The Voices We Don’t Hear: Teachers Who Gave Up

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A version of this essay originally appeared on Robert Pondiscio’s SubStack.

Earlier this month, I was flattered to be invited to a conference at Marquette University Law School, sparked by an article I’d written making the case that education reform has misfired by prioritizing testing, measurement, accountability, and other structural reforms instead of trying to improve classroom practice.

A highlight of the convening was the final panel of the day, featuring four teachers and administrators who acknowledged that many of the challenges I cited—poor preparation, chronic problems with student behavior and classroom management, and the overwhelming demands placed on teachers—were real and concerning. But they pushed back politely on my assertion that we have made teaching “too hard for mere mortals.” I was particularly struck by remarks from Taylor Thompson, an earnest and winningly dedicated first-year fourth-grade teacher from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

“[Teaching is] not an impossible task. It’s demanding. It’s hard. Each day is not rainbows and singing and dancing,” she said, but it’s not impossible “if you are a collaborative person, work with your peers, and you have a community of coworkers and principals who don’t allow you to silo into your own rooms and do your own thing. It can be a very, very empowering job.”

Thompson brought with her materials from the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum; having worked on CKLA’s launch during my time at the Core Knowledge Foundation, I was heartened that it contributed to her success. That said, I couldn’t help but wonder if her first-year experience would be different—if she’d even have had the time and energy to come to Marquette at all—had she not been given CKLA but an empty plan book, and expected to spend 10, 20, or more hours a week scouring Google, Share My Lesson, or Teachers Pay Teachers for lesson plans and materials?

When it was my turn to respond, I told the audience that what they’d just heard didn’t contradict my argument; it amplified it. I suggested to my hosts that what we really needed was one more panel: earnest, well-intended people who wanted to teach but grew overwhelmed and walked away from their classrooms. Their absence from the conversation—not a flaw of Marquette’s thoughtful event but a field-wide oversight—limits our ability to address the issues driving nearly half of teachers to quit within five years. Those stories are legion.

After leaving the classroom, I worked briefly at an outfit called Prep for Prep under Ed Boland, who later left the organization to teach in a New York City public high school armed with little more than idealism. His 2016 memoir, The Battle for Room 314, described the relentless student misbehavior, homophobic slurs, and physical fights he endured. He wasn’t a minimally prepared Teach For America corps member or, like me, the product of an “alt cert” teacher prep program. He had two years of graduate school and six months of student teaching that he described as “a mix of folk wisdom, psycho-jargon, wishful thinking, and out-and-out bullshit.” 

After one freakishly difficult year, Boland returned to his old job. “I had taken courses in lesson planning, evaluation, psychology, and research. Next to nothing was said about what a first-year teacher most needs to know: how to control a classroom,” he wrote.

NPR’s All Things Considered not long ago ran a story about Liz Stepansky, the daughter of two school teachers who wanted to follow in their footsteps, thinking teaching would be a path to a stable, meaningful life. But when she took a job teaching at a South Carolina middle school, she found that she “had no idea” what she was in for. Her middle school students “dialed 911, threw balloons filled with bleach and ink in hallways and constantly pulled the fire alarm.”

“I’d go home and sometimes I’d spend an hour grading papers. And then I’d go back the next day and do it all over again,” she told NPR. “I remember my paycheck being $800 and something every two weeks.” She transferred to another school, faced similar frustrations and threw in the towel. She’s now a speech pathologist.

It’s not hard to find stories of earnest, well-intended people who want to teach but find the job untenable. But I can’t recall hearing from a single one at any of the education and policy conferences I’ve attended over the last twenty years.

Inattention to abandoned careers and disappointed hopes allow false and misleading narratives to gain traction. Last summer, I was invited to give testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Senator Bernie Sanders was proposing a $60,000 minimum teacher salary to address teacher shortages. “By all means, pay teachers more,” I testified. “But don’t harbor any illusions that doing so will solve the problem.” 

Higher pay doesn’t fix shoddy preparation, unruly classrooms, or the ever-escalating burdens we pile on teachers’ plates as we treat schools as not just academic spaces but something akin to the social service agencies of last resort. “We are asking teachers to do too many things to do any of them well at any salary,” I said.

Teaching’s aspirational nature attracts optimists, but crushing demands betray them. A RAND study I cited in my Senate testimony found 99% of elementary teachers create their own materials, stealing time from honing their craft and working more closely with children and their parents. A 2024 Pew survey showed only 36% of teachers feel adequately resourced; a 2022 NEA poll revealed nearly half plan to quit due to poor school climate. These are systemic failures, not personal ones.

Teaching is among our most optimistic and aspirational professions, drawing idealists who believe education can transform lives. But celebrating only the successes—teachers who beat the odds, schools that defy demographics—distorts our vision. As I quipped at Marquette, it’s like watching Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs and concluding, “See? It can be done!”

And it can—if you’re Aaron Judge.  

Other fields learn from failure—medicine from misdiagnoses, aviation from crashes. I urged Marquette’s audience to imagine a panel of teachers who quit—not to shame them, but to learn. What broke their optimism? What tools were missing? Thompson’s success shows what’s possible with support. But for every Thompson, countless idealists leave because they were overmatched, felt unprepared or betrayed by poor training or simply couldn’t manage chaos.

A few days later, Alan Borsuk, who organized and moderated the event at Marquette, told me about a conversation he’d had with a school administrator who was in attendance who disagreed with the notion that teachers who leave are failures. “She said one of the best teachers they have whose students have done well for year after year is leaving after this year,” Alan said. That teacher, she insisted, was not a failure.

Exactly! That teacher didn’t fail. We failed that teacher.

Education reform must weigh frustration alongside triumph. We need convenings where former teachers speak without judgment: their failures and frustration studied, not stigmatized.  

There’s no magic wand that will make the job easy or friction-free, but when you connect with students and go home feeling successful, there’s no job that compares to being a classroom teacher. You feel on top of the world. It’s immensely satisfying work.

The question ed reformers and policymakers need to ask now is what can we do to make more teachers feel successful and their jobs more doable.

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