Education Week - November 18, 2020 - 20

OPINION

INSIDE

16

17

18

Families Not Engaging
Remotely?
Rethink the Problem

The Election Was
Traumatizing for Many
Students (and Educators)

Letters to
the Editor

The New Face
Of Teacher Demoralization
It's not the same as burnout

T

eachers did not enter
their jobs planning to
be front-line workers
in a pandemic. Parents
fortunate enough to
keep their jobs did not
envision managing a
day care in their impromptu home offices.
Students did not anticipate that they would
not be able to share lunch time with their
favorite teacher or examine a slide with their
lab partner.
During the current health crisis, teachers
have faced transformations and stressors in
their work that put us all (higher education
professors like me included) at risk for
demoralization and burnout. What will
we do to sustain the profession and
those who undertake this difficult and
important work?
It is worth distinguishing teacher
demoralization from burnout. Teachers'
ongoing value conflicts with the work
(demoralization) cannot be solved by
the more familiar refrain for teachers
to practice self-care in order to avoid
exhaustion (burnout). Demoralization
occurs when teachers cannot reap the
moral rewards that they previously were
able to access in their work. It happens
when teachers are consistently thwarted
in their ability to enact the values that
brought them to the profession.
Burnout, on the other hand, happens
when teachers are pushed to the brink
of exhaustion and are entirely depleted.
The rhetoric of teacher resilience
offers a clear culprit in the scenario of
burnout-the teachers themselves who
failed to conserve their energy and
internal resources.
Our current predicament has many
teachers running on empty, even those
with good boundaries and solid selfcare practices. They are grappling to
learn new online platforms that will
continue to engage the youngest learners.
They have been required to calculate the
health risks to themselves and their families
if their classes are meeting in person.
They are managing elder and child care
while stemming the economic freefall of
their families. Black and brown teachers
face daily reminders that their lives are
disposable in the eyes of the law.
At the same time, critics on social media
and in traditional media are painting
teachers as selfish and unwilling to perform
their jobs. Parents, many justifiably at their
wit's end, criticize the stopgap measures
districts have put into place during the
epidemic.

The tide of public opinion about teachers
had been turning. After several decades
of teacher-bashing, polls such as last
year's " PDK Poll of the Public's Attitudes
Toward the Public Schools " showed that
a majority of K-12 parents would support
teachers going on strike to garner higher
pay and greater involvement in academic
decisionmaking. For those of us involved
in the recruitment and development of
educators, that was a promising sign.
Prior to the pandemic, the United States
was already in the midst of a teacher
shortage. That same 2019 PDK poll revealed
that half of U.S. teachers were considering
quitting their jobs-this was well before the

arrival of COVID-19. Teacher-preparation
programs across the country have seen
substantial drops in enrollments over the
past decade. Teaching, something that
many families are coming to realize can
be extraordinarily difficult and has been
woefully undervalued, was already waning
in attractiveness as a profession.
One reason people are not attracted
to teaching, and why some are leaving
teaching, is that they do not see it as a
place where they can enact their values. By
this I do not mean that they are seeking to
indoctrinate students in their belief systems,
but that they do not see teaching as a way
to do what psychologist Howard Gardner

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 18, 2020 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion

and his colleagues call " good work. " Good
work serves a social purpose (for example,
supporting students to be critical thinkers
in their community or enabling students to
recognize the elegant logic of the periodic
table) and upholds the highest ethical
standards of the profession (for example,
ensuring that all students are treated
with respect and dignity or designing
assessments that are the best possible
representation of what students know and
are able to do).
Teachers are often compensated far less
than their peers with similar educational
credentials and expertise. As public
schooling has become increasingly focused

on standardized tests invites corruption
and unproductive competition when
collaboration between colleagues produces
better results for all.
Teachers deserve to be paid more. Full
stop. Teachers who must hold multiple jobs
to support their families deserve to be paid
much more.
However, the likelihood that we will see
teacher salaries increase substantially in
the near future is nil. The economic crisis
brought on by our health crisis is leaving
municipalities and states with staggering
revenue shortfalls that are leading to cuts to
education.
We are at the very beginning of
understanding how the education
employment landscape has been
impacted by the current health crisis.
Prior to COVID-19, we did know,
based on University of Pennsylvania
education labor economist Richard
Ingersoll's work, that greater teacher
retention would significantly ease the
problem of the teacher shortage. In
other words, if more teachers remained
in their jobs, we would not see the
shortages that states are navigating.
I am worried about teachers and I am
worried about the teaching profession.
If we want to keep our best teachers, we
must enable them to do good work. We
can do all we can to limit the specter
of burnout, but that is insufficient. We
must stave off demoralization in this
extraordinarily challenging time. That
means enabling teachers to find ways to
do good work whenever possible.
We can begin by acknowledging that
we are all in an impossible situation.
School leaders, teachers, school staff,
and families are attempting to balance
physical safety, emotional well-being,
and worthwhile learning. District
Xia Gordon for Education Week
personnel are weighing the welfare
of their staffs in light of the profound
on standardization, testing, and compliance,
needs of their communities.
it has become a less compelling career
Perhaps we all-school leaders, families,
choice for people who are motivated by
colleagues, policymakers, teacher
contributing to their communities, engaging
educators, reporters, colleagues-could
meaningfully with young people, or
intervene with a simple question for
sharing the beauty of their subject matter.
teachers: What do you need to do good work
In exchange for these moral rewards,
right now? Â
they have traditionally been willing to
By Doris A. Santoro
persist in work that is intellectually and
emotionally demanding and only modestly
SANTORO is a professor of education at
compensated.
Bowdoin College. She is the author of
About 20 years ago, merit pay was
Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the
touted as a solution to retaining the best
Profession They Love and How They Can Stay
teachers. It didn't pan out. Teachers are not
and co-editor of Principled Resistance: How
motivated to do their jobs for money, but
Teachers Resolve Ethical Dilemmas (both
we can see how pay-for-performance policy
from Harvard Education Press, 2018).
http://www.edweek.org/go/opinion
Education Week - November 18, 2020

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