I’ve worked at some rough schools. At one, as summer approached, my colleague and I reviewed the staff picture from September and counted that a third of the teachers who began in the fall had quit before the year’s end. We didn’t hold it against them.
The story was always the same. A student did something outlandish (picked a fight in class, threatened or cussed out the teacher, brought a weapon), administration returned the kid without a consequence, and the next morning everyone found a classroom with the lights off and keys on the desk.
We never heard from the teacher again.
In a new report, the Badger Institute’s Patrick McIlheran investigated this dynamic further by doing something rather simple: He asked teachers why they quit. He and his team used public data to find the districts in Wisconsin with the highest teacher turnover rate, collated email addresses, sent around a survey, and where possible, scheduled extended interviews to figure out precisely why teachers up and left.
The report makes for harrowing reading:
- A student tipping bookcases and assaulting a teacher.
- A school shifting from consistent consequences to teachers assuming a “buddy role.”
- Principals afraid of students.
- A student running down the hall, screaming “f---ing b---h” at the top of her lungs.
- A young man pummeling a young woman on the playground.
- Students throwing chairs.
- Students with free rein in the halls during class.
- A teacher asking for a student’s phone (they’re banned) and being told “f--- your mother” in response.
- A teacher needing 66-stiches and foot surgery from breaking up a fight.
- Refusals to follow the most basic directions like abiding by a seating chart.
- A teacher bit and punched.
- Teachers arriving early for meetings, giving up their preps to sub in classrooms, and then staying late into the afternoon to catch up.
- A principal who spent staff meetings reading a 200-page book out loud, blaming teachers as the cause for education’s failures.
- Districts messing up even the simplest of responsibilities like buying enough textbooks.
- Parents who gave no support because “the idea of giving your time…because it’s the right thing to do for your kid” was just “unheard of.”
One teacher’s quote summarizes well the conclusion of the report: “I need to get the hell out of this.”
Why did he quit? It wasn’t behavior, workload, pay, or a single nasty email. It was all of “this.” To ask why teachers quit is to ask why anyone would run out of a burning building. Well, there’s the fire and the crumbling supports and the falling debris and what do you mean “why am I evacuating?!”
When I’ve written on this topic before, I’ve fallen into the same error of my more progressive counterparts, providing a monocausal explanation. Where they blame pay, I point to student misbehavior.
Picking through this report, however, the reader comes away with a broader sense of complete administrative and systemic breakdown. The schools with the most attrition ceased to operate as institutions that take learning seriously, and the dysfunction manifested in communication breakdowns, chaos, stress, and behavior.
I think back to the school where a third of my colleagues quit. The breakdown began even before students entered the building. On our staff onboarding day, no one could access their computers because the instructional coach running the meeting didn’t have the right generic password. No one knew who did, so we couldn’t access curriculum, email, or anything else that we needed to prep. We all went home and began the year unprepared.
The year proceeded likewise. Curriculum files were in the wrong place, school entry and exit routines were poorly thought through and thereby chaotic, the lunchroom ran out of food because someone ordered the wrong amount, we all got mixed messages on this, that, and the other thing—you get the point.
The dean of students spent his time scrambling to get food or fix the copier instead of dealing with behaviors. The first teacher quit. Now a grade-level lost its TA, who now assumed the role of a long-term substitute, and every other teacher had more work. The second quit. More simple tasks and procedures dropped. Emails grew curt and the administration started to micromanage what they could control—teacher dress or needless observables—in desperate hopes that it would fix everything else.
Every teacher who quit complained about behavior, but really it was all of “this.”
That’s not a totally satisfying conclusion. Behavior and pay are both clear problems with clear solutions. Complete administrative breakdown has countless problems and no one, obvious fix (other than shuttering the school, which is most feasible in the charter sector, but hard even there), but I’ll draw attention to one often overlooked fix: school leadership training.
At these districts, significant superintendent and principal turnover preceded the chaos. Replacements were either bureaucrats looking for higher positions or newbies who had no clue how to run a school. Leaders were scared of difficult conversations, had no idea how to manage behavior, implemented illogical policies and routines, and pushed fads for a quick fix instead of tried and true management.
But ultimately, the report suggests that teachers quit “when they’re prevented from doing the work they chose.” Teaching is an honorable profession and can be a wonderful career. When classrooms run well, they’re invigorating, energetic, lively places, and nothing beats teaching in such environments. If we want to stop having to ask “why did you quit?” policymakers and administrators need to create the conditions for teachers do to what they love to do: teach children well.
