I was really struck by this post. I was a teacher for 12 years and now work at Search Institute in Minneapolis. I also wrote a book titled “How Was Your Day at School? Improving Dialogue About Teacher Job Satisfaction.”

What strikes me about this essay is how easily you could have become one of the “50% of educators who leave the profession within the first five years of your career” – a stat so overused I’m afraid it’s starting to lose its impact. What saddens me to no end is the amount of teachers we’re losing due to fundamental break downs in the relationships amongst staff. It’s not salary or class size. In fact, it tends to be predominantly a dissatisfaction with the workplace climate that drives educators from the profession. How sad, idiotic, avoidable, and tragic.

I’m so happy you’ve found a new school and I hope it brings life back to your teaching and energy around education. And I hope your old school can somehow transform itself so that you wouldn’t have had to leave in the first place.

Thanks for writing this post Maria. It was excellent.

(I blogged about you! http://www.search-institute.org/blog/educators-blog)

Just kidding!

Excellent post. And I want to supplement it, not disagree. Many times I would have voted with my feet and left the NEIGHBORHOOD school that I loved but for two, perhaps three reasons. Firstly, I came to the neighborhood at the age of forty with years of experience working with juvenile felons and with years of successes – and more importantly, defeats. I didn’t have biological kids of my own, and if I’d left I’d had returned to higher ed or other professions. There I would have been surrounded by equally qualified people. The urban classroom was the only place where I knew it was extremely unlikely that I could be replaced.

The solution, as you write, includes the recruiting of enough teaching talent that a dynamic learning culture can be created. I do not begrudge you a class size of 87 students over four years. When I left last spring I reread the 107 names on my Inactive Roll. Most of the 106 who are still alive have suffered extreme trauma. They shuttled in and out between a variety of households, homeless shelters, jails, etc. NCLB and other reforms are completely irrelevant to their situations.

And do the math. On the average, I said hello to a new arrival or goodbye to a transfer every day of the year, while teaching 140 students.

Nobody needs test scores to identify the best teachers. They are being constantly recruited to charters, magnets, and lower poverty schools where they would be “allowed to teach.” Think of that recurrent phrase. The way that selective schools recruit top teachers is not by promising money. The lure is a culture and a capacity that allows teachers to teach. When I think of great young teachers we lost, every single one that I can remember went through the same cycle. They cried, they couldn’t sleep, they repeatedly turned down offers. Then in May or June, always exhausted, they agreed to transfer to a less challenging school.

I gave in once and promised my wife that I’d take a prestigious offer. But that week at the funeral of a former student I realized that I wasn’t emotionally ready to leave. More precisely, the deceased had been repeatedly told by his parents that he had no future. And when I saw his father walk out during the middle of the services, I knew I couldn’t leave yet.

The publishing of two outstanding pieces this week by great young teachers leaving their former classes is a great opportunity. I hope people will check out the vicious comments printed in the Washington Post about the article by Sara Fine. The “reforms” encouraged by NCLB-type accountability have unleashed an incredible amount of venom that ends up in the classrooms of our most vulnerable children. When I stayed in my NEIGHBORHOOD school, I knew that I would still have access to the political process, and I believed I could be more effective speaking from the classroom.

In the political process, I search for a balance. I don’t want to copy the “anti” approach of the most strident of the data-driven “reformers,” but neither do I believe that teachers can continue to allow themselves to be punked.

So, I congratulate you. And I thank you for not joining the teacher-bashing. I wish the best for you and your students around the corner from your old school. Please to not forget, however, the great distance between the realities of neighborhood and choice schools. Please don’t forget the complicated histories that created the horrible conditions in so many neighborhood schools.

I would say that a school’s culture (or belief set) matters tremendously. We’ve not come to a real definition of what excellent teaching looks like, but I think we’re a lot closer on what the underlying core beliefs are that excellent teachers share.

What are the components of the “excellent peer teachers” that lured you to your new school?

I.e., is it that you’ve seen them teach, and you think they’re unusually skillful? Or that you share a similar belief set?