Why Do Teachers Quit? | Hacker News Reader

Why Do Teachers Quit?

theatlantic.com

32 pointsjseliger28 comments

One reason, at least in North Carolina, is the aftermath of the No Child Left Behind Act. There are teachers here who are passionate about education. Many of them feel as though any creativity and skill they have as an educator has been revoked by the state. They no longer have the freedom to create their own lesson plans. Efforts to encourage students to reach beyond the curriculum are stifled. All that matters is what grades they get on some multiple choice test that was mandated by the state.

Even students enrolled in more demanding programs like AP and IB are expected to pass the standardized end-of-grade tests. Now that's two (sometimes three, for students enrolled in both) standardized tests students need to be prepared for.

The people who've dedicated their lives to teaching no longer get to decide what's best for students. Only politicians get to do it now.

To put it in software development terms, imagine a customer giving you requirements that specify not only the desired product, but exactly which programming languages, design patterns, and frameworks you have to use. Now imagine realizing that the tools mandated by the requirements aren't quite a good fit for the solution, and you have 9 months to ship or you fail. How quickly would you drop that client?

The No Child Left Behind Act has led us to a school system where the government -- rather than the students -- is the client of the teachers. More like All Children Left Behind.

I've heard this argument before, but I've never really understood it.

Aren't the mandated exams extremely easy? Isn't the barrier to pass so low that they don't really matter that much anyway?

Why would this be that big of an issue?

I'd also assume that having some sort of standard by which to judge public education is difficult, but I can sense the need for some sort of standard. I went to public school, and while personal anecdotes aren't that valuable - the quality of teacher varied wildly from great teachers who made memorable impacts to teachers so damaging I still remember how horrible they were years later.

If standardized testing is the issue then what's a better way to work towards improving it? Better teachers? Being able to fire bad ones? It's a complex problem.

It's more than just standardized testing. A letter of resignation was discussed on HN about a year ago [1], and that sentiment is far from unique. Teachers, especially the ones who are passionate about education, are leaving the school systems in Mecklenburg and surrounding counties in droves.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713000

I was a student in one of those demanding programs. While we didn't have NCLB exams we had standardized tests every year. Even for AP students. At the most they were a minor distraction. Our teacher spent 1 day going over the prep material, you'd be surprised how even basic, long division becomes hard once you move up to higher maths, then the next day we took it.

For participating and not intentionally hosing the test, as we threatened to do, we had a pizza party (just about the only reward a school can give you) and moved forward with the syllabus.

My problems with NCLB exams are wide and varied but the actual test (1-2 days) is the least of it. It's the results that administrators use to pass judgement that I have the most concern.

NCLB only affects public schools. I'll grant that figures in the article are largely from public schools, but you can be a teacher and passionate about education and teach somewhere else. It's kind of disingenuous to focus on NCLB/public schools here like it is the only choice in education.

For low-income families, it is usually the only choice.

I taught for over 3 years, high school social studies. At times it was amazing (usually when you recognize you made a breakthrough moment with a student), however it was mostly brutal.

Grading is endless. Lesson planning is also non stop. I would always look at my plans and wonder -- is this good enough? Can I make this better? How can I engage the students?

What pushed me over the top was a brand-new principal who tried way too many initiatives all at once. At that point I knew I had to get out -- and do something else.

And now I'm in web development, making way more money that I did as a teacher, and actually enjoying my work!

Oh, and that first-year principal? He was fired a year later.

The complaints I hear centre around grading, lesson planning and of course bureaucracy.

Now, I believe that the education system of the majority of the world is fundamentally broken - and I am cheering on the likes of coursera, khan academy and the like to get to fixing it.

But in the mean time...can we take the first of these...grading. At the risk of trying to find a technical solution to everything this sounds like it should have a nice technological solution to it...

I can see some of the issues in English and the like where answers may not be 0 or 1 but if google can instantly translate English to Swahili...someone should be able to find a way to grade English assignments of high school student efficiently.

Or is this a money issue? The technology exists or could exist but there is no funding, so instead we are wasting hundreds/thousands of teacher hours a week while they repeat the same manual chore over and over again?

I would be interested in hearing some teachers comment on this.

Reminds me of this: http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_canada_our_failing_schools...

It's entirely within our technological grasp to automatically grade high school English papers, but a big part of paper writing in high school (in theory) is getting feedback and improving as a writer and thinker. Getting accurate, clear and detailed feedback on your writing from an autograder seems like it would be extraordinarily difficult.

Disclaimer: my own high school had a phenomenal English department. Do many teachers simply plop a score at the top?

A very good point that I did not consider, I remember getting very good feedback from my teachers - It would appear I underestimated the size of the problem.

>but if google can instantly translate English to Swahili

This is the problem, they can't. They can do the 80% to make it understandable but the last 20% is always the hard bit.

It'll happen one day, but it might be up there with the singularity for when it's viable. Fully understanding a paper to grade might equal AI intelligence on par with humans.

Not to say perhaps a quick hack, like a 80% grader that the teachers quickly look over to check and correct might be a game changer.

I pulled the example from the air to make a point, but you are correct, the last 20% is 80% of the work...

See the comment by aaron695 who made a very good point about feedback.

I wonder though if there is some easy fruit at the bottom of the tree i.e. elementary school - where I gather grading is probably a lower burden and easier to formalise - although I am probably again greatly understating the problem.

Teachers are the anvil on which the hammer of public policy gets constantly, ineptly struck in the vain attempt to turn raw stock into... some kind of shape the smith can't even define.

It's no wonder enthusiasm dies out so quickly.

My ex-wife teaches high school, and I hear her talk about the hours and the mandatory extra-curricular activity support, for the same low low price.

I tell my high school age kid never ever be a teacher, unless God himself comes down and puts his finger on his heart. America hates teachers.

My wife is a high school teacher.

She taught full time for 3 years, and burnt herself out with 70 hour weeks of planning, marking, parental communication, and miscellaneous bureaucracy.

Now she's working as an on-call substitute, working 8:30-3 whichever days she wants, and (get this) making more money than she was teaching full time.

Presumably it's the same where you are here where substitute teachers are paid at a higher rate due to lack of benefits, so that isn't that surprising.

Although I definitely see the advantages of the stability of knowing who your classes are, sick and long service leave and paid holidays over the freedom from preparation, marking and report writing and other paperwork. I think being a substitute teacher you miss out on a lot of the benefits of the actual teaching too, like building a relationship with your students, and being able to teach long-term concepts instead of a period at a time.

One of my co-workers makes most of her living from substitute teaching (she teaches a part time load) though and seems to be fine with it, so different strokes I guess.

She doesn't get anything in lieu of benefits, but she gets a full 1/180th of the annual salary per day she works (there are 180 teaching days in the year). On top of that, she still contributes to the pension and can claim unemployment during the summer.

She does occasionally get longer-term assignments for teachers who are away for a couple weeks at a time, so there's a bit of relationship-building and long-term-teaching here and there. She also likes that she has a less authoritative role and can relate to the students on a friendlier level.

My wife taught at a small for-profit high school for one year. Long hours, extra BS like babysitting the lunchroom, dealing with parents, low pay, having to write her own curriculum: she quit because it totally sucks ass.

Seeing how hard it is made me appreciate a few excellent teachers I had through school more.

Whenever I read something like this, I struggle to formulate a response that I hope will add value to the discussion. I get so disgusted considering the many facets of the issue that, after wasting too much time, I close the page and move on with my day. I suppose that's why we're in this mess.

Former teacher here. I can sum up the reasons why I quit below:

* Dealing with kids has hard. Really, really hard. Computers sit down and shut up when you tell them to; kids don't.

* Rules. Rules rules rules. It's easier to list what you're allowed to do than list what you're not allowed to do.

* I was a 25 year-old male teaching high school. Lots of teenage girls flirting with me => lots of risk for sexual harassment lawsuits. It's not enough to just write them up or ignore them. You have to document everything. If even once it might be implied that you're encouraging it, game over.

* For a vast majority of my kids over the course of 2 years teaching at two different schools, their parents simply did not care. One phone call ended with "I can't control my kid." With all due respect, ma'am, if you can't control your kid, why do you think I can?

Money wasn't really on the list. $41K/year in Alabama (Masters) is more than enough for a single 25 year-old bachelor. Although I will admit the way they pay teachers is fucked. It's based on years of work and degree level. The crazy part is that 1 degree level = 5-ish years of work. I started off making $41k salary, but that's just because I started teaching with a Master's degree. To get to $41k salary with a Bachelor's, you'd have to work 5+ years in the field. Are you telling me that a rookie kid out of college with a Master's is worth more than an experienced teacher with 5 years under her belt? C'mon.

I loved teaching. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. But I just couldn't do it any more after the second year. It's not teaching that sucks -- it's everything else. It's the paperwork. It's the threat of sexual harassment. It's the pressure from administration. It's the parents who don't care. It's the kids who don't want to be there.

Frankly, I'd rather code for a living and tutor on the side.

I'll base this on NJ, but your reference to the salaries is largely to do with unions. Union reps negotiate the salary guides with administrators and since most reps/heads are senior staff members they negotiate the guide to favor themselves. This may not be the case everywhere but if you look them up (public record FYI) you will often see later years see significant bumps in salary while lower level years are small COL increases.

The main ways they're usually negotiated are: 1. high starting salary, but more steps to the top or 2. low starting salary, with less steps.

I decided to enter the teaching field and decided to never go back after I finished my initial 3ish month fill-in. Among most of the stuff that got mentioned, the single biggest thing I couldn't accept was the rigid structure of the course work. I was teaching computers to elementary kids and throughout the entire year of lessons there was nothing about what actually makes a computer work. When I approached the supervisor about this I was told "As long as it fits the curriculum". This struck me as odd that in a computer class, in 2006, the district had not built anything in for discussion of what a computer actually is. Instead, kids were spending 4-5 weeks typing for 40 minutes as their lesson.

This, in the end, was what did me in with teaching (aside from the bureaucratic and nepotistic BS). That in 2006 the biggest factors in exposing kids to computers was by having them play Dr. Seuss games and typing all day. I'm not saying kids should be programming by age six, but the there needed to be something better. NJ's curriculum standards are still pretty terrible and could be a lot better (http://www.state.nj.us/education/cccs/standards/8/), but they're far better than what they were six years ago.

Somehow nobody ever says that people who love investment banking or running a multinational corporation should do that for peanuts.

I never really understood why teachers and preschool teachers make so little money (and recognition/work environments etc. aren't great). As a society I'd expect we'd put a higher premium on educating our children.

It's an interesting double whammy because in many countries there's mandatory school attendance until a certain age. So basically you "force" kids to attend school and then don't even try to create the best learning environment possible.

From my very limited samplesize of being an exchange student in the US back in high school I have also noticed that the situation in the US is actually worse. There's quite a different level of respect for teachers. In Germany being a HS teacher is a fairly respectable job socially (they also get lifelong tenure which may or may not be a good thing, I'm leaning the concept is flawed because I'd rather be able to fire people).

Love the kids, hate the bureaucracy.

Nothing really surprising here; assuming there are alternatives for workers (even a homemaker is a serious alternative to teaching at some of the pay rates), then when you make people work long hours with poor pay and no agency, they will quit.

By the way, in Brazil most teachers get mininum wage (currently around 300 USD mo for 44 hours of work every week, summing classroom time with preparation time)

Because it is not enough to pay even basic living expenses in many cities (like São Paulo) some teachers here fill all their waking time with classroom time, and hope they will figure the homework somehow (thus they end having two or three jobs, working 60 hours at classroom or even more)

Public Universities here are the best stuff you can have without being a 0.1% richest (when you can pay actual Ivy League on US like Facebook founder Eduardo or when you can pay Ivy League-like stuff here, like Fundação Getúlio Vargas), to get in one you must pass a test that is a competition, Computer Engineering for example usually has 45 candidates for every spot.

The public university course to teach children (I forgot the name) is the only course that has more spots than people wanting to get in (last time I checked there was 0.3 candidates for every spot), usually they cannot even fill the classroom, because beside not having enough candidates in first place, many fail the test completely (ie: although the test is a competition and you usually do not have to bother with mininum score, most universities do not let you in if you go abysmally bad on the test, like having a zero in any subject or having a average below 30%...)

I have never worked at a school of any kind, but I have worked in several different city, state, and federal jobs. Again, I cannot speak from personal experience in actual schools - but if the government jobs I have been exposed to are any model, I would say somehow privatize education. If by vouchers or other means, do it somehow.

Government entities in my experience are the most wasteful and ineffective organizations that I have ever seen. Couple that with the teachers unions and who is actually surprised that the education system gets worse every year?

No government agency would survive if it were a private company. The quality and quantity of work that it produces and for the huge sums of money that it costs/wastes - would cause it to go belly up in a matter of months.

There has got to be a better way.

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