The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

I taught at a magnet school on the west side that operated the same way.

Many magnet schools do not operate as they were designed. Each magnet school was supposed to offer an original line of programming in which the school specialized.

Perhaps it was like that at one time, but those days are gone. The school I taught at was supposed to teach aviation. I guess there was one guy who taught that program once, and then he retired. He was not replaced.

Magnet schools give preferential enrollment of up to 40% to neighborhood students and siblings, but they can recruit selectively, unlike a neighborhood school that must accept any student that lives in the attendance boundary.

The situation that I was describing in my original post was more pertaining to high schools than elementary schools.

There are over 100 high schools in Chicago, but most students want to get into the same 5. If you live in a decent neighborhood, your neighborhood school may be alright, but if you live in the South or West sides, the selective enrollment high schools are pretty much your best chance to get out. Therefore, if you fuck up in the sixth or seventh grade on either homework or standardized tests, the consequences can be severe.

- Competition among students, instead of being used as a motivator as piles of research suggests, was specifically DISALLOWED because it might make certain students feel bad.

- When a student fell behind because they were slacking off in class, it was the teacher's responsibility to put in extra time and make sure they caught up, stopping just short of doing the work FOR the student.

- Double standards, administrators demanding that classes be "rigorous", but then when students complain that the class is too hard, or students get bad grades because they can't hack it, that of course is the teacher's fault, and it is reflected in our official evaluations.

- Turf wars among teachers who only care about protecting their own jobs.

- I never had a full time job. Schools will hire for, say .6 FTE, or even .2 FTE, which no one can make a living on. I tried holding 3 teaching jobs at once to put together a full time salary and that worked for about 4 months before things fell apart.

- Working hours of 60-70 hours per week during the school year leads to burnout.

- I make 3x as much as a software engineer.

If it was truly about the students, I'd still be teaching, But it's not.

Most people don't need to live in Wyoming. So they don't. People want to live in cities, for the additional synergistic opportunities. They are driven away by the municipal corruption that spends their higher in-city taxes on sinecures and pensions rather than on actual services and infrastructure.

Every city has outlying suburbs and not a single one has excellent transit throughout the entire metropolitan area. The DC metropolitan area has the lowest mode share for private automobiles and the highest mode share for public transportation of any except for NYC. It is objectively the second best city in the US for getting around without a car. It is clearly not as good as NYC but it is certainly not worse than San Francisco.

Huh? So anyone who wants autonomy and to be well paid is a status seeker? Sounds more to me like they're a typical human being.

> You don't even seem to consider the possibility that you've already managed to recruit as many competent teachers as can exist, and that you have so many incompetent ones because your demand outstrips supply.

I think that idea is so implausible that it's not worth considering. You seriously think you couldn't lure some bright creative minds who would have done an excellent job teaching by making the profession better compensated? Not just those currently on the market but the 18 year olds who are choosing their fields of study? You don't think there have been plenty of people who have kind of wanted to be teachers, then turned on the news and decided "I don't want to put up with that" and then go choose something else?

> They're being rewarded commensurate with their results.

Wow. Way to grossly oversimplify one of the most important public policy issues of our time. You can't ignore externalities that affect student performance and place all the blame on teachers. There are way way too many factors to try to pin blame on any one segment.

>Your tests and qualifications can't weed them out because they will attempt to game any tests you present.

No more than any other profession considered prestigious is "gamed" today. You do realize teachers need to go through a degree program, background checks and professional testing per subject they teach, don't you? And that's today let alone if we further incentivize the profession.

> This is not just an ineffective strategy for a large nation-state, it's an economically and educationally disastrous one. Hiring bright people to do a job that's vitally important to our society at a fair market price? The government spends enough money on nonsense that paying teachers well would be a drop in the bucket.