With a new school year fast approaching, Des Moines public schools have lost more than 500 teachers this summer, and Iowa schools have over 1,600 vacant teaching positions statewide (see story here).
“Buffeted by culture war clashes and burnout, Iowa educators have had enough and are checking out in droves, leaving the public school system depleted of teachers,” the Daily Mail reported on Monday, August 2, 2022.
The Des Moines school district is offering veteran teachers $50,000 to stay another year, but apparently is getting few takers. While Iowa teachers aren’t especially well paid, this isn’t a problem money can fix. The Iowa Education Association president says teachers are “exhausted and demoralized” by “attacks on their profession” in the legislature and school board meetings.
“The problem isn’t just in Iowa,” the Daily Mail notes. “Teachers across the country give their jobs an F grade. A national survey by the American Federation of Teachers, a union with 1.7 million members, found an 80 percent dissatisfaction rate with their positions.”
Can’t say I blame them. In Florida, the Republican governor has threatened to jail teachers who discuss slavery or racism in classrooms. You couldn’t pay me enough to teach in that state.
The spillover of rightwing “culture wars” into classrooms comes after two years of pandemic. The Trump administration and Republican state-level politicians pushed to reopen schools before it was safe (see article here), while teachers were dying from Covid-19 (see article here). Not requiring masks in classrooms triggered teacher resignations in some states (see article here).
Then came classroom censorship, book bans, and jailing threats (see article here); Florida even banned rainbows from classrooms (see story here). Across the country, school board meetings are sometimes turning violent (see story here), and belligerent parents are cyberstalking teachers (see story here). Who wants to be caught in the middle of all that?
Picture: Who will be left to teach if the job is like this?
