Teachers will keep quitting

The number of teachers leaving Western Australian public schools has almost doubled since before the pandemic. Figures tabled last month in Parliament showed 1263 resignations last year, compared to 604 in 2019. 

I’m one of those who’ve quit since Covid. I left the classroom (aside from the odd relief teaching stint) at the end of 2020, fed up, burnt out, and demoralised. 

The reasons teachers leave are well-documented: stress, heavy workloads, ever-increasing administrative duties, difficult parents, and student violence. I think there’s something else at play too. Covid showed that our education system was more deeply entrenched in its brokenness than many of us thought. We’re seeing the continued fall out from that realisation. Since the pandemic, based on what I hear from my teacher friends, standardisation, bureaucratisation, and over-assessment continue to increase. As long as that happens, teachers will keep leaving.

The early days Covid were mind-bending, which perhaps explains why we seem to have collectively blocked them from memory. Grief, fear, and anxiety were palpable, but there was something else in the air: a sense of expanded possibility. The social safety net was suddenly strengthened and expanded, borders and flight routes were shut off, and daily political press conferences became must-watch TV. If all this could happen, surely anything could?

I remember thinking at the time that Covid might turn out to be a productive disruption to education. My school’s administration, normally fixated on results and achievements, was suddenly saying the most important thing we could do was to be caring and stable influences in childrens’ lives – and it even seemed like they meant it. Tests were cancelled. Assessment, the centre of school life around which all else revolved, was suddenly on the periphery, as was externally imposed, standardised curriculum. We were encouraged to meet kids where they were at and consider their needs. Teachers were allowed to experiment with new software and technologies for learning, trusted to use their own judgement as to what would work under utterly unfamiliar circumstances. I thought we might be seeing an early glimpse of the more humane schools of the future.

As economies slowed down and carbon emissions dipped, many of use hoped naively that the pandemic marked an obvious and immediate political turning point, and was ushering in a new world. We all know how that went. The ‘shock doctrine’ as theorised by Naomi Klein came into full effect. The crisis was ultimately used as an excuse for deregulation and ‘disaster capitalism’ (Australia’s ‘gas-fired recovery’ being one example). 

In education too, it seemed like we were back to normal or worse before too long. The earliest warning should have been when I was asked to make sure all students on a remote learning Zoom call were in full and proper school uniform, shoes included. Once WA’s brief period of online learning passed and we were all back in the classroom, there was suddenly pressure to ‘catch up’ on those missed assessments. The priorities of the early pandemic were out. The workloads for teachers and students quickly piled up, and the increased trust put in teachers fell away.

Like Covid, AI has been a serious disruption to education. I’d been out of the classroom a while by the time I first tried ChatGPT, but I immediately became excited by the implications for schools. If a computer program could do in an instant a better job of spitting out the kind of inanities students were so often expected to produce, maybe we could encourage kids to do interesting, creative, and consequential things instead. If cheating had suddenly become so much easier, maybe we could remove incentives to do it by deemphasising assessment and fostering intrinsic motivation.

Of course, this didn’t happen. Schools started by attempting the impossible: banning students from using AI (though I saw teachers from these schools in online discussion forums talking about how they used it to plan lessons and create resources.) These days, I hear more and more assessments and tasks are taking place under exam conditions to reduce the risk of students outsourcing their work to chatbots. An essay a student might once have had weeks to think about, talk about, write, and edit is now more often completed in a silent 45–minute period. Students are still made to crank out artificial work under artificial conditions, instead of using their valuable formative years to build skills by doing real, consequential things they are actually motivated to do. Instead of responding creatively to AI, the education system has once again doubled down on what it already knew.

When we talk about how difficult schools can be for teachers, it's important to remember there’s one group who tend to have it even worse: the students. We’ve all heard the statistics about the increasing occurrence of mental health problems amongst young people. It’s worth considering what role our education system, outdated, stressful, and uninspiring as it is, plays in causing psychological distress.

We live our lives on small timescales, focussing on short-term consequences. While it seems like nothing’s changed, maybe shocks like Covid and generative AI will have longer-term impacts that are yet to become obvious. Schools can’t continue the way they are forever. Perhaps desertion by teachers will prove the ultimate disruption.