Teachers are Victims of a Failed System

It’s hard to be a teacher these days.

They are blamed for everything that is wrong with our public education system, and sometimes more.

But what if everything that ails our public education system – and there’s a lot – isn’t the fault of teachers?

Last week, Alexandra Robbins, a New York Times bestselling author, wrote an article for EducationWeek online titled “Teachers Aren’t Burnt Out. They Are Being Set Up to Fail.” I’m guessing the article is an excerpt from Robbins’s new book The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession.

Robbins writes,

“Penny’s situation was a familiar one for educators.”

“The middle school math teacher worried she was burned out. Her district had instituted an intense new set of math curriculum standards without providing resources to cover those lessons. She was constantly sick from the mold in her classroom, but when she reported it to administrators, they only painted over the mold. Rather than run serious student-disciplinary issues up the chain, her principal sent students back to class as if nothing had happened.”

“And Penny was beleaguered by parents who made ridiculous requests, such as ‘My children like it when their teachers attend their sports events. Your attendance at all of the attached games would be appreciate’ and ‘Did you get the homework out of Brentley’s locker?’”

“Historically, teachers’ rates of ‘job strain,’ stress from high demand/low control work, are higher than the average rate of all workers. A joint American Federation of Teachers and Badass Teachers Association survey revealed that almost two-thirds of educators find work ‘always’ or ‘often’ stressful.”

“The media often use the phrase ‘teacher burnout’ to describe educators’ stress, exhaustion, and overwork. But after interviewing hundreds of teachers nationwide for my book The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession, I believe ‘teacher burnout’ is a myth – and the term should be ditched.”

“Experts have identified several causes of teacher burnout, including inadequate workplace support and resources; unmanageable workload; high-stakes testing; time pressure; unsupported, disruptive students; and a wide variety of student needs without the resources to meet them. Penny, whom I followed for a year for the book, experienced all of these issues, as do many teachers.”

“The premise of teacher burnout is a convenient fiction that blames teachers for not being able to cope rather than faulting school systems that set both teachers and students up to fail. This line of thinking isn’t meant to diminish educators’ thoroughly justified feelings of helplessness, stress, sadness, anxiety, frustration, and exhaustion. But let’s shift blame to where blame is due. Instead of presenting the problem as teachers having high or even the highest burnout levels of all U.S. industries, as a 2022 Gallup poll found, we should reframe the issue: School systems are the employers worst at providing necessary supports and resources for employees.”

“Instead of asking teachers to do the impossible and calling them ‘burned out’ when they can’t, school leaders should fix the underlying causes – school climate, staffing numbers, and resources – not just to prevent employee demoralization, but because that’s how a proper workplace should operate.”

“’Looking back, I wasn’t burned out,’ Penny told me last month. ‘Our school was just a mess.’”

But what if today’s public school system can’t fix school climate, staffing numbers, and resources?

What if today’s public school system is so old and dysfunctional that it’s easier to blame their frontline employees, their teachers, than to fix a broken system?

There are bad teachers in today’s system, no doubt, but many more seem to be trying and failing inside a system that just doesn’t work for many anymore. And, if teachers are struggling, what is happening to our young learners inside schools? The academic and social-emotional data suggest more and more struggle as our children attempt to become smarter and stronger in their learning habits.

So maybe it won’t be the parents who lead the revolution toward a new and improved learning system for our nation’s children. Maybe it will be the classroom teacher once they find out they work inside a system that is broken and can’t be fixed.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB