The Great Resignation: Are Teachers Next?

Since the start of the COVID crisis, employees all across America have abandoned their jobs and sought well-being over work in what has become known as ‘The Great Resignation.’ Now, the workforce is beginning to wonder if teachers are next in line to ditch their education careers for greener pastures.

Current Events
Doctors, lawyers, engineers, corporate leaders, and other white-collar career workers with high-paying salaries have all succumbed to The Great Resignation over the past 2 years. So, it’s no stretch to expect that teachers — who are deeply underpaid and highly overworked — could soon become fed up and escape public and private schools by the droves.

Andria Nelson is one teacher in particular who recently decided enough was enough.

Ms. Nelson fell in love with teaching while working as a special education associate back in 2012. She pursued a teaching certificate and spent several years teaching language arts, accelerated English, and global studies. When COVID hit, she joined other teachers around the world in teaching her students remotely. However, anxiety struck her like a ton of bricks when her school announced a return to in-person learning. Due to an autoimmune disease, Ms. Nelson couldn’t convince herself to take the health risk to go back to work in front of dozens of disease-carrying kids — many of whom were not vaccinated.

So, she quit. After years of going to a job she loved and spent years and tuition money training for, she decided it was time to walk away.

“My mental health is not OK,” she told her principal, “and now I’m starting to lose my physical health.”

Her story illustrates the realities of the COVID-era, which has taken a massive toll on teachers nationwide. It also illuminates an education employment system badly in need of an overhaul.

Teachers were already burning out over ever-increasing demands to do more, despite having very little support and very little salary. In fact, many teachers have been forced to moonlight and work a 2nd job merely to make ends meet while maintaining the teaching position they enjoy. Now, with fewer people choosing to join a profession that’s hardly evolved in 50 years combined with long hours and the threat of COVID, vacancies are on the rise and teachers are rapidly joining The Great Resignation movement.

“Teacher resignations pose an incredible challenge to public schools,” said Anne Claire Tejtel Nornhold, a former middle school teacher who’s now in charge of implementing a new classroom structure at Baltimore City Schools in an effort to increase teacher retention.

“We do know from rigorous empirical evidence that disruptions from teacher turnover have a negative effect on student test scores,” added Dan Goldhaber, director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the University of Washington. “And that test scores are predictive of a variety of later life outcomes, like the probability of employment and labor market earnings.”

• According to a 2016 study by the Learning Policy Institute, an estimated 300,000 new teachers would be needed per year by 2020, and that number would increase to 316,000 annually by 2025. 

If teachers launch a mass exodus and join The Great Resignation, schools across the country will crumble. Additionally, students who have already had to endure the back and forth of remote learning versus classroom learning could suffer the biggest loss.

Or, in other words, a continued failure to modernize the teaching profession and pay educators a respectable living wage for the amount (and importance) of the work they do could not only expedite The Great Resignation among teachers, but completely decimate the American educational system.

We have to do better!

OK WASSUP! covers Current Events:
Teachers and The Great Resignation.