Schooled: Lessons Teachers Have Learned This Year
By Helen Collins Sitler
Note: This essay was completed before children and teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen dead children will forever haunt teachers who know it might have been their own students. And calls for arming teachers are now loud once again. These are yet more examples of the traumas and the demands that push teachers into other work.
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Even before the pandemic, the teaching profession struggled to attract new people. It promised high stress and low pay. (1)
Lesson 1
Nationally, “The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 567,000 fewer educators in America’s public schools today than there were before the pandemic.” (2)
In Pennsylvania, where I spent my teaching career and still live, “’Many of the most solid, well-respected and gifted educators are looking for exit strategies from education.’” (3) What is the biggest challenge for the 2022-23 school year in Pennsylvania? Staffing. (4)
Teacher certifications have plummeted in my home state. This matters beyond Pennsylvania, where a large number of universities that were formerly teachers’ colleges, have traditionally supplied teachers at home as well as for other states. The reduction will be noticed along the East Coast, especially in Virginia and Maryland, but also in North and South Carolina and in Florida. Mid-Western and Western states may also feel the dearth of applicants from my state.
How will teachers be replaced in Pennsylvania and elsewhere?
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They want teachers to be scared in the classroom. (6)
Parents are being urged to challenge [educators] through official tip lines (in Virginia) or lawsuits (in Florida) and teachers say they are confused and scared by threats to their profession, livelihood, and reputations. (7)
It’s so easy [in a classroom] to create a safe and supportive environment for our kids. And I can’t believe that in many places we are going backwards in that (Kelsey Stoyanova, 2022 Maine Teacher of the Year). (8)
Lesson 2
On the night of parent-teacher conferences, a Pennsylvania high school senior cringes in embarrassment over his father’s behavior during a meeting with one of the teachers, a veteran of over twenty years. Later that evening, the father becomes so unruly in his outrage over – what? – that police have to escort him from the building.
A few weeks later, the same teacher defends to one administrator the use of several books she chose under the oversight of another administrator. She says, “If there was one tiny chance we could afford it, I'd quit right now.”
Lesson 3
Twelve years before a former teacher education student called me, she sat at a computer in a drab university classroom in Pennsylvania. With her head tipped forward in concentration, she focused on her writing for my class. After class, it wasn’t unusual to see her in a vigorous game of catch on the lawn near my office. She was smart, capable, energetic, exactly what we want future teachers to be.
The conversation we have at her request in March 2022 takes an unexpected turn.
“One of our new school board members wants teachers to take a loyalty oath,” she tells me.
“A loyalty oath? To what?” I ask, incredulous.
“No one knows,” she sighs. “A majority of our board members seem to be making issues of every conspiracy theory regarding education that they can.”
Then she adds, “I started seeing a therapist this year. Not just because of the board - admin expectations, student behaviors & apathy - I’m taking meds now because I started having regular anxiety attacks before school most days. Thanks to the meds, things are going better. I’m not completely stressed out by the time I get home to my own kids.”
“You can’t continue that way.”
“I know,” she says. “I wanted to talk about what else I can do with the skills I have.”
Lesson 4
Another former teacher education student reaches out.
The message, paraphrased, goes like this: “Please advise graduating new teachers NOT to accept offers from my county. Education is under attack in Virginia. My job is more secure since I’ve worked here long enough, but new teachers would, I think, be persecuted very quickly.”
That county was in national news in Fall 2021. Some school board members suggested a public book burning.
From the same Virginia county, another former student, recognized with multiple teaching awards, sends a frantic message. Also paraphrased, it reads, “Please send me any LGBTQ novels you might have on your shelf. Or order some for me on Amazon. Our library is removing them. My LGBTQ students feel desperate; I’m worried about them. I’m willing to take a risk. I want to add books to my classroom library.”
Days later, students and adults rally at a school board meeting. The board, overwhelmed by the energy of the very students they are trying to strip books from, rescinds the removal order.
I send three novels anyway. That teacher still has a job.
Question
Should I call the Virginia tip line and confound its intentions by filling it with compliments for my former students? Report that two of them have been named by their respective county school systems as Teacher of the Year? Say that one’s travel abroad infuses that classroom with perspectives no one else could? Report that another loves history, so brings interesting connections to the subject area being taught?
Some callers are flooding tip lines with praise, with commentary about how a teacher did far more than could be expected for a particular child, how teachers need better pay. (9) I want to do this, too.
But what if I call and, even in trying not to list any identifiers, someone in the Governor’s office discovers which teacher I’m calling about. What will the Governor do with that young teacher’s name? With all the names available through the tip line? Practicing teachers are not the only ones who need to be cautious. As a retiree, I want to help my former teacher education students, but decide I cannot risk exposing them in any way, even through praise.
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Lawmakers in at least 17 state capitols and Congress are pushing legislation that would require schools to post all instructional materials online…. every piece of instructional material that will be used over the course of a year, including books, articles, handouts and videos. (10)
Lesson 5
One of the most outstanding student teachers I ever observed tells me she’s ready to leave her school. Ten years into teaching in Virginia, she says, “I’m looking for a non-teaching job.”
Lack of substitutes strains teachers as they cover one another’s classes, afraid to call in sick themselves. “Anyone with a high school diploma can apply to be a sub now,” she reports, adding that some kind of screening is involved, but also feeling that years of honing her teaching skills barely matter.
Administrivia sucks up her time. “We have to have [lesson plans] posted in Google Classroom for [quarantined remote students]. Similar posts need to be displayed … for in-person students. And then we have to triplicate that into written lesson plans. Even the new, young, enthusiastic teachers are feeling pessimistic already.”
Christmas break is still several weeks away when she reports all this.
Now, several months later some states have proposed legislation that would require teachers to complete a year’s worth of lesson plans in June for the upcoming school year. (11) Lessons developed before knowing who their students will be and without knowing a thing about what those students will need.
Regarding that possibility, another former student, this one teaching in Maryland, comments: “As someone who writes and rewrites his own curriculum to match state and county standards not only is this impossible, but detrimental to student learning. I consistently alter my pacing, rigor, and even skills and standards addressed based on my students’ needs. I don’t know those needs until well into our first quarter.
“One of these days they’ll start asking teachers what’s best, right?”
My response: “Don’t hold your breath.”
Question
What culpability do I have for the distress my former students feel? I was their teacher, their mentor, their sounding board on difficult student teaching days. Why did I never tell them that I, too, left the classroom for a decade? That by the time I taught them, I loved teaching again. But under circumstances much less harried than their own, I had bailed after twelve years.
At a private school, teachers can have associations but not unions, an option that holds little negotiating power. My high school association walked a picket line for a week, asking for better pay. Our salaries were so low that one of our teachers, a dad with a family, was eligible for food stamps.
Our strike accomplished little. We returned to our classrooms demoralized and became more discouraged through the year as we realized that some faculty who had crossed the picket line routinely received special favors.
It was not the students that caused a full twenty-five percent of the faculty, including me, to leave after that year. It wasn’t even the pay, although that was a factor. For many of us, it was the double standard of favored faculty vs. those who would be chastised for exactly the same thing. It was the lack of acknowledgment that work demanding deep subject knowledge and the skill to engage students held any value.
Some of my colleagues left for public schools and higher salaries. I went into administration at a nearby college. It was employment that I liked and from which I learned a lot. Perhaps the most important learning was this: The longer I was out of a classroom the more I knew I needed to be in one. So I found my way back.
As I hear the distress from young teachers, good teachers that I care about, I want to reach across miles and hug them, tell them that if these things are routine--taking medication in order to go to work, feeling constantly battered, and being pushed repeatedly into meaningless tasks—it’s time to leave.
And what of my peers? The teacher friends who have worked their classroom magic for fifteen, twenty years, and more? I am retired, out of the fray. What can I say to them as they press on?
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Districts are focusing too much on the science [of teaching] with data and test scores, … and we have really lost sight of the fact that it’s [also] an art. (12)
We are trained professionals, we are educated professional, we are meticulously skilled at our craft. Pay us, then and treat us like you would treat lawyers and doctors and even politicians that go into work that are experts (Lee Perez, 2022 Nebraska Teacher of the Year). (13)
Lesson 6
A newspaper headline in March 2022 reads: “Pennsylvania student scores fell, delayed test results show.” (14) The article notes that standardized test scores fell “sharply.” “State officials cautioned the numbers were so distorted by pandemic conditions that they are of limited use for comparison to previous years.”
Teachers knew that pandemic testing data would be invalid. Nevertheless, standardized testing was high on policy agendas and continued to be, in other forms, after in-person classes resumed.
A conversation among veteran 2nd grade teachers in Pennsylvania and their administrators in October 2021:
Administrators: We want you to give the math assessment this week.
Teacher: That’s a formative assessment. It’s designed to show what students still need to work on after they’ve been taught something.
Administrators: We need a baseline for learning loss.
Teacher: It’s a FORMATIVE assessment. None of us have taught those skills yet. The baseline will be that the kids can’t do that math. You want us to waste time on testing when we already know the outcomes?
Administrators: Here’s an idea! Let’s incentivize the teachers. We’ll have a prize for the teacher with the best scores.
Teacher to co-workers: Oh, Teacher Hunger Games. Good idea. None of us have taught the skills yet, all the children will score low, but they’ll pit us against each other just to get some meaningless data. Great.
The 2nd grade teachers’ expertise was overridden.
Lesson 7
During her Fall 2021 break, my niece, an elementary teacher in Kentucky for over fifteen years, comes to visit. She is here to rest, to enjoy time away from work. Yet the day before she leaves, she repurposes my basement into her dance studio. Her 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders will soon be auditioning for the school’s musical. My niece, director of the dance portions, needs to choreograph the dance try-out.
Her choreography is vigorous, angular. Her arms shoot up straight. Her feet stomp. She pivots. Arms make right angles again. Her movements, mirroring the lyrics, convey the sense of Enough! Something has to change.
She chose this song, she says, because it’s a large production number; every student who is cast will have to dance it. Yet, I wonder how much the barely-contained fury of stomping and arm flinging are my niece’s own primal scream over classroom and online teaching demands she’s faced during the past two years.
Months later, I see the production. Well-coached elementary students can do amazing things. My niece plus the drama, music, and art teachers have spent countless, unpaid after-school hours planning, rehearsing, and creating the sets.
Two of these teachers have already applied for other jobs, some in teaching, some not. A third may also leave the school. Small irritations, for instance, a split planning period that makes intensive work on any project during school hours near-impossible, rub like a stone in a shoe. Large expectations, like the weeks of unpaid work for big shows, wear more.
Question
Now what? Where do teachers go from here? Most love their jobs. Many also know that the stresses and demands are unsustainable. They mirror my own experience. It is not usually the students who push teachers out of the classroom. It is adults who fail to hear teachers when they state what they need, adults who fail to acknowledge that good teaching is based on deep knowledge and skilled practice.
When politicians, school boards, administrators, and parents signal that what teachers do has little value, there is not much incentive to continue. When these adults outright assail teachers and schools, why would anyone want to teach?
Bill Waters, a high school principal in Texas, says, “At the height of the pandemic, teachers were placed on a pedestal. No one wanted to teach their own kids, and the value of what we do was at an all-time high. I believe we have a ton of support in the community … but unfortunately and quite often we only hear the negative.” (15)
Recent polling supports that claim. “’It really is a pretty vocal minority that is hyper-focused on parental rights and decisions around curriculum.’” (16) Waters proposes that “We need the positive majority that supports schools to stand up and be heard.”
While Waters urges positive community support, he also notes responsibilities that fall on school districts. They include giving adequate time to faculty: “Demands on teachers have drastically increased. We cannot continue to ask that ‘it’ needs to be done outside the work day…. Time has to be given in the form of a staff-only, no-kids day, or early release days built into our calendar.” He also says that “we have to pay staff for the extra…. We need to recognize that they are giving of their time and create additional stipends to do this.” I think of the countless hours my niece and her colleagues spent on this year’s musical and know that he is correct.
Finally, Waters decries the toxic input of educational outsiders, noting attacks “by state and national politics and special interest groups.” He is not alone in calling out such groups. Support for the teaching of challenging, sometimes uncomfortable, curriculum resounds clearly from the College Board, which administers Advanced Placement courses. Guidelines on the AP website state this: “If a school bans required topics from their AP courses, the AP Program removes the AP designation from that course.” (17) The vocal minority who wish to remove some subjects or literature from public schools may be forced to choose. They can constrain discussion topics and readings in AP courses or their children can earn college credit. They cannot have both.
The supports listed above give me hope. Parents, happy with their schools and their child’s teachers, can speak up. Administrators and districts can take active steps to relieve demands on teachers. The College Board can require challenging topics. This essay itself gives voice to teachers’ stresses and concerns. Several have expressed thanks for including their voices here.
Nevertheless, teachers have felt unheard and undermined for far too long, and the past two years have pushed them to the breaking point.
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More than half of teachers said they likely wouldn’t advise their younger self to pursue a career in teaching. (18)
55% of [teachers] say they will leave teaching sooner than they had originally planned. (19)
What lessons have teachers learned this year? That their professional choices hinge on two similar equations.
Equation #1: If community, board, and administrative support + love of teaching > stresses, teachers will continue to teach.
Equation #2: If stresses > than support + love of teaching, teachers will retire or find other work.
We are all about to find out which equation prevails in our own public schools.
Helen Collins Sitler (she/her) is a retired teacher educator. Her academic writing has appeared in such publications as English Journal, Language Arts, and The Clearing House. Since her retirement, she has focused on writing creative nonfiction. “Reconstruction,” published by The Sunlight Press, was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize. Other creative nonfiction has appeared in Hippocampus, Post Road, and Harmony Magazine. Her essay on craft appears on the Brevity blog.