The fact that Florida is 9,000 teachers short this year has gone viral. The Florida Department of Education released a report this week listing more than 9,000 projected vacancies for teaching positions. This is just the most recent alarm bell ringing about the sorry state of the teaching profession, but also likely represents some especially aggressive attempts by the state to muzzle what teachers can say.
But the problem is bigger than the sunshine state, 2021-22 was one of, if not the hardest year for teachers ever. But Bryan Hogan on twitter has an insight that seems especially apt at this moment.
I’ve had some toxic jobs. Lesson learned:
— Brian P. Hogan (@bphogan) July 24, 2018
When things go bad, good people leave, eventually followed by people who thought they could change things but got buried because too many good people left. Those left are bad people or hostages.
The good people are your canary.
Good teachers are leaving. The teachers who are able to leave, to find jobs that compensate them appropriately for their skills, are leaving. Their roles will be filled with the teachers who are left and with new teachers, which is already an incredibly hard year of teaching, and then poor student behavior is likely to become even worse, which will only increase the rate of burnout, and the teachers left will become even more desperate to leave the profession.
Michelle Cummings broke down the areas that she sees which need to be fixed in our interview, but is it possible to do that quickly enough to stem the bleeding? If our current political progress is anything to go by, it seems unlikely, and that could lead to a slow spiral downward in an area which has already experienced a lot of trouble.
More Stories
SIGGRAPH at 50
SIGGRAPH , the premier conference on computer graphics education, held its 50th event last week in Los Angeles. Back in...
School Board Meetings in Crisis
School Board meetings across the US have become a new flashpoint in the culture wars that have been dividing the...
Biden is forgiving $40 Billion in student loan debt through “administrative fixes”
We talk a lot about big, sweeping policy changes because those are the kind of things that make for easier...
The Supreme Court has taken aim at students
The republican majority supreme court has now decided two important cases we’ve previously reported on; Biden’s student debt forgiveness and...
There is movement, although slow, on teacher pay
At the beginning of this year the Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in an offhand way that teacher base...
House Republicans seemed determined to be cruel and shortsighted on student loan debt
The House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday to block President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program and end the...