Growing up, Micaela DeSimone was “one of those cliché children” who always knew she wanted to teach. With a father, two grandmothers, and several aunts and uncles in the field, the New York native decided to pursue a degree in education and became a teacher in Queens. She didn’t foresee that she would leave behind what she had thought of as her calling in June 2023, at the age of 30, after less than a decade in the classroom. DeSimone felt “demoralized,” she told me, by the low pay, the demands of learning how to teach virtually during the pandemic, and the lack of resources and support offered to teachers and students alike.
DeSimone is one of many K-12 teachers who are leaving the profession behind. In October 2023, 86 percent of schools belonging to the National Education Association indicated that they were seeing more educators leave the profession since the start of the pandemic. Numerous school districts—especially in lower-income neighborhoods—are faced with teacher shortages. Many of these former teachers, like DeSimone, are heartbroken—even bitter—about what they once thought of as their dream jobs. Some have taken to YouTube and social media to tell their “Why I Quit Teaching” stories.
“The stories conveyed in this viral trend match the data.”
The stories conveyed in this viral trend match the data. Those who leave teaching behind cite low pay (since 1996, the average wage of a public school teacher has risen just $29, $416 less than the average wage increase earned by other college graduates), unmanageable class sizes, lack of support from both administrators and parents, and disrespect from students.
In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch warned that the bureaucratization of education would erode the legitimacy of adults’ authority over children, provoking in them “a boundless rage against those who fail to gratify them.” The stories told by former teachers of students spitting, cursing, and hurling desks at teachers—and of the administrators who cave to the parents demanding the teacher, rather than the student, be penalized—suggest Lasch’s warning was prophetic.
Individual teachers, school boards, and think tanks are attempting to find ways to improve teachers’ working conditions so as to combat burnout, proposing a variety of measures ranging from increasing pay and benefits to offering coverage for mental health care. But such measures fail to address the deeper problem: a bloated bureaucracy that has swallowed up education and now makes it nearly impossible for teachers to do their job.
Teaching, noted DeSimone, “demands a graduate degree, and yet we treat teachers like they barely graduated middle school.” Administrators too often act like managers whose job is to keep their customers—students and their parents—happy, and regard teachers as mere service workers. The endless bureaucratic tasks teachers are expected to undertake for the sake of “accountability” distract from the real demands of education.
Jerred Zegelis, a former high-school teacher in Omaha, Nebraska, took on moderating the school newspaper. But after a parent complained about an article that was published, the administration shut down the whole production. Upon asking why they couldn’t have just dealt with the article in question, Zegelis says that he was told by his assistant principal that his “number-one priority is to protect the brand of the school.”
Zegelis also found himself alarmed by how students had become “openly defiant” post-pandemic. They seemed to assume they would face no consequences from the administration, and were sometimes correct. He recalled confronting a student who was “yelling curse words across the parking lot at a girl.” The student then “went off” on him in front of parents, students, and security guards, who proceeded to do nothing. He spoke with administrators about the incident, but the same student came up to him the next day and laughed about the fact that the administration had done nothing.
Zegelis said he could take it, but could only imagine how such behavior would’ve impacted a younger teacher—especially a female one. Indeed, some women who have quit teaching report violent and sometimes sexualized behaviors directed against them by students among the reasons they left the profession.
Two women I knew who taught at the same high school told me about two separate incidents—both of which occurred during the first month back in the classroom after the pandemic—in which male students had unzipped their pants in front of them. Both students were given a slap on the wrist. A teacher in her fifties I will call Mary told me that a student threw a stapler at her head for telling him to wait until she finished explaining the directions to an assignment to use the bathroom. Although she reported him to the dean of students, “the student was sitting in my class the next day with a smirk on his face.” Fearing for her safety, she quit a few weeks later.
Perhaps even worse than the apathy engendered by a bureaucratic organizational model are the new therapeutic discipline programs, based on “restorative justice,” implemented in some schools. Among the most popular restorative justice programs is Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS, which was first instituted in the early 2000s, and spread widely in American schools in the late 2010s. Though some districts report positive experiences with the program’s focus on using “supportive” rather punitive approaches to disruptive student behavior, others have found that it exacerbates already existing problems.
Trish Hephzibah, an ex-teacher in the Midwest with a popular YouTube channel, explains that she left the classroom behind in part because of the “pollyannaish, New Age discipline method” practiced by her former employer, which upheld the belief that “punitive measures were bad,” and instead relied on rewarding good (or merely “normal”) behavior by, for instance, giving students candy for being quiet during a lesson.
In her recent book Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Abigail Shrier featured the stories of several teachers who told her that “thanks to restorative justice, public schools no longer hold back or expel kids in any but the most extreme circumstances. Until they commit egregious acts of criminality, violent kids are kept in school and assigned shadows under the therapeutic ethos: treat, don’t punish.”
Likewise, whenever a student was in trouble, Hephzibah recalls, administrators would ask her what she had done to anger the student. Programs like PBIS, she said, promote the idea that “students should never feel embarrassed” or “any sort of shame about any kind of behavior.” One such program dictated that when correcting a student, she should “constantly remind them over and over again: ‘I’m not mad and you’re not in trouble’”—even when she was having objects thrown at her.
“The proliferation of online testimonies has brought attention to the failures of American schools.”
While the proliferation of online testimonies has brought attention to the failures of American schools, many former teachers I spoke to conceded that publicizing their stories would do little to effect change. When I asked if they had considered staying in the game and trying to use teachers’ unions to push for reform, I was given mixed responses. Zegelis only joined the union during his last year as a teacher, and was disappointed by his experience. When dealing with a difficult situation with administration, he told me, his union rep said that the admins were “too smart” to “do anything we can get them in trouble for,” and advised him to “get a doctor’s note” and take a leave for the rest of the year.
Nicholas Ferroni, a teacher in Union, New Jersey, was a bit more optimistic. He doesn’t judge teachers who quit, nor is he naive about the difficulties they face, but he has opted to stay and try to make a difference from within. Ferroni doesn’t agree with everything that unions do, but says: “I can’t even comprehend what the pay would be if we didn’t have them to fight for us.” Unions are not the only means for collective action. Parents, too, could play a positive role, as Ferroni told me: “If I was a parent, and I knew my child’s teacher was working a second or third job to survive, or that they were begging for supplies online, or that they were having mental breakdowns because they have so many kids packed in a classroom, I would be flipping out at a board meeting and would get every parent I knew to do the same thing.”
Upon instituting the “common schools” movement in the 1830s, the educational reformer Horace Mann aspired to shift control over education into the hands of a state-run professional bureaucracy. His motives were ostensibly egalitarian: All children—whether elite or working class, native-born or immigrants—would receive the same opportunities. Yet Mann also hoped to counteract the “backward” influence of provincial and immigrant families. As Lasch puts it, he “wanted children to receive their impression of the world from those who were professionally qualified to decide what it was proper for them to know.” Further, Mann’s educational approach was less focused on actual forms of academic learning—like inculcating wisdom or teaching practical skills, all of which Lasch deemed conducive to forming responsible, self-reliant citizens—than on “social control.”
“This power is essentially the empty, illusory power of the consumer.”
By design, the school’s “appropriation of many of the training functions formerly carried out by the family” made it more difficult for parents to raise their children according to their own principles; but it has also made it difficult for teachers—pressured to take on the role of parent, psychologist, and social worker—to teach. The professionalization of teaching, says Lasch, rather than “raising academic standards or improving the quality of teaching,” is “undermining the teacher’s autonomy, substituting judgment of administrators for that of the teacher, and incidentally discouraging people with a gift for teaching from entering the profession at all.”
Lasch also highlighted the connections between “moral” and economic factors. He was quick to censure neoconservatives who decried the ways highly-bureaucreatic public schools overstepped the rights of parents, while also working to reverse New Deal-era policies that guaranteed working families adequate compensation, without which it would be increasingly difficult to find the time to be present in their kids’ lives.
The social atomization, collapse of stable jobs in favor of gig work, and increased automation and bureaucratization brought on by the pandemic exacerbated many of the problems that plague American primary and secondary schools. But Lasch’s telling of the story of American mass education shows that few of these problems are truly novel, even if they are taking on new forms.
In the past, critics—from both the left and right—argued that the over-bureaucratization of schools disempowered parents and students alike. Today, we find that the concern has shifted toward the ways that it affords parents and students too much power, while depriving teachers of autonomy. Yet this power is essentially the empty, illusory power of the consumer. The collapse of genuine authority under the weight of centralized bureaucracies and a therapeutic, consumerist mentality has created a system over which all parties feel they lack any meaningful control.
An effective reform of the structure and culture of schools would be linked to labor and economic policy reforms that would protect the rights of working families—thus making it easier to be present in their children’s lives—and on the other, protect teachers, assuring them adequate compensation and benefits, free supplies, and reasonable classroom sizes. But the exodus of teachers suggests the time has come to reevaluate the project of universal education, starting by coming to terms with the fact that schools, as Lasch says, “cannot save society.”