It’s been four years since the COVID pandemic shut down schools, but the teaching profession has never fully recovered. In fact, one could argue that it was fundamentally damaged by the tyrants in charge.

Hybrid and virtual learning were terrible ideas. Teaching is a community activity. Children learn not only from their teachers but also from their classmates. Sometimes, teachers even learn something from their students. That loss of classroom community during the lockdowns caused a horrific disconnect between teachers, students, and parents.

It’s not unlike the horrible online dating scene of today. Unmoored by in-person community and stigmas, chaos and ghosting ensues.

Teachers were struggling even before the pandemic. There is a sarcastic expression that teachers will say to their colleagues: “I teach for the money and the fame.” Truthfully, most teach for the love of it. There is no good explanation otherwise because the economic and social incentives are negligible. In fact, The Washington Times interviewed several people in the education field to ascertain the reason teachers were leaving and found that the return on investment was lacking.

Susan D. McMahon, chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violence Against Educators and School Personnel, told the Times, “The pay is not great, the respect is not great, the workplace is not great, and there are additional challenges of violence. So why would people stay in the profession?”

Most teachers work a great deal more than 40 hours a week. They often take work home like grading, lesson planning, projects, and more. They often use their own personal funds to ensure that students have supplies, a cozy and thoughtful classroom, and extras like party supplies. There is also the continuing education that all teachers have to keep up with to ensure they are able to maintain their teaching licenses.

Why do they do this? Because they love kids and teaching. However, for many, the return on investment is becoming untenable.

Students aren’t able to flourish, and part of that lack of flourishing comes down to bad behavior and the lack of tools and resources for teachers to do anything about it. Natalie Wexler, author of the “Mind the Gap” Substack, elucidates on this dilemma:

In a 2023 book called Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging, Doug Lemov and his co-authors argue that rejecting the idea of a teacher’s authority in the classroom — a rejection that has long been an undercurrent of education orthodoxy and has more recently been taken up by the left as an anti-racist stance — is a luxury belief. “The students who are harmed most by the idea that schools should not set and enforce clear rules for young people are the young people themselves,” they write, “especially those who as a result do not learn how to control their impulses, delay gratification, and exert self-discipline.”

That poor behavior in the students is often a replication of similar or worse behavior in the parents. Ergo, it’s never adequately resolved by the school’s administrative authority.

The school administration structure is also playing a detrimental part in teacher scarcity. As Michael J. Patrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, summarizes: “We’ve chosen to hire more teachers and more staff in general instead of boosting pay. And we’ve gone soft on traditional discipline in the name of equity. Both decisions were misguided.”

When I was enrolled in public school some 20-odd years ago, class sizes were 18 students or less. Now, a class size of 30 is normal, and that number is often much more. Classroom management is a pipe dream. God forbid you have a disruptive, aggressive, and/or destructive student in your classroom.

In summary, schools are burning out their teachers and giving them no incentive to stay.

Despite all that, there are still great teachers who prevail despite the odds being stacked against them professionally. Sadly, there are also a plethora of very bad teachers who are getting into education for precisely the wrong reasons. These are the leftist political activists and the child predators who unfortunately but correctly see the system as easily exploitable.

The teacher shortage is a cultural issue and a values issue. On an individual level, it all goes back to parenting. Parents are responsible for their kids’ behavior. Sadly, many are content to let their children be sedated by iPads rather than letting them use their imagination and ingenuity. In other words, they have handed over behavioral and moral development to strangers on the Internet and teachers at school.

Parents also have abdicated their responsibility of being the first and most important teacher to their kids. A perfect example of this is the million-word gap. Children who are read to for at least 20 minutes every day will have heard over a million words by the time they start school. They will also have a better grasp of literary concepts such as story structure and good stories versus puff and nonsense. Public libraries are free, so low socioeconomic status should only play a small factor in this particular regard.

Parents should be aware of what their children are learning and do everything in their power to remedy any gaps from pandemic-induced delays. It shouldn’t all be on the teachers.

The teaching crisis explanation also expands to the larger culture. It’s a sad fact that the zeitgeist doesn’t consider children important. Therefore, the infrastructure that supports parents, students, and teachers is treated only as a tool for cultural control and manipulation. Children aren’t allowed to be children, and teachers aren’t really given the chance to teach successfully.

It’s no wonder teachers are unhappy and leaving the field.