Opinion/Brown: Where have all the teachers gone?

Let me give you the punchline first: The profession of teaching has fallen on hard times — but it’s not as bad here on Cape as it is in many places elsewhere. While we’re at it, COVID exacerbated a problem that was already in place before the pandemic started. It just acted as an accelerant.

This is partly a problem of numbers. The Boomer-teachers are aging out fast. They’re the seniors, the master-teachers with decades of experience. At the beginning of my teaching career in the 80s, I asked an old veteran if he’d gotten bored teaching the same subject all those years. “No,” he said. “I don’t teach history; I teach kids, and I get a fresh batch every year.”

Now, we’re losing them. New teachers coming out of college entering the profession are fewer — and the average teacher just entering the profession will quit inside of 5 years. Why take out crippling student loans when salaries don’t keep up with the cost of living? There’s an imbalance between years of school required and wages afterwards — more than in most professions.

And the parents are more different than the kids are. When I entered the profession, parents invited me to spank their child if he got out of line. “You’re the teacher,” they said. Now, they’re ready to go into litigation at the slightest disappointment.

Then COVID arrived.

COVID not only scared us, it divided the country over what was best to do about it. Liberals tended to exaggerate its dangers; conservatives to belittle it. As a result, it freaked us out and drove us to extremes. It mattered that kids weren’t in school. It mattered to them; it mattered to their parents. Caught in the middle were administrators and teachers.

I’ve been interviewing heads of schools on Cape. Barnstable High’s Elizabeth Freedman told me how hard COVID was on her teachers. First of all, many of them had family and personal struggles with the disease. Some faculty, near retirement, chose to leave then. The cost of living on Cape Cod makes new hires more difficult when candidates compare the salaries and the cost of renting or owning a home here.

Falmouth High’s Allen Harris has been in education since 1992. In his opinion, teachers and staff working through the pandemic have been heroic. That's his word for it. He said it's hard for non-academics to appreciate how hard it was to reinvent education on the fly. Pressure and expectations never let up. Brand new teachers, shocked and disillusioned by how difficult teaching was, often left the profession. After all, teachers were being asked to completely reinvent their whole profession on a moment's notice. Often, in lieu of being thanked, their professionalism and even their motives were questioned. Maybe that hurt most of all.

Doctor Paul Funk of Dennis Yarmouth Regional High School feels like a coach, which for many years, he was. COVID taught everyone at DY how to adapt and change on the fly. He's very proud of his teachers and says they worked really hard. Constantly, they had to adapt and change. “We never knew what would be thrown at us,” he said. In the summer of 2020, volunteer committees met unpaid, 5 committees totaling 35 staff and administrators. They developed a hybrid process and taught every class.

The pandemic hammered our kids. When they returned to school, veteran teachers reported that strategies honed over decades just weren’t working. We have 3.1 million public school teachers in America and we're at risk of losing a lot of them. Almost half of America’s teachers polled last March said they were thinking of quitting or intend to. A recent survey of principals and school districts found that 72% did not have enough applicants for open teaching positions.

Teacher confidence and morale is plunging nationally and 90% of teachers polled in January say they are suffering from burnout. Seen in that light, what I learned about our schools here is heartening. But schools here are short on teachers, too.

Let me close with a story. Recently, my old school lost a dear teacher to cancer and something came out I’d never known, even though we were friends. Before each class … before his kids came in … he stood behind each student’s assigned seat, visualized the child, and quietly prayed for each one. They never knew. None of us did. But he knew, and I have to believe enough grace lingered in the air that the kids could feel it — and loved him for it. This is what teaching is at its heart. When you think of teachers, please think of that.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion/Brown: Teachers offer knowledge, grace but we are losing them