Why are so many teachers leaving Georgia’s classrooms?
In an essay today, a University of Georgia education professor suggests too many students and too many limits on how teachers can teach.
University of Georgia professor Peter Smagorinsky has been following new teachers to understand their career paths and choices, including a highly rated teacher who came back to her home state of Georgia to teach and promptly left the profession.
“Many of her reasons for leaving her job, and the profession, could be traced to a single source: an oppressive student load. In contrast to classes of 20 in which she quickly learned her students’ names and personalities, she was assigned classes that averaged 35 students, totaling about 175 for a subject, English, in which teachers should optimally assign and grade a lot of writing,” he writes.
The former teacher’s other disappointment: Having to teach to a scripted lesson plan in lockstep with every other teacher of her grade and subject. “Like the reduction of real kids to test scores, the implementation of a scripted curriculum takes the engaging, interpersonal, relational career of teaching and reduces it to mechanical operation,” says Smagorinsky.
To read more, go to the AJC Get Schooled blog.
About the Author
