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In my wife's elementary building three teachers have resigned since the start of the school year and one other gave an early retirement notice for a loss of four Teachers in three months in one building! Cause is unruly, out of control, abusive students, and a Building Administrator who will not address the issue. Naturally, the building cannot obtain Substitute Teachers either.
And the openings being posted to back-fill the loss of Support Staff Personnel (leaving for the same reason as the Teachers) have drawn zero applicants! $17/hour with Pension and a very good health-care plan, ten months/year work with days-off to match that of any children at home, yet the students are so bad that no one is applying!
I wanted my wife to retire in June 2019 but she felt a commitment to fulfill her final year as the Union President for Support Staff, so she is giving it one more year till June 2020.
This teacher has been sent to the hospital four times by a student. He also got a bite from a student which infected him with hepatitis.
I would also add, that almost any form of discipline these days is considered 'abuse'. You can't put the kid in a corner of the room. Can't put him in time out. Can't make him sit alone at lunch. So there are no consequences for his behavior. You even have to be careful what you say to him. If you say the wrong thing or it's taken the wrong way, you could wind up in the news.
I have had two friends leave teaching for some of the reasons listed in the article.
There is a lack of respect and support for teachers in many districts. They are increasingly given very little freedom in curriculum development and it is becoming all about making sure that the kids score high on standardized tests. I would assume that most teachers get into the field because they are interested in helping kids learn, not so much making sure that they can pass the almighty state achievement test. One of my friends left teaching when it became more about standardized testing rather than regular teaching because she hated not having the freedom to develop her own material.
The article also made sense with the climate now with parents & kids. I've heard from teachers that it is frustrating because they get grief from the parents if they let the parents know that their kid is misbehaving in the classroom. It's a nightmare dealing with serious disciplinary issues in the classroom because the parents often come back upset with the school/teacher rather than their kid. I'm not sure what has changed over the past few decades, lol. I went to school 1975-1988. If I acted up in class and the teacher called my parents I was REALLY in trouble when I got home.
I can understand the pay, too. In my state (PA) teaching requires a master's degree in education and an undergrad degree in the subject you want to teach in. You also need a state certification and are required to pay for state clearances/background checks. The average starting pay for a teacher in my area of PA (Erie) is $44,000 in a public school. It is higher for STEM teachers/special ed teachers. Still though, for that amount of education $44K is not a high starting salary.
I got out of teaching twenty years ago and would not wish it on my worst enemy. This was a middle school with 500 students. Some kids were well behaved when they got there but fell in with the undisciplined, unruly crowd after a while. Some of the mothers would bemoan the fact that they had raised their kid right and their kid didn't swear or talk back but they got that way after being in that school. I agreed with them. It was a terrible environment.
We were subjected to verbal abuse on a daily basis and there was nothing we could do. We weren't even allowed to say the word, "discipline"--we had to call it "classroom management" and even then, we weren't allowed to do very much. Just a few kids can ruin a class for everyone and no one learns anything.
They can throw all the money they want at schools but it won't do any good. The problems begin in the home with the kids who never heard the word No. Kids who were given everything, spoiled, got away with whatever they did. Poor parenting. Parents used to support the teacher and so did the principal. Not anymore. Now the unruly, out of control kid is the boss.
These kids should be removed from school and sent to reform school. It would give them some of the parenting they have missed and it would give the kids back at school a chance to actually get an education.
1) the "teaching industry' does not secure the environment for learning thus less occurs and those who desire to instill a spirit of learning have been dumped upon to the point of despair
2) the admin / politicized climate (unions et al) have a deleterious affect amplifying the lack of focus on teaching to tested outcomes which are often not important and...
3) because teaching begins at home and a greater majority of parents / guardians treat education like an extended daycare babysitting facility and complain when their progeny doesn't display the intellectual capacity to learn since they have failed to discipline their children to begin with and most often let the formative years of their children's lives be guided by mass media (tv, movies, games et al) babysitting which is already programming them to be useful idiots.
I've touched on the issues before so here are links to some old comments that echo much of what the article points out.
The irony is the people who could make the most change to improve it will not as is best expressed by George Carlin in this excellent piece on Why Education is so bad (note: language for those easily offended)
"Compulsory education was intended to be what it had been for Prussia in the 1920s, a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern industrialized compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical intervention into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age grading, by constant ranking on tests, and many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would re-integrate into a dangerous whole." - Inglis
Last edited by ciceropolo; 12-10-2019 at 06:56 PM..
Reason: additional content
When I first started teaching there were no unions. Most kids behaved (although in a high school last period lower level kids on a Friday afternoon...well. Not so good.)
All the principles we learned in teachers' college have gone out the window. That kids NEED and WANT discipline and boundaries, that it makes them feel secure and cared about. And yet some new trends came out that advocated teachers letting the KIDS choose what they wanted to do that day! This is elementary school. They do not know what they should be learning so how can they choose? Anyway, most would choose recess.
Another new idea was not to interfere with their "creativity." Let them do what they want even if it's wrong.
Then there was creative spelling and fake alphabets. Supposedly they would learn to spell on their own later.
I was lucky that there was a teacher across the hall who took me aside and told me this trendy stuff was nuts, just plain nuts. She'd been teaching for many decades, had seen it all, was strict, but well loved, and her kids were always the best behaved and the smartest too. Just stay away from the dumb trends because there is really nothing "new" and also if they can't sit still and behave, they can't learn.
She didn't allow any wiggly, silly, behavior. She set down the rules, really strict at the beginning of the year and then eased up a little bit later. Those kids knew exactly what was expected of them and they did great in school and loved school. Also, in those days we had the support of the principal, who would come to your room or take a student out in case of problems. The kids learned. You could always tell the kids who came from classrooms with no discipline because even when they walked down the hall, they were wiggly and slouchy. The better disciplined ones sat and were like sponges for learning. They just soaked it up. But it's not even acceptable today to teach them how to behave. As if that is even possible, considered the type of parenting.
I would never want to teach. However, I have been in my grands’ elementary school many times, and I must say it seems like a nice school. However a family member is a school counselor who is counting years until retirement.
At best, teachers get burned out after a couple of decades, but I do not think our society values education or teachers. And teachers are not treated as if they are the precious resource that they are.
When I first started teaching there were no unions. Most kids behaved (although in a high school last period lower level kids on a Friday afternoon...well. Not so good.)
All the principles we learned in teachers' college have gone out the window. That kids NEED and WANT discipline and boundaries, that it makes them feel secure and cared about. And yet some new trends came out that advocated teachers letting the KIDS choose what they wanted to do that day! This is elementary school. They do not know what they should be learning so how can they choose? Anyway, most would choose recess.
Another new idea was not to interfere with their "creativity." Let them do what they want even if it's wrong.
Then there was creative spelling and fake alphabets. Supposedly they would learn to spell on their own later.
I was lucky that there was a teacher across the hall who took me aside and told me this trendy stuff was nuts, just plain nuts. She'd been teaching for many decades, had seen it all, was strict, but well loved, and her kids were always the best behaved and the smartest too. Just stay away from the dumb trends because there is really nothing "new" and also if they can't sit still and behave, they can't learn.
She didn't allow any wiggly, silly, behavior. She set down the rules, really strict at the beginning of the year and then eased up a little bit later. Those kids knew exactly what was expected of them and they did great in school and loved school. Also, in those days we had the support of the principal, who would come to your room or take a student out in case of problems. The kids learned. You could always tell the kids who came from classrooms with no discipline because even when they walked down the hall, they were wiggly and slouchy. The better disciplined ones sat and were like sponges for learning. They just soaked it up. But it's not even acceptable today to teach them how to behave. As if that is even possible, considered the type of parenting.
I'm getting close to entering my third decade teaching in an elementary school. We still don't "allow" disruptive behaviors, but not allowing and keeping them from happening are two different things. I can set expectations and be strict until I'm blue in the face, but more and more students just don't follow expectations. It's a topic among teachers daily, but what to do? I can use the most direct language: Stop talking. When they don't stop, then what? That's a minor example. We have students tearing up classrooms, hitting, and throwing chairs in various classrooms and various grade levels on what seems like a daily basis. This is at a school that is traditionally known as a "good, suburban" school. i know of a new teacher who is just about at wit's end right now. I wouldn't be surprised if she is gone at the end of the year.
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