The Education Situation: A Small Rant

A note: This is meant to be only a description of my thoughts and feelings towards education and my reflections on leaving the teaching profession. I understand every school/district/state/etc. is different, I am simply sharing my experiences having been a young teacher for 4 years here in Florida. For any other struggling teacher who reads this, you are not alone. I only set out to share my perspective with others who can relate and understand and to vent my frustration about a system that chewed me up and spit me out.

I thought I would be a teacher forever. It’s what both my degrees are in and it had been what I wanted to do since I was in sixth grade. I’m typing this now, however, in the cubicle of my second ever corporate office job after being laid off from my first ever corporate office job after leaving teaching in the middle of the school year in 2025. I haven’t even been out of the classroom for a full year yet. As someone who reflects on their past life experiences and reminisces constantly, I’ve thought a lot about my years as a teacher and with the current state of the world, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore my inner rage fire at the state of things, including education.

The decision to leave teaching has by far been the toughest decision I’ve had to make. I had never quit a job before let alone the career I had planned to stay in for the rest of my life and again, in the middle of the school year. But after just 4 years, I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew going into education that the system was messed up and I went into the profession with the drive to just try my best despite the system and help my students in any way they can. What I was met with was deterioration unlike anything I had previously expected and I was not prepared for how hard it was going to be to deal with everything.

In college, educator programs do their best to prepare you for a teaching career, but often fall short of the real-life of teaching. We were taught to draft 7-8 page lesson plans with detailed instructions and differentiation when in reality, I planned an entire semester on half a legal pad. In reality, I had no time or resources to implement the differentiation I was taught was necessary in every single one of my lessons, which only made me feel like I was letting students down. In reality, the apathy and unpreparedness of the students I was receiving every year only took a bigger and bigger toll on me as it only ever continued to get worse.

I never expected my students to care as much as I did or have the same attitude I did towards my education and learning, everyone is different. However, the apathy in classrooms nowadays is to a degree that should be way more alarming than it is. I never thought I would have to battle with students every single day to do the simplest of tasks or have to deal with multiple classes of failing students for the sole reason of never doing any work or being too absent to ever catch up. I will never forget in my first year teaching on the first day of school I had a student say out loud, “Miss, I’ve failed every class so far so I’m just letting you know, I’m going to fail yours too.” He dropped out before the year ended.

Also, as an English teacher, I was expected to teach students according to the curriculum of their grade level. This proved to be almost impossible though since I was having more and more students coming in with reading and writing abilities 1-2 grade levels below what they should be. How on earth was I supposed to teach a full year of 11th grade English to students who could only really read at an 8th grade level? I had an 11th grader misspell “being” in an essay. Everyone has apparently forgotten how to use contractions. Students can barely write a paragraph and that’s not an exaggeration, let alone an entire cohesive essay. I was stunned. Realizing I was spending more time having to remediate my students on things they should have learned 2-3 grades ago than actually teaching the curriculum I was given proved exhausting. I wanted to teach students about the joys of literature and how it can relate to their everyday lives and improve their skills as readers and writers but I was left scrambling and stuck reteaching elementary-level grammar in order for them to even understand a portion of a text we were reading or to be ready for whatever state test is being given. I had one senior student tell me, “I can read, I just can’t comprehend.” How am I supposed to react to that? How am I supposed to fix that in a single school year only seeing them for an hour and a half every other day? Nobody has resources or time to spend on this level of remediation because everything is centered around test scores, numbers, and graduation rates. I had no idea education had strayed so far from being about actual learning and the pressure I was facing from administration to just pass students so they can move on to the next class or to give students credit where no credit was due because the school couldn’t have that many F students or could not suffer that low of a graduation rate was insane. It simply wore me out.

On the topic of remediation, No Child Left Behind was one of the worst things to happen to education. When I was in school (~2003-2016), when you failed a class or grade, you had to repeat it simple as that. If you failed 3rd grade, you had to repeat 3rd grade. If you failed freshman English, you had to retake it as a sophomore with the rest of the incoming freshman. That motivated you to want to pass your classes. Now, there is no such thing and it’s way more detrimental to student’s learning than people realize. Holding students back forced them to succeed where they previously had failed and provided a necessary consequence. I can understand how a parent does not want their student to feel left out or shame at being held back, but at the end of the day, they need to learn what they need to learn because as they progress, school only get harder, and they need the baseline knowledge provided by previous classes/grade levels. By removing that consequence, we now have students who are just pushed through grade levels and classes despite not having near enough the knowledge necessary to actually succeed at the next step, which puts them immediately at a disadvantage, which is only going to make them struggle, which is only going to beat them down as they try their hardest but just don’t have the skills or knowledge they need. And at the high school level, retaking a class is nonexistent. Now, if a student fails a class, they are put into a credit recovery version of the same course that’s meant to be easier on the student while teaching them the broader strokes of the necessary information for whatever class it may be.

It's a bad solution.

Because now, when a student fails a class, they know they will just be put into credit recovery (which is all online by the way) which they can breeze through in a few weeks if they don’t pay another student to do the course for them. There is no real consequence for students to fail anymore and they realize that and thus, only increase their apathy towards school in general. Honestly, why would a student already apathetic towards school bust their butt to do all the necessary work in a class when they know if they fail, they can just do the credit recovery course in a few weeks and still get the same amount of credit? It’s making teachers fight an uphill battle without the necessary support from the education system. And, it’s only producing young adults who graduate with less and less of the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed in the world.

If despite all of this and more, if I knew or felt the system was trending in a better direction and there was support for me to really truly help these kids, I would have stayed teaching. Unfortunately, the reality of the education situation is only getting worse and there is no path laid or even in sight for improvement. We have an incompetent administration dismantling the Department of Education, something that sounds utterly insane yet it happened in a blink. We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars on war and the oppression of other nations when teachers are forced to spend thousands of dollars a year of their own already pittance salaries on supplies and resources that school districts don’t provide. Part of the reason why I left teaching was I simply could not afford to keep making only 50,000 a year plus a millage that is liable to go away any given election cycle. I know it’s all because the greedy billionaires in power want an increasingly uneducated population to manipulate into accepting their lot in life while the upper class continues to hoard the world’s wealth for themselves, but it’s getting ridiculous.

Schools and education drastically need a back-to-basics approach in order for the education situation to improve in any way, I think. We need to bring back consequences for failing students, we need to refocus efforts on learning instead of testing, we need to actually pay teachers and school staff a livable wage, we need to provide actual beneficial resources so that teachers are actually equipped to face whatever may walk into their classroom, we need to value education and teaching for the monumental things they are if we have any hope of showing future generations how they can do better. We need so much more than I can even write here. I don’t know if I’ll ever step foot back in a classroom, but if things can change, and I am cautiously optimistic that they will, maybe one day.