Why I Left Teaching
The economic and sociological friction of a "special but shadowed" profession.
A few months ago my district sent out an email to all employees promoting a partnership with a realty company that offered affordable housing options to district employees. The cheapest option was a 3-bedroom townhome in suburban Salt Lake County– $429,000. To put this in perspective for my potentially younger readers, or those who have given up on home ownership, qualifying for that mortgage would require a household income of about $130,000 annually. I don’t want to over dramatize this, that is an achievable household income for two earners. I am, however, one earner. There’s no pathway for a teacher to ever earn enough to purchase that home.
Meeting a special someone who makes a median income like myself and buying a home isn’t out of the question. Enough has been said about the decline of the American middle class, we all know that once upon a time I could afford the white picket fence life in this occupation alone, and someone could stay home and take care of the kids. Those days are over for most Americans. I’m not here to add more tears about that. Honestly, money alone was not what led me to submit my resignation in April. To explain what else it took, we need to do a little sociology. What’s up with teaching and teachers?
I’ve been reading a book called Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, by Dan Lortie. From what I’ve gathered, this used to be somewhat of a standard text in teacher training programs. It’s fallen out of favor since many find its takes on gender in the profession old-fashioned (it was originally written in the 1970s). Lortie describes the economic ladder provided by a teaching career:
“Men and women do not benefit equally from these mobility gains. The NEA data disclose that women teachers typically originate in higher-status homes than men in the occupation; for example, more men teachers’ fathers were blue-collar workers. Perhaps the disparity stems in part from the differential opportunities perceived by women and men.”
There is data emerging showing that this has flattened out somewhat in the 21st century, as the perception of teaching as a bridge from the blue- to white-collar world has waned, and opportunities for women to work in high status fields have bloomed. These are the kind of gender-based metrics that earned this book some scrutiny in later decades. Anecdotally, as a man entering the field from a working-class background, this matches my trajectory perfectly. My father spent most of his life working in a cardboard factory, and now drives an Uber. My mother is a special education ESP (an even more societally punished role than most teachers could imagine). Getting a graduate degree and moving out of my hometown to teach was a massive jump up the economic ladder. As I’ve written about before, the prospect of delaying a decent income by another 4-6 years chasing some high-prestige profession did not seem worth it while I was in college.
It is a little too easy to ascribe the lack of upward mobility afforded to teachers to the general callousness of capitalism. That is not to say capitalism should not be interrogated here, but that raising that spectre only creates more questions. Why would any nation that takes its longevity and prosperity seriously, of any economic arrangement, not ensure that the education of its populace is an attractive and even lucrative avenue of employment? Is it the same quarter-by-quarter short-sightedness that delays action on other issues that would be its undoing? To me, it’s too vulgar to say “they just want to keep the labor force dumb”. These are all questions worthy of investigation, but here I want to speak of teachers as intelligent agents capable of understanding their own predicament and maybe changing it.
The public school classroom is a nexus for just about every sociologically interesting force you can imagine. In that room, race, class, gender, the media landscape, psychology, and neuroscience come crashing together. For twelve years most American kids are steeped in this mixture for the better part of their waking hours nine months a year, during the most plastic part of their development. So who do we entrust with shepherding them through this maelstrom? The schoolteacher. That role has changed shape dramatically since what is called the “common school movement”. Without getting into an exhaustive history of public schooling, the Common School Movement was a 19th century push to produce locally governed, secular schools available to all. For an appreciable chunk of its history, the common/public school has been taught by an unmarried woman from the community. When she became married, her tenure was over. Thus the lack of an upward career trajectory for a school teacher was forever cemented. From the beginning, teaching was established as a temporary role for any literate woman of “good moral standing”.
To ruthlessly skip well over a hundred years of debate and development, the people of America eventually decided that teaching ought to be professionalized. Institutions called “normal schools” were established, the precursors to teaching colleges and education departments at universities. This marks, in my eyes, the starting point for what most of us would recognize as the state of teaching today. Lortie describes three important ideas earlier in his book that I want to discuss here.
Teaching as a “shadowed but special profession”.
The apprenticeship of observation.
Governance by non-practitioners.
For the first point, imagine the chatter and clinking glasses at a dinner party full of mostly young professionals. They are sharing their occupations: “Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer, Teacher”. Almost invariably these jobs will receive the reactions something like – “Wow! Wow! Wow!” and “Aw, thank you.” This is essentially what Lortie means by “special but shadowed”. Teaching is reserved a place in our society that is decidedly professional, white collar, and “knowledge work”, but definitely not one of prestige or status. There are myriad factors that make this so. For one, as it stands, the first three professions undeniably require a degree of cognitive aptitude just not present in the average person. I am not saying that this should not be expected of teachers too, but it is not. Two, teaching is a “feminized” profession, which is to say that it is thought to be a soft-skill focused, caretaking role best suited to women– and compensated as such. Teaching is seen by most as a virtuous and honorable vocation. The unspoken other side to this coin is that teachers volunteer themselves to a life of lower earning potential and chronic stress. They are more akin to members of the clergy than doctors or lawyers in this way.
The second concept, the apprenticeship of observation, is itself an explanatory element to the first. It’s best illustrated by its counterpoint. Except for the one hour you may interface with them, most people have more or less no idea what the day to day work of a doctor, lawyer or engineer looks like. Their world is carefully obscured by academic gatekeeping and relative privacy. Their world develops a mystique due to its distance from the common man. Teaching could not be more different. Nearly every person in this country has spent thousands of hours observing teachers in their work environments. Illusory or not, most of us think we know exactly what teachers get up to and what constitutes a good or bad teacher. Aside from “bedside manner”, almost nobody has had the opportunity or the hubris to say the same thing about the medical professions, no matter how many appointments you’ve had.
Lastly, we must speak of the Administration. In most professions, one’s superiors are members of the profession itself. To simplify, doctors are in charge of doctors, engineers are in charge of engineers. Teachers are in a unique position where we report to someone whose daily work is completely different than a teacher’s. While principals or assistant principals may have been teachers in the past, their role as administrators shifts their alignment away from the classroom and toward a system ultimately governed by non-practitioners (like school boards and legislators). Combined with the relative isolation that most teachers work in from each other, this creates a situation where the development of a professional vocabulary is severely stunted.
The combination of these factors has created so much inertia in the field that it’s difficult to imagine a world where full professionalization of teaching could be achieved. The common refrain is that teachers are punished by society for their good deeds, but the difficult truth is that we do it to ourselves as well. Through excessively autobiographical descriptions of our professional point of view, resistance to organization-wide efforts (often due to distrust of non-practitioner leadership), and entertaining the martyrdom narrative, we retrace the shape of the “shadowed but special” profession.
The teaching schools have been hard at work trying to turn this boat around for some time. I have a Master’s in science education, and they did their best to portray teaching as a science rather than an art. In fact, I received serious push back for voicing the idea that there are some traits of a good teacher that you cannot be taught, but are born with. Two times a week my cohort met for a three hour seminar on Science Teaching Methods for almost two years. We read research, simulated pedagogical techniques, and analyzed our own practices with data. I’m not going to crack open the can of worms that is the quality of education research, and just leave it at this: we were really trying. Despite all of this, teaching as a true profession with a technical vocabulary is in its infancy. Get two teachers together and have them compare approaches, and you’ll likely get a series of anecdotes rather than citations. This is what Lortie describes as an autobiographical vocabulary of the profession. If you ask a doctor about their practice you may end up with something to emulate on your own, if you ask a teacher you are more likely than not to hear a story about another teacher they grew up with, who had an emotional impact on them that they’d like to replicate.
My claim is that the way teachers describe their own practice, in combination with top-down efforts to lower the barrier to entry in many states, are making the fight to bring teaching closer to a “true profession” much harder. As much as I share the autobiographical understanding of teaching as vocation, how attractive the idea of knowledge work outside of the flow of capital was, and how much I cherish the person-to-person connection necessary for an impactful education experience, none of this is a recipe for making teaching that white picket fence occupation it used to be. If you want to convince capable, intelligent, thoughtful people to enter the profession– and stay, you need to pay them more. If you want teaching to be a technical, scientifically sound skillset, you need to pay them more. As much as I hate to say it, you can’t get there without raising the bar. Many districts around the country have floated the idea of merit pay, which is fraught with many complications regarding metrics for performance and largely shut down by the unions, but I cautiously support the spirit of what they are trying to do.
To get there is a massive undertaking. To give teachers a professional vocabulary to differentiate themselves from the average candidate, the quality of the pedagogical research they are drawing from needs to increase. No more laughably tiny sample sizes, no more revolving door of ideologically driven, pre-drawn conclusions. There must be some body of knowledge robust enough to allow teachers to compare notes and explain what works and does not work. Of course this is massively complicated by how intertwined the three points I’m drawing from Lortie are, but I can imagine a world where even a non-practitioner leadership can draw from the same knowledge base as the practitioner when trying to mobilize an entire school or district toward a common goal. This could break down the atomic arrangement of the public school much more successfully than previous attempts have (during my average school day I mainly only left my classroom and interacted with colleagues on the way to the restroom, save for the faculty meetings and PLCs.)
The biggest argument I’m skirting around here is this: is teaching really a technical task fit for professionalization? Or is it ultimately a vocation centered around connection with young people by those who feel drawn to do so? It seems like this dialectic has been resolved in the medical professions to some extent, perhaps through the severity of the stakes at hand (literally life and death). I would argue that the stakes in a classroom are similarly dire but temporally stretched. Perhaps you have read the reports of the deleterious effects of taking phonics out of the early childhood classroom in favor of a hot new framework with better vibes. There are certain windows in a child’s life that, once they are missed, are extremely difficult to fill back in.
As much as I love the classroom, the look in a kid’s eyes when they really understand something cool, the accidentally profound questions they would ask, I had to make a choice. Over the last 18 months or so I started picking up a technical skill set aimed at a career in software engineering, and eventually got very lucky to land a job. It’s cognitively demanding work, my colleagues are exceptionally bright, and yes– they started me off at the same salary I would be at right before retirement as a teacher. The questions of identity and vocation that have come along with this transition are something I can write about another time.