If We Want Teachers to Stay...

This is the AJC Get Schooled version of the "All in All" article published here several weeks ago.

Let’s begin with the premise that teaching is challenging work and that good teaching is even harder. Some teachers work hard, but fail through inexperience, poor planning, poor preparation, ineffective staff development programs, lack of good mentoring, poor administrative support or a deadly combination of all of the above.

My first suggestion for those who want to teach is don’t do it if you don’t like kids. Seems so simple, but you might be surprised at the number of people who want to teach because they get summers off. Ha!

That’s like the kid who told me he wanted to quit high school and join the U.S. Marines because he was tired of people telling him what to do. Great teachers will tell anyone who will listen that teaching is a calling. If you are not called, don’t answer.

Because it’s not easy.

We have loaded teachers’ plates with many jobs that used to be called “parenting.” Somewhere along the way we forgot that relationships and personalized learning are the foundation of an effective education for every child. If we overload teachers with extraneous stuff that misguided politicians or administrators think is “a great idea,” they won’t have the time or inclination to do what we actually hired them to do.

In an unscientific and informal survey, I asked nearly 100 teachers over the past several months what they thought were the issues that made teaching unenjoyable and/or unbearable.

These are the joy killers:

Lack of administrative support for student discipline

Reductions in teaching time and frequent classroom interruptions

Lack of parental support and confrontational parents

Increasing class sizes

Scripted teaching requirements

Professional development taught by “experts” with little or no teaching experience

Increased paperwork

Increased expectations to do increasingly with less and less

Administrative rules and expectations on student make up work

No money for classroom supplies

No-fail policies.