The problem isn’t the students. It’s the unforgiving reality of the American education system.
This is Bell Ringers, a column by Erin Crosby-Eckstine about the state of contemporary education.
A rug.
It’s an ordinary object to most people, a way to tie a room together, something to keep the cold off your feet on a winter morning, a trick to keep your neighbors from banging your door down for breaking in your new heels.
Yet, as many teachers can tell you, ordinary objects take on a supernatural level of significance in a classroom.
When I sat down to watch the pilot of Abbott Elementary, I was tentatively excited. I have been a Quinta Brunson fan since her BuzzFeed days, but I shied away from starting the show for weeks. This was partly out of a desire to separate myself from classroom life when I’m at home, but also out of a fear of misrepresentation. What could a career comedian and actor possibly know about the ins and outs of being a young teacher?
It was the rug that sold me.
In the first few minutes of the pilot, Brunson’s character, Janine—an idealistic young educator and the show’s main protagonist—waxes poetic about how much she’s grown as a teacher since her first year, only to turn and see one of her students peeing all over her rug. The light leaves her eyes, and the next time we see her, she’s rolling up the urine-soaked fabric, blasting “Baby Shark,” and praying the classroom doesn’t descend into abject chaos before the school day ends.
I soon discovered that being an early career teacher meant getting your proverbial rug peed on at least once a week.
In my first couple of years teaching middle and high school, my equivalent to the rug was my daily slideshows. Neurotypical middle and high school students have attention spans that range from ten to twelve minutes. Combine that with classes that change every forty-five minutes, cell phones that buzz constantly in their laps (yes, even after I’ve told them to put them away), and the general social drama of being a teenager, and a teacher is lucky if they can keep the class on the same activity for more than a minute. In my first year of student teaching, I learned that my students were hardwired to respond to blue-lit screens. My workday lived and died by my slide presentations: the color palette, the embedded timers, the topical pictures to add humor and visual cues. I spent every late night and weekend on my decks until they perfectly externalized my knowledge and paired it with a well-timed cat GIF.
On my third day of full-time teaching, a sixth-grade student tripped over my projector’s cord and sent it careening to the ground. It was dead for the rest of the class, and it took my lesson along with it. I had no backups, no vault of skills to fall back on. I tried my best to improvise, reading that day’s story aloud, but it was ultimately a disaster. A few months later, my projector caught fire and the class descended into Fortnite dances. The next year, when I taught ninth grade, I lost access to the laptop cart (the delivery system for that day’s slides) and broke down into rolling sobs in front of my boss two minutes before my class started. I soon discovered that being an early career teacher meant getting your proverbial rug peed on at least once a week.
I’m embarrassed to admit how much rosier I thought teaching would be when I first applied to graduate school. I imagined spending my days discussing books and teenage life with groups of enthusiastic students, all of whom sat in their assigned seats, completed most of their homework, and turned up to class every day with a pencil in hand. But the problem isn’t the students. It’s the unforgiving reality of the American education system.
From day one, new teachers are encouraged to work themselves to the bone, skipping all their sick days and taking on as many unpaid opportunities as possible, all in the interest of supporting the students. I stayed late every day of my first three years and worked most weekends. In my first year, when I had a horrific case of the flu, I cried with shame taking two sick days in a row because I’d been led to believe any day I missed school was actively harming my students. I kept Gchat alerts on high so I could answer any message I might receive at any time. It took until this past fall, when I had a sobbing panic attack on Bleecker Street at the thought of going to work the next day, for me to truly examine how my relationship to my work was driving me to the limits of my sanity.
Teacher burnout is by no means a new topic, but there is a massive lack in how we frame the problem. The horror of the first five years is not simply a rite of passage or an unfortunate consequence of an imperfect system. It’s a gauntlet with a vested interest in driving away otherwise-passionate teachers before they become too expensive to support.
I’m embarrassed to admit how much rosier I thought teaching would be when I first applied to graduate school.
Unlike other professions, in which employees have the ability to negotiate with their employers for higher salaries, teachers are paid on scales set by their districts. These scales are typically based on the number of years in the classroom and level of education. A quick search of the Philadelphia teaching scale reveals that while Janine would make about $50,541 per year, her colleague Barbara Howard (played by Sheryl Lee Ralph) would make about $92,000 per year, which would have maxed out at her eleventh year of teaching. This system means that early career teachers are compensated at rates that fall below a comfortable standard of living in any major US city. Additionally, teacher salaries cap at a particular level of experience determined by their district. This disincentivizes people not only from becoming teachers to begin with but also from staying with the profession for the long term.
The teacher salary pay scale creates an even greater problem for student learning. An experienced teacher like Barbara, who is extremely effective in the classroom, costs the district as much as nearly two Janines. Having schools full of cheap, inexperienced, early career teachers is much more cost effective than having lots of expensive, experienced faculty.
This problem is far worse in districts that primarily serve low-income students of color. In graduate school, I was floored when I learned about the differences in salary from one side of the Bay Area to the other. While the Mountain View district (famously home to Google) pays a starting salary of $92,469, the predominantly student-of-color Oakland district can pay as little as $32,380 for a first-year teacher. This pattern is consistent across America; high-property-value districts with a majority-white student body pay higher salaries and have more funding, while low-property-value districts, home to more students of color, pay lower teacher salaries and have less funding. This often means the latter can only afford inexperienced teachers, who become overworked and burned-out before they can develop any real expertise. A staggering two-thirds of urban-district teachers leave before year five, meaning that most students in these districts are being taught by teachers with limited experience addressing complex student needs, creating engaging curriculum, or navigating the school system. This in turn leads to worse academic outcomes for the students.
Public education is one of the best gateways to economic and social mobility in this country. What happens to our society when the teaching profession becomes so toxic that the people who love it run away in droves? What happens to our society when public education becomes so broken that no one wants to become an educator at all? What happens to our society when our children aren’t educated at school, but simply supervised? I fear that the answer to these questions is far closer than we think it is.
“We younger teachers are still getting the hang of it, if we don’t end up leaving,” says Brunson’s character in Abbott Elementary. The line is followed by a clip of one of said teachers flipping off the school building on her way out. About half of my peers from graduate school had already quit teaching by year five. The reasons for leaving the profession are always the same: The pay is too low, the demands are too high, the lack of support is too stressful. I do have glimpses of my dream-teaching reality sometimes, but most days involve digging myself out of a pile of grading, addressing the use of hate speech in my classroom, figuring out how a student split a gallon of milk across the hallway, and planning lessons that somehow conform to the ever-increasing number of standardized tests I’m beholden to. On the whole I love my job; I work with great people and sweet kids in a school that doesn’t actively work against my success and oftentimes even supports it. Yet I’ve considered leaving more times this year than I care to admit.
I’m thrilled that Abbott Elementary has been such a runaway success. Brunson has offered a window into the lives of teachers who toil against the odds to do what they can for their students. My hope is that, after looking through that window, viewers won’t simply turn off their televisions and go about their days but will examine the social structures that create schools like Abbott Elementary. I want viewers to do what they can to advocate for teachers in our schools, instead of viewing us as expendable bodies. I want viewers to fight for the schools that America’s teachers and students deserve—schools that aren’t merely held together by the dwindling will of a few passionate educators and a few good rugs.
Erin Crosby-Eckstine is a writer and teacher in Brooklyn. Her bylines have appeared in HelloGiggles and The Cut.
