Shannon, a seventh-grade English teacher from Dallas, has considered leaving her teaching job for about a year now. She cites a number of reasons: Teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic meant putting her physical and mental health at risk every day; and on top of this, Texas governor Greg Abbot signed House Bill 3979 in June, which states that educators cannot teach students that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” This combination has made Shannon think twice about staying in education long-term.
“During COVID, I realized that neither the Texas Education Agency nor our governor cared about our students nor their teachers,” Shannon, who prefers not to use her real name, tells Teen Vogue. “They wanted our kids to risk their lives and their family lives for an entire year. They want us to whitewash everything we are teaching to our kids.”
Shannon is one of many teachers who have either left or seriously considered leaving education in the past year. In addition to Texas, at least 20 other states have recently introduced legislation that limits or outrightly bans educators in public schools, some charter schools, and universities from teaching the history of race and racism and its modern implications. Educators say these laws are curtailing overdue, open discussions about racism and policing that were sparked by the mass Black Lives Matter protests over the past year. Educators nationwide have also been forced to risk their health and safety by teaching in the classroom during the pandemic; in Chicago, teachers were preparing to strike last winter over Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to require educators to return to the classroom before people were vaccinated.
According to a recent study by the RAND Corporation, nearly one out of four teachers in the U.S. considered leaving their job by the end of this past school year due in large part to work-related stress, an increase from before the pandemic. For many educators, a combination of health risks, more censorship of learning material, long hours, and low wages have pushed them out of the classroom.
Jennifer, a high school teacher from Ridgewood, Washington, who prefers not to use her real name, tells Teen Vogue that she has been actively job hunting in the past year, hoping to switch fields. Though many factors are driving her decision, COVID was the breaking point.
“In this last year I have watched teachers go from heroes at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, when we had to shift everything with zero instruction or support to online learning, to constantly being harassed and guilt-tripped over not wanting to expose ourselves to the risk of disease in the classroom,” Jennifer says via email. “Hearing parents call us lazy, say that online school isn't real school, that we're just collecting paychecks… It was utterly demoralizing, and frankly traumatic when the people whose kids you teach say they don't care if you die and that you're replaceable.”
Many teachers tell Teen Vogue that increased expectations to perform tasks outside of their job description, such as unpaid emotional labor for students and the students’ families during the pandemic, also made them consider leaving the field. Hudson Rains, a former pre-calculus teacher in Houston, says he formally resigned at the end of the 2020-21 academic school year largely because "too much is expected of teachers without the pay or benefits to back up the expectations. Teachers are expected to be content experts, pedagogical masters, counselors, therapists, DIY craftspeople, tech wizards, and more every single day.”
Rains also laments that the profession is filled with the tropes of toxic positivity, which have contributed to an exploitative work environment where teachers are often unpaid for much of their labor. “When teachers stop relying on passion to sustain them, what is left?" he asks. "Pay? Benefits? Respect? Not in my experience. You can't pay bills with passion.”
While some teachers have left the field voluntarily, others say they were forced out. At Collin College in Plano, Texas, several professors were fired after criticizing the school’s reopening plans during COVID. According to an August 2020 email to staff obtained by Teen Vogue, Neil Matkin, the school’s president, assessed the risk of dying from COVID-19 in Collins County, Texas, based on data from the preceding months, as 100 times less than that of dying in a car accident, and argued that the recorded number of deaths from the virus were “clearly inflated.” He added that “the effects of this pandemic have been blown utterly out of proportion.” When some professors pushed back, they say they were forced to leave.
A spokesperson for Collin College tells Teen Vogue that the school’s practice is “not to comment on individual employee statements in the media.” Matkin told The Chronicle of Higher Education that staff personnel decisions such as hirings and firings are made during a multilayered review process involving several people. “It depends on what’s been presented to me,” Matkin said of hypothetical employee firings. “But I’m not the initiator.” (Matkin did not respond to Teen Vogue’s request for comment.)
Several educators say they felt unsupported by their school or administration during the past year. Alexis, a teaching assistant at a university in Washington, D.C., who prefers not to use her real name, is immunocompromised and has a lung disease. She tested positive for COVID-19 multiple times in the past year and a half, yet her university still expects her to return to campus in the fall.
“As a teacher, I feel disgusted,” Alexis says via email. “I get paid so little, yet my life is in the hands of a money-hungry institution. How do you exist like that? I have given up so much to stay safe, and even then I have had COVID. Hospital visits, doctor visits, treatment programs… My life has been steamrolled by this virus, and it seems as though the very institution I am pouring my creative energy into does not care at all.”
The pandemic has made teaching a much more fraught and dangerous profession, but many of the issues teachers are dealing with today have been ongoing for years. “None of the challenges faced in the last year were really new, aside from being quarantined and fully online,” says Amy, an adjunct professor in St. Louis, Missouri, who prefers not to use her real name. “The last year really exacerbated existing challenges to the point where they were unbearable and have pushed me and many of my colleagues out.” Amy, who is leaving her teaching job at the end of the summer, mentioned that low pay, no benefits, working more than 40 hours a week, and the struggle of balancing her personal life and mental health with those of her students were contributing factors in her decision.
Many educators tell Teen Vogue that even if they chose to leave voluntarily, they feel forced out; a combination of health risks, financial stress, and emotional turmoil has made the classroom feel like a battleground. Says Shannon, “I wish non-educators understood how difficult it was to try and prepare our students for the future this year.”
Editor's note: This piece was updated to remove comment from a source who decided after publication that she no longer felt comfortable being on the record.
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