Three Educators Speak Out on Why Teachers are Leaving the Education Industry

By Zainab Cheema 

A teacher exodus is underway, leading to massive shortages in public schools across the United States. While COVID-19 acted as the trigger to the educator walk outs, in many ways it has only exposed the systemic flaws waiting to burst like a powder keg. This past week, I discussed the teacher walkouts in interviews with three educators—Tara Boertzel, Nicole Routon and Hope Blecher. Our conversations take the temperature of the restructuring ED Industry, and the collapsing project of public education in the United States.

The mass level of teachers quitting has led to skyrocketing shortages of labor across public schools. The situation is so dire that New Mexico had to bring in the National Guard members to teach public schools. This past week, Brenda Cassellius, the superintendent of Boston’s public schools, published an op-ed in The Washington Post warning “My fellow educators are quitting in droves.” Metaphors of national emergency drenched her op-ed. She’s not far off the mark. The situation is an emergency. Kids across the nation may board the school buses to go to their local school, but they may not meet anyone there to teach them. According to a January 2022 National Education Poll, around 55% of teachers in the nation are looking for the exit from their jobs.

Meet Three Teachers 

The three educators whom I talked to are in different stages in their careers. Tara Boertzel is a former public school teacher based in Denver, Colorado, who taught kindergarten for over 15 years. Five years ago, she transitioned into building her own education company, Brainiac, Inc. While she still consults with public schools, her work is now channeled into a self-made business that now earns her over six figures. Nicole Routon is former middle school science teacher based in Kentucky who transitioned to the financial services industry only this year (in January 2022). Nicole was a dedicated educator who worked for a variety of schools in her school district for over 13 years. Last year, she decided that enough was enough. She feels like she has gotten her life back. Hope Blecher is currently an ESL teacher based in New Jersey, and who now works with an adult literacy program funded by the US Department of Labor. Hope has taught in the public school system for over 30 years and at all levels, from kindergarten to adult education. She’s branching out into education consulting but is staying within the system for now.

No educator makes the decision to walk lightly. Most educators walk because they reach a breaking point with the systemic dysfunction of the ED industry affecting their mental and physical health. “I’ve always loved the work of educating kids and doing things that will empower and better children,” said Tara. Tara had accepted the low salaries that accompany teaching until she became a divorced single mother and found that the pay and the hours simply didn’t lead to helping her keep her family together. Nicole spoke about how she stayed in the ED industry for so long because of the unspoken expectation on teachers to keep on taking low pay and work long hours for the good of the students that they love and care for. “When we’re watching this burn out, we’re watching people who’ve sat in staff meetings, who had kept on saying, ‘I’m doing it for the kids, I’m here for the kids,’” said Tara. “[But] they’re no longer available to do it just for the kids. They’re now saying, my sanity, my joy, my fulfillment also matters. COVID just sped this whole thing up.” Tara is now developing a children’s show called Tara Bara, which is bringing her the joy and fulfillment that she was missing as a public school teacher.

Hope talked about the emotional stakes of leaving education as a career. “For teachers who are walking, it’s never just a job that they are walking away from,” she said. “Teaching becomes part of your being. I have two kids who are now their 20s, and they came with me to many of my school events. I’d share activities I did in my classrooms with their teachers. Because you become a community of supportive people. [If you are a teacher], only you know how much time you invest.”

“We’re done,” says Nicole. “I get a lot of energy from fixing and supporting things. That’s why I went into education, to make a difference. But after 13 years of fighting [the ED system to get work done] and stressing, I needed to take a break. My stress levels were super high. I didn’t enjoy life anymore. I was exhausted. The only time I had any personality was summer break, spring break and Christmas. The rest of the time I was a zombie that would sit and stare into space. I realized that that’s not how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.”

Causes of Teacher Walkouts

The issue of what is going wrong is more thorny. All three educators agreed that COVID only sped up deep rooted issues in public schools. All three identified a breakdown of trust between teachers and the school- and district-level administration. They discussed systemic issues with the way in which teachers are evaluated, expected to take on an ever-growing roster of responsibilities without compensation, and the increasing levels of surveillance they are facing in a divided political climate.

Hope explained how teacher evaluations in the public school system work. Tenure as a public school teacher is based upon three or more yearly evaluations conducted by the principal, vice principal or the immediate supervisor. “It’s like preview night on Broadway,” Hope quipped about the evaluation visits. “Either you’re a hit or curtains closed.” But it’s not just the teaching on which teachers are being evaluated. “Part of the evaluation is, how are you working with your colleagues? Are you a collaborator? Are you a team player? What other roles do you play in the school?” As school education budgets shrink, this has meant that teachers are having to take on the role of creating school- and district-wide events and programs; enroll in tech and professional development trainings and then be expected to train their fellow teachers; or even buy school supplies, all without being compensated for their time or money.

Tara discussed how some principals would abuse the system to weed out talented teachers that they happened not to agree with or get along with. “I would hear them say, ‘I need you to go collect data on her so that I can write her a nonrenewal.’ [But] There is nothing wrong with her, she’s a great teacher. She also has her principal’s license, and she could do your job, probably better.’” When an administrator writes a teacher a nonrenewal, it is far more dire than simply firing them, because it means that no other school in the district will hire them. “The relationship between the school district and teacher is like a toxic relationship,” said Tara. “[But] teachers don’t understand that they have all the power right now. If teachers could understand that they have all the power, this whole thing would flip on its head.”

COVID-19 set off a tipping point when an increasing number of teachers began to call in sick or became unable to come to school. In addition to their jam-packed schedules, the remaining teachers then had to cover their sick colleagues’ classrooms. “The intensity of it now is unbelievable,” said Hope. “Teachers are having to give up their prep time for colleagues who are sick, or absent or who have walked away. Nothing is being taken off. The bubble has burst.” The compensation for covering an absent teacher’s class period is normally $20 to $25 a period, which simply doesn’t compensate the full-to-bursting schedules and lack of time that breathless teachers have to juggle now. For teachers continuing to work under these conditions, there isn’t even enough time to take a bathroom break in the school day.

Teachers are also walking because they feel distrusted and disrespected. Many teachers feel that the love and care that they put into their professions are not being returned by their community, district and state employers. For example, Nicole pinpointed the stress that she felt as an educator from breakdowns in the state-district-teacher relationship caused by the increasingly polarized political climate in our country. The recent debate about critical race theory has translated into legislative action taken by state governments that has amounted to mass level surveillance of teachers, breaking down the trust between teachers and their employers. This is dramatically increasing educators’ stress levels.

“We have some legislative leaders who just don’t have their hearts in the right place,” said Nicole. “It’s not about doing what’s best for kids.” “In Indiana, a bill was recently passed that requires teachers to present their lesson plans for the whole year 30 days before the start of the school year,” Nicole explained. “That bill alone will run off Indiana’s teachers to other states. Utah and Kentucky have similar bills coming through.” Since many politicians have made critical race theory into an election platform, these kinds of legislation have become a way of signaling to constituents that they are keeping their campaign promises. However, the end result is massive micro-managing of teachers in a way that signals state-wide distrust of them, their care for their students, and their expertise. Nicole was referring to bills passed by the Indiana state Senate, and now being followed by the Utah and Kentucky state legislature, requiring that schools post their entire curricula (including syllabi and lesson plans) online to make sure that CRT is not being taught to students.

Educators are Stressed 

Public school education has simply become too stressful for teachers. Tara’s message to teachers is to embrace their worthiness and to invest in a better life for themselves, even if it means walking away from their current understanding of what a job in education looks. “I want teachers to know that it’s okay to feel good,” said Tara. “There’s a life after teaching where you get to feel good and continue to do the thing you love. Find another way to serve the kids.”

Nicole noticed her health rebound when she left teaching for public schools. “Now that I’m out, I feel like I’m back to who I was before I went to education. These past 13 years, I just thought that I was just getting older, that I was getting tired. And then it turns out that, no, I was suffering 13 years and just didn’t know.” The cost of her health has been to leave a career that she felt passion for. “My heart is still in education. I will always love it. It’s in my family, my blood. I feel magic when I’m with kids. But it’s just not mentally feasible for the adults anymore.”

In my last blog post on the issue, I talked about how these correct individual decisions are adding up to a dark picture for the Ed industry as a whole. As Hope observed, it’s important not to blame teachers—the teacher blaming in response to educators asking for healthy and safe working conditions and trust and respect for their craft, has partly led to the walkouts. All three educators felt that districts and states were still in denial, despite the media coverage. Not only are teachers walking away from schools, but the pipelines supplying teachers to schools are also drying up. “I fear what will be left is a crumbled public education with the kids who don’t know how to get out,” said Nicole about the public education system. “The rest of the kids will be in private education. But there won’t be the materials necessary to take care of [the public school] kids. It’s dark.”