Teachers who fail upwards from the classroom into administration or education policy

In public school teaching, the ones who already think they’ve arrived are the ones we should worry about. I am never satisfied with my performance. I am constantly re-evaluating my methods, changing this or that thing to make my instruction better, always striving to be more effective. Maybe by the time I retire I’ll feel that I’ve gotten it down, but I doubt it.

Meanwhile, the Peanut Gallery of non-certified critics of our profession are certain they know more about what we do than we do (they don’t–not even close), and think they could do it better. And yet there is a teacher shortage…because what we do is HARD.

At the end of my first year of teaching I told my husband that teaching is the most powerful and intensive self-improvement program a person could ever go through, because although you are there to teach children, the one you learn the most about is yourself. It puts you right up against your STUFF, and reflects back all of your flaws, where you need to change, what you need to improve in YOURSELF.

The best teachers are the ones who don’t look in that mirror and run as fast as they can out of the teaching profession. They stay and keep working on themselves and become the best teachers and human beings they can be. Maybe they change careers later, after they have put in enough time (perhaps five years, minimum) to discover whether this is the right career for them.

I have found that those who quit early (within the first year) and then go on to get a masters in education policy or some adjacent field are in complete denial about what the real problems are. They haven’t stayed in it long enough to give themselves a chance to be good at it, and they also haven’t stayed in it long enough to discover that the entire system is broken, and no matter how good they become at teaching and mastering their craft, that there are many things that need to be fixed. Usually they quit believing that it’s the teachers around them who are broken. Again–deep, deep denial. The teachers who stay are not the problem.

This career is not for everyone. Teaching is not for sissies.

But the solution is not to quit before you’ve had a chance to extensively explore whether it’s not right for you, or whether you are not right for it. And leaving the profession before your first year is up to become an “expert” in education is an enormous part of the reason that public education is broken right now. We need a requirement that teachers put in a minimum number of years of service in the classroom before being admitted to a master’s degree program in public education policy, or an administration licensure program. Those jobs should only be for teachers with a minimum of five years of experience. At that point they know the system inside and out, and have had time to draw conclusions about what is working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. When they don’t gain that experience before moving on to create policy or run schools, they become the biggest part of the problem in public education.

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