A new report out this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is pretty telling. The Confidence Report found that of over 1,300 educators surveyed from across the country, 34% of teachers say they feel optimistic about the state of the profession, down from 50% in 2018.
Did you catch that? Look again. A 16% decrease in one year and the level wasn't so great last year. Big concerns for teachers include the social-emotional needs of their students, teachers' low salaries, and lack of education funding.
I have a daughter who is a first year general elementary music teacher at a title one school. She spends most of her time addressing the social-emotional needs of her students. She is a fantastic teacher who has received praise from the the district music coordinator and fine arts head. They have even shown a lesson of her teaching beginning violin for all the district music educators to watch. She is not even a string player, she is a brass player. She is however, a fantastic music educator.
But, she spends much of her time addressing behavior and emotional issues. It is wearing on her. She is getting burnt out and is not even through her first half year of teaching yet. Her students have so many issues going on at home. At school they can barely function some days. She spends much or her time re-directing, reminding, disciplining and comforting her students. There are anger issues, bullying and apathy issues to deal with as well as classes filled with ADHA kids who can't control their impulses. The veteran art and p.e. teachers have both been in tears this year with the difficulty of issues they face with certain grade levels. My daughter has been very frustrated just trying to teach.
While all of the regular teachers have smart boards and white boards in their classroom which is fantastic, her room is very OLD tech and only has 2 actual green chalkboards and a small white board. That is it. She commented to me the other day that this is the first time she has ever used an actual chalkboard in a school. When she was growing up, her classrooms had white boards and later smart boards. She didn't even know how to clean a chalkboard. (haha) She is supposed to teach using interactive curriculum provided form the district that is technology based. Instead she is using that curriculum in a non- interactive way displayed through a basic projector that she had to BEG to obtain.
The projector broke this week. If she is to use any technology in the classroom in the future, she has been told she will need to pay for a projector herself as there is no budget for a new one or to repair the one that broke. She will now buy one on her own as there is no other way to use the district curriculum which she likes and is familiar with. She already had to purchase a speaker for her room as the old one was broken and a CD player to play music as the old one there didn't work.
Our state is consistently the least funded state for education in the nation and has bounced around from 49th to 50th for more than 10 years. Some districts are better funded than others, but none are funded well. I am not aware of any district that has EVERY teaching position filled for there schools. Not one. Many have multiple positions open. We are approaching crisis mode.
She told me this week that teaching music at her school is sucking her passion for music out of her. This, my daughter who went to England to get a master's degree studying the Psychology of Music because she loved the subject and there were no real good programs like that in the US. She lives, breathes, sleeps and eats music.
Well, she used to.
I posted this here not as a rant. It is a warning. We are failing our children. These children are the adults of tomorrow. Those that want to learn have difficulty because of the environments they have to deal with at home and in the classroom. Those that don't want to learn make it difficult for everyone else. Our teachers want to teach and make learning creative and inspiring. Instead they must deal with everything else first, including demands of great test scores, school shooter drills, low pay and no respect.
Who will be left to teach our children when those who used to love their profession finally decide to quit? Will there be a new generation to take over once the recent college graduates have heard the horror stories about our educational system and decide to focus on fixing the environment or political system instead because it is to overwhelming to try to figure out how to actually fix the educational system?
https://www.hmhco.com/educator-confidence-report
This was an absolutely wonderful post about the state of both education and the physical, mental, and emotional health of our teachers.
I was and have always been a teacher but left organized education and an income to be a lifelong volunteer in my children's preschool through high school classrooms, the school boardrooms, special community programs and behind the scenes in cleaning, counseling, sewing or being a back stage mom to thousands of kids as the volunteer parent who tried to provide the support for children, teachers, programs and communities that others could not or would not help.
Tell your daughter to never, ever lose or love or her passion for music just as I never lost my love for fostering education or creativity.
The pain of the lost and broken children, families, and abandonment of support especially financially by others can fill one with exhaustion and despair if not totally breaking you. But there are ways to keep going, keep doing, keep helping.
There were or are many educators in my family and we all did our best at whatever we did, however we did it. But it is relentlessly challenging and as far as I have seen norhing has changed in that regard in my 50 years of being a helper.
We all bought or used our own supplies, even as volunteers giving freely of our time and energy. Our own single income families lived on less but grew in heart and spirit by learning to give without expecting to always receive. And how lovely but how very realisticly sad if not tragic that others saw what was happening and did nothing.
I haven't read your link yet but its story and your daughter's story has been my lifelong experience. I majored in English and yet I've taught PE, art, music, welding, geography, history, and social sciences as well as psychology. I had kids come in stoned, describe building bombs, recount graphic abuse at home, and all I could ultimately do was care about them and make sure they knew I did. Nothing else ultimately came from all my hard work of seeking change or getting help for most of them.
I did my best but was hardly qualified to do so especially as a parent volunteer! I taught PE at lunchtime as a volunteer because my kids tiny schools had no PE teacher for months as a time. We also had no counselor, no special ed teachers and often no janitors and this was a public school. A few willing teachers and parents stepped into and pulled up the slack and the district looked the other way and saw it as good enough to make do. How very, very sad that nothing is dobe, nothing really changes.
It has been a tragedy in the making and it is far worse now, I know. I know yet even I know it is worse than I want to imagine.
You are living and breathing it now through your daughter's experiences, her fears, pains and anxieties. Ultimately she has to take care of herself first to make a difference in her life, their lives or her own future. But if course its our bigger future that ultimately matters most or the cycle never ends.
We need one huge wake up call and if all the school shootings aren't enough to open people's eyes that everyone and every thing that happens to us are connected I'm not sure what it will take.
The multi-faceted, multi-layered depths of our nation's problems are and possibly always have showed up in the very essence of educating our children abd buildibg the very future of our civilization.
.And that is often the state of our schools and our children's education as symbolized in the state of our families how they are being physically, mentally, and emotionally destroyed in front of our eyes.
My heart goes out to you, your daughter, and your family as examples of so many others who really love, care, and want to do and be more.
It's been 50 years of attacks on the education system nation-wide. It started with my generation in the 1960s - "new math", no art classes, few music classes if any (chorus yes, but not instrumental), zero dance or movement classes, P.E. cuts so severe none of the schools I went to til college really had organized teams.
I went into teaching in the 1980s. I lasted less than 2 years in NYC. Private and public schools. I still get nightmares about it. In 1990, we had no kind of tech of any kind for any grade. I had to buy my own chalk and all school supplies for the kids. There were many emotionally disturbed kids but no counselors or school psychologists to help. I went home and cried every single night. I got very physically ill too. The private school was partly a dumping ground for rich kids whose parents didn't want to engage in an IEP process in the public schools. So kids with severe ADHD etc. got NO attention and I had no resources to offer beyond trying to reward good behaviors ad hoc.
I still remember the day I quit for good. I woke up on a wintry February morning and realized no one was standing there holding a gun to my head. I called out sick. The next morning I got to the school super early, went to my classroom, gathered my stuff, left the key on the desk and walked out. I never even returned calls from the administrators. I called the Board of Ed to resign. I never taught in a classroom again.
Thanks for your responses, they were both quite interesting.
My daughter is a 3rd generation teacher. 3 of her grandparents were teachers, only one retired as an educator, the others opened their own successful businesses midway through their teaching careers. I was a teacher for 4 years, one of those I taught overseas. I stopped teaching once I had children and did a lot of what Michele spoke about. I volunteered in their schools and chaired many parent and school related programs until they graduated.
@michele-b-here-in-the-forum , I can't imagine doing all that you have done in such a small school.
@laura-f, interesting how we think of private schools as the "best" education. Not always.
Interesting article about the licensing of outdoor preschools in the state of Washington:
My mother and grandmother were also both teachers, with long careers in NYC. In fact, the principal of my high school had been taught by my grandmother! (So yes, I was "Principal's Pet")
I regret letting them kind of talk me into going into teaching. I hated every minute and have never missed it.
I taught fo 31 years and just retired 2 years ago. I have 4 teaching certifications, and a Masters in Education. I loved working in education and taught middle school, high school, alternative ed, GED, adult education and functionally illiterate adults to read. I also worked 5 years in a juvenile prison. The reason I retired was I no longer wanted to deal with all the problems that now exist in the public school. Teachers are expected to teach students who have various mental health issues. Students in the classroom cannot be “leveled” so you have a student who can barely read with students who are advanced in reading. Behavior was definitely a catalyst since discipline in the class room in almost non-existent. The day a student punched a teacher in the face and broke her nose and then proceeded to bum rush another teacher, knock her down and beat her head on the ground was the day I decided enough and put in my paperwork to retire. The student was taken to juvenile court by our resource officer and the judge ordered the school to take him back and provide him with the services he needed. Both teachers left teaching that year.I love teaching and was heartbroken when neither of my daughter wanted nothing to do with working in eduction but now I am glad they are in careers where they love their work and are very successful. I don’t know what it will take to change things but something has to give. There is a huge teacher shortage now and it is only going to get worse.
What an important discussion, and I appreciate hearing your experiences.
I'm also an educator. Right now I teach part-time at a university, but I have worked in Title-one elementary schools and for a Job Corps program for at-risk youth. I volunteer in my son's K-8 public charter school. The struggle is so real, and talented teachers are leaving the public school system in droves. The teacher and administrative turnover in our local public city schools is terrible right now--there is no stability, and the teacher pay is too low compared to the cost of living here. The reasons for this crisis are myriad and complex. The problem starts, I believe, with policy that was ostensibly intended to improve equity in education but which really meant to undermine education, by promoting school "choice" and emphasizing testing, testing, testing. The culture shifted to put full accountability for learning on teachers and schools, and to run schools on a business model. Education is not a product and cannot be qualified or measured in ways that are not problematic. Teaching used to be a secure, middle class profession--that isn't the case in most places anymore, and schools are grossly underfunded. We see even more disparity rooted in systemic racial and economic injustice. It is a mess.
But we also see a notable rise in trauma, mental health issues, and neurodiversity. Our education system hasn't changed enough from the model that was developed in the Victorian age to serve the needs of students today. There are so many things you might point to for reasons behind the behavior issues we see--I even see them among college students, many of whom struggle so much to do the basics: come to class, read texts, and submit work. But our country and our whole world is a a major crisis, and I don't know how issues with education can be unrelated to that. The systemic traumas of climate change, mass-extinction, our food system, economic inequality, racism, sexism, homo & trans-phobia, etc. are endemic in our collective psyche. Until these basic needs for security and emotional connection are met in deep, cultural ways, then we will continue to see children struggle to learn--a matter of the hierarchy of needs.
I'm glad you started this thread, Lovendures, since I've been wanting to introduce a similar topic for some time. The way I see it, we don't need to fix our educational systems so much as we need to sweep away institutionalized education as we've known it.
I started becoming disenchanted with institutionalized education when I was in college and dealing with my health issues. Even though I liked my professors and what I was studying, it felt insane that the very architecture of schooling was forcing me to choose between nurturing my spirit and "getting a good grade." And after you go almost completely deaf at the age of 18, as I did, it becomes hard to take seriously the premise that learning how to correctly format Powerpoint slides or staying up all night writing a critical analysis of the Iliad is somehow important just because your professor said so. But younger students have it a lot worse, since they don't have the agency or choice that college students do.
Fortunately for me, I discovered the writings of Ivan Illich and Charles Eisenstein, who have written widely on this subject, and they focused my angst towards more productive means. They both point out that institutional education as it's practiced in most of the modern world is a product of extractive capitalism and the need for standardized, compliant workers who are okay with performing boring, rote work. But we as humans are not meant for that. Our spirits demand joy and spontaneity. The behavioral problems and lack of structural support your daughter is seeing seem to be logical endpoints of this anti-human model of learning. And those problems are manifesting in different ways beyond the US. I was a foreign exchange student in China, and I've seen how the exam-obsessed culture of East Asia inculcates constant anxiety, fatalism, and poor physical health in students. Then there's the well-documented pattern of how institutional education in post-colonial nations is actually furthering colonialism's goals of homogenizing human culture and snuffing out any alternative ways of apprehending the world.
Fortunately, there are alternatives. I'm a big proponent of the Sudbury model of education and the Unschooling Movement, both of which jettison coercion and rigid curriculums and rely instead on each child's inherent curiosity and desire to learn about the world. I will probably post a part 2 of this comment, since I have a lot to say on this topic. But for now I'll leave off on this: you worry about whether there will be "a new generation to take over once the recent college graduates have heard the horror stories about our educational system and decide to focus on fixing the environment or political system instead because it is too overwhelming to try to figure out how to actually fix the educational system?" As @herondreams points out, problems with the education system are tied up in global systemic problems. I believe that, pretty soon, more and more people will start connecting the dots and will start revolutionizing the ways we teach not just our children, but also ourselves, so that our environmental and political crises are addressed at the same time.