Geez, what a crisis. We are witnessing a slow-moving train wreck that constitutes the un-doing of public education. It was bound to reach a breaking point. Teachers can only take so much. They're people, too, and they deserve to enjoy professional identities that allow them to impart their craft.
Instead, they're demonized at every turn and told that they are indoctrinating children instead of enjoying not solely the respect but the joy of teaching that motivated to the profession to begin with.
I'm in the very large camp, by the way, that says that children should get taught more critically—alongside most Texas parents with public school children (see the Butt Foundation report titled, Connected Through Our Schools) This anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ nonsense is not only toxic, but it's literally scaring people from the profession. If these folks decrying alleged indoctrination cared so much about public education, they'd be pushing for funding it. Instead, they opt for engaging in a contrived culture war.
And now conservative Republican members of the legislature want to push vouchers next session—presumably to kill off what remains of a public education system that is already in shambles so that the private sector can gnaw on and reap profits from its rotting remains.
However predictable, given how policy has been trending, this is nevertheless terribly sad and enraging. This will result in terrible costs, in particular, to children attending high-poverty schools—which is a majority of schools in the state of Texas. According to this Sept. 6, 2022 news item on recent test scores that cites the Texas Education Agency:
"The TEA labels schools as high poverty if more than 80 percent of their students are economically disadvantaged. Texas has about 5.4 million students in its public schools, and 60 percent of them are economically disadvantaged."
Our system of testing, by the way, has also got to go, as this is pushing teachers, administrators, and children to their limits. Tens of millions have gone into this system, resulting in a real opportunity cost of not prioritizing what should be other priorities like raising teacher salaries, improving decaying infrastructure, improving teacher working conditions, and enhancing teacher professional development. We should live in a world where teachers are not only paid well, but they get opportunities to present at conferences, pursue creative projects, and have access to funded sabbaticals and enjoy excellent retirement benefits, and Academic Freedom like university professors. Students should enjoy project-based and portfolio-based learning and Ethnic Studies and other real-world, quality learning opportunities. Let's face this nightmare with a stronger vision that our families and communities can get behind.
I do hope that Texas teachers leverage their associations like Texas AFT and the Texas State Teachers Association (TSTA), to push hard for what they want and need this next legislative session that begins in January 2023—and to push back on vouchers while they're at it.
I also hope that Texas teachers and the public, as a whole, vote in great numbers in November. It couldn't be more urgent.
-Angela Valenzuela
77% of Texas teachers are seriously considering quitting as morale plummets, new poll shows
Parents line up with their children outside Alief ISD’s Martinez Early Learning Center for the first day of school Monday, Aug. 8, 2022 in Houston.
Brett Coomer/Staff photographer
Citing financial stress, a toxic workplace culture and a recent lack of support and respect, more than three-quarters of Texas teachers are seriously considering leaving the profession, a poll from the Charles Butt Foundation found.
The poll results are consistent with an August survey published by the Texas State Teachers Association that found 70 percent of teachers were considering quitting.
The foundation has conducted polling of Texas teachers for the last three years, and the percentage of teachers seriously considering a departure has risen from 58 percent in 2020 to 77 percent this year.
LAST MONTH: More Texas teachers on verge of quitting than at any time in the last 40 years, survey finds
Funded by the foundation, the poll is conducted by a New York City research firm that is also the primary pollster for ABC News.
There are thousands of unfilled job openings across the state, even as the new school year began in recent weeks. Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott convened a task force led by the Texas Education Agency to study chronic teacher workforce shortages in the state, but the problem persists.
Meanwhile, the teaching profession has increasingly been viewed with distrust by conservatives who are complaining at every level of state government about what they see as liberal indoctrination in the classroom.
The Legislature passed a law banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory and restricting how political issues can be discussed in social studies classes. Outraged parents around the state have taken to school boards and challenged books in their children’s classrooms, calling some with LGBT themes pornographic. And the State Board of Education last week bowed to political pressure from conservative activists and set aside a year of work from teachers and experts who had worked to rewrite the state’s social studies curriculum, angering teachers groups.
The percentage of teachers who “feel valued by Texans overall” was just 17 percent, down from 44 percent in 2020, and just 5 percent feel valued by the state’s elected officials.
Just over 80 percent of teachers said they felt they were paid unfair wages, and 98 percent said they spent personal funds on classroom supplies. Research groups consistently find that Texas lags behind the national average in teacher pay, and experts point to increased pay as the most simple way to address the workforce shortage.
The poll was designed to be representative of the opinion of the more than 375,000 Texas teachers. From the list of all teachers, thousands at-random were asked to fill out the poll questions, and ultimately the sample size was about 1,300 teachers. The margin of error was 3 percentage points.
Edward McKinley reports on Texas state government and politics from the Hearst Bureau in Austin for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.
He is a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism and a 2020 graduate of Georgetown's Master's in American Government program. He previously reported for The Albany Times Union and the Kansas City Star newspapers, and he originally hails from the great state of Minnesota.
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