Story at a glance
- At a roundtable discussion hosted by the nonprofit Democracy Forward on Monday, a six-person panel warned that the newest wave of book bans and laws targeting how educators can talk about racism and sexism are hurting the teaching profession.
- The new efforts to control what teachers can say or give to students are pushing some to leave the profession entirely, they said, contributing to the nation’s teacher shortage.
- Teachers feel “handcuffed” by these new laws and efforts to remove books, one panelist said.
The culture war’s newest battleground of the classroom is contributing to the national teacher shortage, free speech and education advocates said Monday.
Recent efforts to ban books and new laws targeting lessons on race and gender have pushed some instructors out of the classroom, contributing to the national teacher shortage, free speech and education advocates said during a panel discussion Monday.
“What we are seeing is our teachers being handcuffed and not being able to provide the quality education that we would love to be able to provide,” Terrance Martin Sr., president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers and one of the six panelists at the roundtable discussion hosted by Democracy Forward.
The Detroit Federation of Teachers is a local Michigan branch of the national teachers’ union the American Federation of Teachers, which represents about 1. 3 million educators across the country.
The U.S. is experiencing a major teacher shortage in public schools and after two years of online learning and COVID-19 shutdowns, burnout is the main driver behind educators’ decision to leave the profession.
According to a National Education Association survey released in February, 55 percent of teachers said they planned to leave their job earlier than they had previously thought due to pandemic-related stress.
And federal data suggests that the shortage won’t get better any time soon.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, 44 percent of schools reported the same number of teacher vacancies in October as they did in January of this year. That same data also found that unfilled teaching vacancies disproportionally affect schools serving low-income communities and children of color.
But according to Martin, as well as fellow panelists and activists Chris Tackett from Granbury, Texas, a spike in new laws aiming to control how educators can discuss racism and sexism and the new wave of book bans from conservative groups that has taken place since 2020 are pushing teachers out of the profession.
“We go into the profession wanting to draw on our personal experiences, our lived experiences and things that happen to us each and every day and bring what is happening in society into the classroom to teach children,” said Martin.
“So, the sheer thought of having to censor folks, bank books, and not teaching real, true history is really an attack on that very premise. What we have seen in education is that this is has helped contribute to the teacher shortage.”
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