Between politics and poor pay, teachers are more strained than ever — and the numbers show it
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Tough Lessons
New state-imposed curriculum rules add to the list of things teachers must overcome to get kids to learn.
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Between politics and poor pay, teachers are more strained than ever — and the numbers show it
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Before the first day of school last year, Laura Leigh Rampey added a sentence to her syllabus, something along the lines of, “This is a college-level class and there are topics that may make students uncomfortable.”
This year, the advanced math teacher at MAST Academy on the Rickenbacker Causeway again decided to add a similar caveat. This time, though, she included language from her contract that ensures her academic freedom.
It was a move Rampey, 58, a veteran teacher of more than three decades, noted as she described a classroom discussion that typically occurs early on in the year — one that stems from a problem in a statistics textbook that analyzes the impacts of a medical treatment.
“When I ask the students what they see, someone will eventually say, ‘Well, they only categorized gender as male and female,’ ” Rampey said.
The debate about how to approach inevitable classroom discussions about topics that have been deemed inappropriate by some parents and politicians underscores the heightened awareness teachers have ahead of a new school year — one that will see a slew of new state laws that limit what they can teach and give parents an elevated role in decision-making.
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That is just one element that’s placed a strain on an already thin workforce across the state. In recent years, teachers have endured stagnant wages, skyrocketing living expenses in South Florida and a pandemic that placed them and their methods under a microscope.
The result, Rampey said, is an atmosphere where teachers, especially young educators, are more afraid to take risks and discouraged from teaching creatively.
“We’re creating a climate where teachers will do one of three things,” Rampey said. “They will comply with orders coming from the state, which means leaving out [topics] they shouldn’t be leaving out; they will defy the state and put their jobs at risk; or they’re going to leave the state to teach elsewhere or leave the profession completely.”
People who might have planned to “stick around for a few more years ... may now be defaulting to getting out as quickly as possible,” she said. For some, that sentiment will likely be tested this school year, and it comes as schools across South Florida contend with teacher vacancies.
Teachers left amid pandemic
In Broward County Public Schools, about 1,400 teachers resigned and about 1,030 others retired between March 2020, the start of the pandemic, and June 2022, according to the school district. Personal reasons, relocation or accepting another job were among the top three reasons people cited for leaving, according to exit interviews recorded by the district.
This past 2021-22 school year, the highest number of teachers resigned or retired in the district in the past decade, with 1,122 leaving..
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As of Aug. 4, the school district had 280 instructional vacancies, compared to 525 at the same time last year. The district tweeted Tuesday — a week before classes are set to begin — how it was recruiting teachers, media specialists and counselors.
But, overall, the attrition rate for the 2021-22 year — 7.39% — stands “right about where the district usually is,” said Superintendent for Broward Schools Vickie Cartwright.
There are a similar number of classroom vacancies in Miami-Dade. As of Wednesday — a week before school starts — there were about 225 classroom vacancies in the district. Last week, about 400 newly hired educators participated in orientation, according to officials. At the start of the 2021-22 year, the district had about 100 fewer vacancies, district officials said.
Since the 2019-20 school year, officials said the district “experienced an increase of 128 instructional personnel who have retired earlier than anticipated.” The district did not disclose the number of resignations or retirements.
Dawn Baglos, Miami-Dade schools chief human capital officer, said the areas hardest to fill are higher level math and special education, similar to statewide trends.
The Florida Department of Education’s 2022-23 Critical Shortage Areas Report showed that for the upcoming school year, the state most needs professionals who can teach English and English for speakers of other languages, exceptional students or students with special needs, science, math and reading.
The Florida Education Association, a federation of Florida teachers unions, says the number of advertised teacher vacancies statewide soared to 4,359 in January 2022, up from 2,135 in pre-pandemic August 2019, a 104 percent jump.
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In the 2019-20 school year, Florida colleges and universities graduated only about a third of the teachers needed to fill vacancies in state schools for the 2020-21 school year — or only about 3,380 teachers out of 9,080.
Because of the shortages, districts are hiring people who are not certified to teach those courses, the report found. For special needs students, for instance, non-certified teachers are teaching nearly 20% of all classes taught statewide.
Teacher shortage: It’s complicated
The relatively small number of vacancies for the two largest school districts in Florida reflects a national trend.
In a random sample of 291 district and charter network leaders between Feb. 28 and April 20, just 17% of school districts nationally foresaw a large teacher shortage, according to a report published by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. Comparatively, 58% expected a small shortage, data showed.
“What we can say is that nationally, there has not been a teacher exodus,” said Heather Schwartz, director of the Pre-K to 12 educational systems program and a senior policy researcher at RAND.
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Indeed, there are shortages, she said, but it’s likely caused by a “confluence of things coming together.”
In the spring of 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, some districts paused hiring for the following year and didn’t account for teachers who were retiring, moving out of the district or leaving the profession. Thus, many schools came into the 2020-21 year shorthanded, she said. (Nationally, annual attrition is about 8%, she said.)
Then, large numbers of people calling out sick at rates higher than normal, fewer support staff — non-instructional staff positions saw the largest turnover rates, she said — and a lack of substitute teachers left districts scrambling to keep schools open, Schwartz said.
In addition, districts hired more substitutes, para-professionals and tutors last year, a decision she said was likely in response to districts receiving federal stimulus dollars.
“That’s where we find that confluence,” she said. “There has been a teacher shortage, but the shortage is this heightened rate of absences.”
Both Broward and Miami-Dade schools have launched efforts to recruit educators. Both districts held hiring events and will continue to recruit throughout the school year. Out of the more than 2,000 people who attended, Broward County schools hired about 560 people, including about 210 teachers alone.
Still, despite recent recruiting efforts, district officials, including Miami-Dade Superintendent Jose Dotres, say the issue isn’t singular to South Florida, or to this school year. At the back-to-school address Aug. 5, Dotres told reporters the district has been working to address classroom vacancies since before the pandemic.
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In recent years, Miami-Dade has leveraged partnerships with local universities and colleges for existing personnel and offered college students to have a job placement in the district to transition to after graduating, Baglos said.
Concerns about early career teachers
Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law education bills that limit how race and racism is taught in the classroom, and prohibit instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade — potentially restricting such instruction for older kids. They also give parents the right to sue a district if they believe a teacher is violating the rules.
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Dotres, again at the back-to-school event earlier this month, said he didn’t attribute the challenges in recruitment to the laws, but some district teachers, including Jennifer Desa, say they could pose a problem in the coming year.
The last few years have been stressful because of the pandemic, the Miami Southridge Senior High journalism and social studies teacher said. But the stress of this coming year may be higher than in previous years: Not only are educators and students still reeling from the aftermath of school closures and learning setbacks during the pandemic, teachers now have to worry about potentially “crossing the line” for even just one parent’s standards.
“We live in a county where we run the gambit of conservative to progressive and you never know what parent is watching your class ... and that’s scary,” she said. The daily stressors of watching what is said — and how it could be interpreted — “takes a toll,” she said; she wouldn’t be surprised if the added pressure pushes people to leave the profession.
That concern is especially true for early career teachers, said John Burkowski Jr., a social studies teacher at the Academy for Advanced Academics, a dual-enrollment program housed at Florida International University.
There’s been a shift in how the public views teaching and there’s been an “increasing dedication to the idea that teachers are becoming a public enemy,” said Burkowski, 41.
As a teacher with 16 years of experience, and 15 of those teaching Advanced Placement U.S. History, he’s not concerned with how parents or students may react to his teaching approach. Instead, he said, “I’m concerned about my department members [and] teachers in my subject area,” particularly new teachers or those that have been newly assigned to the subject, he said.
“Do I worry that there could be a student or parent that takes something the wrong way because they’ve been emboldened [by new laws]?” he said. “Yes. It’s not something I want to deal with. It’s distracting to the learning environment.”
Poor pay, concern about staying in teaching
For Renee Okenka, however, an early career teacher with five years’ experience, concerns about the upcoming school year are mostly regarding financial stressors.
When she moved to Broward from Michigan last year, the Western High School teacher struggled to find affordable housing on her $47,500 annual salary. Eventually, she did, but at 40% of her monthly income. This summer, Okenka, 26, took a waitress job at a Boca Raton restaurant to cover her bills.
“What broke my heart was realizing that I could probably double my salary if I took some of those jobs full time,” she said.
Still, other issues concerned her, too, such as safety, inflation and the new Florida laws — the same rules veteran teachers are reeling over.
“My students asked me the other day, ‘A lot of teachers have left, will you leave us too?’ And I intentionally didn’t answer that question, because one, I never lie to my students and two, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to do this for. How long will it be sustainable?”
Removing creativity from the classroom
For her part, Cartwright, the Broward County schools superintendent, acknowledged the challenges facing teachers. Still, she said, “this is a time when we have to do a lot of self-reflection and go back to our why. Why did we get into education?”
Most of the time, she said, “it’s because we want to have a positive difference in children’s lives.” Moreover, she added, there’s still much to be determined about how new legislation will impact schools, and district officials are “going to try to make it as black and white for our staff so they know exactly what the boundaries are and can stay within those boundaries.”
Even still, Rampey, the MAST Academy teacher, believes much of the new legislation is aimed to “create a climate of fear among teachers.”
Teaching, she argued, historically has allowed teachers to be the expert in the room, the master of the classroom while ensuring students learn the requirements and standards; new restraints on what can be discussed in the classroom is removing that autonomy.
“The ability to try different methods or methodologies — to look at what my students are doing and make a judgment about the best way to proceed — that creativity is going away,” Rampey said. “And I think that will take the joy out of it for the kind of people who we’d want to go into teaching.”
This story was originally published August 14, 2022 at 4:30 AM.
