What Would Make Teaching a Job People Actually Want to Do?

How can we make working in education a job that people want to do again?

Because I get the sense that so many people like working in education.

They want to work in education.

It's just we've kind of broken it lately.

As a society, we've done some things that have made education just not worth it, just not worth the risk, not worth the financial sacrifice, not worth the effort.

And I think all of those mistakes that we've made as a society are reversible.

I think we can turn back the clock on some of the worst mistakes we've made in the last couple of years.

One of them is around compensation.

Education compensation has just not kept pace with other industries, not kept pace with inflation.

That's fixable.

I think as a society, if we have the will, we can increase compensation if we're willing to compete with other industries for talent.

We can pay enough to attract people back to the profession who right now may be staying home, who may be working in another field, who may have retired early or just are not you know, choosing to take the jobs that they would have taken in the past.

And I think we probably underestimated how many people had a choice.

I think that was one of the big mistakes that we made as a society was just to assume that, well, anybody who's working in education needs to, they'll always be around.

We can take them for granted.

We cannot take educators for granted.

Because as we have seen over the past couple of years, they can walk away and are walking away without really any viable plan on our part for replacing them.

So I think we've got to address the compensation piece, but I also think we have to address the violence piece.

This has to be a job where people are physically safe from violence.

And I don't mean primarily gun violence.

Obviously, gun violence is a terrible problem in our society.

It's a terrible problem in schools.

It's statistically rare, but it looms large for people.

But what I'm talking about is day-to-day safety, safety from unsafe student behavior that normally would have been handled through progressive discipline, that normally would have just not been tolerated.

but now is increasingly being tolerated in the name of discipline reform.

Well, tolerating bad behavior is not discipline reform.

Like if you have a different idea for fixing behavior problems, great, go for it.

But ignoring behavior problems is not discipline reform.

So we've got to abandon that false start because I think it's really the straw that breaks the camel's back for so many educators.

So we've got to address compensation.

We've got to address physical safety.

And of course, there's psychological safety and things that go on with that.

I think the last thing we need to think very hard about is just the workload that we put on people like we've made this job harder and harder and harder for years and years and years.

in the name of making education better for students.

But at some point, things get so hard for teachers that they say, I'm out.

I'm just not going to go to all these meetings.

I'm not going to participate in all this stuff.

I just want to teach.

Let me teach.

And I think there's very real tension around improvement and just letting people teach.

So let me know what would bring you back if you are outside of the profession.

Let me know what is almost causing you to quit if you're kind of on the fence there.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.