Change in Career Direction – Why Teachers Stop Teaching

Among the clients who come to me regarding a change in career direction, the ones who sadden me the most are those who are choosing to leave the teaching profession. While a few of them have been BEd grads who weren’t able to land their first job or weren’t really suited to teach, the vast majority have been seasoned and highly dedicated professionals who entered teaching out of genuine passion for helping children achieve their potential.

So why are they leaving? It isn’t why you would think. I don’t hear a litany of complaints about “kids these days….”, “parents these days…”, “crime in schools…” or any of the other psycho-social issues that make teaching a much harder job than it was 20 years ago.

Instead, they are burned out by an administrative structure that just doesn’t GET teaching. They mention the complete disconnect between those who teach and those who try to tell them how to do it – all too often people who, unable to make it in the classroom, opt for a career in administration instead. They discuss the enormous waste of investment in repetitive in-servicing programs, frequently at the expense of actual resources in the classroom. They lambaste a mind-numbing bureaucracy that is more interested in standardized test scores than student learning. And mostly, they regret the fact that they just can’t be as effective as they would like to be. Two particular anecdotes come to mind that illustrate these concerns.

The first involves a client who opted to complete a master’s degree in special education after five years as a mainstream teacher. He is a passionate advocate for integrated learning, and developed some really unique approaches to ensure that the needs of both typical and special needs children could be met within a conventional classroom. After six years with a large school board in southern Ontario, he was throwing in the towel. He was worn out by the continuous struggle to ensure that the resources that were committed on paper for each child actually got used for that child.

I was surprised to learn that even though a child with an identified special need is assigned a certain number of resource hours by the school board, the ultimate decision on how to use those hours is left up to the principal. In my client’s case, the principal saw him as the school’s jack-of-all-trades, and called upon him for assignments such as lunchtime supervision, supply teaching, and monitoring of children whose classroom behaviour was disruptive. My client came to realize that each of the children he was meant to be working with was receiving less than 50% of the one-on-one time they really needed. Rather than thriving and moving ahead, they were falling further behind, and my client was left to explain to justifiably confused and frustrated parents why the Individualized Learning Plans weren’t working. He couldn’t do it anymore, he said, he couldn’t keep defending a school system that was failing the children he was committed to helping.

The second incident involves a case of in-servicing gone amok as a result of the focus on standardized test scores. In Ontario, if test scores fall below a certain level, bureaucrats from the school board parachute in to evaluate the teaching program and provide recommendations on how to fix it. For the record, the story was told to me by a colleague of the teacher involved, so I am getting the information third hand. A grade three teacher (let’s call her Jane) whose students had failed to perform well the previous year was assigned a so-called “expert” to help Jane improve her teaching skills and lesson plans.

“Karen,” my contact confided to me, “you have to understand. Jane is an awesome teacher. She has some of the most creative and successful lessons in the school. I mean, she’s our role model. The kids love her, the parents love her, and most years her students do well. But last year, she had donuts. I don’t know why, call it a quirk of astrology, but some years are just like that.”

Jane was pulled out of the classroom at least two to three times a month to take in-servicing seminars. The “expert” had her completely redesign the lesson plans. She threw out carefully thought out activities and interactive lessons in favour of rote-work designed to improve test scores. The entire year became focused on teaching to the test, and critical elements of the core curriculum were neglected. Students became increasingly bored and disengaged, and it showed in their behaviour.

The net result? The scores went down even further, and the school is now faced with even more “experts” trying to fix the problem. Worse, an entire class of students started grade 4 without having adequately covered the grade 3 program, and needed a lot of catch up work. Of course, there were no “experts” to help the grade 4 class; their needs won’t become a school board priority again until grade 6, when the next standardized test kicks in.

Why is this article in a career services blog? Because recruiters are coming to recognize that teachers represent a huge untapped candidate pool, and are developing strategies specifically aimed at luring them out of the teaching profession (see Dr. John Sullivan’s article on using “group targeting” to recruit teachers to become corporate employees ). According to Sullivan, a thought-leader in the recruiter world, teachers are highly educated, highly competent, well organized, good at planning, great communicators, adaptable, dedicated, and eager for opportunities. They make ideal new recruits, and are ripe for the picking.

Of course, the recession has put the brakes on employee raiding of any kind, and unhappy staff in virtually all professions are opting to stay put until the economy recovers. But the recession won’t last forever, and when recovery mode kicks in school boards may find themselves facing an exodus of top talent who understand that job satisfaction requires more than a good pension plan.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.