Connect the Dots

The last few days brought two blog very important blog entries for those of us who really think about the sustainability of a teaching career. Kilian Betlach (TMAO) of Teaching in the 408 has announced that he's not coming back to his school in September and Pete Reilly over at the District Administrator blog writes about ex-teachers' attitudes about the profession. Suffice to say, when those ex-teachers compare their new jobs with teaching, teaching comes up short.

We all know the stats that say 40-50% of new teachers leave teaching within the first five years. Now, TMAO hasn't announced whether he's leaving the classroom or just his school, but even a casual reading of his blog gives plenty of reasons why he may be leaving the classroom.

The Pete Reilly article is really worth reading because it speaks to the ex-teachers' feelings about teaching. Those teachers felt overworked, under-prepared, under-challenged, and under-appreciated. Now, granted, these are the teachers who did leave, so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that they found more satisfaction in their next job, but the data is staggering in how overwhelmingly they felt what they felt, and given that we are losing teachers in such staggering numbers, we need to pay attention to the reasons why.

One of the questions I've started asking when I present is this -- "How is it that we have so many idealistic, intelligent, dedicated people in our schools and yet have so many problems in our schools?" We have to start questioning the system that cannot harness all this energy and intelligence.

Too often, the rhetoric of schools does delve into the heroic martyr teacher succeeding against all odds. That's not sustainable. That's not even useful.

We have to create school systems where teachers are valued, where we support young teachers, where we find ways to ensure that teachers at all levels of their career are given the opportunity to continue to grow and learn, and we have to find ways for teacher to reach the highest of expectations - their own expectations and others - in ways that allow them to work fewer than 70 hours a week. It wouldn't hurt to pay a living wage, too, but honestly, teachers know what the money looks like, and while it's a problem, I'd venture to say it's not the biggest problem. Class size, teacher load, lack of collegiality, lack of support, the sheer massive effort that excellence in the profession takes, day in and day out... all those loom much larger in the minds of the people I know who have left the profession.

The sooner we recognize that if we want teachers to treat our students with an ethic of care, we have to create school systems that treat teachers with an ethic of care. If people don't believe that for ethical reasons, they should realize it for practical reasons, because if we keep on with our current model, we are never going to get enough of the teachers our students deserve.