Rethinking Their Careers: Teachers ready to exit the industry both nationally and locally

Laura Mullins’ most difficult year as a teacher wasn’t in 2020, when in-person learning ended abruptly and teachers scrambled to transition to online learning.

For Mullins, an elementary teacher for 25 years, the hardest academic year yet is the current one.

Students came back from the pandemic changed, she says. Their learning had suffered, but so had their social and emotional development.

Things are still a long way from normal, says Mullins, who also serves as president of the Springfield Public Schools chapter of the National Education Association.

“We have kids that for several years we’re going to see that they have gaps, but the empathy for that is gone,” Mullins says. “People very much want to get back to normal, but the reality is our kids still have some lingering effects of going through a pandemic.”

Mullins says the district’s new superintendent, Grenita Lathan, spent a year observing and listening, but the second year has become an action year, and SNEA members tell Mullins the pressure is intense.

“It’s the expectations that are being put on the classroom teachers to do better, to get these kids to do better,” she says. “We all know they’re not where they should be, but the directives being given are being pushed down to the teachers, and they are being spread so thin.”

It’s an environment that many teachers nationwide are choosing to leave.

Mullins says at least once a week she has teachers asking her how they can get out. Last year, the district enacted a $3,000 fee to be assessed to every teacher who breaks a contract.

“The fee has made it where some teachers who probably would have quit already this year haven’t,” she says.

Nationwide problem
In a nationwide member survey conducted by the National Education Association in January, 55% of educators say they will leave the profession earlier than they had planned. Just five months earlier, only 37% wanted to expedite their exodus.

Half of all educators with 10 or fewer years in the profession say they would leave earlier than planned.

Other findings from the NEA survey include:

• 74% of members say they have had to fill in for colleagues or take on other duties due to staff shortages.
• Of educators who remain, 80% say unfilled job openings have led to more work obligations.
• Burnout is a serious problem, say 90%.
• Raising teacher salaries was seen as the best way to address educator burnout by 96%.

In the NEA’s Teacher Salary Benchmark Report, the average starting teacher salary for 2020-2021 was $41,770, an increase of 1.4% over 2019-2020. When adjusted for inflation, this represents a 4% decrease from 2019-2020.

Missouri’s average starting salary for the same period was $33,234, the lowest in the U.S. Its average teacher salary was $51,557, 47th in the U.S. Starting salary for SPS teachers this year is $41,544.

Teachers’ levels of dissatisfaction are not matched in the rest of the local workforce, according to Springfield Business Journal’s 2022 Economic Growth Survey. The survey found only 11% of general workers plan to exit their jobs within the next three years, and the same percentage plan to leave within three to five years.

No, thank you
Quinn Marie Jones graduated with an education degree from Missouri State University in spring 2022. She was immediately hired as program director of the Henderson Unit of Boys and Girls Clubs of Springfield.

Jones had six practicums as part of her degree program, four in person and two online. All were in public schools, except for one at Greenwood Laboratory School.

“I observed that in all of those classrooms, except those at Greenwood, that the teachers were spread scarily thin,” she says. “I observed struggling students, educators and other child care professionals at the end of their rope, and that made me fear that I would be in the same situation.

“I opted to bypass the traditional classroom because I wanted to choose a path that filled me with hope, not dread.”

Jones says her idea of teaching did not match the current reality.

“What I knew as a teacher when I dreamed of being one and what being a teacher now means are no longer the same,” she says. “I felt as if by signing a contract with the schools that I would be stuck in that setting feeling burnt out before I ever began.”

The school environment
While the pandemic has been challenging, SPS Chief Communications Officer Stephen Hall says SPS is in a better position than most, with a turnover rate for educators that is below the national average.

The district lost 50 teachers to resignation between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2021, and 13 in the same period of 2022, when the resignation fee was enacted. Only five were charged the fee, Hall says.

The Springfield News-Leader reported 257 out of 1,859 teachers opted not to return to work after the 2021-22 year, for a turnover rate of almost 14%. Of these, 30% were retirements. The resignations were up 30% from the previous year when 183 opted not to return. The district’s turnover rate is typically 10%-12%.

SPS Chief Human Resources Officer Bill Redinger says the fee has helped with staffing.

“Even if they were planning to leave the district, it’s helpful if we know that much earlier so they can delay another year and honor the contracts that they’ve entered,” he says.

One thing has not changed about teaching, Redinger says: “It’s a challenging job. It always has been.”

Redinger says the difficulty of coming back together and trying to work through learning loss is likely going to be felt most acutely with teachers.

“We have a new structure of support in place to our schools with a group of administrators who work here at the district office but who then support our principals as they work through challenges,” he says. “It’s going to be a positive for teachers.”

Mullins had a different take. She says the district has created multiple new administrative positions, many of them at the building level.

“I’d like to say that we feel they’re there to support us, but that is not what the feeling is,” she says.

Hall says the district added executive directors to allow each to supervise 10 schools instead of 30, and it retitled assistant principal positions in elementary schools. He says the changes in administrative structure were made using SNEA feedback, and that Mullins’ misrepresentation is disappointing.

However, teachers see an increase in both expectations and oversight, Mullins says. As examples, she says they are locked into curriculum that may not match the skill level they can professionally assess in their students, and they are required to write plans in a seven-step format for each lesson.

“There’s a lack of respect,” Mullins says. “Public education, particularly in Missouri, has a lot of that already from our legislators and our community for some part, but to get it from your own administration, it’s just something a lot of people are not willing to deal with, and they don’t have to.”

Hall says the district’s policies are motivated not by disrespect but a desire to maintain high standards.

“SPS has always maintained high standards for staff members and students, but current academic outcomes do not reflect our district’s full potential,” he says. “We can and we must do better.”

He noted there is an expectation by the SPS Board of Education, administration, most staff and the community that the district achieve measurable and timely improvement in academic achievement. He added teachers have autonomy to make adjustments in their classrooms within the framework provided.

Shawn Randles, superintendent of the Logan-Rogersville School District, says he has seen a lot of teachers come into his district from others, including those with four-day workweeks or those, like SPS, with higher pay.

“If you have a climate where your opinion is valued, that’s number one,” he says.

It’s important to trust professional educators while also providing support and oversight, Randles says.

“We have a lot of trust at L-R,” he says. “You can’t be in every classroom every moment of the day, so we have to trust the teachers, that they’re going to take their skill set and hone their craft and reach kids, build those relationships, make it relevant and make it rigorous.”

What works to recruit and hold onto teachers is what works at any other place of employment, Randles says.

“If you have that culture of trust where everyone’s voice is heard,” he says “once they’re in that environment, they’ll recognize it, especially if they’ve been somewhere else.”