I’ve often observed that teaching is the easiest job in the world to do badly and the hardest to do well. But it’s harder than ever for even the most fiercely committed teacher to stay true to his or her core mission—raising student achievement—given the spiraling demands on teachers to serve as curriculum developers, mental health professionals, after-school chaperones, or simply trying to run safe, orderly, distraction-free classrooms.
On Thursday, AEI Education hosted a webinar that posed the question, “Have we made teaching too hard for mere mortals?” The occasion for our discussion was a recent paper authored by more than two dozen teachers in the state and published the state department of education. Titled “Let Teachers Teach,” it recommends a number of classroom-focused reforms including limiting student cell phone use, addressing the challenges of chronic absenteeism, paying teachers for non-academic work, and giving teachers relief from extreme disruptive student behaviors that make teaching and learning impossible.
Regena Beard, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher in the Zachary Community School District, was one of the Louisiana teachers who met to work on the report. She emphasized that it wasn’t a mere grievance session. “Dr. Brumley was very specific that our recommendations need to be actionable,” she said. “We have a short amount of time and we’re not here just to share our grievances. We’re here to make a change.”
One of the biggest challenges for teachers is the sense that they’re on their own. “Teachers leave their principal, and that’s actually across the workforce,” observed Michael Sonbert, CEO of Skyrocket Education. “So leaders would be really well-served to define, with impeccable clarity, what matters in [their] school.” Cade Brumley echoed this sentiment, saying, “When I’ve talked to many teachers who leave the profession, really they didn’t leave the profession, they left their principal.”
Several of the recommendations go against ideas that are currently fashionable among policymakers and even some practitioners. In Louisiana and elsewhere, teachers are responsible for student mental health-related issues in the wake of a counselor shortage, including the expectation they should be able to identify a host of social and emotional issues and respond to those issues. “We certainly appreciate and understand that some students have mental health challenges, but we need to stop forcing teachers to be mental health therapists,” Brumley said. “Teachers are not trained for that, so it’s a disservice both to the teacher and to the student.”
Perhaps the most controversial recommendation is one that could go a long way to keep stressed-out teachers in classrooms. RAND’s 2024 survey on teacher well-being reported that “managing student behavior” was the top-ranked source of teachers’ job-related stress. “One student or a few students should not be able to disrupt a teacher or other students from learning,” said Dr. Brumley. “We’re recommending that those students be placed at alternative sites where they could get the mental health and maybe academic support they need to return to that regular education classroom.”
Louisiana’s teachers and Cade Brumley deserve a round of applause for the report. Teachers and policymakers tend to talk past one another, breeding an attitude of mutual contempt. It won’t do, for example, for teachers to have an attitude of “trust us and send more money.” Their work is a public service performed on the taxpayer’s dime. Similarly, it does no good for policymakers to blithely assume bad student outcomes are evidence only of teacher incompetence or to expect teachers to solve every problem that children bring to school while serving increasingly as the social services provider of first and last resort. Something’s gotta give. Louisiana’s report is a good start at launching a badly overdue conversation about what we expect our teachers to be able to do, and how do we create the school and classroom conditions to enable them to do it well and sustainably.
Surprisingly, no other state has reached out to Brumley or his colleagues about “Let Teachers Teach.” That’s disappointing given that none of the issues the state’s teachers surfaced or the report’s recommendation are unique to Louisiana. “If another state would like to engage us on this work, we we’re happy to share,” Brumley concluded. “We certainly have lessons that we’ve learned through this process.”
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