Teachers flee broken system

Lack of prestige and autonomy soon scares off even the most dedicated

A year-and-a-half ago, I quit teaching. I know it's crazy, but I still feel guilty. Teaching is a little like the priesthood-a "calling"-and you just don't leave if you're a good human being. So ever since, I've been listening to stories from other people who've made the same leap, wondering what their reasons were (and wondering about their guilt). Because although I have some vague notions about why I left a career full of joy and meaning, I can't quite put my finger on it.

I never imagined what I'd find: in the developed world, there's an emerging crisis in teacher attrition. Doune Macdonald is a professor and researcher at the University of Queensland who has published one of the key studies in the field, "Teacher Attrition: A Review of Literature". She finds that depending on where they live, between five and 50 percent of teachers leave the profession in their first five years, with an average of 18.9 percent of all those under 30 leaving during that time frame.

Peter Grimmett, associate dean at the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, has also studied teacher attrition extensively, and he positions Vancouver at about an average of 20 percent-not extreme, but far from insignificant. And Grimmett agrees with Macdonald's findings: that regardless of location in the developed world, young teachers leave for the same five reasons.

According to the experts, those five reasons are: alienation and lack of support for new teachers; low pay compared to the pay for similar levels of education and skills in other professions; a decline in the status of teaching (which affects both how teachers perceive the job and how students and parents relate to teachers); increased bureaucratization/standardization (which leads to decreased creativity and power); and difficult working conditions (such as class sizes, lack of resources, and workload).

Thom Wong is an example of several of those reasons. He's a 28-year-old Vancouverite who left teaching in June 2004 after spending five years on the TOC list (teacher-on-call, or "sub", list). After scoring in the 98th percentile on his LSATs, Wong is now studying law at UBC.

"I went into teaching because all my heroes and mentors were teachers," Wong says in an interview at a Vancouver café. "And I wanted to do a really good job. I wanted to be the kind of teacher that kids felt they'd really benefited from.

"But the system for hiring means that you can only get a permanent position if you have covered the same class for six months straight. Merit doesn't enter into it; it's all based on whether you lucked into covering a mat [maternity] leave. I got one mat leave in my third year, but the teacher came back after two months. So people with science degrees would get senior English jobs over me.

"In the private sector, merit often leads to advancements. I'm not naive; I know it doesn't work perfectly. But companies don't tend to sabotage themselves by simply hiring people who have been at it for one month longer than someone else; they want the best."

Wong says the TOCs he knows earned about $15,000 a year. Not only were they disillusioned, he says, they were also often too financially strapped to continue their work in teaching.

Grimmett sympathizes with Wong's experience and says it's the first and main reason we're losing good teachers in the Lower Mainland. "We need to change the way people are inducted into the profession," he says, reached by phone at an education conference in Montreal. "They do five years of university then often spend five years in isolation on the TOC list. Then, even when teachers do find a permanent position, the experience of being on the sub list is so harrowing that they've lost their passion. If we put some money into the induction phase, it would save the much higher cost of training new teachers to replace the ones that leave."

Grimmett argues that each school district should hire TOCs and pay them a livable salary, and the districts should partner with teaching schools to mentor the new teachers. He agrees with Wong that the seniority-based hiring system should go. "Seniority has become far too sacrosanct. If people are overlooked for positions where it's clear they are better-qualified, they are often provoked to leave."

Susan Lambert, second vice- president at the British Columbia Teachers' Federation, agrees that the six-month clause should go but thinks it should be replaced with a system where TOCs get seniority for every day they teach. She says seniority generally is "the only way to guarantee fair and transparent hiring processes". In cases where seniority isn't the only factor when awarding positions, she's seen examples like TOCs baking cookies for fellow teachers in an attempt to win favour in hiring decisions.

But Grimmett says that B.C. is a leader in developing performance-based assessments, even if they're not used here at present. "There are lots of ways to fairly and objectively determine the quality of teaching. And if we provide ongoing education to teachers, they can continue to gain needed skills and improve."

In addition to the merit-hiring issue, Wong was also motivated to leave teaching in order to earn a better wage. In fact, Macdonald's research shows that the second reason teachers leave is that with their skills and experience they can earn more doing something else. This is especially true in strong economic markets where teachers can secure private-sector jobs quite easily.

In the U.K., in an attempt to stem the flow of leavers, the government has introduced an "Excellent Teachers' Scheme" that will take effect in September 2006. Teachers who are at the top of the pay scale can apply for external evaluation in four criteria. If they are successful, they then can be paid the equivalent of $90,000 per year (or $105,000 in Central London). The government expects 20 percent of teachers to attain this level.

But Grimmett says that creating a better induction period would be far cheaper and more effective. And even Wong agrees the money is sometimes a red herring. "Money is important; it means you can do good things." Wong wants to set up a free tutoring centre in the Lower Mainland, modelled after a renowned institution called 826 Vallencia in San Francisco. "But money isn't the main factor when you get down to it."

Lori Johnston also changed professions to gain more of a challenge. After teaching secondary school in Toronto, internationally, and in B.C. for five years, Johnston left a year ago to pursue marketing. But after a short while, she was approached by a group of investors who asked if she wanted to start a yoga studio in Halifax. She'll be opening this summer.

"I loved the creativity of teaching and, of course, the students," Johnston says on the phone from Halifax. "I really miss the students; they're so full of energy and quirkiness." But she experienced Macdonald's third reason for attrition: increased bureaucratization that has led to a decline in the creativity and power of the individual teacher.

"There were so many times when I had an idea for something I wanted to do with the students but there was so much red tape to go through that it just became impossible. And often, after all that work, the idea would get turned down."

In Toronto, Johnston once taught school in a very privileged suburb, where she proposed a new program in which students would volunteer in the community under her supervision, only to be told that there was nothing students would learn from helping those less fortunate.

"I could be creative in my own classroom, but not in a broader sense," she says. "And I needed to know that I could take on new challenges in my career."

Like Johnston, Wong believes his new career will offer him more challenge, but he says that the status of the legal profession was also a draw. "In teaching, I could stand up and say what was wrong with the system, but my voice wouldn't count. As Thomas Wong, Q.C., ironically, my words might carry more weight." Macdonald found that giving teachers more power in decisions about education is another way to stem attrition-and is often even more effective than higher salaries.

In fact, Macdonald discovered that the decreased status of the teaching profession affects how parents, students, and the public treat teachers, and also how teachers view their own work. This is the fourth reason teachers leave.

"You can't vilify teachers and expect them to stay," says Jennifer Muir, who taught in Winnipeg for four years before pursuing an MA in educational studies full-time last January at UBC.

During an interview in her home in Vancouver, Muir tells stories about how much she loved teaching-so much so that she arrived at school at 7 a.m. to coach sports, taught all day, then coached and worked on various committees before starting her marking and prep at 9 p.m., often finishing at midnight. "I really loved it but felt I had to do so much work just to do it well. And I couldn't imagine having kids and doing that job."

"People have this idea that teachers are lazy. That they show up at 9, leave at 3, take long summer holidays, and teach out of the textbook. Well, first of all, I don't know a single English teacher who teaches out of a textbook."

In her first year she taught science, as it was the only available position, even though she has an English degree. "I had to get through the curriculum, but there was no budget, so I ended up spending close to $1,000 of my own money on materials [that year], even though my take-home pay was $1,600 [per cheque]. But at the end of one month I was broke, so I had to steal limestone rocks from my boyfriend's father's driveway in order to do the experiment," she says with a laugh.

Macdonald cites this as the fifth reason for teacher attrition: the lack of sufficient resources to do the job well.

The BCTF's Lambert says that "when a teacher can meet an individual student's needs, it's a joy. But when they can't, they think, 'Am I willing to stay this frustrated?' So they often jump at a chance to do something else."

Muir says some teachers certainly do slow down and not all are workaholics, but that's probably because they have a spouse and kids and actually want to see them. And they're probably burned-out.

"The social safety net is collapsing, and teachers are picking up the slack," Muir says. "I drove kids to doctor's appointments, took them shopping to buy clothes for job interviews, filled out birth certificates when they had babies, and talked to their parole officers. I also often bought their lunches at the cafeteria because they hadn't eaten all day-and kids don't learn anything when they're hungry, so there was no point in me teaching otherwise."

Like Wong and Johnston, Muir says it wouldn't have taken much to get her to stay. "We don't need billions of dollars. We don't even need all the new computer labs. What we really need are some new books and some more power to make decisions. And we need society to support us."