My response to an article on NEA's website about the decrease in number of students graduating in education majors. The link to the article can be found below.
I don't think it's just the pay. Educators have been getting paid the way we have for a long time. The part I think is driving people away or not even driving students towards is the job satisfaction. Being a professional teacher is tough for a lot of my colleagues outside of Belle Isle ( the school I teach at). They are being asked to fit in a one size fits all box, to teach the way the schools have for the past 100 years. They are held accountable for things in which they have been granted very little autonomy to discover solutions for. Everyone from the teachers to the admin are afraid to do anything new and that leaves no hope in the hearts of the teachers that they can make the difference they came to make in the beginning. Students that have grown up in this system hear teachers complain about the low pay and how "crap" the job is and they believe it, and sometimes see it, and don't get involved. This results in less interest in teaching as the years go on, and less teachers. The problem then compounds itself. Students have gone through many an uninspired classroom and have never had a chance to see a teacher throw out the boxes that we are asked to teach in. They have never seen us say "screw it we are going to learn and let the test take care of itself." We are afraid of the scores because we do, in fact, feel the students' scores reflect on our teaching in spite of what we say to the contrary. We are afraid that those scores will tell someone else that we are ineffective or that we suck at our job and we still care what other people think because that's why we got into the job in the first place. We care. When you care, this job drains you down at times because we stand up everyday and do the thing other people don't want to do, and we do it even when we are instructed how to do it. I want to see teachers mobilize to take back the creative, caring, personal side of teaching. I want to see us rally for what's important instead of talking about what isn't. I want to see us change education instead of being afraid that we might not be up to the task of walking into that unknown world of future education. We need to ask ourselves what that world will look like. How do we educate more kids with fewer teachers? We are educated people, that is not an unsolvable problem. We have to step outside the box, keep trembling through our fear, and see that we can't do it the way we have always done it. We are at a time where we will look back and see this as a moment when education shifted, we have the power to make that a positive one. What will we do?
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