The last gasp of boomers retiring from teaching echoes across the land as school districts bewail the lack of good teachers. The recruiting and retention model that worked for almost a century has met its demise, and good riddance to it. Gone are the days when schools required teachers to be single. Also gone are the decades when few other jobs were open to female college graduates. For other reasons the large cadre of females planning to work until marriage has also dried up.
We are in a period of adjustment, or, some might say, the winter of our discontent.
What incentives could coax some of our best and brightest to come into the classroom and stay there? As many pundits note, it's not just about the money, but it increasingly is about respect, working conditions, and advancement.
As Aretha Franklin might have said, "Give me a little respect when I get into school."
We must return to principals as "principal teachers," the origin of that title. A principal who has never taught students or has not taught in more than a decade has no concept of how difficult a teacher's job has become. Too many lurk in their offices instead of proactively engaging with both teachers and students. Some see teachers as lesser mortals not bright enough to exercise good judgment, in fact, as simply larger students needing control.
Improving the attitude of parents must also occur, although fixes remain complex. Given contemporary attitudes about money, it's true that teachers will get as much respect as NFL quarterbacks when their salaries are comparable. Not going to happen, ever. Yet how principals respect teachers and how students show respect to teachers must play a major role in resolving the problem. Too often society blames teachers for problems beyond their control, following the lead of superintendents, school boards, and taxpayers.
Do students have the right to curse their teachers? If such behavior goes unpunished (and it does), why would any student show respect? Students show the same respect, or lack of it, to their teachers as they do to their parents. Therein lies a societal problem.
Of course, teachers owe respect to their students. Should high school teachers dress in sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers? All of us stereotype others according to fashion, teenagers most of all. To be treated as professional, teachers must dress so.
In addition, school boards and superintendents need to analyze how to improve teachers' working conditions. As Peter Smyth wrote last January, "Teachers need resources and especially time to build, reflect on, and polish lessons. Good lessons, like good teachers, are created, not born. It’s a hard job, and teachers need support to create and own those lessons. Teachers need meaningful opportunities to build and refine their craft. Teachers need to be allowed to grow in their profession and should be rewarded for that growth."
Last March, we read of attempts to learn why teachers leave the profession: "The SC Education Department committee solicited feedback from educators. . . . Among the 197 responses, the most common complaint, after teacher pay and a lack of classroom support, regarded the demands of assessments and accountability." 'What we know from having taught is not valued, and they’re constantly changing what they think should be taught in the classroom,' said former first-grade teacher Mary Ellen Woodside, who ended her 40-year teaching career at the Charleston County School District in June. 'There's less and less time to do the things that we know matter most at that age.'"
Jody Stallings puts it most succinctly: "The problem isn’t necessarily that teachers are underpaid in the main, but that they are woefully underpaid in proportion to the number of daily obstacles they are forced to overcome just to teach a simple lesson. One answer to this might be, of course, to pay them enough money to stay. But if you really want to keep teachers in the classroom, perhaps a better option is to actually address the reasons why they’re leaving in the first place."
Not to put too fine a point on it, the flat salary scale doesn't help retention. While CCSD now brags of increasing pay for new hires, experienced teachers receive little notice and hit a cap after 20 years. This flat scale doesn't exist in the business world for obvious reasons.
There are no quick fixes.
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