After two years of living my dream job as a teacher, I am leaving the classroom and brokenhearted.
My entire life, I have dreamed of being a teacher. When I declared Secondary Education (6th-12th grade) as my major at Baylor University, I learned very quickly that public school teachers were really there to earn high test scores (and district money) for the schools. Disenfranchised by this, I decided on a different course before getting distracted by adulting, tax brackets, and politics.
When I turned 40, I decided it was time to teach because that ambition had never died. I taught English Language Arts at an inner-city charter school in Tampa. I broke up fights, fed food-insecure kids, and introduced students to the beauty of Edgar Allan Poe — it was amazing!
My husband's orders moved us to North Carolina, where I was hired as a 4th and 5th grade social studies teacher at a Catholic school. It was even better than I'd imagined because I could talk about Jesus, and these kids still wanted you to think they're cool.
I am the kind of person you want teaching your kids. I don't have funky piercings or hair color; I will shut down any discussion about pronouns faster than a New York minute; I can take any topic (except math, let's be real) and make it interesting. But, I'm out.
North Carolina has a Permit To Teach, a one-year permission slip to teach without a license. Over the course of that one year, you're supposed to start the licensing process, which includes 18-24 college credit hours from a state-approved Educator Preparation Program and pass a subject curriculum knowledge test while teaching full time.
North Carolina expects me to pay thousands of dollars to listen to professors who have not been in a middle or high school classroom for who knows how long, so I can learn how to do what I already know. And they wonder why 36% of Permit To Teach hires leave after one year...
Even if I had silly amounts of money sitting around looking for a scheme to fund, I don't have time to go back to school while working full-time, raising two little kids, supporting an active duty Marine Corps husband, and maintaining a reasonable degree of sanity. North Carolina is short 5,000 teachers, and they're in Raleigh lamenting over the mass exodus of education professionals. Schools aren't churning out teachers the way they used to, and people aren't staying in one place forever anymore.
Rather than addressing these issues, Democrat Gov. Josh Stein and the Republican General Assembly do wonderfully stupid stuff, like banning cell phones from classrooms.
Yes, we all agree students should not have phones in the classroom, but let's look at the facts:
I watched a 6-foot-tall, 180-pound 8th grader punch an iPad in half before throwing a desk across the room because I took his cell phone. If you think I wasn't scared, you'd be mistaken. Now, imagine an older, experienced but more frail and genteel woman in that situation; she wouldn't come back the next day. I'm still baffled that I did.
North Carolina has done nothing to make it easier to become a teacher. The Tar Heel State has done nothing to incentivize the really good teachers to stay. As the kids get more unruly, the attrition will become a hemorrhage, and knuckleheads in Raleigh will be wondering where they went wrong.
There are three things that could very easily address these problems, assuming the higher education lobby and teachers' unions were restrained (but that's the problem, isn't it?):
- Eliminate the goofy Educators Preparation Program and replace it with a robust apprenticeship. Assign new lateral-entry teachers (that is, those who come from different careers and industries) to seasoned professionals and have individual meetings, as well as campus-wide development events, regularly. You'd be amazed how much I have learned in the classroom in just two years, and, unlike tenured professors, I know textbooks are rarely effective tools for kids. Put benchmarks and standards in place to make people feel better about the laissez-faire of it all and set a pair on a two-year course.
- Pay the mentor teachers a supplement for each lateral-entry they take under their wing, and then pay them a bonus when that lateral-entry completes the two years and passes the subject curriculum knowledge test.
- Design the budget and staff structure to be an equilateral triangle. There should be more teachers and money at the bottom, and the higher you go, the fewer administrators, bureaucrats, and dollars.
Teachers today are being asked to do more than cultivate curiosity or teach facts. We have become social workers, IT departments, lunch ladies, nurses, coaches, mediators, and parking attendants. Anyone who wants to take on all of that while also being paid in peanuts and hugs should not be hindered by politicians chasing campaign contributions or swanky lobbyist events.
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