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Permit me to begin with a confession.
I’m partially responsible for the current teacher shortage.
As a 30-year public high school teacher in New York state, I retired at first eligibility. I also tried, unsuccessfully, to discourage my daughter and even some of my students from pursuing a career in the classroom.
Even though I consider my career to have been largely successful and personally fulfilling, I did become an outspoken critic of many reform-based initiatives during my final years in the profession.
Admittedly a traditionalist, I pushed back hard beginning in the mid 2010s when education policy makers began discouraging — even penalizing — direct instruction and scaling back reasonable discipline standards.
Indeed, a principal once asked me — in my side hustle capacity as a sometimes education writer — “Do you ever write anything positive?”
While most school leaders might consider such levels of teacher cynicism to be professionally disqualifying, I can point to state test scores, performance evaluations and numerous student testimonials as evidence of my effectiveness.
Immodesty notwithstanding, I was at minimum an above average teacher who chose to remain in the classroom for the entirety of my career.
Anyway, with about a month remaining in my farewell tour, I was selected to serve on the interview committee tasked with replacing that very same principal who had chastised me for being excessively negative.
Suffice it to say my fellow committee members probably didn’t expect the following commentary-laced questions to so thoroughly reflect how jaded I’d become. Readers are free to use, modify, or ignore them as needed:
- Why do you suppose there are dozens of applicants for this principal job, but when we post teaching positions we’re lucky if we get more than two candidates to apply? And given that pay in education tends to increase the further away one gets from the actual classroom, how much did increased compensation and/or classroom burnout impact your decision to become an administrator?
- Are you willing to personally demonstrate specific instructional strategies and classroom management techniques to new or struggling teachers in actual classes? Would administrators periodically returning to teach also serve to better familiarize them with current conditions, and possibly foster unity of mission?
- When conducting teacher observations, how do you distinguish between cosmetic engagement and substantive, actual learning? Do you prefer the classroom to be a busy, collaborative space where teachers are relegated to mostly facilitator status? Is content-focused, direct instruction by subject matter experts in a more structured environment a methodology you’d permit or encourage?
- Are you a proponent of the “Don’t teach kids anything they can Google” philosophy? Can students solve problems or think critically without first acquiring a working framework of key facts that must be memorized and essential skills that must be perfected — regardless of whether such content is naturally engaging?
- Some principals consider discipline problems to be largely the result of teachers not being entertaining or engaging enough. Do you? Not to absolve teachers of their responsibility for front-line classroom management, but what should the principal’s role be in directing school-wide discipline especially as it relates to extreme behaviors?
- Do you agree with the popular education catchphrase that claims students don’t learn from teachers they don’t like, and that most behavior issues can be prevented through “building relationships?” Do discipline problems sometimes occur even after authentic connections have been made, or despite teachers’ best and sincere efforts to establish rapport?
- Given the oft-stated goal of cultivating college and career readiness in students, is assigning minimal — or even zero — consequences for conduct that would get one expelled from institutions of higher learning or fired from their job creating a false sense of no repercussions, and setting kids up for failure later in life?
- What are your views on restorative practices? What course of action do you propose for students who are repeatedly disruptive, potentially dangerous and so resistant to any type of behavior modification that students, staff and learning are being continuously put at risk?
- Numerous administrators have conceded to me that their hands are tied by bureaucratic and financial constraints when it comes to perfectly safeguarding schools and providing disruption-free classrooms. Yet those same school leaders also generally insist that teachers must always be held to the highest standards of accountability, even if teacher effectiveness is limited by performance-impacting factors over which they have minimal control. Do you acknowledge this double standard, and how it contributes to teachers sometimes feeling thrown under the bus?
- How big an issue is toxic positivity in education? Are cheery slogans and mandatory enthusiasm sometimes used by administrators to deflect criticism and avoid addressing correctable problems that contribute to school underperformance?
Taken together, these questions are admittedly not very “cheery.” And it’s worth noting that an updated list would need to reference other even more recent challenges such as chronic absenteeism, digital overload and artificially inflated passing rates. Meanwhile, behavioral issues and national test scores are getting worse.
For years, critics have graciously advised that if teachers don’t like their jobs, they can just quit. Well, many have — some even mid- year.
So while the tone of some of these questions may be contentious, the unrealistic expectations and policy disconnects they spotlight are part of why good teachers are leaving. Stated bluntly, If school leaders are serious about understanding teacher burnout and fixing the current staffing crisis, they should welcome all the brutal honesty they can get.
Dismissing uncomfortable questions because they’re not focused enough on positivity, or pretending that only a small group of disgruntled relics like me are asking them, isn’t the answer.
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