Nobody Wants to Teach Anymore

Everyone should know why.

I remember having a conversation with my dad when I was in high school. He told me that nursing and teaching were "thankless occupations." He also told me he wouldn't sign the papers for me to go to college, but that is a story for another day (and a box of tissues and a bottle of booze). He was pretty much dead on about teaching though.

By Jessica Wildfire

It’s getting pretty bad.

Schools are resorting to all kinds of last ditch measures. They’re planning to hold classes three or four days a week. They’re hiring teachers from outside the country. They’re recruiting military vets. They’re letting college students with no training into the classroom. They’re not going to be interns. They’re going to be in charge of everyone’s kids.

We’re not just talking about K-12 schools, either. The shortages have started hitting colleges so hard that, once again, they’re talking about increasing class sizes and upping our loads.

Nobody wants to teach.

Not anymore.

Almost nobody respects teachers.
Teacher shortages have been a long time coming. They’ve been losing us for a solid ten years now, maybe longer. The solutions to every year’s teacher shortage makes the problem even worse. The teachers who stay wind up doing more work for less pay. We grind up our souls, and we’re rewarded with post-it notes and chocolate bars.

More teachers get fed up.

They quit.

Everyone secretly thinks they can teach because they watched Mr. Holland’s Opus. They don’t know the first thing about teaching.

They wouldn’t last a week.

There’s a long, long history of Americans undervaluing teachers. They’ve never paid us a living wage. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was seen as women’s work, and therefore constantly trivialized. Nobody even understands what teachers do. There’s times when politicians and administrators even promote the notion that teachers should work for free, because it’s “not about the money.”

When I tell someone I’m a teacher, they don’t say anything along the lines of “thank you for your service.” No, they usually talk about how much they hated school. They complain about your summers off.

They don’t know the word pedagogy. They don’t understand the difference between outcomes and objectives.

Most Americans don’t think teaching is a real job. They think schools exist in order to warehouse children while their parents do the real work, and to keep them out of trouble. It’s the same way they think about moms and nurses. That’s not a coincidence.

It’s a pattern.

Teachers are beyond burned out.
I want to light the word “burnout” on fire.

It’s the worst way to describe what’s going on with teachers. When you call someone burned out, it implies a personal moral failing on their part. The phrase shifts the conversation away from work conditions to a teacher’s individual personal choices.

Burnout is just victim blaming.

We call someone burned out when we want to accuse them of working too hard, caring too much, or neglecting their personal lives. It happens to teachers all the time. Their bosses increase their class sizes and teaching loads, assign them all kinds of service projects, and then lecture them about the importance of dedication/sacrifice.

My own administrators routinely praise faculty and staff for living in their offices, going without showers or sleep, and eating fast food, all so they can “dedicate their time to their students.”

It’s commonplace in education.

Principals and deans and superintendents go around talking like this, extolling the virtues of overwork and priming teachers to give up their lives in exchange for pitiful salaries.

Then all their teachers quit.

They wonder why.

Americans think it’s “not about the money.”
It’s one of the great ironies of our culture.

Americans think it’s great that some dude like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk can make a fortune off being an asshole. They’ll launch a crusade to save them from cancel culture, explaining all the reasons why they deserve their money and how they’re a misunderstood genius. They’ll mourn the loss of Jordan Peterson from Twitter for a few days.

Bring up teacher pay, and their eyes burn. They tell you, “It’s not about the money. They love what they do.”

Well, I’m a teacher so let me tell you:

It’s definitely about the money.

Every single teacher I know has a second or third source of income, even professors. They’re either married to a banker, or they work a conventional second job. They have side hustles.

They drive an Uber.

Last year, South Dakota made 10 teachers crawl around on the floor of an ice hockey stadium for cash. The money wasn’t even for them, it was for lesson plans and student projects. For once there was a public backlash, but only because it was impossible to watch them and not feel deep shame for how we treat teachers in this country.

For some reason, Americans accept the premise of billionaires. They celebrate it. They cheer for con artists.

They reject the idea of paying essential workers more. It’s like they don’t know what the word “essential” means, or maybe it’s become a code word for expendable unskilled labor. According to them, the job is essential — but the person doing it is disposable.

Teachers fit right into this category. They’re not supposed to demand more money, because they’re doing something important. The job itself matters more than their needs. They should feel honored simply to be doing something so vital, without fair pay.

The job of teacher is sacred.

Teachers aren’t.

Teaching has become truly miserable.
Americans still talk about the joys of teaching.

What are they again?

Everywhere you look, states have banned almost every aspect of education that’s worth teaching. States banned math books for being too woke. They’re passing bills that don’t let you teach history.

Academic researchers who study this thing called “burnout” have discovered that what really drives teachers out of the profession, even more than stress and low pay, is lack of autonomy.

Nobody listens to us.

Teachers have a dozen bosses, including a bunch of parents and politicians who are never satisfied with our performance. If you can’t meet the standards they decide on with testing companies, they don’t help you. They punish you. They take away your money.

They make your job even harder.

Teachers spend their afternoons, evenings, and weekends dealing with complaints about how they do their jobs. There’s always a new set of laws, rules, polices, or guidelines to learn. Our bosses make us write reports, and they don’t even read them. Last year, I got kicked out of my office to make room for a Starbucks.

My university has partnered with a dozen major corporations to outline curricula for us. They believe a CEO is more qualified to decide what students should be learning than I am. They’ve hired a dozen consulting firms to decide everything down to when we should teach.

Almost every school does the same.

They love consultants.

They hate teachers.

Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do.

So, we give up.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Some of the solutions colleges and school districts are coming up with belong in satire. I mean, they’re letting anyone in the classroom now. I’m surprised they haven’t started recruiting the homeless.

Maybe inmates could teach.

Let’s say you get arrested for weed. Instead of going to an overcrowded prison, you’re sentenced to nine years in the classroom.

In many ways, teachers already feel like prisoners. They join a profession hoping to do something they love, something they’re good at. They want to make a difference. They wind up broke, drowning in debt, overworked, and forever sleep-deprived. They’re constantly harassed and threatened, sometimes by their own students.

Other times, it’s their parents.

They’re exposed to diseases in poorly ventilated classrooms. They’re lucky if they have air conditioning.

It’s never about paying them more. It’s never about giving them the kinds of classrooms they actually need.

It’s never about listening.

Surprise.

America doesn’t deserve its teachers.
You might remember any number of articles over the last two years talking about the teacher shortage, warning everyone that we wouldn’t continue to put up with the abuse, on top of being asked to breathe children’s germs and fling our bodies toward gunfire.

Now it’s happening.

America doesn’t have enough teachers. They’re so desperate, they’re hiring anyone off the street. Bureaucrats are scratching their heads, wondering if maybe they should finally do the unthinkable and raise teacher salaries and get them an air purifier, maybe even stop telling them how to do their jobs while banning all their books.

The real question for me isn’t how we’re going to solve the teacher shortage. Teachers have been saying it for decades.

The question is why they haven’t all quit.

That’s the mystery