Why Are Teachers Quitting?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Turning to the teacher crisis facing America now. Staffing shortages, burnout, funding cuts and the debates over the curriculum are putting pressure on education, not to mention school shootings. In her new book, best-selling author Alexandra Robbins, followed three teachers to see how these issues are changing the way they work. And she joins Hari Sreenivasan now to discuss the state of teaching in the United States.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Alexandra Robbins. Thanks so much for joining us. You know, in the past few weeks, we have seen headlines from the biggest school systems in the country, both in Los Angeles and in New York about strikes, about retirement pensions. It seems that the entire system is going through some big changes. And at the core of a lot of these concerns are whether or not there are enough teachers to do the job. What’s happening?

ALEXANDRA ROBBINS, AUTHOR, “THE TEACHERS”: What’s happening is that teachers aren’t being treated properly. You know, they say there’s a teacher shortage, that that’s a popular term, but it’s very misleading. There is no teacher shortage. There is no shortage of people who are wonderful, qualified, willing educators. There is a shortage of teaching jobs that adequately treats, compensates and respect skilled professionals such as they would want to be teachers in the first place. That’s not a shortage of people, that’s a shortage of support.

SREENIVASAN: So, give me an example here. How much is the average teacher making? What’s the — what we think of as a pay gap, if they could go out and — with the same level of education, get a different type of job, how much more or less are they making as a teacher?

ROBBINS: Well, it depends where you go. It depends on the district. It depends on the states. But I’ll give you an example. One of the three teachers I followed for a year for my book, Penny, had 18 years of experience. She was a veteran teacher, award-winning teacher. And after 18 years, she was making $47,000 a year. That’s a problem. She has to work extra jobs in order to afford to keep being a teacher. That’s something that 70 percent of educators have had to do. They’ve had to work an extra job or two or sometimes three, if you count summer jobs too, just to be able to afford — to continue teaching our children.

SREENIVASAN: So, what are you talking about here, driving Ubers on the side?

ROBBINS: Yes. Actually, there is a teacher I spoke with in Texas who is just petrified that at some point, he’s going to accidentally be called to pick up one of his students because he doesn’t want them to know. Yes, Uber driving, retail, farming hay, dog walking, tutoring, a lot of waitressing, bartending, selling their blood, just anything they can do just to be able to continue to afford to fulfill a role that’s arguably society’s most important role.

SREENIVASAN: So, tell me a little bit about the three teachers that you followed for the year. How did you pick them and what kinds of positions are they in?

ROBBINS: Well, I followed Penny, who is a middle school math teacher in the south. Miguel, a special ed teacher out west. And Rebecca, an east coast elementary school teacher. So, people could sort of see these perspectives behind the scenes through their stories and secrets and learn what school is really like from the inside. I chose them because their stories were both relatable and interesting, and because I thought that people would love them as main characters, and enjoy the read with them.

SREENIVASAN: What was fascinating to me was some of the parents during the kind of open house, and one of them had a sense of entitlement that, you know what, I’m not going to bring or pay you anything for school supplies, because, guess what, I pay my taxes. I pay your salary and you should be doing all that. Give us an idea of how much or how often teachers are going into their own pockets to make the school system whole.

ROBBINS: 94 percent of teachers pay out of their own pockets for classroom supplies. They pay an average of $500. Penny, one year, paid $2,000 of her own money because there was so much she needed for her math class or math manipulative and so forth. Districts are not giving teachers what they need to supply their classrooms.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that you illustrate so clearly is the amount of time that teachers spend that the rest of us, non-teachers, might think it’s free time but really isn’t, from the summer to even a single day.

ROBBINS: Yes. First of all, teachers aren’t paid during the summer, which is why so many of them have to take on a summer job to make ends meet. However, they’re still doing teaching activities during the summer, whether they’re doing continuing education so they can retain their certification or doing professional development or prepping lessons for the following year. Districts tend to change their curriculum pretty often, and then, that starts everything over again. If a teacher is involuntarily transferred to a new grade or subject, then they have a whole lot to catch up on over the summer. And that’s just summer. During the year, teachers are working so much more often than people realize, the job is impossible to handle during a school day. Teachers maybe have one 50-minute prep time/planning time if they’re lucky, maybe a 20 to 30-minute lunch. That’s not enough time to grade, prep, do all the parent calls that administrators are now putting on teachers’ shoulders. It’s too much. Middle and high school teachers, people don’t realize, can have 180 students easily, OK? I talked to a teacher in Utah, a high school English teacher, who had 263 students. Can you imagine grading, refining the writing of and correcting essays for 263 students every single time you give them an assignment? He cannot accomplish that in 50 minutes during the school day.

SREENIVASAN: The special ed teacher that you profile in here whose name you’re using as Miguel. Also, what’s interesting to me was how just overwhelmingly taxed his schedule seemed, how many different types of classes that he was teaching. And, you know, I mean, just reading it gave me stress and exhaustion, and you talk about basically that he’s also facing a little bit of a burnout and a change of heart for this profession.

ROBBINS: Yes. That’s one thing I followed his story through during the — or the beginning of the year. He was thinking this was his last year. He couldn’t take it anymore. So, we follow him to see what happens. However, the phrase teacher burnout, it’s such a popular phrase that Miriam Webster Dictionary describes for its featured contextual examples for burnout, both of its two examples are about teachers. However, it’s a misleading phrase. And here’s why. Experts say that teacher burnout is due to unmanageable workload, high stakes testing, pressure at work, not enough resources at work. But instead of actually fixing these issues, like any normal workplace you’d think would do, schools instead tell teachers to relax, do a better job of self-care, that’s a common buzzword among districts, as if it’s — the burden is on the teachers to go pay for a massage or something to alleviate the stress called but — caused by a job that’s impossible to do. So, I think instead of saying teacher burnout, we need to come up with something else, teacher demoralization maybe, because the burnout is not on the teachers. This is not the teacher’s fault. Instead of saying teachers have the highest levels of burnout, we need to say no, school systems are the employers worst at providing necessary supports and resources to their employees.

SREENIVASAN: You also mentioned a shortage of substitute teachers, which I didn’t really think about because I just assumed that the market sort of

goes up and down when there are shortage of teachers and so forth. You even became one and that turned into a longer-term engagement. Tell us about

that.

ROBBINS: Yes. I wasn’t expecting that. A couple of days before the August open house last year, a school allotted a new class but had no teacher. I had short-term stuff at that school before, so they asked me to fill it, and I did. And to everybody’s surprise, they didn’t hire someone until after winter break. So, I was a full-time third grade teacher for that semester. And I’ll give you — and first of all, I loved it. Substitute teaching for me was a gift. I loved being with the students. I loved learning what it was like to connect with students and to see their exhilaration when a science project works or they finally understand a math concept. But I can tell you now why there aren’t so many substitute teachers and why there’s a problem finding them. Last school year, I worked in school subbing for more than 150 days out of 180. My paycheck for the entire year, including retention bonuses, including the COVID sub race, because it was very hard to find subs when there weren’t vaccines for elementary schools especially, including all the little snippets they tried to throw in, my paycheck for the entire year, including almost a semester as a full-time teacher was $17,630.28 with no health insurance or any other benefits. That’s a problem. You know, an administrator told teachers last year, near where I live, it’s really hard to find long-term subs. So, I need you to not get really sick or pregnant this year. And the problem with that is if a district can’t find enough subs, the fault and responsibility lie not with teachers for needing one but with the district for not making the job doable.

SREENIVASAN: How much of the stress on teachers right now is coming from an increasingly political climate of what is taught in the classroom and how — depending on the community, how mobilized parents are to get involved in this? Because on the one hand, you — you know, every child succeeds if their parent is involved. We know that that’s true. But the ways that parents are now kind of attacking school boards and districts about curriculum seems very different, and you’d want all those parents engaged, but maybe not exactly in this way.

ROBBINS: Yes. You know, educators are the only skilled professionals trained and certified to develop and deliver aged appropriate lessons to students, not parents who think they know about schools just because they went to school and not politicians who have never taught in a public-school classroom. So, there is a line between involved and over involved. And many of the teachers leaving classrooms today are not leaving because of their students. They told me over and over again, it’s so hard to leave teaching because you love your students, but they told me — teachers all over the country told me, we are tired of the adults.

SREENIVASAN: Is there an increasing amount of politics that is coming into the classroom?

ROBBINS: Yes. We’re seeing a dangerous step nationally that we’ve seen in some states leads to politicians and parents pushing to remove from schools books, school materials and discussions involving race, LGBTQ identities and racism in American history. Republicans are pushing these prejudicial measures under the banner of parents’ rights, but which parents? Their messages of exclusion and the bigotry cater to only a certain small fringe of parents, but every child deserves to feel safe, comfortable and represented, at school, in the classroom, in the bathroom and in important sometimes lifesaving conversations with trusted adults like teachers and guidance counselors.

SREENIVASAN: So, if there are these forces at play here, whether it’s a push to privatize, whether it’s called increased parental rights, or the decrease in teacher’s salaries, what is the sort of net cost to a generation of students?

ROBBINS: Well, their education is going to take if we don’t have enough teachers in the classrooms, and I think people are starting to see that. A lot of long-term subs, if they — if schools can even manage to get the long-term subs are in the classroom. Some classes are empty. Penny had to double up her class often. She had some of — the teacher in the south, whom I’m followed for the book, she often had to combine other classes with her own because the classes didn’t have enough coverage. And we’re going to see more of that if we don’t turn this ship around quickly.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that I don’t think many people realize is just the general racial composition of what public education is in America today, and I wonder how you see this conversation about how to educate students about race and culture in America, because you have a lot of parents who are saying, hey, look, I don’t want you to make my child feel shamed for something that their ancestors might have participated in. And at the same time, you look at the composition of the classroom and you’re like, well, shouldn’t the children who are living in America today also have an understanding of what happened the past?

ROBBINS: Yes. Of course. Yes, I agree with that. Every child should feel represented in the classroom. How are we going to stop bigotry if children don’t learn what it is? How will we promote inclusion if students don’t learn that not every family looks like theirs? The majority of public-school students in this country are students of color, and we need to make sure that they feel like they are getting the same education as everybody else, like their history is represented and like their culture is represented.

SREENIVASAN: What is the fix then? I mean, is there a correlation between paying more for teachers and student outcomes? I mean, because there’s so much of our system that is trying to be designed towards outcomes based on the research and based on what’s working in school districts and the teachers that you’ve spoken with, what does work?

ROBBINS: Yes. Studies show that students’ test scores in math and English do raise significantly in districts that give teachers higher base salaries. There’s a clear correlation. So, yes, number one, pay. But even more than that, the majority of parents in this country do not want the culture wars in their schools. They want everybody to be taught history as it happened. It’s just a small subset of parents and politicians who were — just happened to be very loud. So, now is the time that those of us who are educator allies need to stand up for teachers, speak up for them and show up to board meetings to lobby for what they need.

SREENIVASAN: A lot of challenges we’re facing the education system pre pandemic. I mean, what happened after, do you think, that kind of fired up so many parents into the culture wars and added these kinds of new stresses and what’s the long-term consequence?

ROBBINS: I – OK. So, to get a little bit into the politics, parents became upset that they said schools were closed. OK. Schools were not closed. They were open. They were just virtual in some cases. And I do want to say that teachers wanted to be in person too, but only if it was safe. And at that time, before vaccines, before we knew anything about COVID. nobody knew if it was safe or not to be in school. However, teachers ended up working a lot longer days trying to transfer their lessons to virtual materials and online platforms, than they would have had they been in school. With that said, parents who were upset that their children were in their own house instead of an a building started being vocal, and then they started being about vocal about the masks. Glenn Youngkin used parents’ rights as the central part of his campaign over in Virginia. And when Republicans saw that his campaign worked, I think they all started jumping on the bandwagon. In the first part of, I believe it was 2022, there were more than 100 bills proposed just in the first six weeks of the year to start meddling in schools and censoring discussions and have more parental control over items that may involve race or LGBTQ identities. So, I think Republicans kind of pounced on this as something that might work in their campaigns. They galvanized parents by weaponizing the term CRT, Critical Race Theory, is not taught in K through 12 schools, but Republicans started using it as a way to refer to any oppression or talk of racism in American history. They used this, this umbrella term to sort of rile up parents, and it worked. Those parents are now fighting for something that actually is not going to help students. However, if you look at the surveys, most parents of school age children do not want the culture wars in their schools. And, in fact, the parent — the people who are more likely to say that they are upset with their local schools are actually parents who don’t even have school aged children. So, this has become a political thing rather than an education thing.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession.” Alexandra Robbins, thanks so much for joining us.

ROBBINS: Thank you for having me.