Teachers are tired of our sh%t. I don't blame them.

After years of public disrespect, parental bullsh%t, and rising student dysregulation, educators are leaving the classroom.

I've been hard on teachers. 

As a student, they weren't there for me. As a parent, some have been better than others. As an education activist, they often seem in the way of significant interventions critical to the success of the least advantaged children.

So, for years, I've dragged them on social media and in blogs. I've pointed out that many of them come from the lower end of the collegiate cognitive pool. Most do not culturally reflect the students they teach, and due to that, they harbor hidden and overt biases that harm outcomes.

While my relentless prodding of the nation's educators may seem unduly bitter, it isn't personal. My focus is on children, particularly those victims of unfair, ineffective, and racist systems predating their existence, to which public schools are central. Public education is an inequity machine that sorts students into different tracks of opportunity and fortifies longstanding patterns of social inequality.

Teachers often collaborate through their political unions to block progress when people come to disrupt that problem by enacting major system reforms. They have their reasons. Testing is a corporate intrusion into the art of teaching, they say. Charter schools are funding thieves. Standards need to take into account the poverty of students. Evaluations of educators are an insult to their professionalism. Giving school letter grades punishes them for being black and in high poverty.

Collectively, I've called their anti-reform grievances the "belief gap," the difference between what kids can achieve and what adults think they can achieve. 

While our kids can pass their tests if taught well, others believe they are too broken to learn. 

While students who select independent public schools, like charters, are well within their right to move their per-pupil funding to better public schools, others believe these kids are the property of the district systems that have failed them.

Standards set a bar for all to achieve, but some educators speak as if all bars are too high for our kids.

I want nothing more than to support educators. Radical teachers can save the world. So, if I drag them, it is not for their lack of worth but for betraying it by awfulizing our kids into a state where they seem unteachable.

All that said, the times are changing, and so is my feeling about how we engage with teachers.

Saving our kids from bureaucrats, a failed system, and its employees - teachers - can be Thor's electric hammer in the education debate, but it can also eliminate nuance and compassion by excluding the valid concerns of educators.

Seeing them as a collective obstacle to justice and progress, as I have, removes the obligation of seeing them as human.

There are consequences to educational activism that sees the people tending to our children as cogs rather than partners.

After years of crappy work conditions, constant disparaging, low rewards, parental bullshit, and incompetent administration, teachers may be quietly quitting.

Parental jackassery at the worst possible time

It’s the year of the parent, characterized by smarmy stump speeches by oily politicians seeking to ride pandemic frustrations to electoral victory. Parents need to be heard and feared, they say. They need a bill of rights.

Without responsibilities, qualifications, or accountability. Parents aren’t showing up to assist with meeting the needs of their children.

Instead, they're storming schools with stupid talking points cooked up in elite right-wing think tanks and distributed through moron media that accuses social-emotional learning and other practical methods of teaching kids to cope with their struggles of being communist plots to make kids gay.

These parents aren't as concerned about recovering losses in reading proficiency as they are with removing books from libraries that FOX News bobbleheads have told them will convert their churches into BLM chapters. Instead of seeing teachers as people working mightily to keep kids safe, sane, and on track, there is a prevailing narrative that teachers are "grooming" our kids for disgusting purposes.

The long goodbye

It’s becoming too much.

According to a recent analysis by Chalkbeat of data from eight states, more teachers than usual left the classroom after last school year due to pandemic-related stresses. 

This confirms longstanding fears about an outflow of educators. Although the turnover increases were not substantial, they could still have a meaningful impact on schools' ability to address learning loss in the aftermath of the pandemic. The data indicate that high-stress levels, challenging student behavior, and political scrutiny have contributed to teachers' departure.

Old me would have told them to suck it up. Teaching is challenging, and so are a lot of other occupations.

What a dumb position.

Teachers are alerting us that children are different after a global pandemic. Mental health and behavior issues are no joke. Self-regulation problems are making teaching far more difficult, and there doesn't seem to be a solution on the horizon. 

According to two recent surveys, post-pandemic concerns in schools about a significant decline in student behavior are far worse than we, as civilians, understand.

• Both teachers and superintendents say student mental health and behavioral concerns are more urgent now than before the pandemic, but schools are lacking resources to properly address the issues, according to two surveys released Thursday by EAB, an education research and consulting firm.

• While a large majority of superintendents (81%) agree student behavioral concerns have deepened since the pandemic and an even greater portion (92%) indicate the student mental health crisis is worse than in 2019, most (79%) also say they don’t have the staff to focus on the problem, a survey of almost 200 superintendents in 37 states found. Nearly two-thirds of superintendents (63%) cited budget concerns as another barrier.

• In a separate survey of 1,109 teachers, administrators and student support staff, 84% said students are developmentally behind in self-regulation and relationship building compared to pre-pandemic levels and that incidents of physical violence have more than doubled since COVID-19. But almost 60% said pressure to boost academic outcomes leaves them with little time to address the situation.

Our home-to-school relationships are so poor that educators fight a crisis we’re wholly ignorant of and unattended to.

How long would I last in that situation? 

How long would I accept the insults, lack of support, and expectations that I raise feral kids from distracted, disinterested, and disrespectful dolts to scholars?

Not long. 

I've dogged teachers for contributing to educational injustices. I’ll continue doing that whenever they talk about equity while blocking paths to it.

But, given the current situation, I can see why they've had enough.