Inside the great teacher resignation

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Speaking of temper tantrums, how does being so angry and irate at teachers 2 years later help your child learn this year?

Is your vitriol helping children get help or is it making the situation worse?

Or are only teachers expected to put your child above their family/yourself?

Is that how you’d characterize the situation of the tens of millions of people that worked through the pandemic in public-facing and/or crowded conditions? Including the people that made sure you had food, utilities, medical services/supplies, public safety services, and countless other essential (and nonessential) goods and services?

No it is how I characterize this thread and people who are still rehashing this argument after 2 years.

There are different issues now. Are they related? Sure
If you want to help and not just spew anger then help. If not your anger is just anger and only you can change that.

Schools and teachers can help by acknowledging their past mistakes and promising to act differently in the future.

Ok we are so very very sorry. The pandemic was mishandled by school boards, the president who threw out the CDC pandemic playbook, superintendents and the NIH. Teachers taught these people and are therefore responsible for their actions. It is true, even teachers themselves made errors of judgement and wanted to work from home. In the next global emergency we will act differently. This new, improved and better plan will be based upon the needs of the pandemic of 2020, not whatever future situation the world will be facing.

Thank you for demonstrating my point. It’s a problem that teachers haven’t acknowledged the harm they did to kids through their actions. It’s not even clear many of them fully understand that harm or the role they played.

You are not getting apologies. You are not getting reparations. You are not getting future promises.

GROW UP AND MOVE ON. Or keep holding your breath and impotently stamping your feet like a toddler. Your choice.

Ok. Then watch public support for public schools and teachers continue to be in the gutter.

You are acting like this is a threat to teachers. Who are you honestly hurting but kids?

It is like in a divorce. If the parents are fighting over kids, custody or whatever in the end the KIDS are the ones who pay the price.

The only thing you are really doing is hurting kids. Especially those who already start with fewer advantages.

The teachers can and will find other work. The kids only get one shot at this and 2 years are already gone. You can take shots and get mad and kick and cry, or you can say “That sucked, but let’s get back to work. We have even more to do. How can I help?”

No, I was trying to say public schools are threatened. If you care about protecting public schools then you should be looking for a path that not only meets the needs of teachers, but also students and their families. Otherwise more and more of those families are going to turn to private schools, which we're already seeing happening. That will only increase political support for private school vouchers. And yes, it's going to be the disadvantaged kids that lose out, not really the DCUM crowd.

DCUM kids are generally in the top 5% of the nation economically. Most people who have left for private school already have. It's not just disadvantaged kids who will and are suffering, it's middle income and even upper middle income kids are too or at the very least, won't be able to afford even the cheapest of private schools.

Exactly. And those middle-income families rely on schools. That doesn't make them bad parents. The narrative that "school isn't child care" and that parents should have had backup plans for an 18-month school closure was a ridiculous attack on working families.

What? That is the weirdest take on this I have ever seen. Are you suggesting schools closed just to “attack” families? Attack means there was malicious intent. Wow. That is NUTS!

Read it again. The comments made by the teachers unions, and some teachers themselves, included attacks on working parents. There have been examples in this thread, although I tend to think they’re from SAHMs rather than teachers.

Nope, I’m one of the responders you would incorrectly characterize that way and we are a decidedly not wealthy, dual full-time working family. Try again.

Interesting that you seem to acknowledge your own mean-spirited attacks on parents.

I’d be astonished if you had a full-time job outside the home. Your Etsy store, Mary Kay scheme, or "freelancing" gigs don't count.

Aww, you’re precious. I’ve never touched a MLM, I don’t craft, and I’ve worked full-time in a professional role since I was 22.

[Anonymous]

Fairfax county’s school board and administration just keep piling on the demands of teachers in FCPS. Nearly all the new demands are equity-driven.

FCPS is losing teachers, both old and new, while also lowering the quality of education offered to students in the county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Fairfax county’s school board and administration just keep piling on the demands of teachers in FCPS. Nearly all the new demands are equity-driven.

FCPS is losing teachers, both old and new, while also lowering the quality of education offered to students in the county.

I’m in LCPS and every day I’m seeing 12+ job listings for various positions (about half are teachers and half classified). This is year round, whereas ten years ago there were no new listings except March-June. People are just walking, and I don’t blame them. It’s become impossible to do our jobs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Fairfax county’s school board and administration just keep piling on the demands of teachers in FCPS. Nearly all the new demands are equity-driven.

FCPS is losing teachers, both old and new, while also lowering the quality of education offered to students in the county.

I’m in LCPS and every day I’m seeing 12+ job listings for various positions (about half are teachers and half classified). This is year round, whereas ten years ago there were no new listings except March-June. People are just walking, and I don’t blame them. It’s become impossible to do our jobs.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Fairfax county’s school board and administration just keep piling on the demands of teachers in FCPS. Nearly all the new demands are equity-driven.

FCPS is losing teachers, both old and new, while also lowering the quality of education offered to students in the county.

This and it’s so much worse this year-more will leave

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Fairfax county’s school board and administration just keep piling on the demands of teachers in FCPS. Nearly all the new demands are equity-driven.

FCPS is losing teachers, both old and new, while also lowering the quality of education offered to students in the county.

This and it’s so much worse this year-more will leave

It's not just FCPS. My district in MD seems intent on piling on the work so that teachers will quit. It's insanity. My mom taught the same grade I do. She retired after 28 yrs. I tell her what we have to do and she is dumbfounded. All she had to do was teach and grade.

[Anonymous]

There are a ridiculous amount of special education teacher vacancies. The job has become unmanageable and so incredibly stressful. It is snowballing because as more and more special education teachers quit and retire they are piling on more and more work on the special education teachers who are left. So that is burning out the remaining ones.

And then they are closing specialized eped programs because they can't find special education teachers and pushing special ed students who needs smaller classrooms into general education under the name of inclusion. But really they are abandoning these kids because there is no special ed staff available to support the student. This then creates havoc in the general ed class and makes general ed teachers quit because they are so overwhelmed.

[Anonymous]

Go in for your 40 hours per week if they want to make you do meaningless tasks instead of planning and grading then you will not have quality plans and you can justify this to the parents that admin would rather have the teachers do busy work than work to educate your kids. When your admin wants you to make up fake data for your time sheet you should always right down the correct data that can be verified as the security cameras saw you walk in and out of the building. Let payroll make up false data on their end.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of the issues with all of this teacher blaming was that in many areas of the country, teachers were back teaching in person fall of 2020. Yet somehow they are still the target of crazy levels of parental angst.

DH was an experienced teacher who retired a few years earlier than originally intended due to how unpleasant everything outside the actual classroom was. And he was not the type of teacher anyone would have wanted to retire early—students from years past made a habit of visiting him as adults as they enjoyed his class so much.

I agree with others who suggest fomenting ongoing parental ire is part of a larger goal to destabilize public education. Add the book banning campaigns we are seeing in both school and public libraries to that larger goal as well.

If you are still so angry about what happened in the pandemic that you can’t see this, try taking a deep breath and a few steps back to see what is happening across the country, even in places where kids were in school almost the whole time.

This. I was teaching in the fall of 2020 and my kids were back in school. I live in New England and I don’t know one person in Boston, Portland or anywhere, actually, whose kids weren’t back in school by fall of 2020. Online learning was a total bust—kids and teachers alike hated it— and that’s why my school moved back to in person as quickly as possible. I realize that some large school districts in California and a couple other places stayed closed but it was nothing like the whole country.

The real sea change was remote work—most people I know who went remote never went back in person. That has changed the entire real estate landscape as people move out of cities and into the type of small town where I live. These days, basically everyone is remote except teachers.

I work in an independent school but we also serve the public school population, so i have seen all sides of this and I am lucky because I work with a lot of smart, dedicated faculty and admin. On the other hand, watching my kids go through the public school system here, what I see is that the veteran teachers are amazing and when they retire, there is no one to replace them. It’s a merry go round of underqualified, overwhelmed employees and they leave because the issues kids are exhibiting are more severe than ever before and there is no administrative support. It’s really bad. If I was having kids five years from now, I would have to move to find a school with adequate teachers.

Therefore, it’s complicated. Parents have valid worries and so do teachers. But if we don’t make teaching an attractive profession, we will never have good education in this country. You get what you pay for. Education programs should be more like law and med school—much more selective. Attract the best and brightest, pay them well, support them. And try to keep teachers for ten years minimum, because institutional knowledge and experience are invaluable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agree with PP about PTSD. I’m a PP who posted about my DD having her own safety plan because she was the target of a child’s explosions. When the child was in control, they were friends. But when her friend had an episode, my DD had to separate herself by putting furniture between them and then run across the hall to the other 1st grade teacher’s room until they could clear the other girl from the classroom and the hallway.

I knew and respected the parents of the other girl so I went along with the safety plan nonsense for way too long until the girl was removed to go to a special emotional support program in February of last year. But I’ll never forgive myself for the time before that, especially before I knew about the explosions in the classroom. For the entire year including the time after that girl left, my DD cried nightly at bedtime because she was dreading the next day. She was behind on reading and her math was full of random numbers and erasings. She was put in remedial groups for both. I wrote it all off as post-pandemic adjustment, like a fool. Sometimes my DD falls asleep and wakes up and says she’s scared about school the next day, and we have to talk through how it’s safe this year until she falls back asleep. This fall they accelerated her in math and reading- it turns out she is quite good at both but couldn’t concentrate long enough to do either last year because she was always on alert for the next evacuation.

Wow, wow, wow. Reading all this about your daughter and her experience breaks my heart. Please give her a hug for me tonight. So glad it is getting better for her now. No kid should be afraid to go to school because of how another kid will act. Wow.

This sickens me. My SAHM mother needed a “break” from her kids and refused to pay for private school when i was in a similarly potentially dangerous situation at our “neighborhood school.” This mother needs to be in therapy and so does her daughter. Your daughter will never forget how you failed to have her back.

[Anonymous]

It’s the workload. I have to work all weekend just to keep my head above water. If I’m awake, I’m working or thinking about how I should be working.

And the days at school are brutal assaults on my senses. I go into my bedroom when I get home; the lights are off and I need silence. My own family barely sees me.

I’m miserable and told my doctor that recently. She suggested I quit, and so I likely will.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some here don't like hearing it, but this is all part of the GOP plan:
Get rid of the federal Department of Education, Destroy local public schools,
Complain how bad local public schools,
Give vouchers so more can go to private, meaning, Christian

You have lost the plot. Dems ask schools to do everything- all social services/safety net for entire family. Those should be an outside of education.
Dems also created the lack of enforcement on crime and expulsions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Fairfax county’s school board and administration just keep piling on the demands of teachers in FCPS. Nearly all the new demands are equity-driven.

FCPS is losing teachers, both old and new, while also lowering the quality of education offered to students in the county.

This and it’s so much worse this year-more will leave

It's not just FCPS. My district in MD seems intent on piling on the work so that teachers will quit. It's insanity. My mom taught the same grade I do. She retired after 28 yrs. I tell her what we have to do and she is dumbfounded. All she had to do was teach and grade.

This is why most sped should be removed from the gen ed classroom along with kids who exhibit anti-social behaviors. Parents who can't even parent their own learning disabled or emotionally challenged children effectively are basically expecting strangers to do the work for them while managing 20-30 other kids in k-5 or 100+ kids in 6-12. They try to shame other parents and kids by saying that normal kids "need" to be around these other kids, and not the other way around. The result is a general downward trend in education for everyone, and teacher burn out.

Is there a study that shows test scores are higher for all kids in a class that has sped kids mixed with regular kids? Or does it show that gen ed kids perform lower than they should while sped kids perform better? If it's the latter, then this could translate into 100s of thousands of dollars in lost income over the course of a lifetime for gen ed kids because they're collateral damage.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some here don't like hearing it, but this is all part of the GOP plan:
Get rid of the federal Department of Education, Destroy local public schools,
Complain how bad local public schools,
Give vouchers so more can go to private, meaning, Christian

You have lost the plot. Dems ask schools to do everything- all social services/safety net for entire family. Those should be an outside of education.
Dems also created the lack of enforcement on crime and expulsions.

I agree with this. I’m a teacher and while I’m weary about the effect that a GOP controlled government will have on education, I really believe that a lot of the liberal ideology that is so entrenched in education has made the job intolerable. Like essentially having no consequences for misbehavior, putting kids of all ability levels in the same classes and expecting the teacher to differentiate to all levels. I voted for Harris but I’m really hoping that this Trump win will cause schools to bring back some traditional ideas, like not requiring teachers to put up with kid’s disrespectful and disruptive B.S.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some here don't like hearing it, but this is all part of the GOP plan:
Get rid of the federal Department of Education, Destroy local public schools,
Complain how bad local public schools,
Give vouchers so more can go to private, meaning, Christian

You have lost the plot. Dems ask schools to do everything- all social services/safety net for entire family. Those should be an outside of education.
Dems also created the lack of enforcement on crime and expulsions.

I agree with this. I’m a teacher and while I’m weary about the effect that a GOP controlled government will have on education, I really believe that a lot of the liberal ideology that is so entrenched in education has made the job intolerable. Like essentially having no consequences for misbehavior, putting kids of all ability levels in the same classes and expecting the teacher to differentiate to all levels. I voted for Harris but I’m really hoping that this Trump win will cause schools to bring back some traditional ideas, like not requiring teachers to put up with kid’s disrespectful and disruptive B.S.

I have never voted for Republican in my life, but I feel the same way, Cautiously, optimistic that maybe we can reign in some of the issues