Kesa sent me this article about how the exodus of teachers out of the profession isn't really about "burnout".
https://kappanonline.org/teacher-burnout-stories-moral-objections-santoro/
People get into teaching for moral reasons, and they are leaving for moral reasons.
Teachers are demoralized, and their departure from the profession is often an act of a conscientious objection, not of personal burnout.
Focusing on "burnout" puts the onus on individuals rather than the systemic conditions that actually need attention.
@edsu @pixouls I walked by a school in an adjacent neighborhood the other day. The neighborhood is about 40% Black, but all of the kids I could see on the playground were Black. My guess is that any white people for whom that's their school send their kids to private school instead.
A large fraction of public schools in the US have re-segregated, and rather than treating this as an emergency our governments and school boards seem to simply be tolerating it for the most part. The system doesn't seem likely to fix itself, so having teachers leave for moral reasons seems like it may be the only to force us to stop pretending the public school system is working.
On the other hand, it's also "evaporative cooling", in that the teachers who would say something (and have been saying something) are leaving, and the ones who stay or join are likely to be the ones who are fine with the status quo. If that happens then only some external stressor is likely to cause any reform. And external stressors will become more likely as parents who didn't send their kids to public school fight against public school funding, find ways to divert more tax dollars to private schools, and move out of places that force them to pay a lot for public schools they don't use.
