What Happens When ALL the Teachers Leave?

In this blog, I will refer to teaching as a job, because that's what it is.

If you would do your job for free and think teachers should view the profession with only passion and little regard to the money that they need to survive - stop reading now.

Passion is what brought most of us to the classroom. Test-driven curriculum and politics are what have made it a job.

It has been five months since I wrote "Teaching is a Woman." - five months and I haven't missed a meal. I also haven't written a blog about education because I was afraid that I would be resented for making it to the other side. I didn’t want to insult my many colleagues and friends who have remained in an industry that I simply can’t stomach anymore.

I've been enjoying lower blood pressure, fewer anxiety attacks and the complaints by parents on social media feel a little less personal these days.

I do miss my students. I miss the laughs and the heart-to-heart conversations. I do, however, know that I made the right decision.

Opportunity has found me several times since I walked away from the classroom.

Like so many teachers, I did the job for so long that I almost forgot how marketable I am in the world outside of teaching. If my near 37 years have taught me anything, it’s not to sell myself short. As a teacher, you are skilled to do just about anything. Never forget that there is a CEO on a yacht right now who doesn’t know how to do what 90 percent of his workers are doing.

So many men and women have reached out to me over the last several months. What can I do? How do I get out?

I can't say this adamantly enough: I'm not advising any individual to walk away from his or her job. God knows I'm not able to help you pay your bills. I share my words as a single woman without the responsibility of children. Perhaps, if you don't work - you won't eat.

But if you suffer a stress related health issue that affords you a lengthy hospital stay - neither the district you work for or the state in which you are a public servant will go out of their way to help you emotionally, financially or mentally.

While you're out, the district may even employ a 19-year-old substitute with no work experience to sit at your desk and make nearly your daily pay because desperate times have helped districts find extra money for substitute incentives - extra money that never existed for decent teacher raises.

In conversations with educators from around the world – I’ve learned that many are holding on by a thread.

I’ve cried with single mothers who are struggling to pay for their apartments and homes with their teacher salary - mom’s who’ve had to use their 10 personal days when their school age children have gotten Covid. I’ve listened to a young man in his second year of teaching (second year teaching in a pandemic) who has had to postpone plans of moving from his parents home because although a first-year teacher salary is better than it once was – it’s still not much when nice apartments, (not an hour’s drive away from school) cost $1,600 and up. I’ve been on Zoom with a teacher who was forced to report to campus, while her son (who attends the same school) sat home alone with Covid.

My fear is that so many teachers will remain for too long out of a sense of obligation and responsibility to a job that will never fully appreciate them - and they will remain unhappy. They'll find themselves bitter and resentful, just like staying in an unfulfilling marriage for many years.

Maybe we need to let education fail. 

And before you ask, "what about the children?" - Allow me to remind you what is most important here in the State of Texas - Graduation Rates. The very superintendents “jumping ship” because of stress and opportunities to make a less stressful six figures elsewhere have for some time enjoyed bragging about the 90 plus percent graduation rates. It has far too often not been about what the students know. It is about them having a diploma in hand, whether they know what the real-world entails or not.

Superintendents can cry me a river.

The last convocation I sat in on - the superintendent looked out at thousands of teachers and suggested we couldn't possibly believe in God if we were afraid to teach during a pandemic.

I wouldn't advise you to ask me what I think of superintendents and their current "stress."

They make more than anyone in the district and have minimal contact

with students until massive amounts of teachers are sick and cameras are rolling.

There are some phenomenal students, who despite all the chaos around them will do any and everything educators ask of them. Many of the children coming from less than stellar homes do their very best at school. Children will be fine. They are very resilient.

Letting the Education Industry fail does not mean letting children fail, because if the truth is told - the Education Industry hasn't been about children for years. The adults within the schools, the underpaid and overworked adults in the schools have been about the children, and they are tired. 

If 70 percent of the teachers from every school district walked away tomorrow– what do you think the powers that be will do? They will replace them with adult bodies (substitutes, recent graduates, inexperienced individuals off the street with no immediate record of harming children) and don’t let them tell you otherwise. 

My trainer asked me just yesterday should I have a child; would he attend a public school. I quickly told her no, but then I had to backtrack. "I am a product of public schools," I began. And then I paused again. "I'm actually a product of my mother's home and an upbringing that included constant learning - so school was an exciting bonus for me." My child would be educated whether he sat in the very classrooms I did, learned from his computer in the living room or visited the pyramids he read about in his textbook.

For years, I’ve listened to outsiders complain about curriculum in schools – suggesting that teachers need to teach more life skills: balancing checkbooks, doing taxes, etc. Mind you, curriculum is usually mandated by a controlling power beyond the teachers. And then virtual learning rears its head and outsiders say, “students don’t learn that way and we need them back in school.” Now the teachers are sick and walking away – the outsiders say, “what about our children?”

For God’s sake – teach them yourselves and tell them to behave the eight hours they’re away from you.

This pandemic has shed so much light on all the darkness in our politicized realm of education. Yes, there are parents who would go above and beyond to thank teachers for caring about their children. And then there are parents who would leave their children with their teachers before sunrise and hours after the last bell if they could.

Eventually the teachers will all get tired.

More will walk away, and many will never look back. But the school doors will be open. There will be adult bodies standing at the doors, adult bodies in the hallways during passing periods and adult bodies to read (not teach or explain) material written inside of manilla folders. 

But the school doors will be open. 

Certifications, degrees and professional developments will become nonexistent. Mandated curriculum won't be creatively spiced up to keep the students engaged. Tutoring won't be a thing anymore. 

But the school doors will be open. 

The teachers will eventually get tired of being disrespected and they will all leave. 

Please write a lesson plan for that day. Include your objective, goals, assignment, materials needed and don’t forget your assessment.