From days off to “thanks for sticking around” bonuses, my feed seems flooded with desperate attempts to try to retain Texas teachers.
It’s not a surprise that countless good humans reached their limit facing the new challenges in the classroom this year. Texas teachers in particular have been in the trenches since the beginning of the year last year — before there were vaccines. We’ve taught hybrid models and online and face-to-face and upside down.
We’ve been on the battle lines while politicians from local school board members to our governor juggled with our health and our lives. We’ve lost fellow soldiers, we’ve lost family members, and some of us have watched our students lose family members too.
The fatigue is palpable down the halls.
Students are exhausted from a society that’s expected them to jump right back in the rat race unfazed. They came to schools with no increase in mental health counselors. Students did not return to smaller classes. They did not get more nurses in our clinics.
The reality is that students returned to schools with larger classes, more fights in the hallways, and depleted and demoralized teachers.
The Texas Legislature was enormously helpful, as always.
They spent this session attacking trans kids without a single concrete example of any girl being harmed in any sport or activity — ever. See, Texas public school educators make data-driven decisions. We don’t have the luxury to waste your time and Texas tax dollars.
The Legislature also aided by attacking librarians, Social Studies teachers, and English teachers. They accused us of being indoctrinators when just a year ago we were the heroes that kept teaching through the crisis. Banning books? Those chapters in our history are embarrassing, and it is likewise embarrassing to witness these lawmakers debase themselves in this monumental moment. See, Texas public school educators make curricular decisions based on our extensive continued education and experience — not on reactions to the latest fake social media outrage. We don’t have the luxury to appease every radical un-American idea that pops up on Facebook.
And while these legislators will lie that they’re trying to preserve parent choice, they ignored the parents like me who chose to opt their children from terrible standardized tests. Though these burdensome, expensive, and inaccurate tests have given us zero evidence that they help our students or local schools in any tangible, traceable way, Texas legislators still passed a bill defying parents and making kids take the tests anyway. Even though they’re assessing curriculum from last year, even though an entire summer passed, even though they’ve spent a semester with new teachers and new curriculum — this was Texas leg’s solution.
Instead of tossing us a life-jacket, they threw an anchor at us.
See, Texas public school educators design lesson to grow our students, not set them back. We don’t have the luxury to be counterproductive and fiscally irresponsible.
What teachers need isn’t complicated.
1. Give us smaller classes.
My largest class this year is 39 freshmen. Don’t get me wrong — I adore these silly students, and we work together to have as much fun as possible.
But teachers with ever-growing class numbers face countless challenges. From finding where to physically place students to a loss of one-on-one opportunities, these classes usually fall behind and struggle to focus.
When we have less students, we have more room and time to get to know them. It’s easier to identify the student who is struggling with dyslexia and the one struggling with a drunk dad that hurts her and her siblings. It’s easier to plan creative and complex lessons. It’s easier to differentiate learning and serve a class’s wide range of needs that walk through our doors.
2. Return our stolen planning time.
Countless districts butchered teacher planning time and packed our classes during the infamous 2011 Texas Legislature public school butchering. A decade later, we never got that time back. We haven’t seen a reduction in class size.
For Englishs teacher like me, that means it’s hard for us serve our students the way they deserve. At the high school level, Texas teachers juggle anywhere between 160–200 students a year. The math is so easy even this English teacher can do it!
If I have 180 students, and I give each of their essays only 5 minutes of my time — that’s 15 hours of grading. If I give them 7 minutes, that’s 21 hours. If I spent a healthy 10 minutes reading and commenting on each essay with care, that’s 30 hours.
This is grading we’re doing outside of class time. It has to come from a planning period or it has to be stolen from our families.
Give teachers more time to do our jobs right.
3. Don’t throw temporary bonuses at educators.
Whether it’s better healthcare, help with student loans, or a paycheck that keeps up with the increases in cost-of-living, Texas teachers deserve better.
Houston ISD once covered the first $700 of a family’s healthcare cost for the year. This amount usually covered copays and other basic costs for my little family, and it saved us a lot of money. That’s a benefit the largest school district in Texas could prioritize and embrace again to help educators.
Though I’ve spent 16 years working in the classroom and chipping away at my student loans, I’m nowhere near paying them off. There’s no doubt that I’ll begin paying for my eldest daughter’s college tuition before I’ve tackled my own college debt.
But leaders like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick aren’t interested in raising teacher pay. Sure — the idea was fantastic for his 2018 campaign commercial when he promised teachers a $10,000 raise. Ha!
The reality is that experienced Texas teachers today still make $4,800 less than the national average. When you consider the rising cost of housing and healthcare, the pennies the leg threw at us in the 2019 session evaporated.
Patrick’s actions speak louder than his commercials. He has aggressively worked to shame and defund public schools while continuously fighting for vouchers which steal money from our local investments and give it to private institutions with no accountability. They don’t have to take the STAAR test along with countless other standards that public schools must meet to earn our public tax dollars.
Stop playing games, and pay teachers, so we can feed our families and send our own kids to college.
4. Send real help.
Schools need the support of specialized staffers.
Counselors and psychologists are paramount. Many of our school counselors are too overwhelmed with creating and changing schedules to be able to provide the quality otime to mentor our students. There are kiddos who need help processing deaths in their families, the stress of returning to school, and managing all of the new fears students face today (from the psychological effects of social media to fears about school fights and shootings).
We need more reliable and quality substitute teachers. Teachers are taking more time not only because of COVID spread, but teachers are burned out. Many of my colleagues take days off to catch up on grading, but sometimes they take time to just piece themselves back together. Teachers from schools all over Texas share how they cry more this year — that we all thought last year was the worst it could get. This emotional exhaustion is hard to overcome when you’re putting on 7 shows a day to students who are also depressed and depleted. Increase the incentives to attract substitutes — whether aspiring educators or retired pros. Get creative.
5. Stop wasting valuable tax dollars.
Why waste $90 million a year on a flawed STAAR exam or $14 million a year on a propaganda program to force teachers to teach the history your political party finds palatable? Give us grants to make learning fun and relevant.
Pay for buses and bus drivers to take students to the countless wonders Texas has to offer. From NASA to the Buffalo Soldier museum, my city offers invaluable learning experiences that engage students to think about their future. The list of where I want to take my kids is endless: the Houston Food Bank, the first library of Texas in Galveston, visits to universities from Rice to the University of Houston, Ima Hogg’s house at the Bayou Bend MFAH museum. Everyone remembers their field trips from our school days for a reason: it was a day of real-world active learning that was — gasp! — actually fun.
Instead of banning books, fund our requests to grow our classroom and school libraries. Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw once explained to my students that he knew he wanted to be a Navy SEAL when he was 12 years old. You know what inspired him? A book!
From food pantries to menstrual products, there’s no lack of need for students whose parents may not always apply for free and reduced lunch benefits. Fund the things that countless studies show us make true impacts on helping kids learn better. Stop wasting Texas taxes on programs designed to attack Texas teachers. Then, you won’t have to resort to desperate and ineffective bandaids to stop the hemorrhage of teachers leaving the system when all they ever wanted was to make an impact on students.