadwick, Colby Gull, Mark Perkins, and Allison Lash for taking time to sit down and chat with me. This dive into history was greatly aided by two books: American Education: A History by Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr. and Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States by Joel Spring……This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.
I was a Junior in high school when my English teacher, Ms. Dianne Panazzo assigned us to write a paper that explored our backgrounds. I wrote about a neighborhood game of capture the flag. In the middle of our game, we came across a soft-top, convertible. It was parked in the lumber yard of the hardware store at the end of our block. Our pursuit of the flag came to a standstill to look at this car. We lived in a small town in western New York – a place of rusted trucks and economy vehicles.
One of the boys that lived across the street from us always wore camo and did reconnaissance missions into his neighbor’s house. He was pretty sure the car belonged to a guy who was trying to shut down his dad’s business. With the logic of 10-year-olds, we felt a sense of duty to retaliate against any encroachment on locally owned, businesses so we stacked lumber and bags of concrete on the car.
Then, my camo-wearing neighbor climbed onto the hood of the car and threw a cinderblock into the windshield. There was this cinematic pause, as we gathered our senses, and then we destroyed that car. Lumber and tree branches went through the windows, the soft top was punctured – more cinderblocks made pieces of the car – it was a mess. When we were done, we finished our game of capture the flag and went home at curfew. Later, 2 police officers visited our door, looking for the vandals. Lawlessness that my oldest brother assured them that we had nothing to do with.
My essay explored how this story was a metaphor for rock and roll. I know, but it was high school – I was trying to be edgy and profound.
My teacher, Ms. Panazzo, applauded my writing and had me walk across the hall to Mr. Wacker’s room. This was not because Wacker was more or less of an expert on writing or deviance. Panazzo sent students to Wacker as a way to celebrate and share writing. These were teachers who collaborated often, believed in the writing process, and took efforts to teach students how valuable their writing was. Sending a student to Wacker was a novel way to give kids a feeling of getting published.
Wacker was on plan, crouched over a stack of papers, pen in hand, at his desk in the back of an empty, dimly-lit classroom. I had never interacted with him before. He had a reputation of being dynamic, kind, and willing to be outrageous – he’s the guy that put on a foam ten-gallon hat and had a stick horse race in front of the school at a pep-rally. To Wacker, shame was for suckers.
I told him that Panazzo had sent me. He had me sit in a chair to the side of his desk so he could listen to me read my essay. I read and Wacker nodded, gasped, said, “uh-huh,” now and again – all of the things that I wanted to hear as a young writer.
He handed me praise balanced with some advice and sent me back to class. I was impressed by how willing he was to listen to me, to inspire and encourage me. A kid that wasn’t his student, interrupting his planning time, to read an essay about young stupidity. That moment was pivotal in my desire to be a writer. And I’m not the only student that Panazzo sent to read to Wacker. My wife, Jennica – she goes by Jennie – had a similar experience.
This is what made Wacker a great teacher and what inspires me in my teaching practice still. His willingness to take time for others, whether he knew them or not.
But Wacker isn’t a teacher anymore. 15 years and over a thousand students after our first meeting, Wacker quit. He told me it was a matter of life or death.
This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus.
My name is Charles Fournier. I am a high school English teacher. In the 10 years that I’ve been teaching, brilliant teachers have been leaving the profession, my wife included. And those numbers have only increased with Covid. So in order to root out why teachers are leaving and reflect on my own ambivalence towards teaching, I spent this summer traveling, researching, and interviewing teachers, parents, students, legislators, professors, and administrators to try to find out why good people are leaving education.
This is a national problem. In February of 2022, the National Education Association (NEA) reported that 55% of teachers are thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned. And last spring, in my state of Wyoming, a University of Wyoming survey showed that 65% of surveyed Wyoming teachers would quit teaching if they could. Think of that…about two thirds of the teachers in your kids’ school right now want to leave. That’s an astonishing number. So I figured Wyoming would be a good place to start. If it’s bad here, a state that is seen as a haven for having some of the highest teacher salaries in the past decade, we know it’s bad. Maybe salaries aren’t the only thing causing teachers to leave.
This podcast will explore the reasons teachers leave. We will look at how low pay, ignored mental health, lack of respect and autonomy, and mandated education policy influence teachers’ decisions to go. And how these things are not new…take a look at our education system’s history. We’ve talked about reforms for generations. Or think about how teachers are depicted in movies or in political debates. The images of martyrs or slobs also make an impact. Things have been accumulating for a while. And we could see this crisis a long way off.
I have wanted to write this podcast since my wife left teaching. And then two more of my favorite colleagues left education just one after the other. So today, I will be starting close to home to find out why teachers are leaving.
But before we begin, a quick warning, this episode discusses miscarriage, abuse, and suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call the national suicide hotline at 988.
Here is part 1: “Fight, Flight, or Apathy”
Jennica: My first year was with you was a ton of fun.
Jennie and I started teaching at the same school in a small agricultural town on the eastern border of Wyoming. I taught English and she taught Chemistry and Biology.
Jennica: Then you wanted to kind of get out of education for a little bit. So you went and got your Masters.
I returned to school to get a Masters degree in Literature, and Jennie started teaching in a new district. She collaborated with the University in town, took kids on field trips into the community and had a wonderful time teaching. But after I earned my Masters, we moved again, and we got to teach together again in a new district. This was what we’d talked about since our Freshman year in college – to teach in the same building together for the rest of our careers.
And working together was amazing, but we didn’t realize the toll teaching was taking.
Jennica: We had gotten pregnant. And we felt like, oh, gosh, like, we're gonna double down on this career. And we're going to be teachers till we retire. And that felt awful. I felt defeated.
Thinking of teaching for another 25-30 years made us very aware that we were more dissatisfied with teaching than we thought. We liked the idea of having kids but now it felt like we were stuck in this career. Then in October, we had a miscarriage. Jennie told me that she felt something wrong in class while she was teaching. She eyed the door and waited for someone to pass her room, so she didn’t leave her students unattended. When a principal walked past, she asked him to cover her class, and she ran to the bathroom. Jennie said it was all so fast for her – it was almost a blur. And then she went back to teaching during the same class period in a fog. In another profession, it would have been easy to take the afternoon off, but here she would have had to plan for a sub, which included potentially explaining why she needed coverage on such short notice. She wasn’t prepared at that time to do this for such a personal and confusing experience. She said it was surreal for her to brush herself off, put on a smile, and keep on with her lesson. She wasn’t even completely sure if she had miscarried until it was confirmed that afternoon at the doctor’s office.
There are no standard ways to grieve. We went to the mountains and talked and thought and cried and we tried to answer why such things happen.
Jennie’s mom always tells us, “You know, everything happens for a reason.” So we were trying to find one.
Jennica: It was sad to have our miscarriage but at the same time, it was like, well, the door’s open again, and leaving this career, is something that I've been thinking about for a little bit. And so it just solidified that I should take advantage of this moment to do something that I wanted to do.
When Jennie was still pregnant, our lives seemed laid out in front of us, and we had accepted that. But our miscarriage gave us a moment to reflect, and we realized that the life we almost had – a life that included teaching for the rest of our careers – was not the life we wanted. We felt like if it wasn’t our time to become parents, maybe we were supposed to be doing something else or taking another path. I had just gotten my Masters, so it was Jennie’s turn to decide what she wanted her life to look like.
Many of the reasons Jennie wanted to leave education had a lot to do with not feeling valued and trusted as a professional – all things that contributed to her own self-worth:
Jennica: I didn't feel like I had a lot of autonomy. It was all guaranteed and viable curriculum. And I didn't have a lot of wiggle room.
For those of you who don’t know, a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum or GVC is an effort to ensure the same quality of curriculum is presented to all students. They are the culmination of efforts to standardize education, and they act like a middle-man to the Common Core Standards. Most states adopted the Common Core Standards, which if followed should already guarantee an equitable education, but the GVCs are used to map how those standards are reached.
Jennica: I felt like I was getting critiqued by people that should have been showing me what to do or helping me to grow. And I just didn't get a lot of affirmation that I needed. I got it in my reviews. I always got really great reviews from administrators, but I just didn't get it from my department. I didn't feel like I was an intelligent person. And I didn't feel like I was doing enough at any given time.
Part of this feeling came from having to play the role of a disciplinarian, to uphold rules that she didn’t see value in.
Jennica: I would have appreciated the administrators focusing more on what the students were learning in my class versus how students were behaving. And it's strange that I was expected to be a disciplinarian with absolutely no teeth. I don't even think I had the option of having kids have detention after school with me. I think I would have gotten in trouble for making them clean desks after they drew little wieners on the desks. I just felt like I had no control. If I were to send students to the office because of their behavior. It's like a mark against you. You know, you have teachers bragging that they've never sent students to the office. You can hear administrators talking about, “Well that teacher always sends me that student, they need to handle it on their own.” But there's really no way to handle it in your classroom.You know, you call home and the parents just as much of a jerk to you as the child is. And there's just, there's no respect for the teacher from any end.
As I did interviews, I kept coming back to these questions: What is the role of teachers in education? How many hats do teachers really need to wear? Teachers are expected to do a lot and sometimes it feels like that includes being a parent. Most teachers have probably had this similar conversation with a parent. The parent says something like, “I don’t know what to do with (insert student name). What should I do?”
This is a tough question. When I’ve tried to answer it, it’s from the lens of a teacher, not a parent. Because if my answer was from what I would do as a parent, it might seem like I’m criticizing their parenting.
Jennica: I don't want to have to be the parent, I want to be the teacher. And I think that parents should let teachers be teachers, and that they should play the parent role.
I'm an expert in my field. I have a degree in both chemistry and education, and I understand how people learn and I understand what needs to be taught. And parents aren't experts in that field. And I don't think that they need to think that they are experts or control that. Do I think that teachers should just go in without like it's the Wild West and just do whatever they want? No, but I think the oversight should not be parent driven. I think it needs to be expert driven.
This would mean trusting teachers as experts in both their content and in the delivery of that content. That trust might start with getting rid of phrases like, Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Trusting teachers to do their jobs recognizes that teachers “Can Do” that’s why they “Can Teach.” If we continue to distrust teachers’ capabilities to do their jobs, we might have to rely on a new phrase as teachers continue to leave, a phrase that Jennie came up with - Those who can’t, teach…anymore.
Outside of education, most advisory boards of any field are typically made up of experts in those fields. Education boards and even education legislation aren’t often like that. School boards are made up of non or former educators, and education legislation, at least in Wyoming, is rarely developed by educators.
Questioning teacher expertise is a national issue. And the national issues are contributing to why teachers are leaving.
Jennica: So the the micro environment that I was in played a part, but then when you went home and read the news, or you, you thought about the bigger picture when it comes to how teachers are viewed, that didn't help it didn't soothe me when I got home.
Hearing about school shootings is devastating and terrifying. Every story makes me think about what if it happened here? When Jennie taught with me, my first thought when going through my imaginary scenario was always, “Will she be safe? Could I prevent a shooter from making their way towards her end of the building?”
Jennica: Thinking about teachers having guns in the classroom, thinking about how I should protect students that weren't mine, they weren't my children, and how it was my job to sort of be selfless, you know, throw my body in front of them. I didn't really feel like that was my role. I'm really good at teaching people how to balance an equation. And I'm really good at inspiring kids and coaching them on what they're good at and encouraging them to keep going through hard problems. But I don't really think that my role as a teacher was to be a martyr for other people's children.
So we had had a lockdown. That was a real lockdown.
There was a shooting in the neighborhood near the school, and the shooter was still on the loose, so this is what caused the lockdown.
A lockdown requires classes to be buttoned down – doors shut, blinds down, students out of sight of any windows and silent. We practice these often. Once, during a teacher development day, we practiced with fake active shooters to hear what guns would sound like going off in the hallways. I remember sitting in a classroom with my brother – we also teach together – and thinking about the absurdity of having to have officers fire blanks from automatic rifles to prepare us for what could happen.
So Jennie was caught in a real lockdown, meaning she had to get students behind a locked door.
Jennica: And I was just panicking about the students and they weren't really like on my side. They weren't coming into the classroom, they weren't staying quiet. And it was just a terrible experience. And I just didn't want to be trapped in that. That's not what I signed up for. I signed up to teach people things, not to save their lives.
So after 7 years of teaching, she left.
Jennica: When I got accepted into pharmacy school, I was expecting to wait like two weeks after my interview to find out but they pulled me into the dean's office. And they told me that I was accepted, and I just started crying right away because I knew I could quit teaching. I knew that I was going to escape an environment that I was very sad to be in every day. They cried because they thought I cried because I was getting into pharmacy school, but really I was crying because I was getting out of education.
This transition out of teaching had a massive impact on her well-being.
Jennica: My self-esteem is incredibly higher than it was before. You know, I used to be very depressed, and I was overweight when I was a teacher. And I just didn't really feel good about myself. And I wasn't getting a lot of positive affirmation from my peers and other teachers. I really thought, like, maybe I'm just not very smart or capable.
I'm sure that you remember the first time that I came home from that anatomy class and I came home with a list of anatomy, and I just bawled.
She worried that she wasn’t smart enough. But, she studied, sometimes over the phone with me as she commuted to her classes, and she finished at the top of that class. And she’s continued to be at the top of her pharmacy classes since.
Jennica: I have a 4.0, in pharmacy school, and I have a lot of achievements. And it's something that I wasn't made to believe that I could do before.
Of course, Jennie’s decision to leave education makes me think more about my own longevity in this career. I know why Jennie quit, and I get it. I can’t say that I haven’t thought about leaving either – I have and I do. And I think about it more and more when the people that I admire and love leave or when the woes of America’s problems are traced back to the education system – a system that is ironically hobbled then blamed for not meeting all of the expectations placed on it.
Shane Atkinson taught in the same building Jennie and I taught in, and when he left teaching, he told me that he found a career that allowed him to merge his morals and values with his work.. He actually started his career teaching with one of the most noble reasons I’ve ever heard.
Shane met me for a drink in Fort Collins. I set up mics at a picnic bench, shaded by a low hanging tree – Shane rode up on his bike, ordered a beer, and told me about when he decided to become a teacher.
Atkinson: It’s gonna sound almost untrue how crazy it was.
Shane went to college for journalism – he thought of it as the 4thbranch of government. While Shane was in college, his cousin, James, who was more like an older brother, taught middle school in the same town. During this time, James was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma after having battled colon cancer and liver cancer since he was 18. The Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was fatal.
Atkinson: When he passed away, we were just floored by the support from the school from the students. Students were coming into hospice. We had stacks and stacks of letters and cards that kids had written. A kid came in and played guitar when he was in his last days, played a song for him. We went to his classroom, saw where he taught, all of us together. His coworkers were telling us how he would schedule his chemo appointments super early in the morning, so he couldn't make it to his first class. So he was teaching just extremely ill, and I was honestly, you know, losing my brother. But one of the final thoughts that I had throughout all of that was that he made an impact, right? On all these kids. It was very clear looking at all the cards and going through all of that. He made an impact and he was taken too early. And you know, 25 years old, go forward in your life and think how many other kids might have impacted? So the last words I told him was I'm changing my major. I'm going to try to impact some of these kids that you didn't get the opportunity to.
And things went well in the beginning. Shane felt like he was reaching kids with important conversations – he even developed a new course called Human Genocide and Behavior. Then cultural shifts started to affect Shane’s classroom in the 13 years between when he started teaching and when he left.
Atkinson: And in that time period, there were immense changes in education, in our society, and politics in the way that people thought about each other and treated each other, and it started to come into my classroom. And it happened slowly. It's the frog in boiling water analogy. Because had my first year of teaching then even remotely close to my last, I would have been gone after a year.
When I asked Shane about shifting cultural views about education, we started to talk about the purpose of education - Why are we here? For Shane, he turns to the founding fathers:
Atkinson: I think many of our founding fathers have been attributed to this quote, that a democracy is only as strong as its citizens are educated.
This idea can be seen in a 1786 letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Wythe. Jefferson wrote:
“I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”
Jefferson and other founders made efforts to prioritize and secure educational opportunities for the general public. In so many words, they emphasized that a public needs to be educated so they can recognize their own rights and privileges and make sure the government is working for them. Of course, this so-called generalized public that the founding fathers were referencing was exclusive to white men but over the decades we’ve expanded that to all Americans.
Shane held onto the idea that education was for helping develop good and active citizenry.
Shane: So, I really do think that in the social sciences, it should be about creating good citizens, people who are informed people who can work together, even a spirit of bipartisanship, that you can have different viewpoints. We need to start with a certain set of facts that we can all agree on. But ultimately, there's a lot of room for differing opinions. I mean, we're all a product of the experiences that we have lived and those around us that influence us to think about certain things the way we do. And that's great, I think it's important to understand and notice and realize that, and then also realize that it's not necessarily always right. That there isn’t always a right answer. But sometimes there are wrong answers.
Part of creating good citizens in Shane’s mind was to build quality relationships with students, which required some authenticity on his part. So if a student asked Shane his opinion on an issue, he felt like this opened up an opportunity to have an authentic, civilized conversation with his class.
Shane: I almost felt like I had to be honest with them, but also demonstrate here's how I view this issue. But I'm just one person. And here's why I view it that way. And here are some of my experiences and biases. Identify your biases. Then you can also show that, “Look, I respect you. And I can earn your respect, although we disagree a lot with one another.”
And that's really what our country is lacking right now. I used to be able to have a conversation with kids about a current issue. And 100% explore both sides of that issue. If overwhelmingly, the class is on one side, the teacher's role at that point is not to reaffirm what they believe. It's to say there is another side to this issue.
This is part of the joy of teaching. Challenging students to have a metacognitive moment or a moment when they can reflect on why they think the way that they do. This level of critical thinking and conversation is where learning occurs.
That used not be problematic in the first five years that I taught. It started becoming…and it happened like that…where if I said, even just in through the Socratic method or just getting kids to, to consider the other prospective, parents were coming in parent meetings, administration meetings where it was like, “Eid you say this to your class?” Yeah, we're talking about current issues that are happening in the world right now. How can you really teach kids to think of the world in which they live if you can’t broach these subjects.
Shane points out that censuring what teachers can broach in an academic arena is making everyone suffer. I know that feeling. I used to teach the President’s State of the Union address every year to look at rhetoric in the speech, but I stopped because of constantly rising political tensions and recommendations from administrators to avoid politics.
For Shane, when he couldn’t have important conversations in his classroom, that was suffering. Those limits hinder the effectiveness of a classroom, and they can take away from a teacher’s joy of having an impact. This inevitably hurts kids..
Atkinson: I feel like you have three options. Fight, flight, or apathy. So you always hear about these teachers who are just like, I don't care, “Whatever. Here's a worksheet. Sure you want an A, I'll give you an A. You don't have to learn a dang thing.” I feel like those are your choices. One of those three paths.
And I was 37 at the time, and, if there's going to be a career change… Can I find something else to do that more aligns my beliefs, and at the very least, doesn't emotionally scar me? Everyone knows about the Sunday scaries. Or you come back from winter break, and you can't sleep the night before summer break. And there's just a sense of impending dread and doom. And I think that's because you're constantly in that, what do I do? Do I fight? Do I flight? Or do I become apathetic? Because what I'm doing is not aligning with what's best practice and what's best for students, what's best for society. They tell you all the time, this isn't just a job. This is more than a job. Which, to me, says that there's some sort of moral benefit. I mean, they're not paying you, that's for sure. So what do you gain from that? Well, it's the belief that you're making a difference.. And the administration will tell you that all the time. If you don't think you are, you don't think you can. Then what do you do?
I am very familiar with the feeling of dread - once the theme for Sunday night football plays out, my gut drops. This cycle of feeling dread or feeling like you’re making a difference all while deciding if you should be fighting the system, fleeing the system, or becoming apathetic to the system is one that several teachers brought up in their interviews. And it’s a trend that Shane’s wife noticed and was concerned about.
You get home from work, and you talk about what's going on in your life, how you're doing, how your day went. And I would just come home, just fuming, fuming. And she would say, she told me for years, “Leave or do something else. This is not good for you. This is not good for your mental state.” And then I would get an email from a kid that I had five years ago, checking in saying, “Hey, I just wanted to give you an update. You know, I'm on my way to grad school. I'm studying this thing. I still think about stuff I learned in your class.” And it's like, wow, and it brings you right back. And my wife said it's an abusive relationship. It's a domestic violence relationship. He can beat the crap out of you. And you are beaten down, emotionally scarred, and then it's a hug, an I love you, a nice gesture, and it sucks you right back in, just to get abused again. And my wife was in an abusive relationship when she was younger. And that's how she described it.
Shane left teaching after 13 years, and he now works in government. He rides his bike to work, and he said that he’s excited to go to work, that he’s never actually worked harder than he is at this moment.
Every Time I talk with Shane, I walk away feeling like it was time well spent. I end up being a little fired up about something. This is a big reason students loved him – even students who didn’t see eye to eye with him. Shane made them think and talk and explore their ideas, and he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his values for the letters of appreciation, though I’m pretty sure that those letters will still be finding their way to Shane.
And this is what makes me worried for education. Good teachers are leaving. Teachers that make impacts on kids. Teachers that a person will write to years after graduation to catch up, to say thank you, or to invite them to a wedding. When these teachers, the ones reaching kids and making a lasting healthy impact are not willing to stay, we should worry. This is not something to dismiss.
And it bothers me that when teacher concerns are brought forward, I’ve heard people respond with statements like “Good Riddance,” “It could be worse,” or “At least you get the summers off.” This goes back to the idea of abuse that Shane spoke about earlier and even the martyrdom that Jennie talks about. When teachers speak out about the stress, burn out, or even threats and intimidation, it seems like they shouldn’t complain because it could be worse. Just because I’m not dead doesn’t mean a knife in the thigh is any better – just ask Portia.
And if you didn’t get that last reference to Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar, that’s okay, We’re not here for great Shakespeare jokes, we’re here because Wacker, the teacher from the start of this episode and a man who would have chuckled and spit water out about that really lame joke, quit teaching. And he’s adamant about saying that he quit – he took it very personally.
Jaye Wacker taught for a total of 31 years, 29 in one district, and he quit 2 months before he could retire. Wacker loved, and I mean LOVED teaching – especially when he felt like he had freedom in his classroom. Freedom to listen to stories from other students or to create lessons that he knew were effective.
Wacker: When you're not limited, you can teach. When you're not limited, you can push kids to reach a potential. There's things about what drove me out - limits. We had the best book room, and part of it came from IB. But we had an absolutely unbelievable book room. And little by little, we lost books.
Wacker pointed to a few examples where books were removed from classes and the book room. The book that hurt the most was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison is one of 3 Americans to have won the Nobel prize for literature. She is the only woman and the only person of color of those 3 winners. And, she is the only one of the three to have had her book removed from Wacker’s shelves.
And I'm incredibly bitter because kids desperately need The Bluest Eye. Yeah, it's a tough book. It has really tough content. And guess what, these are important issues in our contemporary society. And so we address them, we face them. And so it was just little by little, our, I hesitate to say freedoms, but in some ways, not freedom, the breadth of what we could teach became more and more limited. And that restriction, I guess, I've always chafed against restrictions like that. And I just hated that.
On top of the restrictions of books were the restrictions set in place by standardized inspired curriculum or the tests associated with that curriculum, which started to take precedence over things that Wacker knew allowed for engaging and authentic learning.
Wacker was working on sentence modeling with his students. It was an effective approach from a pivotal figure in grammar instruction named Constance Weaver - not a standardized assessment company .
And suddenly, we were having these incredibly complex, beautiful sentences. And so then, when I have these students that are creating these things that…friggin art. I took what Weaver had, and then I Wackered it and ran with that. And what I was seeing out of that was amazing. And none of it worked on the GVC. I was teaching students to write brilliantly, and it wasn't going to work on the GVC. It was so frustrating because I think the sentences were the building block of thinking, not of writing, of thinking. And so then when they had those tools, and then that thinking and writing…everything exploded from there, but I dropped it because it didn't work on the GVC.
And then Wacker narrated this:
He motioned to shooting himself in the chin.
Wacker said this in jest, but the threat of suicide is present for teachers and it came up again and again in interviews. Several teachers mentioned having suicidal ideation when they woke up or when they were sitting in their cars before going into school. Many said they had to go to therapy or be placed on anti-depressants. This was also serious for Wacker and his wife Jenny - we both married a Jennie. He pointed to a spot just outside of his dining room, right behind where I was sitting, near a lazy boy recliner and the glass door entrance to his house before he said,
Wacker: And I was standing right there when I told Jenny that, and I confessed that I was ready to kill myself. Because there's no way out. We need the salary. But I hate myself, and I hate what I'm doing. And I think that's when she took very seriously I needed to do something different. And she was a motivating force because I lacked the confidence in myself to believe I can do something different. But my identity was being a teacher. My whole sense of self was being a teacher, even more so than being a dad. And I suddenly was a complete and utter failure at who I thought I was, and you talk about crashing. Jeez-Oh. Tthat was a that was a rough night.
Wacker is a good friend of mine. Hearing this breaks my heart. It’s important to ask why teachers get to this point, and it’s important to listen. For many, it had to do with not feeling valued or feeling smart in their roles. For Wacker, it had to do with what was lost over the years of teaching – over the shifts in policy and resources and ability to make an impact. When teaching is associated with terms like a calling or a vocation, it isn’t a surprise that people attach their identity with the work. And separating from the work can be devastating.
Wacker: I left because I wasn't making a difference anymore.
My last year in the classroom, I did a worksheet packet for To Kill a Mockingbird. And I've yet to forgive myself. I was trying to find something in there, because this is what people do. They do these things. So it must be good teaching. And little by little, those packets just started sitting on the back window sill because I just couldn't bring myself to face them. They were the sort of thing I hated. But then I couldn't seem to address these other things that needed to be on these tests. And I just felt like a failure. I just I felt like a failure. I wasn't keeping up. I wasn't exciting. I wasn't…it just I wasn't turning kids on to English. I felt if anything, I was turning them off. So it's time to do something different.
I literally was becoming the teacher I despised. I hate myself for that. But I needed a job. I've had to come to grips with the fact that I love teaching. And by the time I quit, I didn't love myself as a teacher. Again, look in the mirror. I became what I didn't like, what I despised. I became that to a certain degree. And that that hurts.
I used to think ideally, my ideal retirement would be teach half time, where I could still get that fix of working with kids and literature and writing. I never thought I'd quit early.
When thinking about why teachers are leaving Wacker puts it simply – Teachers teach for the love of it, and many teachers are leaving because they don’t love it anymore.
Wacker: And it’s got to be love of kids first. For me with English, then its love of literature and writing, second. It's not love of curriculum. It's not love of administration. It's not love of standardized tests, it’s not love of the almighty ACT. It’s the love of learning and making a difference.
But the love of learning and making a difference are hard to measure. Almost every teacher I spoke with, and even folks I still work with, know that we’re teachers because of the kids. We love the kids – they’re usually the best part of the job. It’s the other stuff that weighs teachers down, that impacts their mental health, their willingness to fight rather than flee or become apathetic.
Note that Wacker said teachers teach for the love of it. Pay matters, without a doubt, but Wacker knew the pay wasn’t his priority when he started teaching.
My cooperating teacher, Jeff Fong, the very first at the end of September. I'll never forget, because we went into the teachers lounge and his paycheck was in his mailbox. And he said, if you learn one thing, learn this. When you look at this check, the word that should come out of your mouth is suckers. Because I’d do it for free. The day you look at the check, and you say, it's not enough, it's time to go.
The negativity that Wacker expresses is present across education, and as his co-teacher said, for many folks, that paycheck just isn’t enough anymore.
Wacker said that teaching is the best profession when the conditions are right, but they weren’t for him anymore. So after 3 decades, Wacker quit teaching. He has spent the last year working with the Wyoming Department of Administration and Information.
Before we finished the night with pizza and watching a tv show with his wife and daughter, Wacker left me with this as a final thought.
We gotta change things. We got to fix this. This is insane. This is utterly insane.
And I agree. Things need to change. They need to change in order to keep teachers, and they need to change in order to ensure that we have the best education we can have for students. What Jennie, Shane, and Wacker talk about isn’t unique to our school, district, or state. These are the same concerns teachers across the country are having, and like Wacker said, We gotta fix this.
But to figure out where we need to go in education, we need to remember where we’ve been (from the good to the bad) and why a system to educate the public was built in the first place.
That will be next time on Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and share episodes with everyone you can think of.
This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Cody Fournier. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website – create and name website. A special thanks to Jennica Fournier, Shane Atkinson, and Jaye Wacker for being inspiring teachers and taking time to sit down and chat with me. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.
