Perhaps the real problem with the shortage of teachers is that fewer and fewer people want to do the work as it has evolved over the past 30 years or so.
When I started teaching in 1989 teachers operated in classrooms that allowed for independent creavitity, initiative, and excitement. There were no testing surveillance systems. You could operate without the intrusion of administrative experts and consultants who claimed to know how to teach content better than you. Parents were generally supportive of teachers and were not engaged in antagonistic tactics to what you were doing. They came to you if their were problems usually, and the teacher could work with the parent.
Classrooms have become culture war zones. They are places where the teacher often receives less and less professional deference. Instead, there are so many voices out their saying, “No, you need to do it this way, not that.” In a word, teaching has been transformed into a mechanistic scientific management task where one is surrounded by a troup of experts all telling the her/him how to do the job.
There is no art to teaching anymore, because the administrators and their cadre of experts have transformed the instructional act into a scientific management work task.
It’s no longer rewarding to be a teacher. So, the answer seems to be in focusing on pay. Certainly you can find someone willing to do this work for the right pay, the idea goes. The problem is apparently you can’t pay enough for someone to do the teaching work today because fewer want to do it.
The reality is, teaching has lost what librarian-researcher Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe.”
Vocational awe is defined as a set of notions that Librarians have about their institution and themselves. To have vocational awe, the worker has to believe in their institution’s goodness and rightness. Also, the worker has to believe that their profession, the work they do is inherently good and sacred. In other other words, the worker believes their work is a calling, which means they will endure and persevere in the work tasks because of the good, sacred and worthwhile big picture.
Teaching has lost this vocational awe. Schools are constantly labeled failing by everyone. Even administors focus on the negative always in an environment of so-called continuous improvement. In addition, the teacher’s work is no longer seen as sacred, as special because it has been turned into tasks to be carried out scientifically. The teacher’s institution and the teacher’s work is fundamentally degraded by a system paranoiacally obsessed with trying to improve or change, in the worship of constant innovation.
What’s more, administrators and school HR recruiters can no longer capitalize on “vocational awe” to fill teaching positions. That’s because the “awe of teaching” and “being a teacher” is gone.
The profession of teaching has been destroyed by politicians who want to cut budgets and continuously impose new requirements on teachers.
It has been decimated by administrators who think they know how to teach so well, they constantly intrude into classrooms with their so-called coaching and feedback, treating teachers as if they don’t know anything.
The teaching profession has been decimated by a consultant industry made up of experts who say they know teaching better, even though some of them spent less time in the classroom, and sometimes no time there.
The teaching shortage problem will not be solved by pay alone.
It will certainly not be solved by relying on the vocational awe myth any more because no one is buying it.
The teaching problem will only be solved if those who have degraded the work of teaching to the point that no one wants to do it, no matter the pay, are convinced to change their ways.
No one wants to be a teacher anymore because vocational awe no longer exists.
