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EdSurge
Many Frustrated Teachers Say It’s Not Burnout — It’s Demoralization
By Stephen Noonoo
Nov 19, 2019
A few years ago, Chrissy Romano-Arribito began to experience something
that may sound familiar to a lot of teachers: burnout. Or not burnout,
exactly, but demoralization.
Romano-Arribito is an EdSurge columnist and has spent about 27 years in
the classroom teaching everything from first grade to middle school in
her home state of New Jersey. But while teaching middle school a few
years ago, she began to feel the squeeze from high stakes testing,
administrator turnover and battles over curriculum scripting. It was
making it hard for her to do good work. Worse, it began sapping her
love of teaching.
“I did get to a point where I saw that the kids were coming in and
their love of reading and writing was just slowly going out the door,”
she says. “They were just coming in and sitting down, reluctantly
opening up their books. But I felt the same way.”
Experts like Bowdoin College education chair Doris Santoro, author of
the book “Demoralized,” define the concept in moral terms. According to
Santoro, almost all teachers have moral reasons for getting into the
profession. But systemic pressures, such as top-down initiatives or
punitive evaluation systems, can deplete teacher autonomy. As a result,
teachers may feel they can no longer tap into what “makes their work
morally good,” she says. They can start to feel frustrated or ashamed
of the work they’re doing.
In short, they no longer feel like they can be good teachers.
Santoro and Romano-Arribito, along with teacher Danielle
Arnold-Schwartz, join us this week on the EdSurge podcast to discuss
the serious impacts of demoralization—and also whether it can be
overcome.
The U.S. in the midst of a growing teacher shortage, which according to
researchers at the Economic Policy Institute is only getting bigger. By
some estimates there are as many as 100,000 job vacancies for qualified
teachers going unfilled. Today, there are more teachers leaving the
profession for reasons other than retirement compared with the 1980s.
To some experts, at least part of that retention crisis is caused by
teacher dissatisfaction—which is also on the rise. And demoralization
could be a serious contributing factor.
“Some sort of dissatisfaction is the major source of why teachers
leave the profession,” Santoro says. “So I’m going to say that if a
major source of teachers entering the profession is because of moral
reasons, a significant number of those are going to be leaving for
moral reasons as well.”
Demoralization is systemic—meaning teachers really don’t have control
over it. It can feel like new rules are supplanting the old order,
which makes good, moral teaching more difficult or even impossible.
“I think demoralization happens when you are in situations with chronic
and ongoing conflicts, value conflicts, that you can’t resolve,”
Santoro says.
A few years ago, Pennsylvania teacher Danielle Arnold-Schwartz wasn’t
feeling burned out per-se, but she was getting frustrated with what she
calls “corporate education reform,” which to her includes things like
pointless new jargon and changes to the teacher evaluation system that
she says was more like a checklist than a conversation with the
principal. But being in the suburbs, it felt to her more like a creep
than an outright deluge.
When asked to describe what demoralization feels like, she says it was
actually something of a relief when she discovered the concept—almost
like giving it a name and a definition allowed her to start addressing
it.
“The best way I could describe it is like I was going through all of
the stages of mourning, and I felt like I was walking around with a
weight on my shoulders when I was at work,” she says.
“I couldn’t shake it—and you know, the stages of grief are denial,
anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. So I’m still fighting the
good cause. I really believe in public education and haven’t given up
quite yet. But there’s an acceptance that I don't have the control.”
For Chrissy Romano-Arribito, the issues leading to demoralization were
simple enough to name: testing and curriculum. She says she loved
working in elementary school but the switch to middle school was tough.
She had taught younger grades before with end-of-year tests, and while
it was stressful it didn’t rise to the same level. Looking back, the
earliest flags of demoralization, she says, came from her school’s
administration.
“It was a great atmosphere in the first year or two, but then there
started to be a turnover in the administration,” she says. “It was just
this constant turnover of administrators. And that really took its toll
on the culture and climate and morale in the building.”
Romano-Arribito says the school climate was also roiled by a rigid
adherence to scoring well on the end-of-year test. And that began to
crowd out what makes teaching special for her, which is engaging
students in learning, making it fun and getting to know her students as
individuals. But that was getting harder and harder for her to do.
“Everything that we did was focused on the test, so that surely is demoralizing,” she says.
That’s when she says students began losing their love of reading and
writing, which really saddened her. Her response was to go to bat for
her students. She thought back to how she reacted when her own children
were younger—when she would review their projects and their connection
to state standards and take her concerns directly to teachers and
administrators. And she thought her students deserved an advocate who
would fight for them just as hard—even if it put her at odds with her
school leaders.
After years of requests, she received a transfer to an elementary
school, where she now teaches second grade. She loves second grade and
has fully thrown herself into the challenge, tapping into the second
grade teaching community on Instagram along the way.
But becoming a re-moralized teacher isn’t always so straightforward,
and switching grades or schools might not always solve the problem. In
response, Santoro created what she calls a “menu” of options teachers
might explore for reconnecting with their moral centers and making
changes. Among her suggestions are getting involved in leadership roles
in local teachers unions or in politics; writing or working to
galvanize parents and inform them of structural issues that make
teaching and learning hard; and carving out new positions, either in or
adjacent to the classroom where there’s a need.
Another piece of advice: Connect with people who are feeling like you
are, and who want to make change. Even before her transfer,
Romano-Arribito began attending Edcamps, which are impromptu educator
conferences that encourage organic discussion. She made new friends on
social media and began meeting teachers from across New Jersey for
Sunday coffee. Now she believes in the power of surrounding herself
with positive people.
To Santoro, who spoke with more than a dozen educators for her book,
these efforts at remoralization are a good sign. But she says the fact
that there’s a need for them in the first place is “heartbreaking.”
“It makes me really angry that people with this degree of talent and
energy and passion are being stymied in this way,” she says. “It makes
me worried as a teacher educator about sending new, talented teachers
out into this environment, but at the same time, I have a lot of hope
from speaking with these folks.”
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