Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Should I Stay or Should I Go

 

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

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.