Parents Are Competing for Teacher Talent by the Way They Act
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder points out that parent behavior directly affects whether good teachers stay at a school — and that difficult parents drive talent away.
Key Takeaways
- Teacher talent is a competition - The best teachers have options, and they'll leave schools where parents make the job unbearable
- Parent behavior matters - Aggressive, demanding, or disrespectful parents create working conditions that push teachers out
- Parents should be allies - Supporting teachers rather than undermining them attracts and retains the best educators for your child's school
Transcript
What if parents had to compete for teachers?
Now, we're familiar with the phenomenon of parents lobbying the principal to get a certain teacher for their child or to get their child in or not in a certain teacher's class.
But what if we recognized that schools essentially compete for teachers on the basis of how their parents parent and how their parents treat the teacher?
See, I think what's not recognized is that principals play a role in this, certainly.
But a lot of the working conditions for teachers, in terms of student behavior especially, but also in terms of parent treatment of teachers, a lot of that comes from parents.
Whether it is productive and healthy and happy to work in a given school depends.
to a large extent, on the parents and on the decisions the parents make in parenting their own children, in disciplining their children, in holding their children accountable, in helicopter parenting or not, in siding with the teacher when the student is in the wrong.
There are lots of things that parents can do to help teachers want to be in that community and work in that school, and there are lots of things that parents can do that make teachers want to run away.
So I think we've got to recognize, like this doesn't have necessarily huge implications for us as educators, but I do think we have to recognize that parents are competing for teachers and they don't realize it, right?
They don't realize that when they act in a certain way, when they're selfish about their kid, when they do things that feel good to them but are bad for their kid and they know it and the teacher calls them on it, like when they do those things that drive away teachers, they're competing badly for talent and we know we don't have enough talent to go around right there are not enough people entering this profession there are not enough people going into teaching and parents play a role in that let me know what you think