By Jill Jenkins
Many schools
across the United State face teacher shortages.
Why are so many teachers leaving the profession or like the musical
group Clash sang wondering, “Should I Stay or Should I
Go?” It’s not hard to imagine that teachers mentally and physically exhausted
from teaching both virtually and in-person classes simultaneously during the
pandemic now facing over-crowded classrooms and traumatized children who might have
lost a love one to COVID or terrified from the recent images of school shootings
might want to seek alternative forms of employment. After all teaching has never been a lucrative
career and now being confronted by angry demanding parents organized by the
extreme right to attack curriculum, books, libraries and educators might find
it simpler to find a new career. Their guerrilla tactics might be an attempt to
intimidate educators to make it easier to privatize schools and hire only
like-minded friends? Who knows? The results, however, is many teachers,
especially special education teachers are not renewing their contracts.
Teaching has
never been a lucrative career. During my
years in the classroom, I remember teachers begging the water department to
give them a little more time on a bill or hurrying off to a second job with a
briefcase full of papers to correct. I
remember one teacher who managed a movie theater at night and as he left the
theater one weekend night, he was held up at gun point and his briefcase full
of science tests was taken. Boy, was the
criminal in for a surprise. Shortages in
education started a long time ago. First,
the district couldn’t find substitutes willing to work for so little. Some districts lowered their standards until
some of us joked that they will be picking up homeless people with “Will Work
for Food” signs and offering them school lunch.
Some districts offered teachers $10.00 to cover classes during their preparation
period. It wasn’t really an offer,
because I offered the secretary $10.00 if I didn’t have to cover another
class. She didn’t find it funny. As the district had more difficulty finding
teachers, most of us had to give up our preparation period and teach seven
classes anyway. Seven straight classes
of students with no consultation period or breaks led to more burn out and
increased the problem. Should we be
surprised that when we burdened teacher with preparing and presenting both
on-line teaching and in-person teaching while risking their lives with possible
exposure to COVID that they might conclude that “there are some things that not
even a pig will do.”
Then, there
is the problem of the parents. Trust me
there have always been parent who complained: “I don’t want my son reading Charles
Dickens’ Oliver Twist because a woman is violently murdered in it;” I
don’t want my daughter reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,
because it makes White people look bad;” I don’t want my son reading Victor
Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame because there is too much sexual innuendo;”
or “I don’t want my son to read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 because
the language is horrible.” (That one I had to review the text to find the word “bastard”.) Today, however, the parents are organized and
they are coming to enforce a list created by far-right political groups to
classrooms, PTA meetings and school board meetings and they aren’t just
concerned about their son or daughter.
They want their demands to be leveled against every student. In the past some school districts distracted
these complaints by organizing committees comprised of teachers, administrators
and parents to approve lists of books appropriate to be “taught” at each grade
level. The committees served two
purposes: first, they kept teachers from pilfering books from
other grade levels; second, they kept parents happy because if they objected to
what the teacher had selected, they understood it had been reviewed and if it
was still inappropriate in their view, they could select another book from the
list to assign to their child only. In
all my decades of teaching only one parent made such a selection because she felt
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit had too much magic for her religious
beliefs. This approach might still work if the administration held
strong. Unfortunately, these parents
want their demands met not just for their child and not just for book in the classroom,
but want to control what is available in the library and want to control what all
students read. Frankly, if they
want that much control, they should pull their kids out of public school and either home
school them or send them to a private school.
What’s the
solution? President Lyndon Johnson faced similar shortages in the ‘60’s and he
offered to forgive educational loans for those who taught in low-income
schools. Since many teachers find it had
to pay back student loans on a teachers’ salary, forgive all student loans for
anyone who teaches five years in a public school. Furthermore, district should offer more
perks like free health insurance and a good retirement to teachers like they
did 40 years ago. Society should be
celebrating what teachers do in the classroom instead of weaponizing parents to
destroy public education. Benjamin
Franklin’s idea of free, public education was a great idea then, and it is
still a great idea. Celebrate our
amazing teachers.