Why I am quitting teaching
While millions of students and teachers prepare for a return to classrooms next month, for the first time in nine years, I will not be one of them. At the end of last year, I decided to leave the classroom. Teaching has always been a hard job, but I had expected to be a teacher my whole career. However, well-intentioned (but ultimately harmful) policy changes transformed a large part of my job from teaching into task management that ultimately took the joy out of being an educator.
That the Covid-19 pandemic affected students negatively is well-understood; yet for a while, many people, myself included, were hopeful. Optimistically, many saw the pandemic as a time to fundamentally rethink how schooling is done; at the very least, teachers believed that things would eventually return to “normal.” During the 2020–2021 school year, expectations were low. Many schools were only partially reopened, and things were obviously going to be different. Behavioral problems were up, attendance was down. 9th graders were acting like 7th graders. Students had to be constantly reminded to pull their masks up. Students came back with anxiety and depression — at one point during the 2021–22 school year, I remember our school social worker telling us she could not find a single open pediatric psychiatric hospital bed in the city of New York for a student who was suicidal. But there was still hope that things were eventually going to get better.
Over the last year, though, I have become convinced that things have changed fundamentally for the worse.
Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash
Policies have created a self-reinforcing loop that has made school even more rote.
Schools have long used carrots and sticks–like grades and attendance requirements–to encourage students to do assignments that otherwise feel meaningless. And for many students during the pandemic, school work ran up against lack of access to the internet, taking care of siblings, and the trauma of losing loved ones, and completing assignments rightfully took a backseat. As a result, schools understandably promoted students to the next grade en masse, regardless of assignments completed or classes attended.
Once schools reopened, though, policymakers could have used the isolation and disengagement many students had during the pandemic as a wake up call to create classrooms based around compassion and intrinsic motivation. Or they could have gone back to the way things were, using rewards and punishments to get student compliance. Instead, schools have done neither. They did not make schools more compassionate or more interesting, but they also took away the rewards and punishments that made the old system work.
During the height of school closures, schools that struggled to get students to attend Zoom classes created work that could be completed asynchronously. Since reopening, though, schools have continued many of the same policies that existed during remote learning. With the persistent threat of school closures and covid exposures, schools have continued to push this kind of work that can be completed independently. Whether this is called “individualized learning,” “independent learning,” “blended learning,” or “asynchronous learning,” it is all the same. It frequently just looks like…worksheets (or Google Docs). Schools have dropped attendance requirements and deadlines. Precisely the kind of work that is easy to complete independently, though, is also the least interesting: it is easier to complete a worksheet or a Google Doc remotely than it is to participate in a discussion or complete a project. Consequently schools–especially those with the worst attendance problems–became even more boring. We have created an education system where the actual class, by design, is unnecessary to completing the work, and students have responded in kind–students have realized that attending class is literally pointless, even for earning a good grade.
While well-intentioned, if these measures help to facilitate chronic absenteeism, they will disproportionately impact low-income students; 45% of low-income students in New York City, for instance, are chronically absent, and this number has skyrocketed since the beginning of the pandemic–a trend that has been reflected nationwide. Schools with a large number of chronically absent students will be more likely to resort to even more “independent” work, creating a self-reinforcing loop: as attending class feels more and more pointless, fewer students will attend; as fewer students attend, schools will create work and policies that emphasize needing to be in class.
In other words, while wealthier students will receive instruction that is relatively similar to the kind of instruction they received before the pandemic, low-income students will likely be the subject of worksheets and Google Doc learning that is ultimately less interesting and less engaging. While this may permit higher graduation rates, it will squash curiosity and real learning.
A Lack of Structure Is Doing More Harm Than Good
Before the pandemic, for most major assignments, I would generously give extensions, but students would need to contact me in advance to ask for one. Students who missed deadlines and didn’t ask for an extension would usually still be allowed to turn in work , but only if we came up with a plan to turn future work in on time. For me, this was both practical and didactic; students need to learn how to communicate with adults about their needs, and asking for an extension and receiving it helped to build trust and develop students’ executive functioning. As a teacher having to grade 120 essays, it is way more practical to do them in batches than to grade a slow trickle of essays turned in every few days over the course of months.
As a result of remote learning, many schools have done away with deadlines for assignments. While opponents of deadlines argue that they would rather have students turn in work late than no work at all, I have found that deadlines can be an important structure for students who have not fully developed executive functioning.
As a result of lax attendance requirements, no deadlines, and a pressure to pass all students, I have felt like for the last two years, I wasn’t really doing much teaching — I have become a taskmaster. Rather than engaging with students in deep learning, I felt like I was increasingly spending my time hunting down students who had not attended class in a month, trying to get them to turn in 3 assignments before the end of the marking period so they would pass the class. At multiple schools, I faced immense pressure to pass and graduate all students–this is directly the result of policy pressures that administrators face that overemphasize four year graduation rates. The list of students I have passed over the last few years included those who attended fewer than 10 days of school; 12th graders who were functionally illiterate; and students who did not speak English after four years of high school.
While these were the extreme cases, the more typical cases looked like students turning in an essay weeks late, making it impossible for me to give timely feedback to the student and conference with them to help improve their writing. Because students were turning in one major assignment weeks late, they couldn’t collaborate with other students, and they couldn’t build off of previous assignments (which they had not done). As one parent wrote to Slate:
“But of course, it all just piles up for the end of the marking period when he turns in a bunch of half-assed work. His test grades usually don’t rise above mediocrity because in his head, he can always try again later. He did not have these habits at all in middle school before these policies were implemented, so I feel fairly confident that these habits are mostly a result of the policy changes.”
Good, rigorous learning is based on iteration and building one assignment on top of the next; with infrequent attendance and no deadlines, this just did not happen. The joy that I got from seeing students reading and writing improve or seeing students make connections across time just cannot happen with such a lack of structure. And the lack of structure is bad for students, too.
Student Misbehavior Is Not Being Addressed
Student misbehavior is frequently a sign of some underlying need not behind met. While there are certainly extreme examples of misbehavior like getting into fights and showing up to class high (both of which are also on the rise), the more frequent kind of misbehavior I have seen is just complete disengagement–students on their phones, skipping class, leaving school during the middle of the day, or lashing out at teachers. This is the result of a student mental health crisis. Between the increasing meaningless of the work they are doing at school, increased isolation, and real trauma, dissociating completely makes sense.
In the past, schools have responded to misbehavior with a regime of punishments and rewards. Under the guise of restorative practices, though, schools have increasingly left misbehavior unaddressed.
While schools should see the increased disengagement and misbehavior as a sign that something is incredibly wrong, they are instead enabling it. We are not pushing kids to self-regulation; instead, we are accepting their lack of self-regulation as an immutable given, and we are not pushing them to develop personally. What we are doing to students is not kind or restorative or equitable — we are just failing our students.
What will next school year look like?
I expect this upcoming year will be even more painful; near the end of this past year, student disengagement, non-attendance, and increasingly rote work reached their logical conclusion with the proliferation of ChatGPT. Students, facing no deadlines, turn in all of their work at the end of a marking period; but without having attended class, the rise of cheating skyrocketed, and ChatGPT has only made it easier. At the same time, because of the incentives facing schools and teachers, many of these students turning in either very bad work or work that was clearly AI-generated were still passed on to the next grade, telling students that what they were doing was okay and allowing students not to develop the requisite skills to move on to the next grade. It also becomes harder to catch cheating when work is all turned in at the end of the semester; hundreds of late assignments mean less time to thoroughly grade each.
The pandemic gave us an opportunity to reevaluate the purpose of school. Instead, we have leaned into the worst parts of schooling, making the work of school less meaningful, more individualized, and more detached from any sense of community. Students have responded logically to this alienation by disengaging from school even more and eschewing attendance, further exacerbating the student mental health crisis. All the while, schools are passing along all students and pretending like nothing is wrong because students continue to graduate in four years.
I hope to one day return to the classroom. It was a job I once loved, but policymakers have established a set of incentives that have taken the joy out of teaching; they have made me feel like a taskmaster rather than a teacher. In the face of student suffering, rather than helping students or intervening, we have collectively decided to allow students to dissociate and disengage from public life. With the current state of education policy in this country–and the current battles being fought over teaching–I have little hope that policymakers are in any position to begin addressing these deep, underlying problems.
