DEMORALIZED

DEMORALIZED
Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and
How They Can Stay

DORIS A. SANTORO

Harvard Education Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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Paperback ISBN 978-1-68253-132-7

Library Edition ISBN 978-1-68253-133-4
ePUB ISBN 978-1-68253-134-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Santoro, Doris A., author.

Title: Demoralized : why teachers leave the profession they love and how they can stay / Doris A.
Santoro.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard Education Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046120| ISBN 9781682531327 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781682531334 (library edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Teacher morale—United States. | Teacher turnover—United States. | Teachers—Job
satisfaction—United States. | Teachers—Job stress—United States. | School environment—United
States. | Teachers—Professional ethics—United States. | Teachers—Training of—United States.
Classification: LCC LB2833.2 .S34 2018 | DDC 371.1001/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046120

Published by Harvard Education Press, an imprint of the Harvard Education Publishing Group

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I feel I must emphasize and explain repeatedly the moral dimensions of all
social life, and point out that morality is, in fact, hidden in everything. And
this is true: whenever I encounter a problem in my work and try to get to
the bottom of it, I always discover some moral aspect, be it apathy,
unwillingness to recognize personal error or guilt, reluctance to give up
certain positions and the advantages flowing from them, envy, an excess of
self-assurance, or whatever.
—VÁCLEV HAVEL, “POLITICS, MORALITY & CIVILITY”
Contents

Foreword
INTRODUCTION
1. “We Have Been Taken Away from Our Own Reward”
THE MORAL SOURCES OF TEACHER DISSATISFACTION
2. “We Should All Be So Embarrassed”
DISTINGUISHING DEMORALIZATION FROM BURNOUT
3. “They’re Suffering and They’re Struggling”
SOURCES OF DEMORALIZATION: CAUSING HARM TO STUDENTS
4. “I’m Admitting to Being Disingenuous in My Craft”
SOURCES OF DEMORALIZATION: DEGRADING THE PROFESSION
5. “I Can’t Be That Kind of Teacher”
RE-MORALIZING STRATEGIES FOR CAREER LONGEVITY
6 SCHOOL LEADERS: SOURCES OF DEMORALIZATION AND RE-
MORALIZATION
7 TEACHER UNIONS: SOURCES OF DEMORALIZATION AND RE-
MORALIZATION
8 HARNESSING THE POWER OF RE-MORALIZATION
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
Foreword

I have come to believe that in certain fields the “bad apple” rate is very low.
Of course, “bad” physicians and “bad” teachers exist. But almost everyone
who goes into these fields has a purpose that is somehow related to “doing
good work.” They enter each of these professions to make a difference; to
help make the world a little bit better. Aspiring physicians and teachers hold,
sometimes quite deeply, moral convictions about the worth of the work in
which they want to engage. Thus, the “bad apple” rate in these professions is
likely to be low. To find these “bad” practitioners, the medical and
educational professions, along with state and federal legislators, have set up
elaborate, but ultimately destructive, programs designed to find and eliminate
those few harmful or incompetent professionals. Such programs often are
supported by the public, glad to be protected from incompetent medical and
educational personnel, but these same programs can seriously demoralize the
vast majority of knowledgeable, experienced, committed, expert
professionals in each of these fields. It turns out, as education professor Doris
Santoro aptly argues in this important new book, when teachers cannot enact
the values that motivate and sustain their work, demoralization is a common
response.
In Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How
They Can Stay, Santoro does a terrific job, in fact, of turning the spotlight on
this underreported and underappreciated phenomenon of demoralization.
Distinguishing it from burnout, a word used to describe many forms of
teacher dissatisfaction, she categorizes its common sources and, in doing so,
lends legitimacy to this problem, opening the door to new ways to think
about how to deal with it.
For educators, demoralization is a natural accompaniment to being told to
fix the lives of children born into poverty. That is not easy to do. However,
Santoro shows us that demoralization also occurs in our nation’s well-funded
and well-regarded public schools. Demoralization among teachers is a natural
response to unfair evaluation systems that hold teachers accountable for
standardized test scores influenced to a far greater extent by family and
neighborhood, than by schooling. Demoralization among teachers also occurs
as a function of being denigrated, sometimes vilified, by too many
uninformed politicians and journalists. In particular, the voices of political
leaders are heard, and teachers are required to adhere to the laws they pass.
But the voices raised by experienced and admired classroom teachers, as
responses to the laws that are made, are neither heard nor respected.
The international movement to intensify the work of the profession—to
achieve more with less resources—is another source of demoralization
among teachers, across nations. And demoralization also occurs among
teachers when they have to cope with being squeezed economically in a
society that may be paying too little in taxes to properly pay many of its
public servants.
These and a dozen other contemporary sources of demoralization among
experienced teachers described in this book are leading to their exiting from
the profession in substantial numbers. Of course, when that happens, the
knowledge they gained to be successful in their educational career is lost with
them. This is true because reasonable estimates suggest that teachers’ grow in
their ability to influence student achievement for seven to ten years.
Moreover, the total costs to replace an experienced teacher may be quite high,
easily $15,000 in many of our nations’ school districts. Furthermore, there is
evidence that higher rates of teacher turnover negatively affect student
achievement. So demoralization among America’s teaching corps has serious
educational and fiscal consequences. Santoro provides critical insights into
the lives of those teachers who feel such demoralization and offers a
compelling case for why their concerns are legitimate and should be taken
seriously by district leaders, union leaders, and policy makers. They are not
burning out—they are disturbed not to be contributing to education in the
ways that they had hoped. In fact, Santoro argues that many of the teachers
who leave the profession after years of successful and personally rewarding
teaching may be more like conscientious objectors than they are like failing
teachers. They leave teaching because they have ethical concerns about the
work they are doing. They cannot practice the profession as they intended. As
one teachers says: “We have been taken away from (the sources) of our
reward.” And as might be expected, they do not all live easily with that
sadness.
Our nation seems not to know how contemporary educational policy, and
the leadership of schools that carries out those policies, is demoralizing so
many of our nation’s teachers. The teachers who speak in this book believe
that they are witnessing the loss of their profession, and they feel powerless
to stem its disappearance. Santoro captures the teachers’ despair; they mourn
and express many of the symptoms associated with grief of a loved one.
However, after many deeply troubling stories of teachers’ disillusionment
over not being able to do good work, we learn that all but one of the
experienced teachers in Santoro’s book stay. Thankfully, for those who
persist, a way forward is found. They find a way to recommit to the dreams
they held. They find ways to believe that they can still “do good” in
education. Santoro analyzes their strategies and offers a framework that other
teachers can use. Re-moralization, as Santoro asserts, does take place. And
when that happens, teachers find ways to lead meaningful lives for
themselves, and once again, help our nation, as well. Our nation is lucky to
have these fine educators still working to make the world a bit better.
I found something quite interesting in the persuasive and engrossing stories
recounted and analyzed in this book. It was a realization that these
expressions of dissatisfaction with the teaching profession were not those of
an ordinary group of complainers, as every profession has. Rather, the
dissatisfaction expressed by these teachers is coming from deep commitments
to the moral and ethical principles that define our remarkable system of
public education. I found in the contemporary concerns of these teachers
echoes of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Horace Mann. These were not
ordinary complainers at all! And it left me thinking that to ignore the
concerns of these teachers—the concerns of such committed and exemplary
professional educators—really would make us a nation at risk.
So what can readers expect from this insightful book? Readers will gain
insight into the contemporary shortage of classroom teachers that we are
experiencing and the role that current educational policies play in driving
away experienced, talented teachers. They can expect to “hear” the authentic
voices of teachers who want to do well, and who are frequently blocked from
doing so. They will be privy to remarkably insightful analyses of these
lamentations along with strategies for counteracting demoralization collected
by one of the most astute scholars in our research community. And they will
also learn about the remarkably empowering effects that reframing and
distinguishing some forms of teacher dissatisfaction as demoralization, rather
than burnout, can have on teachers and those who care about strengthening
rather than harming the profession. School leaders and policy makers will
need to reconsider the levers that they use to address teacher shortage and
retention problems. They damage the profession and our schools by targeting
all teachers as “bad apples” and by neglecting to take a deeper look at the
sources of teacher dissatisfaction.

David C. Berliner
Regents’ Professor Emeritus
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College
Arizona State University
INTRODUCTION

I didn’t disagree with the letter. It was more . . . the disappointment in myself for having become a
teacher I didn’t like.
—Carla, a twenty-three-year teaching veteran, in tears as she describes the letter of reprimand she
was issued by her principal.
You play ball or leave with your ethics.
—Reggie taught for ten years. He resigned in 2015.
As a teacher, my job is to answer questions for kids. As a teacher, it’s my job to make my students
feel safe, cared for, and part of a community. They’re nine years old. They have certain adults in
their lives that they’re supposed to be able to trust and that they care for. The fact that [my student]
felt that she was hurting me in any way, shape, or form by not being able to perform [on a test] was
wrong . . . I had words and actions of things that I wanted to be as a teacher, and I was able to enact
them until this point. And at this point, no longer am I allowed to be that person that I know I want to
be. I have to be this other person who feels monstrous, actually.
—Diane, who has taught for twenty-one years, recalls first administering a high-stakes test.
I wish Arne Duncan [former US Secretary of Education] would come to my living room. [I would tell
him] I really cared about kids and I wanted to connect with them. I don’t think I wasn’t who
[accountability proponents] wanted me to be. I think I was the teacher they would’ve wanted, you
know. And yet they broke me . . . And so the only people that you really damaged were the people
who were already invested and caring and dedicated.
—Gina, a National Board certified teacher with thirteen years of experience, was Teacher of the Year
for her state. The following year she took a disability leave as a direct result of the increased
workload associated with accountability measures mandated by her school.
There were always these people that were the type of teachers—the June, July, August teacher—
counting the years to retirement teacher. You run into that in any field. So, I was like, alright, I’m
definitely not that kind of teacher . . . I’m going until I’m blue-haired, you know, as long as I can still
be funny and make it fun, I’m good. And I see more teachers who would never say [“I’m leaving
teaching.”], talking about retirement. In my worst moments, I say I’m never going to make it to
retirement. I’m never going to have a pension . . . I wanted to make enough [money] and I wanted to
be happy and love what I do. So I worry that more teachers, good teachers, who wouldn’t be leaving,
are leaving earlier.
—Vanessa entered teaching after a career in marketing and has been teaching for nine years. She
works in a nationally recognized suburban school district.

It is not hyperbole to say that the teaching profession in the United States is
in trouble. Teachers are leaving the profession at rates that outpace
retirements. Surveys indicate a high level of dissatisfaction, with only a slight
majority saying they remain enthusiastic about their job. Teacher retention in
public schools—a potential solution to the current teacher shortage crisis—
has been on a decline since the late 1980s.
 Research is incontrovertible on this point: experienced teacher turnover
disrupts schools and negatively impacts student learning. Yet little is known
about why experienced teachers leave, and conversely, how to keep them in
the classroom.
Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How
They Can Stay challenges the common explanation of burnout to explain why
experienced teachers leave their schools. It also offers lessons for teachers,
school leaders, and policy makers about thinking more strategically about
how to harness their talents to make a difference in the lives of students.
Drawing on ten years of research on teachers’ moral concerns about their
work, this book presents an argument that some forms of teacher
dissatisfaction are better understood as demoralization. Demoralization offers
a more precise diagnosis of experienced teacher dissatisfaction.
Demoralization is rooted in discouragement and despair borne out of ongoing
value conflicts with pedagogical policies, reform mandates, and school
practices.
Not all teachers will experience demoralization. Some will not encounter
situations that pose value conflicts between their job expectations and their
vision of good teaching. Their values will be closely aligned with the
pedagogical polices, mandates, and practices of their schools and districts.
Some teachers approach their work from a perspective that does not
emphasize the moral aspects of their job.
The preceding quotes provide just a sample of the types of moral concerns
that contribute to dissatisfaction in experienced teachers who come to their
work with moral motivations:
• failing to embody the values that have guided their practices for years
• complying with mandates that compromise their professional ethics
• contributing to student distress by following policies and procedures
• understanding that policies designed to support students render teachers expendable laborers
• realizing that the profession has transformed in ways that make career longevity unsustainable and
unrealistic
• experiencing isolation when standing up in the name of professional ethics
While researchers show that teacher attrition is a process, not an event,
most studies examine the experiences of beginning teachers and reveal only
the earliest stage of the process. This book addresses the dearth of research
on experienced teacher dissatisfaction and attrition. It draws on teachers’
narratives as a means to raise questions about the concepts that are used to
explain dissatisfaction among experienced teachers. These narratives offer
insight into teachers’ concerns that disrupt the common discourse of
experienced teachers as resistant to change and primarily self-interested.
Indeed, I show how these concerns are rooted in professional values of
“client responsibility” and “craft performance” identified by sociologist
Daniel Lortie and the desire to do “good work” as posited by Howard
Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon. Throughout the
book, I chart how the feminization of teaching impacts the ability of teachers’
moral concerns to be heard as ethical claims, rather than simply self-
interested forms of resistance.
School leaders, policy makers, and teacher educators have been urged by
researchers to inoculate and prepare teachers to withstand the perils of
burnout with a strong dose of resilience.1 While resilience is touted as a
remedy to protect against teacher burnout, typically it entails adjusting to
challenging situations by meditating, practicing mindfulness, and following
other self-help recommendations. However, the process of demoralization
occurs when pedagogical policies and school practices (such as high-stakes
testing, mandated curriculum, and merit pay for teachers) threaten the ideals
and values, the moral center, teachers bring to their work—things that cannot
be remedied by resilience.
When teachers experience re-moralization—the ability to access and
conserve the moral rewards of their work—it is through a more action-based
approach that is tailored to the individual and the context in which they are
working.

THE BACKGROUND
The seeds of this book date back to 2006 when a former coteacher sent me a
copy of her resignation letter. Lisa had taught for twelve years, the last ten
years in a large, comprehensive high school in San Francisco where I also
taught for two years. We were both ninth-grade English teachers and
collaborated frequently, eventually coteaching an elective together. I knew
firsthand that Lisa was a fiercely dedicated teacher who was uncommonly
effective in supporting student learning. Faculty members respected her, and
she had assumed various leadership positions in the school and district
throughout her tenure.
Having recently completed my doctorate, I read Lisa’s resignation letter as
a concerned friend and from the perspective of someone immersed in
research on teaching. I noticed that Lisa’s reasons for leaving did not fit into
the categories typically used by scholars and educational leaders to describe
teacher attrition. Lisa was a successful and passionate teacher who adored her
students. A year or so before her resignation, I had visited her at the school
where we had taught together. I didn’t know her classroom number, but I was
able to easily identify her room as I scanned the doors in the hallway. The
room was filled with student work hanging from every surface and the hum
of students working together. Hers certainly wasn’t the only room in the
school that had these qualities, but it was one of the few. I have a hard time
believing that the quality of her teaching had deteriorated significantly in the
next two years. My sense is that she was a better teacher than many up until
her resignation.
In 2006, I could find very little research that addressed why teachers with
five or more years of experience quit the profession. The most common
explanation, especially for teachers who work in demanding, high-poverty
schools, like Lisa’s, is burnout. As I read the research, I developed an
unsatisfying image of burnout: a candle with a finite amount of wick and
wax. If it is never snuffed, the candle will burn out. Teachers burn out,
presumably, because they do not ever take time to themselves by blowing out
the candle of their teacher selves. As a result, they have no more resources
(wick or wax) to offer their students and colleagues. Yet, Lisa still had plenty
to offer her students and colleagues; she had not been extinguished
prematurely. I did not see burnout as offering a sufficient explanation for
Lisa’s resignation.
Professor Susan Moore Johnson’s team studying what they call The Next
Generation of Teachers argued that teachers’ career cycles had changed and
new teachers no longer viewed teaching as a lifelong profession.2 They
argued that teachers leave the profession when they do not feel a “sense of
success.” Again, these explanations didn’t capture Lisa’s situation. Lisa was a
teacher confident in her abilities. She had described herself as a “lifer.” She
could be heard warning her current students what she would reveal to their
children when she was still working at the same school two decades hence.
Instead, Lisa explained why she was leaving the profession after twelve
years this way: “I felt like I was becoming less good.” For Lisa, this was a
moral claim. Becoming less good did not mean that her pedagogical skills
were waning. Rather, she offered an evaluation of who she expected to be as
an educator and what she believed students deserved.
Lisa did not necessarily want to leave teaching, but she believed she could
not continue to teach under the conditions she faced: a school that had once
taught students in heterogeneous classrooms transformed into a rigidly
tracked institution where students and teachers in the higher tracks enjoyed
higher status and better resources; a small learning community that fostered
teacher collaboration to provide supports to students was disbanded; scripted
curriculum appeared on the horizon. The values of justice, inclusivity, and
teaching as intellectually stimulating work that motivated her practice for
over ten years could no longer be realized in the school that she also loved
but that had changed so much over the last decade. She could no longer fulfill
her vision of good teaching, even after making innumerable accommodations
to new school and district mandates and organizational frameworks.
Lisa was leaving work she loved because she could not live up to the
values that guided her practice. Working with the hypothesis that new federal
policies, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), may be the reason that
teachers like Lisa were leaving the profession, she and I embarked on a
project in which we interviewed thirteen teachers with six to twenty-seven
years of teaching experience in high-poverty schools who had taught before
and after NCLB.
This book is written against the backdrop of interviews that Lisa and I
conducted between 2006 and 2008 with experienced teachers who left the
profession for moral reasons. I described them as conscientious objectors to
teaching.3 They could not continue to be complicit in practices that they
believed denigrated the profession and that damaged students. In the analysis
of the interviews, I developed the concept of demoralization—the inability to
access the moral rewards offered and expected in teaching.

THE TEACHERS
The first set of interviews with conscientious objectors revealed that
demoralization, like attrition, is a process. I hypothesized that if
demoralization is a process, rather than an event, then teachers, school
leaders, and their allies might be able to arrest or reverse it. I wanted to learn
how teachers currently employed in public schools would describe the ways
they managed moral concerns about their work. I wondered if the experience
of demoralization need not conclude with teachers’ resignations.
 To better understand the process of demoralization and to find out if it
could be arrested, I interviewed twenty-three teachers with five to thirty-five
years of experience who had moral concerns about their work but who had
not left.4 I recruited these teachers via Twitter and through inquiries sent to
teacher education programs, alumni networks, and associations such as the
Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education. While some of these
teachers had only taught in the era of NCLB, all of them had experienced the
introduction of the Race to the Top Initiative and the Common Core State
Standards. Therefore, all the teachers in this study had worked through
significant policy shifts.
The interviewees self-identified as having moral concerns about their
work. As an exploration about professional ethics, I limited the interviewees
to those who expressed moral concern about their own behavior and their
colleagues’, and excluded those who focused on the morals of their students.
Although any teacher can be eligible for demoralization, this book focuses
on the experience of educators who have taught in public schools for five to
thirty years. My purpose is not to ignore or diminish the experiences of early-
career teachers who may have much to share about the process of
demoralization. However, by limiting the research to those who had
demonstrated their commitment to the profession through longevity, I was
able to clear away potential confusion between disillusionment and
demoralization.
The teachers I interviewed are not intended to be representative of the
profession as a whole. Instead, their selected narratives provide insight into
some of the ways that teachers have difficulty accessing the moral rewards of
their work. They are cases that illuminate the concept of demoralization and
provide examples of possibilities for re-moralization.
I asked the experienced teachers in my study what they understood to be
good work, when they were able to best embody their conception of good
teaching, and what prevented them from fulfilling that vision of their work.
Often, I acted as devil’s advocate. I challenged the teachers to justify their
concerns. I proffered unsympathetic interpretations of their moral misgivings
and required that they better justify their actions. I made these rhetorical
moves only after we had established trust. Nevertheless, the arguments that
the teachers developed in response to my critical probing showed that they
were able to support and stand by their claims. Their responses provided
critical details that might have been missing in their first articulation of their
moral concerns.
At the time of the interviews, I would characterize seventeen of the
teachers as experiencing demoralization. They were engaged in practices or
contexts that contradicted or threatened their moral center as a teacher.
However, I discovered that eight of the teachers had experienced re-
moralization. They had been able to reestablish the moral rewards of their
work without compromising their core values and ideals about teaching. All
but one of the teachers were still teaching in 2017. Reggie was accepted into
a prestigious doctoral program and resigned. All names, including those used
in quotes, have been changed. Some identifying details have been altered.
I do not imagine a time when or place where teachers have no moral
concerns about their work. The fact that teachers experience moral dilemmas
in the conduct of their profession is not new, nor is it unique to teaching.
However, the consistent finding from my research is that teachers’ moral
concerns about their work are rarely recognized as moral. As a result,
teachers have few avenues though which to negotiate their dilemmas and no
clearly identified resources to access in these challenging situations.
My hope is that this book generates discussion among educators about
their moral concerns in teaching. More conversations about teachers’ moral
concerns will provide increasingly inclusive and wide-ranging insights into
the many dimensions of demoralization and re-moralization in the profession.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In chapter 1, I argue that any attempt to resolve the current US teacher
shortage is incomplete without recognizing the moral sources of experienced
teacher dissatisfaction. Richard Ingersoll has long explained and now Linda
Darling-Hammond’s Learning Policy Institute concurs that teacher retention
must be a priority for US public schools. Given that many teachers enter the
profession for reasons that could be characterized as moral, and that many
teachers explain that they remain in the profession partly for the moral
rewards, failing to understand the moral sources of teacher dissatisfaction
presents a major gap in our understandings of teacher attrition. Teachers
whose moral motivations sustain their work are susceptible to demoralization
that may lead to attrition.
Without an accurate assessment of the problem, it is impossible to design
appropriate solutions. In chapter 2, I distinguish demoralization, its causes
and symptoms, from the phenomenon of burnout. Drawing on sociological
and philosophical research, I show that the two main categories of teacher
moral concerns are those that relate to harming students or denigrating the
profession.
In chapters 3 and 4, I look closely at the two main categories of teachers’
moral concerns: harm to students and denigration of the profession,
respectively. The teacher narratives reveal the ways that teachers experience
and negotiate moral concerns. In most situations in chapter 3, teachers are
expected to follow policies and practices that they believe outwardly harm
children or violate the trust that they have established with students. I also
include two situations in which teachers are accused of physically harming
students, and it is their school leaders’ handling of this assumption that
causes them moral distress.
Moving from a focus on students, chapter 4 homes in on teachers’
responsibility to the profession. This chapter explores teachers’ moral
concerns about denigrating the profession, such as colluding with colleagues
on dishonest grading. Another example involves a teacher who finds that she
has unwittingly contributed to the martyr-teacher narrative that is so
professionally and personally destructive. Members of a profession are
responsible for maintaining the integrity of the profession. This chapter
analyzes examples of teachers who feel they have failed to uphold the
conduct required to fulfill this duty.
The call to cultivate resilience can often be understood as an expectation to
better handle the adverse conditions that teachers encounter in their work.
Chapter 5 offers specific examples of actions that the teachers took to re-
moralize their work lives. Demoralization can be reversed, but re-
moralization often involves transforming situations rather than
accommodating them.
This chapter shows that teachers at any stage in their careers can become
re-moralized. At times, re-moralization occurs partly as a response to the luck
of new opportunities and changes in school leadership. Most often, re-
moralization involves a meaningful connection with authentic professional
community. The strategies that re-moralized teachers’ work were almost
never only an “inside job” that altered the educators’ outlook or energy.
Instead, almost all the teachers’ experiences leading to re-moralization
involved taking some form of outward action. However, these actions need
not be activist. There are strategies available to those who are risk-averse,
classroom oriented, or introverted, just as there are strategies that will appeal
to those who are open to taking a public stand.
However, teachers are not the only persons responsible for their
workplace. Chapter 6 provides examples of school leaders causing
demoralization as well as serving as sources of re-moralization. School
leaders need to be aware of the moral motivations that bring teachers to their
work and provide opportunities for educators to articulate and navigate their
moral concerns. A significant source of teacher demoralization occurs when
school leaders refuse to recognize teachers’ moral claims as moral.
Chapter 7 reveals the ways that teachers’ unions can also be a means for
re-moralization and the cause of demoralization. Uniquely poised to protect
the integrity of the profession, unions can help teachers amplify their moral
concerns and provide a collective voice for the significant moral work of
teaching. Unions can connect teachers with an authentic professional
community and provide outlets for taking re-moralizing action.
In chapter 8, I discuss the difference that demoralization makes. Reframing
teacher dissatisfaction that stems from a moral source as demoralization
enables educators to better understand and potentially transform their
experiences. Naming the moral source of teacher dissatisfaction enables
teachers to identify the origins of their concerns and to make clearer claims
about their troubles. Mainly, the identification of demoralization versus
burnout reveals that the problem is with the conditions of the work rather
than with the teachers themselves. The book concludes with
recommendations for systematic research that better isolates the moral
sources of teacher dissatisfaction.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

For teachers who are troubled by their work, this book offers a new way to
make sense of concerns about their practice and their profession. I provide
action-based and collaborative examples of re-moralization that can be set
into motion by an individual teacher, groups of like-minded faculty, union
organizers, or school leaders. Teacher educators will be able to use this book
to discuss the common pitfalls and challenges practitioners will face in trying
to live up to their commitments to teaching in the short term and over the
long haul. Finally, I call upon educational researchers to fine-tune their
inquiries to better capture the moral dimensions of teacher attrition and
retention.
Research is incontrovertible on this point: experienced teacher turnover
disrupts schools and negatively impacts student learning. Demoralized offers
lessons for teachers, school leaders, and policy makers to attenuate the moral
sources of teacher dissatisfaction. The book offers the following insights and
recommendations illustrated by the narratives of experienced teachers:
• Teacher demoralization is often confused with burnout. The misidentification of the problem leads
to ineffective remedies to address it.
• Moral concerns in teaching need be understood as matters of professional ethics rather than
personal dilemmas.
• Demoralization in teaching threatens the moral commitments and values that sustain many
teachers’ careers.
• School leaders and unions can exacerbate and alleviate demoralization.
• Well-resourced, suburban schools are not exempt from reforms and mandates that have
demoralizing consequences for teachers.
• Re-moralization is possible; most frequently, it entails cultivating an authentic professional
community.
CHAPTER ONE
“We Have Been Taken Away from Our Own Reward”
THE MORAL SOURCES OF TEACHER
DISSATISFACTION

Facing teacher supply shortages and high levels of teacher dissatisfaction,

what should US public school leaders and policy makers do?1 In response to
these challenges, I anticipate that the public will be told of the need for more
programs that attract the best and brightest young minds for short-term stints
in the hardest-to-staff schools. We may be provided evidence that teacher
education programs need to be redesigned to prepare teachers to meet the
unique challenges of today’s schoolchildren. Salary-based incentive
programs that promise to attract talented individuals deterred by teaching’s
low pay may also emerge as proposed interventions.
Each of these proposed solutions responds to a particular problem with
teaching: the low status of the profession relative to the education and
training required for entry; demographics of teachers that are remarkably
different from those of their students; low compensation relative to the
preparation required for and demands of the work. These are recruitment
problems. Interventions implemented along these lines are designed to
harness a human resource stream into the teaching profession that might be
diverted elsewhere.
As a longtime teacher and teacher educator, I know that these problems are
serious obstacles to building a deep and diverse pool of public school
teachers. The urgent demographic imperative to build a teaching force that
reflects the diversity of the student population has been well documented.
The low status of teaching in the United States cannot be attributed solely to
its low pay; however, the low pay can be understood as a function of the
profession’s low status. The logic of the recruitment strategies described here
could be termed the Field of Dreams approach: build it and they will come.
I have devoted my entire professional life to the practice, preparation, and
study of teaching. I want teaching to be a field of dreams for those who enter
it. Nevertheless, the attraction and recruitment logic misses an important
component to the teacher shortage problem facing US public schools. This
component is retention, especially for teachers who, despite its low status and
low pay, have already proven their dedication to the profession.
Teacher retention is a problem, especially in the hardest-to-staff schools:
usually urban or isolated, small rural schools where 30 percent or more of the
students meet federal poverty guidelines for free and reduced lunches and the
majority of students are from black and/or Latinx backgrounds. While these
schools face challenges with recruitment, not having continuity among
experienced faculty and school leadership is even more disruptive to building
a culture of learning for students, as well as staff.
Teachers are leaving the profession at rates that outpace retirements and
that create unstable conditions that undermine school effectiveness and
student learning. Even if recruitment challenges could be resolved through
short-term placement programs, the ongoing turnover of teachers (especially
if the turnover is approximately every two years) is especially disruptive for
students. Faculty with whom students develop close mentoring relationships
move on, and institutional memory about students’ life history and progress
fades quickly. Members of the school community, savvy to the message of
market forces, come to identify their school as a place where the successful
get out if they are able. Therefore, those who do not leave are the “losers”—
students identify themselves, their peers, and the staff who remain as losers.
Why treat classmates and teachers with respect if operating with this
collective self-assessment?
A similar phenomenon occurs with teaching staff. They may begin to
internalize the loser identity if they continue to teach in a school with
ongoing faculty turnover. However, not all will accept this self-deprecation.
Even those who maintain a high-minded purpose for their role in the school
may be overcome by turnover fatigue. Instead, they may experience a school
in perpetual reconfiguration where norms are constantly being rearticulated
and reestablished rather than refined and deepened. Schools that depend on a
revolving cast of educators likely rely on imposed forms of authority such as
highly regulated procedures and regimentation that students and researchers
recognize as approaches consonant with the school-to-prison pipeline.
Cocreated forms of authority rooted in interpersonal respect are nearly
impossible to maintain under such conditions. The cycle thus continues:
schools become rigid places focused on fear where neither students nor
teachers want to be.
 Places that have been traditionally hard to staff such as high-poverty urban
and isolated rural schools currently feel the teacher shortage most keenly, but
we cannot expect that the shortage will be confined to those locales. Well-
resourced suburban schools are not immune to the impending staffing
shortfall, but they will not be the first to experience the effects of high teacher
turnover. While wealthier suburban districts may boast higher salaries and
well-maintained physical environments, this book shows that these districts
may be taking on some of the characteristics that drive teachers to change
careers.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT TEACHERS’ MORAL

CONCERNS ABOUT THEIR WORK?
Facing a national teacher shortage that could exceed 100,000 educators by
2018, what should concerned colleagues, state policy makers, school and
district leaders, professional unions, and teacher education programs do? One
low-cost, high-leverage intervention would be to take action to retain
teachers. Analyses of teacher employment data reveal that reducing
preretirement attrition would virtually eliminate the current and anticipated
shortage.2
High-achieving nations have about half of the annual teacher attrition rate
that the United States is currently facing.3 Richard Ingersoll has long argued
that the teacher shortage needs to be understood as a problem of retention,
not attraction.4 Teacher retention in public schools has been on a decline for
the last three decades according to figures published by the US Department
of Education. While public school teachers moving between schools has
remained relatively the same since the 1980s, teachers leaving the profession
for reasons other than retirement increased from 5.6 percent to a peak of 8.4
percent in the 2004–2005 school year. The most recent figures are still high
at 7.7 percent.
Yet, these nationally representative numbers do not tell the entire story.
Schools serving high-poverty populations can experience yearly turnover as
high as 25 percent. Arizona’s Department of Education, for instance, reports
that in 2014 over half of its districts and charters had between one and five
educators break their contract or resign midyear in 2013–2014. In a time of
shrinking school budgets and a recovering economy, administrators in
Arizona report that better salary accounts for about 40 percent of their
attrition. The majority of teachers leave Arizona schools for reasons other
than salary.
The US Department of Education’s national survey results indicate that the
most significant reasons teachers leave the profession are “personal life
factors” (38.4 percent) and “other factors” (20.5 percent). Although these two
broad categories do not provide a fine-grained description of teacher attrition,
these figures do debunk two popular, but erroneous, explanations for why
most teachers leave: low salary and “fitness” for the work. Although popular
wisdom and mainstream media often portray teachers as biding their time
until higher-paying work comes along, reliable data show that low salary is
not the most significant reason teachers leave.
National data reveal that most teachers leave due to “some type of
dissatisfaction”:
Areas of dissatisfaction include concerns with the administration, ranging from lack of support to
lack of input and control over teaching decisions; testing and accountability pressures; dissatisfaction
with the teaching career; or unhappiness with various working conditions.5
Large-scale surveys, as well as the reports that they make possible, provide
unassailable data to debunk myths and depict the magnitude and various
facets of the problem with accuracy. They provide a rationale for new
hypotheses to be explored and alternative policies to be enacted.
Linda Darling Hammond’s Learning Policy Institute report reveals policy
avenues worth pursuing. She also highlights well-publicized initiatives, such
as fast-track certification routes, that may not resolve the “leaky bucket”
teacher supply problem. For instance, the report finds that teachers with little
preparation for the profession leave at rates double or triple those of better
prepared educators. Therefore, identifying more shortcuts to the profession
will prove shortsighted and ultimately ineffective. In contrast, identifying
ways to make comprehensive teacher preparation affordable and rectifying
profound disparities between teacher salaries in high-poverty, racially
segregated schools and well-financed suburban schools could effectively
target the disproportional attrition for teachers of color and the white teachers
who work in those schools.
We still need more information about teacher dissatisfaction to develop
effective strategies to attenuate experienced teacher attrition. Recent surveys
report a “precipitous drop” in teachers’ job satisfaction and an “undercurrent
of despair” about their work.6 Of the thirty thousand respondents included in
the American Federation of Teachers and Badass Teachers Association’s
joint survey, 100 percent reported that they began their career enthusiastic
about their profession. In 2015, only 53 percent said they remained
enthusiastic about their work.7 Given this extreme drop in teachers’
enthusiasm about their work, it is imperative that we ask what accounts for
this profound discontent.

Unlike many of the experienced public school teachers that I interviewed,

Paul prepared in advance for our conversation. He’s a scout leader, and I
soon learned the many ways he lives up to the motto “Be Prepared.” Paul
occasionally reads from notes he generated in anticipation of our meeting.
His frustration, tempered by Midwestern politeness, can be heard in the
tremor of his voice.
Teaching is in Paul’s blood. At least three generations of teachers
preceded him, including his father, whom he describes as a “union guy.”
Paul was introduced to the idea of teaching as a calling in grad school but
found the concept too weak. Drive, he explains, is a better way to understand
his purpose. Highlighting the priority that this drive occupied in his life, he
describes transferring to a college that offered a different major to ensure
that he would be employable as a language teacher. Finding his way into
teaching took “tenacity, perseverance, [and] stubbornness.”
Paul made strategic decisions that would enable him to build a lifelong
career in teaching. During his student teaching in an urban district, he
witnessed the inverse relationship between student needs and school
resources and the profound effect it had on teachers. Although he recognized
that students served by that district needed high-quality teachers, he
anticipated that he would burn out in four to five years. Paul attributes his
seventeen years in the classroom partly to teaching in a well-funded
suburban/rural district where students’ basic needs are met, and therefore
students come to school ready and able to learn. His school regularly
appears in Newsweek’s list of the nation’s top five hundred schools.
Although the esteem of teaching has been degraded nationwide, the
antiteacher rhetoric and policies have been particularly bitter in Paul’s home
state of Wisconsin. The passage of Act 10, a measure that eradicated
collective bargaining for teachers as well as many salary scale benefits and
tenure protections, demoralized Paul.8 The new policies purportedly were
developed in collaboration with practitioners and school administrators, but
Paul feels alienated by what he believes should been a democratic process.
He explains that “at no point do I find that my years of experience and
expertise [have] really been valued enough for someone from that top level of
government to actually talk to me, or even survey me.” Paul views public
schools as cornerstones of civic life and believes that teachers are public
servants who should model and teach the virtues of democratic participation.
The defamation of teaching extended beyond the sphere of government
offices and institutions. Paul recalls that many neighbors stopped speaking to
each other as a result of Wisconsin’s Act 10 that portrayed teachers as
“Public Enemy #1.” After more than a decade of going to the same barber,
Paul felt that he was forced to make a change. He couldn’t tolerate the
relentless ribbing about being a teacher that he’d endure while getting his
hair cut. Paul wonders aloud how members of a nation that can’t treat each
other civilly during a haircut will meet the pressing challenge of teaching all
children equitably.
Teachers in Wisconsin are being asked to do more with less, even as they
are being “attacked unilaterally” for having it easy and doing their jobs
poorly. Paul heaves a packed three-ring binder that easily weighs five
pounds onto his kitchen table. The binder contains a comprehensive and
organized archive of all the materials from the state and district that relate to
documentation that teachers must produce in the course of their work. The
state has been rolling out initiatives and then revising expectations: his
binder tracks various policy iterations and synthesizes what is actually
expected of teachers at the present moment. He has also created step-by-step
guides with screenshots for how to navigate the clunky and time-consuming
online curriculum and assessment reporting platforms that the faculty are
required to use. Paul shares these with his colleagues to minimize the
duplication of effort.
Paul crescendos from incredulity to agitation, “We have been taken away
from our own reward.” The reward, he explains, was never about the money
or even job security, although they were important benefits that Act 10
eviscerated. Teachers are separated from the reward of participating in and
witnessing student learning and focusing on the improvement of their
teaching. Rather than putting the emphasis on students and their learning, in
Paul’s experience, the state and district polices and mandates require that he
devote the majority of his attention on bureaucratic details (“I’m a
secretary.”) that value seeming over being. The policies and practices
reward individual teachers and schools that can “play the system,” and this
is intolerable for someone like Paul who sees his work as having dignity and
integrity.
Paul repeatedly emphasizes that he is lucky to work in a district that values
teachers and that attempts to render mandates meaningful to the goal of
student learning. Even so, he recalls the countless and daily distractions that
keep him from realizing the rewards of his profession: students pulled from
class for testing, prep time lost while he proctored exams, meetings with so-
called professional learning communities (PLCs) that are just small groups
to roll out the latest top-down administrative mandate that entails even more
paperwork, and the required use of computer-based applications that crash
regularly and destroy work.
“My heart resides in teaching.” The affirmations Paul receives from
students and his parents sustain him. He recalls a parent who jubilantly
threw her fists in the air when she found out that Paul would be teaching her
younger child the following year. He finds satisfaction in the long-term
relationships he develops with students, especially those who needed an extra
push or ongoing support when he first worked with them.
Although scores attest to Paul’s effectiveness in ensuring his students
perform well on tests, these numbers do not reflect what really matters to him
as an educator. Performance-based metrics that are now reviewed yearly by
an administrator as part of the contract renewal process do not account for
Paul’s reputation in the community. Where can he account for the times he
has let students know that he sees that they are not working to their potential,
but he believes in them? Where can he show the times that he designs a
learning activity that enables him to step back and watch the students take
over?
It is not until we’ve spoken for nearly two hours that Paul reveals his
shame. He tells me that the interview feels risky. I let him know that I am
honored that he has trusted me with his account of the work he cherishes.
Like nearly every other teacher I interviewed, Paul says that it is cathartic to
talk about his work—what makes it worth doing and what makes it
intolerable. He feels heard, and that matters. A lot.
We return to the shame: “I hate to admit this on tape . . .” Now that his job
is no longer secure through tenure protections, he needs to ensure that his
classes are fully enrolled. “I was more rigorous a few years ago. I’ve had to
lighten up because if I don’t lighten up, the kids won’t take my elective.”
Paul tells me his Catholic faith has helped him get through these times. His
health has suffered, and his increased workload has eaten up the time he’d
prefer to spend with his wife and school-aged children. “There’s a good tired
when you feel fulfilled at the end of the day. There’s a bad tired when you feel
drained from fruitless labor. Teachers, like most other professionals, want to
feel purposeful and appreciated in their work. Such is the meaning of life:
being purposeful and appreciated. We try our best to make our students feel
this way, after all.”

Compared to other teachers’ experiences described in this book, Paul’s

transgressions may appear minor. He has not changed a student’s grade when
pressed by his principal. He has not colluded with other faculty to ensure that
standardized test results appear better than they are. He has not assisted a
distressed student during an assessment that forbade teacher intervention.
Paul’s actions as a teacher in response to school, district, state, and federal
policies and mandates cause him distress. This is the bond Paul shares with
other teachers experiencing professional demoralization. He, like many of the
teachers in this book, revealed his shame to me after deciding that I could be
trusted. Shame is a moral emotion. It indicates something more than simply
being dissatisfied. An expression or feeling of shame indicates that a person
has transgressed a norm or violated a value that is an important part of how
he or she identifies as an individual or as a teacher.
Another’s assessments of the severity of a teacher’s actions are
inconsequential when identifying demoralization. Paul may feel shame about
reducing the rigor of his classroom, whereas another teacher may not feel a
twinge of guilt over something else that seems much more egregious. Paul
finds the current condition under which he teaches nearly intolerable while
other educators may consider them only inconveniences.

ADDRESSING DETERIORATING CONDITIONS

The nation’s earliest teachers were often itinerant men seeking temporary
work. Although the morally stringent and personally confining historical
“rules for women teachers” are ubiquitous on faculty lounge bulletin boards,
historical research reveals a more complex account of teaching in the
nineteenth century. Women were able to pursue teaching as a means to
establish independence, travel, and exercise their intellects.9 Likewise, black
men and women who worked as teachers were able to pursue higher
education and establish middle-class status for their families while
contributing to the education of their communities.
Since the 1950s, the status of teaching in the United States has experienced
radical shifts. A brief review helps illuminate the challenges of retaining
teachers of color and attracting high-achieving students from all backgrounds
to the profession. While many accounts of Brown v. Board of Education
depict the ruling as an unalloyed victory for racial justice, one of the many
complicating factors of the decision was the effect on black teachers. When
schools were merged as a result of desegregation ruling in 1954, black
teachers were the casualties. Figures suggest that over thirty-nine thousand
black educators lost their jobs as a result of Brown. The severity of this
displacement for the profession and the deleterious effects on the black
community’s middle class cannot be overstated.
A more recent example of the active reduction in teachers of color is post-
Katrina New Orleans. In 2005, the parish’s majority-black schools had a
teaching force with over 70 percent black teachers. By 2014, less than 50
percent of its teachers were black. At this same time, the proportion of
inexperienced teachers also rose.10 The disproportionate closure of schools
that serve majority black and brown students may also reduce the ranks of
teachers of color. More teachers of color work in high-need schools that
would be subject to closure than in other types of schools.
The displacement of black teachers in the mid-twentieth century resulted in
direct benefits for white teachers. However, the civil rights and women’s
movements that soon followed both dealt a blow to the teaching profession.
Expanded opportunities for people of color and women resulted in a “brain
drain” in teaching, especially when other professions proved more lucrative.
Teaching in the United States has traditionally been considered a feminized
profession as a result of the educators’ responsibility for children and the fact
that the vast majority of public school teachers are women. Some attribute
this feminized status as the reason that teaching has not risen to the level of
full-fledged profession such as medicine and law. The level of
professionalism for teachers varies widely by school type and student poverty
level, especially in terms of teacher autonomy over decision making and
pay.11
This feminized status also makes teaching an easy target for popular
criticism. Refrains of teachers’ lack of qualifications are legion, but titans of
technology who drop out of school are lauded for their ingenuity. Teachers
with experience are depicted frequently as ineffective and calcified, although
perhaps dedicated, whereas individuals with long-standing careers in business
tend to be portrayed as seasoned go-getters. The public’s license to criticize
teaching and teachers may be a result of its gendered status, but also affects
its esteem.
The disparagement of teaching is felt keenly by those considering the
profession as well as experienced educators. Gallup’s State of America’s
Schools report describes the profession as “vilified.” It describes the
“alarming” findings that compared to twelve other occupations, teachers were
the least likely to agree with the statement, “At my work, my opinions seem
to count.”12 Teachers’ ability to participate in decision making at their
schools and their professional autonomy have been correlated to job
satisfaction and retention.13
It is reasonable to wonder if teaching has really changed all that much. The
profession has a longstanding history as “women’s work”; salaries have
mostly lagged behind other professions requiring similar levels of education;
and, as public employees, teachers have always been required to meet the
expectations articulated by local, state, and federal governing bodies. While
these conditions have remained in place, demands on teachers’ time, defining
features of the work (standardization, recordkeeping), and scrutiny of
teachers’ daily activities (high performing and underperforming, alike) are
unlike any other period in the history of American schooling. While teachers’
work has changed, the organizational conditions in which teachers work
have, by and large, deteriorated.
The deteriorating conditions for teachers have been documented globally
and nationally and termed GERM, the global education reform movement.
Following are some distinctive features of the last twenty years:
• standardization
• increased focus on core subjects/narrowing of the curriculum
• prescribed curriculum
• adoption of corporate practices/use of value-added measures
• high-stakes accountability for students and teachers
• fast-track or alternative teacher licensure programs14
The policy reforms ushered in by No Child Left Behind and that continue
today were intended to improve the quality of teaching and learning for
students who most need the support of a rich and engaging school experience.
The tragic irony is that high-stakes accountability has been shown to have a
“corrosive influence” on the quality of teaching and learning. The authors of
a study on the detrimental effects of standardization, surveillance, and
narrowing of all aspects of teaching offer a conundrum. They found that
“strong teachers . . . offer the strongest defense against this corrosive
influence.”15 Yet, retaining strong teachers becomes an increasing challenge
in an environment where it is becoming more and more difficult to do good
work.
Public school teachers are expected to do more with less; they are
experiencing intensification.16 Intensification refers to the increased
professional demands added to teachers’ workloads without concomitant time
provided to incorporate new expectations or any reduction in previous duties.
The new duties may include unprecedented expectations to collect and
analyze data, recordkeeping to justify referrals to special education, explicit
test preparation and practice, and adoption of new curriculum standards.
While all of these activities may seem like reasonable expectations, those
outside the world of public schools might be surprised to learn that it is not
unusual for teachers to be provided no additional planning or administrative
time for these tasks. Furthermore, teachers who want to incorporate new
initiatives conscientiously are often frustrated when they are expected to
incorporate new curricular mandates in short order without sufficient training.
Teachers may accept the intensification of their work when it is held out as
a promise of professionalism.17 For instance, teachers may believe that their
ability to analyze data on student performance will elevate their professional
status. Or, they may accept an invitation to contribute to curriculum
development for the same reasons, without compensation or a reduction in
their duties. Practices that deprofessionalize teaching can also result in
intensification. Inexperienced and underprepared teachers may anticipate that
a school’s scripted and paced curriculum could make their jobs easier.
However, these products may also increase a teachers’ workload
considerably given that they usually require many specific teacher behaviors,
including highly regulated documentation of student performance and
classroom displays.
Teachers in public schools have experienced deprofessionalization and
intensification unevenly. Schools traditionally labeled as underperforming,
especially those serving high populations of students of color in urban areas,
were the first to see the adoption of many of these reforms. The global trend
takes on distinctive features in the United States where decentralized, local
control of schools is often seen as a point of pride by constituents on both
sides of the political spectrum.
Some of the distinctive features of US-based reforms include:
• replacing locally elected school boards with appointed committees
• closing schools that serve predominantly black and Latinx populations
• diverting public funds into privately managed schools that seek to realize profits
• putting public schools and districts into competition for resources
• hiring school administrators with little to no experience in teaching or education
However, like Paul, not all teachers included in my research work in
schools where it has historically been difficult to attract and retain excellent
educators. Some are employed in districts that offer enviable salaries and
where it is not uncommon for teachers to possess terminal degrees in their
fields. In these cases, the challenges come from a rotating slate of school
leaders, perceived disregard for teacher expertise, and a concern about the
district’s or school’s uncritical adoption of policies and practices that the
teachers believed were harmful to students or that undermine the work of
teaching and learning.
The 2008 recession dealt a blow to public schools. Despite stimulus
efforts, many schools lost staff positions. These positions included not only
teachers, but also nurses, librarians, counselors, and paraprofessionals. While
some schools inch closer to returning to prerecession staffing levels, many
teachers now fill the gaps where support might have been provided by a
nurse, a social worker, or a librarian. Teachers report that positions
previously held by long-term, trained professionals are now being replaced
with short-term volunteers with little to no preparation for the work.
Finally, teachers are concerned about meeting the needs of their students
inside and outside of schools. Against this backdrop of increased curricular
and performance-based expectations for teachers, the challenges facing youth
in the United States are staggering. Over 50 percent of public school children
are living in poverty.18 Drug addiction and overdoses in many communities
have reached epidemic proportions. A Southern Poverty Law Center survey
reports that 80 percent of teachers have witnessed increased anxiety in their
students as a result of the 2016 presidential election. Districts regularly
provide training on creating trauma-sensitive schools and classrooms.19

INVESTIGATING THE MORAL SOURCES OF TEACHER

DISSATISFACTION AND DESPAIR
Surveys of teachers’ levels of satisfaction reveal clear links between
deprofessionalization and dissatisfaction. However, uncovering the moral
sources of teacher dissatisfaction requires a different sort of investigation. We
know that improving teaching working conditions has been cited as a key
feature of increasing teacher retention. However, the phrase working
conditions includes “school environment factors that affect student and adult
learning, including leadership, opportunities for collaboration, accountability
systems, class sizes, facilities, and instructional resources such as books and
access to technology.”20
Undoubtedly, one strand of dissatisfaction can be connected to the
deprofessionalization and intensification of teachers’ work in an era
dominated by GERM, or market-based reforms. This variety of
dissatisfaction might be expressed by experienced educators as, “You’re not
paying me enough to do this job.” Or, “You are asking me to do the
impossible.” Or, “My experience as an educator is ignored by this
administration and these policies.” These are all legitimate responses to
deprofessionalization and intensification. These concerns also reference
teachers’ working conditions. They respond to the material conditions of the
work: low pay, increased expectations in the face of reduced resources, and
qualities of organizational leadership.
I hear a different sort of concern expressed when teachers like Paul
describe how policies and mandates “take them away” from the rewards of
the profession. My research indicates that moral sources of teacher
dissatisfaction and despair contribute to the problems of teacher attrition.
Moral sources of dissatisfaction may be more challenging to identify than
dissatisfaction with material conditions, but they are an integral component of
many teachers’ satisfaction with their work.
Teaching in public schools necessarily entails a civic role and a
responsibility for the well-being of others. For some teachers, a sense of
justice, moral obligation, or care for young people or society provides a
significant source of their motivation for the work.21 As a philosopher of
education and experienced teacher, I am especially attuned to hearing the
moral significance that teachers attach to their practice. The teachers
interviewed for this book incorporate at least one of two categories of
“normative commitments” identified by sociologist Daniel Lortie nearly fifty
years ago: norms of “client responsibility” and norms of “craft performance.”
Put simply, the teachers I spoke with discussed their beliefs about what
students, their caregivers, and the community deserve (client responsibilities)
and what good teachers should do and should not do (craft performance).22
The terms ideals or values could easily be substituted for the terms moral or
normative, as long as the ideals or values involve concerns for something or
someone beyond the individual who holds them.
Here are a few examples:
• “We are doing an injustice to students if we don’t share this information with them.” (client
responsibility)
• “I damaged the integrity of my work when I passed that student.” (craft performance)
• “This testing is reducing education to test prep when we should be cultivating a love of learning.”
(craft performance and client responsibility)
• “How can I meet the needs of students when I am required to follow a curriculum-pacing calendar
created by people who don’t know my kids?” (craft performance and client responsibility)
I do not use the term moral to outline a particular set of behaviors that
teachers must or must not exhibit. Good teaching comes in an infinite variety
of forms and is responsive to local contexts and mindful of broader contexts.
At the level of generality, this characterization of good teaching may appear
to endorse relativism. However, as I highlight specific ways that the teachers
featured in my research attempted to enact good work, I believe that their
guiding norms will appear noncontroversial. Nonetheless, the choices they
make to fulfill those norms may elicit disagreement. Conversations about
these types of disagreements are an important function of practice-based
professional ethics. I suggest that engaging in, rather than ignoring or
silencing, discussions about professional moral concerns may prevent
demoralization.
Sometimes the distinctions between statements that I am describing as
other- or craft-regarding are difficult to distinguish from those that may
initially sound as if they are self-interested or self-centered. I found that it
was important to probe statements such as “I’m not allowed to be creative
anymore,” to learn if that statement contained any notions of client
responsibility or norms of craft performance. Sometimes, simply saying “Tell
me more about that” would lead to a fuller moral concern such as “I am not
allowed to design and implement curriculum that builds on students’ interests
and questions.” Other times, the response might remain at the level of the
self-interested: “I really like studying frogs, but the new curriculum puts it in
the third grade. My principal told me I can’t study frogs again in the fourth
grade.” I suggest that school leaders who are interested in attenuating teacher
attrition improve their quality of questioning to be able to discern the source
of teacher concerns.
The differences between self-interested and moral concerns are sometimes
subtle and may be intertwined:
• “I’m not included in decision making.” (self-interested)
• “We emphasize the value of democratic decision making with our students, but teachers don’t have
a voice in decision making at our school.” (moral: craft performance)
• “I can’t be creative as a teacher anymore.” (self-interested)
• “I am not allowed to design and implement curriculum that builds on students’ interests and
questions.” (moral: craft performance and client responsibility)
In making the distinction between moral and self-interested concerns, I am
highlighting the moral to reveal a category of concerns that require greater
attention in order to gain a fuller picture of teacher dissatisfaction. However,
my point is not to elevate the moral over teachers’ self-interest. There are
times when self-interest requires immediate attention, and there are instances
when moral concerns are the product of paralyzing overanalysis. Only
sustained conversations with teachers will reveal the difference. This book
provides an opportunity to gain insight into the moral category of concerns
expressed by a range of experienced educators in a variety of school settings.
On a survey, we would learn that all these teachers have “some type of
dissatisfaction” with their “work environment.” It is only through a finer-
grained analysis that involves a conversation rooted in trust that we can
access the moral dimensions of teacher dissatisfaction. Many teachers ask
moral questions about their work: What does it mean to engage in good
teaching? What should I do if my job expects me to violate norms and ideals
that I believe are central to my work? Is it possible to be a good teacher for
the long haul?

FINDING THE MORAL CENTER

The distinctive amalgam of what each teacher’s beliefs about what students,
their caregivers, and the community deserve (client responsibilities) and what
good teachers should and should not do (responsible craft performance)
composes the teachers’ moral centers. I adopt the term moral center from
Lee, whose experience is featured in chapter 2. Lee used the phrase to talk
about the moral purposes of teaching that give her work significance. All the
teachers I interviewed shared their moral center with me. I did not introduce
the phrase moral center in any of the interviews. The teachers revealed their
moral commitments about their work throughout our conversations,
especially in response to these questions: What is good teaching? What does
good teaching look like in your classroom? What prevents you from engaging
in good teaching?
Moral centers are internal guides that help teachers gauge their distance
from and proximity to the ideals they aim to embody as educators. Therefore,
moral centers are revealed most clearly when teachers articulate their
purposes as educators and when they fall short of them. Experienced teachers
recognize that their ideals are best used as touchstones and self-evaluative
tools, not easily achieved goals. The moral centers of the teachers I
interviewed were compromised when previously attainable aspects of their
ideals of good teaching were threatened or became impossible to achieve.
Their moral centers were diminished when core commitments to their
“clients” and “craft” were intractably compromised. These conditions can
lead to demoralization in teaching.
The concept of craft conscience, coined by philosopher of education
Thomas Green, is closest to my use of the phrase moral center.23 Both
concepts prioritize the moral commitments of teachers qua teachers.
Likewise, both guard against idiosyncratic visions of good work. Craft
conscience and moral centers are refined through experience doing the work
in a community of practitioners. Nonetheless, I believe moral center better
captures the ways in which the teachers I interviewed approach their
professional obligations. Many philosophers believe that conscience is
consulted only when something goes wrong. Therefore, craft conscience
could be viewed as retrospective. A moral center, in contrast, guides teachers’
choices and actions and enables retrospective analysis. Additionally, the
image of a moral center conjures a more embodied, or gut, experience that
rings more true to the way teachers in my study spoke about the role of their
values in their work and the significance of their identity as educators.

MORE THAN A JOB

More than mere dissatisfaction, many teachers are in despair. Witnessing the
loss of their profession and feeling powerless to stem its disappearance, they
mourn and express many facets of grief. The teachers may be angry and
desire revenge. They may broker compromises that leave them feeling
betrayed. They may feel isolated and alone in their shame. Acceptance of the
loss of their profession often concludes with their literal resignations.
 The tremor in Paul’s voice reveals the significance and depth of his
concern about his profession. His concerns, like others quoted more briefly
here, reflect issues that affect the core of who he has committed himself to be
—as a person and as a professional. Paul, like many other teachers,
experiences teaching as more than a job. It is a way to live his values. Some
expressions of value or significance are “identity-conferring” commitments.
These are the kinds of values that, if encroached upon, threaten a person’s
self-understanding.
Paul is not what we would call a workaholic, a person whose only source
of satisfaction and meaning comes from his job and the recognition he
receives through work. However, his work as a teacher has been one of the
primary ways he has found to express his most significant commitments and
to find the value he can bring to the world. For over a decade (well into the
post-NCLB era), Paul had been able to enjoy the rewards of his work
alongside the joy he finds in spending time with his family and his other
forms of community engagement. Now, ten-hour school days are the norm.
He makes it home for dinner and then goes back to work.
A man I suspect is not eager to find himself in need of a therapist, Paul
tells me about the ways that his health and well-being have been
compromised. However, it would be wrong to understand the problem simply
as one of overwork. Paul is mourning the loss of his profession, which is
different than simply saying that he has lost his job. Paul is still gainfully
employed in one of the top schools in the country. Even so, he says he has
been “taken away from [his] own reward.” The blockage is more than simply
a job being experienced as “less rewarding,” it is the loss of a significant way
Paul expresses his moral center.
What do we know about Paul’s moral center as a teacher? He views his
work as an expression of democratic values and as a service to civic life. He
values holding high expectations for students while forming supportive
relationships that push students to reach their potential. He has built a life in
which doing this work well has been a goal and a priority. He knows that
school is more than just academics, and he engages students by advising
clubs and being an active member of the broader school community. He
believes in fulfilling expectations set by elected officials and helping his
colleagues do the same.
Recently, a suburban district nearby Paul’s own experienced a 15 percent
turnover in teaching staff. The costs of this level of turnover for districts,
schools, and their students are staggering. Contrary to conventional, and
short-sighted, wisdom, the costs are not recouped by the lower initial salaries
of newer teachers. Paul wants to keep teaching until retirement. Labor
statistics reveal that we need teachers like Paul to keep working through
retirement.
This book offers insight and guidance for those who want to stem the
personal and financial costs of teacher demoralization. It calls on teacher
educators, policy makers, school leaders, and union organizers to take
seriously the costs of compromised professional ethics. It presents an
argument that demoralization is not a failure of individual teachers to develop
professional resilience. Instead, teacher demoralization is an institutional and
organizational problem that can be solved by drawing on the resources and
information offered by teachers expressing moral concerns about their work.
The ways in which teachers experience demoralization share some
common features of grief, but they may have distinct causes. The next two
chapters focus on teachers’ responsibility to students and the profession,
respectively.
As the United States faces a teacher shortage, school leaders and policy
makers need to know these truths:
• Much of the teacher shortage could be resolved by improving teacher retention.
• Many teachers bring moral motivations to their work.
• Moral motivations have been described as normative commitments to students and to the
profession.
• When teachers believe that they must violate these normative commitments, they may express
shame and experience demoralization.
• The moral sources of teacher dissatisfaction are not well documented using current survey
instruments, and we need to gather better information about the extent of teachers’ moral concerns.
• We do not need to wait for more data in order to address teachers’ moral concerns about their work
and to improve teacher satisfaction and retention.
CHAPTER TWO
“We Should All Be So Embarrassed”
DISTINGUISHING DEMORALIZATION FROM
BURNOUT

Lee recognizes the signs of burnout: unrelenting stress, exhaustion met by

sleepless nights, work that looms so large that it feels all encompassing.
These were her feelings ten years ago when she worked as part of a team
opening an alternative high school in the South. Unable to find a way to
balance the demands of the job and her personal needs, she transferred to
another school after two years. By switching schools, she was able to
recalibrate the time she devoted to her job so she could also attend to her
family and interests beyond teaching.
Burnout, however, did not accurately capture the growing unease,
discomfort, and, frankly, shame she experiences at her current school. Lee
explains that working at the alternative school shifted what she called her
moral center, and this moral center began to guide her work as a teacher. At
the alternative school, she collaborated with others who “were trying to craft
the traditions of the school to make it feel like it had a really solid heart.”
Although the daily demands ultimately proved unsustainable for her quest for
a balanced life, the mission and practices aligned with her beliefs about what
good teaching should be: honoring the distinctiveness of each student;
recognizing that students’ cultural backgrounds and previous experiences
profoundly shape their knowledge, interests, and learning; fostering student
growth; and creating equitable learning opportunities.
The alternative high school principal is considered a visionary leader who
places student well-being and learning at the center of all discussions and
deliberations. He expected teachers to use professional development time to
raise and discuss matters of importance to the school and to collaborate on
classroom-level, team-based, and schoolwide plans to meet students’ needs.
Lee does not fault the principal for her approaching burnout. She recognizes
that the demands of starting a new school challenged her own ability to set
healthy boundaries with work.
 Lee now works in a comprehensive high school where a professional
culture of closed classroom doors prevails and where noninterference is
considered virtuous. Some teachers have a lot of power and status by virtue
of the school’s complex hierarchy structure. Department heads tend to teach
the highest-track classes and determine students’ eligibility for honors and
AP courses. They also fill the leadership vacuum in the main office by setting
the professional tone for their subject areas. This arrangement leads
departments to perceive collaborative overtures by teachers outside their
subject area as an encroachment on their authority and autonomy. The
building union representatives are drawn from the school’s power elite and
will fight doggedly for labor-related contract issues. Lee doesn’t consider
them allies and believes that self-preservation and the maintenance of the
status quo are their primary purposes.
Lee did not leave her moral center at the alternative school; it is embedded
in her professional ideals and identity. Each of the five schools where Lee
has worked offered opportunities and challenges. At each one, she used her
moral center as a touchstone, asking, “Can I keep doing good work here?”
Sometimes, the ability to do good work entails ensuring that she doesn’t burn
out. At the alternative school, she could not continue to enact her moral
center through her practice due to overwork and overcommitment. Her
personal resources had been depleted.
These days, her ability to do good work has faced a different kind of
challenge. Lee believes her moral center has become corroded. While a
change of schools could keep impending burnout at bay in the past, she’s
beginning to wonder if she can continue teaching. Her current school’s
practices and policies render her complicit in what she views as harmful and
unjust treatment of students. She believes that her role as an advocate for
students is undermined by culturally insensitive and inequitable practices at
her current school. She explains, “I was working with [newcomers] who
were coming from places where they had experienced trauma or loss. And
then they were coming into an environment that was tone deaf to that.”
Even though she can stand by her teaching and believes she is doing her
best to support students, she is troubled by her complicity in wrongdoing. She
believes that her school communicates to newcomers that their identities do
not matter, that they are outsiders, and that they are deficient. She feels guilty
by association. She consistently communicates to students that they must take
ownership for their learning and engage with the opportunities at the school,
but, in her view, students encounter a school environment that alienates them
and undermines those messages.
Many teachers find themselves at odds with longstanding school rituals
that fall short of being adequately inclusive. However, Lee is deeply troubled
by entrenched school practices that continue to confer privileges on white,
middle-class students. Teachers of the honors track courses are permitted to
develop their own prerequisites for admission. At Lee’s school, students are
required to complete an extensive amount of summer work in order to be
eligible for honors enrollment. The prerequisites deter many students whose
caregivers do not advocate on their behalf or who are unlikely to receive
support with the summer work at home.
For incoming ninth graders, the transition to high school is fraught with
new procedures that may be mystifying, especially for recent immigrants and
refugees. Partly as a result of these eligibility requirements, the honors
classes at this racially diverse school are made up almost entirely of white
students. Enrollment in honors courses in Lee’s academically tracked school
not only increases the likelihood of college admission, but also of being
nominated for leadership positions and enrichment activities. Missing out on
honors enrollment in ninth grade sets a cascading loss of opportunity in
motion.
Almost daily, Lee wonders how long she can stay in her job when she
believes the school’s environment subverts the values that inspire, guide, and
sustain her work as a teacher. She cringes when she remembers juniors who
proudly told incoming eighth graders that teachers hold honors students to a
higher standard. The school’s pervasive categorization of some students as
“honors material” and others as less capable was a message that students
internalized. The labeling was an affront to Lee’s moral center as a teacher.
She thought, “Oh my gosh, we should all be so embarrassed,” but she looked
around at a room of nodding heads. Later, she characterized her problem as
“a fundamental conflict of belief systems.”
In the face of these institutional practices that undermine the moral center
of her teaching, Lee is teetering on the edge of quitting her job. Contrary to
wisdom commonly proffered by other experienced teachers, Lee believes that
the remedy is not simply to shut her classroom door. The legitimacy of her
teaching is impacted by the school’s culture and its practices. “I have no one
to go to in my school to discuss the things that I think are egregiously . . .”
Lee pauses, then continues, recalling a teacher who consistently assigned an
English language learner (ELL) student failing grades despite his solid grasp
of content knowledge. “Well, the only way that I can think of it is
malpractice.”

While some might characterize Lee’s experience as burnout, I argue that her
experience is better described as demoralization.1 This form of professional
dissatisfaction derives from teachers’ inability to enact the values that
motivate and sustain their work. Demoralization reaches its peak when
teachers believe that they are violating basic moral expectations that
educators should embody: do no harm to students, support student learning,
engage in behavior becoming of a professional. For teachers experiencing
demoralization, the moral dilemma is not what they should do to be a good
teacher, but that they cannot do what they believe a good teacher should do
in the face of policies, mandates, or institutional norms. The source of the
problem is the dissonance between educators’ moral centers and the
conditions in which they teach.
Burnout is a common explanation for why experienced teachers are
dissatisfied with their work. Undoubtedly, burnout is a problem that needs to
be addressed, especially as the demands on teachers’ time increase, their
responsibilities expand, and the needs of students intensify. However, for
many experienced educators like Lee, burnout does not capture the moral
source of their dissatisfaction. We need a new concept to more accurately
recognize and address this distinct form of teacher distress that can lead to
isolation, despair, transfer to other schools, and to leaving the profession
entirely. This new concept is demoralization.
When a teacher is described as “burnt out,” this problem potentially could
be resolved by the individual. Perhaps the teacher did not know how to set
good boundaries with school leaders, colleagues, students, or their families.
Teachers experiencing burnout may not have conserved their personal
resources sufficiently, or perhaps they did not come to the job with sufficient
personal resources that could act as reserves in times of difficulty.
In sources as diverse as parenting guidebooks, research on teaching, and
seminars for business executives, resilience is defined as the ability to
persevere in the face of adversity. Teachers also need to rely on resilience to
navigate and sustain a career. Researchers and professional developers,
however, have homed in on resilience as a silver bullet to address the teacher
attrition problem. Resilience may be an important antidote to burnout, but it
is an insufficient response to demoralization.
Here, I am building a case for the distinction between burnout and
demoralization. Burnout signals that something is amiss with a teacher who
could otherwise be doing good work in her position. Demoralization points to
a normative problem the teacher sees with the context of the work. The
teacher considers it very difficult, if not impossible, to engage in good work
in her position. The source of burnout is an individual teacher’s current
psychological profile. Demoralization signals a problem with conditions of
the work that impede the realization of the teacher’s significant commitments
and beliefs about the purpose and conduct of good work.
Sometimes, burnout is characterized as an unavoidable byproduct of
working in challenging schools or teaching students with overwhelming
needs. These conditions may hasten burnout, especially in the absence of
consistent school leadership and a stable teaching staff. When teachers find
that they have reached the limit of what they are able to sustain personally
and professionally, they may be experiencing burnout.
Demoralization can be a precursor to burnout. Experienced teachers who
feel as though they can no longer do good work rarely make that decision
based on a single incident. In every case in which I identified a teacher
experiencing demoralization, the process was gradual and the teacher’s
responses along the way were substantial. When teachers’ attempts to resolve
moral concerns about their work are ignored, rebuffed, or ridiculed, it’s
possible to imagine that their personal resources may be depleted. Burnout
may be an effect of unresolved demoralization. In this case, resilience is
unlikely to help.

Quinn experienced four different mandated curricula in his last three years of
urban teaching. He is exasperated because each attempt at standardization
denigrates what he believes teaching and learning should be. Even if Quinn
were given the authority to select and purchase his curriculum, he wouldn’t
take what he calls the “lazy” route. His moral center calls for teaching to be
a highly relational, flexible, and responsive performance. Good teachers
need to know their students very well and be tuned in to what is happening in
their world. Was there a bake sale earlier in the day? Did a fight occur
during gym? What’s going on in the students’ neighborhoods?
Quinn and his colleagues taught at a school serving the most challenging
and highest-need students because they wanted to make a difference in their
lives. They cared about providing nontraditional students with the support
they needed to get a high school diploma. However, he describes working
there as “not what teaching should be. It’s not a healthy school.” This
assessment is markedly different from when he first started at the school and
saw a dedicated and energized staff poised to meet students’ needs.
Lacking schoolwide expectations for student behavior left teachers
responsible for carrying the weight of moral dilemmas. If students acted out
in class to the point of disrupting others’ learning, Quinn had to deliberate
between jeopardizing the relationship with the student and maintaining
classroom-level behavioral standards. If the behavior rose to the level of
asking a student to leave class, what alternatives were in place for a student
whose presence at school was itself an achievement? He watched several of
his friends and colleagues leave for other careers because they were so
disheartened by the lack of support for teachers facing these dilemmas.
Quinn became the building’s union representative when the person filling
that position resigned. Although he did not have tenure, Quinn took on the
role because he saw it as an important part of professionalism. The union
enabled teachers to have a voice, and that was especially important in an
alternative school where union work rules didn’t align seamlessly with
school practices. Quinn envisioned his role as informing the principal of
teachers’ rights and ensuring that those rights were respected. For instance,
if the principal wanted to change the school hours, it could be done but
required a faculty vote.
Once Quinn was affiliated as a union leader, his opportunities for other
meaningful involvement in the school evaporated. Despite his interpretation
of the role as collaborative, Quinn was no longer invited to participate in
planning committees, and his relationship with his principal deteriorated.
Quickly. Despite Quinn’s bringing in a neutral teacher to attempt to repair
the rift, the principal only saw Quinn’s role as adversarial. Quinn received
no additional pay or benefits for his service position to his school, his
colleagues, or his union.
Anticipating an upcoming vote for the configuration of a special program,
Quinn met with the faculty prior to their casting ballots. Examining each
proposal, he guided the faculty through an exercise in which they imagined
the pros and cons of each option. The secret ballot revealed that the faculty
did not support the principal’s preferred proposal. What happened next
crystallized Quinn’s decision to leave a school where he enjoyed teaching the
students, was considered effective by his colleagues, and dedicated much of
his free time to planning and service.
The votes were tallied during the school day. Quinn had learned that the
principal’s proposal didn’t pass, but he wanted to focus on his teaching.
Sharing the unpleasant news with his principal could wait. Word reached his
principal nonetheless. Over the loudspeaker, as he finished up the last ten
minutes of the day with his final class, the principal’s voice entered the room.
“I would like to thank Quinn Raymond for completely undermining the
mission and goals of this school.”
Quinn had given years of his life to the students and staff at the school.
“Being a teacher is the majority of who I am. It’s how I identify. It was a
vicious attack on me professionally and personally. When that happens in
any career, that’s hard enough. You know, you’re already vilified [as a
teacher in public opinion]. It completely magnified everything wrong.”

Some teachers who experience moral concerns about their work are able to
intervene and make a change that restores their moral center. In these cases,
teachers like Quinn are able to avert demoralization and burnout. Young and
able to relocate, Quinn was hired at another school in a different city where
his professional values aligned with the institution’s mission. This time, he
orchestrated a more mature job search, ensuring that the fit was right for him
both in terms of the institutional values and the school leader’s approach to
management.
Lee had fewer choices when faced with demoralization. In her forties, with
a family of her own and a strong network of relatives and friends, Lee’s
demoralization, if escalated or chronic, likely would have been remedied by a
career change rather than relocation. Lee was invited frequently to participate
in events at local colleges and was tapped by district leadership to participate
in strategic planning, curricular development, and national conferences.
Despite talent, commitment, and recognition, the chronic moral concerns that
Lee encountered in her work could be the end of her career.
The path that might lead to the premature end of Lee’s career could be
averted. Teachers who experience moral concerns about their work do not
necessarily become demoralized. However, untreated demoralization could
lead to burnout. If the moral sources of teacher dissatisfaction are recognized
and addressed, there could be opportunities to avert the current teacher
shortage facing US public schools.
 In the cases of Lee and Quinn, and any other teacher I would characterize
as facing demoralization, the problem would not be resolved by individual
remedies such as therapy, mindfulness, or resilience in the form of the ability
to handle adversity. Experienced teachers know that teaching is hard and
fraught with political and interpersonal challenges—sometimes outright
conflicts. Demoralization is distinct from other forms of difficulty.
Demoralization occurs when teachers cannot enact the values that motivate
and sustain their work. Their dilemma is not what should be done, but that
they feel as though they cannot do what should be done. It is unlikely that
resolution to the dilemmas of demoralization will occur without some form of
strategic action. The context may change by a teacher leaving teaching
altogether, switching schools, or experiencing a fortuitous shift in policy,
practice, or leadership.
Not all norms are good norms. Therefore, teachers need to be prepared to
defend their professional values (their interpretations of the norms of client
responsibility and craft performance) when they are challenged. They need to
be prepared to offer rationales for their commitments and actions that are
convincing to their colleagues, students’ families, school leaders, and other
stakeholders. Through this process, it is possible to critically examine norms
and to revise them when needed. A sign of a healthy profession and of a
responsible practitioner is the ability to provide good reasons and to be open
to change when evidence supports a shift in belief and/or practice.

WHEN GOOD WORK IS THREATENED

Demoralization, as I am using the term, means far more than a state of being
dispirited or even very depressed. It signals a state in which individuals can
no longer access the sources of satisfaction that made their work worthwhile.
Most teachers are unlikely to categorize the sources of their satisfaction as
moral. Moral sources are any rewards from the job that cannot be explicitly
seen but contribute to living a life that these teachers consider worthwhile and
good. Moral rewards are also enjoyed when teachers believe that their work
contributes to the right treatment of their profession, their students, and
communities. When teachers use words like conscience, integrity, dignity,
guilt, shame, value, and responsibility, it is likely that a moral concern is in
play.
“Good work” operates as a moral evaluation that examines a profession’s
moral purposes and rewards. The focus of the assessment is not on the
personal characteristics of individual teachers. Instead, it is the moral
evaluation that teachers may make in reference to the work they do.
Teachers’ moral centers are articulated in the values and commitments they
bring to and attribute to the work. The evaluation is not about outsiders
assessing the content of a teacher’s moral center. Rather, the assessment
entails evaluating how well the values and commitments inherent to the work
can be enacted in the work. This is a self-assessment undertaken by the
teachers but that always references the imagined assessments of respected
colleagues. Just like the “reasonable person” is often used as a test in legal
proceedings, “admirable teachers” are visualized in assessments of good
work.
The concept of good work comes from Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and
Damon’s book of the same name. Their project examined the fields of
journalism and genetics, two professions in the midst of significant transition
and faced with major ethical dilemmas.2 Individuals engage in good work
when they believe (1) the work serves a social purpose that contributes to the
well-being of others and (2) the way the work is conducted is aligned with
that social purpose. In the fields of journalism and genetics, the inability to do
the work ethically could damage the social purpose and might contribute to
social harm.
Teaching provides many individuals an opportunity to engage in what they
consider good work. Those who enter teaching today often select the career
out of a desire to contribute something positive to the social world. Their
focus may be on individual children, particular communities, the nation, or
global welfare. For many who enter teaching with these motivations, the way
in which the work is conducted is very significant. Therefore, altering the
conditions and methods of the profession may be of great consequence for
those who consider themselves as undertaking good work.
For teachers who pursue the profession from the perspective of
undertaking good work, the rewards go far beyond the material to the moral.
This is not to say that the material rewards are insignificant. Many
individuals make a decision never to enter or to leave teaching because they
need more than the material rewards that are currently offered, despite the
appeal of doing good work through teaching.
The material rewards of the profession may become a significant aspect of
teacher dissatisfaction if teachers engaged in good work can no longer access
the moral rewards of teaching. The moral rewards of teaching are various and
not experienced equally by all practitioners. Lee’s moral center contains a
commitment to creating a school climate of cultural inclusion. Although she
could enact that commitment in her classroom, the moral rewards of fulfilling
that commitment are compromised by schoolwide practices that make her
feel complicit in creating environments that might traumatize and exclude
students. Therefore, the schoolwide practices that go against her moral center
as a teacher threaten and undermine the purpose and reward she has
previously found in her work.
Nina’s moral center, on the other hand, is guided by close observation of
children and a belief that children will achieve academically if they are
engrossed in their learning. When the curriculum was mandated, she could
not allow the students a choice of topics or to respond to the energy
throughout the day. She believed she violated her core beliefs about children
and what they deserve as well as her purpose for teaching when she adhered
to the curriculum. Following the rules led to a classroom that was joyless, for
Nina and her students. The moral rewards for Nina were evaporating. She
experienced demoralization.

Nina worked with the youngest of New York City’s children, prekindergarten
to second grade, for twenty years. She relished identifying the materials and
designing experiences that would grab students’ interests. She kept up with
research on teaching practices. As a result, she found evidence to support her
decision to give students choices about the direction of their learning for the
day. Now, she is counting down the days until retirement.
An ardent supporter of public schools, Nina believes that the children who
are educated publicly should have the same opportunities and quality of
instruction as those in private schools. The lock-step pacing and focus on
rote learning that was being mandated seemed antithetical to her. “They
wouldn’t dare educate [private school] kids the way these kids are
educated.” It is not only the methods and materials, but also the environment
that compromises her vision of good work. After attending a workshop at a
prestigious private school in the city, she thought, “Every kid deserves to be
in a beautiful school. And then I’m in this. My school. And there’s a mouse
coming out during parent-teacher conferences.”
Listening to Nina, I wondered if I’d encountered a teacher who could be
characterized as passionate about teaching and her students, but who was
rigid professionally. Was Nina a more palatable version of the teacher who
dusts off the same yellowed lesson plans year after year? She kept speaking
about how she would not follow some of the city mandates for her grade,
especially in the language arts curriculum. I realized, however, that she
described trying these interventions but then abandoned them if they “don’t
work.” I wondered if she had given the different teaching approaches enough
of a chance.
Our conversation is peppered with references to the many professional
conferences she attends and the educational research she reads. She recalls
asking her principal for permission to restructure her classroom in order to
enact the new ideas that were generated at one of the conferences. Yet she
refuses to enact the reading program mandated for her building. She has
tenure and decided to prioritize student engagement over her own
compliance. Her goal is learning, and she believes students will learn when
they are engaged.
Finally, with the rollout of the Common Core State Standards, Nina feels
as though she is being asked to move students into reading too quickly. So
much of her moral center is supported by the work of Montessori and Reggio
Emilia. Her reticence to push students to read does not seem to be rooted in
resistance to change or to the evasion of difficult work. Nina takes the long
view, and one that is rooted in research she has read. She is not focused on
the level at which children read when they leave her classroom; she wants to
help students develop into lifelong readers and people who thrive on
curiosity. She believes that the scripted curriculum she is asked to deliver will
undermine both of those goals.

Understanding why Nina was counting down the days to retirement is

incomplete if we go directly to a diagnosis of burnout. Demoralization may
be accompanied by some of the same emotions as burnout, such as
depression, discouragement, frustration, and shame. What is distinctive about
demoralization is that the previously accessible moral rewards of teaching are
now elusive. Left untreated, demoralization may lead to burnout.
Uncharacteristic of teachers who experience burnout, Nina still believed that
she had a lot to offer students and the profession. The problem was that
district mandates made it difficult, if not impossible, to do what she
understood as good work.

WHO IS ELIGIBLE FOR DEMORALIZATION?

Any teacher may face demoralization, but teacher dissatisfaction of this
variety can be more precisely identified in experienced teachers. Teachers
with tenures of five or more years have demonstrated a degree of
commitment to the profession, can articulate their vision of good teaching,
and can describe in detail the ways that they have been able to enact their
visions and values over time.
Any teacher may experience demoralization, but some are more prone to it
than others. Teachers who come to their work with significant moral purpose
or those who operate with a strong sense of professional ethics are more
likely to experience demoralization than teachers who have a more functional
approach to their work.
Teachers earlier in their careers may be testing the waters to see if the
profession aligns with their interests and skills. True in most any profession,
new teachers anticipate what the work should be like. These expectations
may relate to the so-called theory-practice divide, but also include romantic
idealizations of the role and blind spots about major components of daily
work. Focusing on more experienced educators has enabled me to distinguish
demoralization from early-career disillusionment.
Disillusionment comprises the experience of most individuals moving
from a preservice mode to active service. We all build a vision of what our
classroom will be and what our colleagues will be like during the preparatory
modes of our work, regardless of how substantial or abbreviated that
preparation may be. We necessarily develop a positive vision, even if it right-
headedly anticipates challenges. Otherwise, we would not move toward the
challenge. Disillusionment is not just a by-product of naïve fantasies that fall
away, but a necessary component of moving through experience.
Teachers who experience demoralization are able to point to a time when
they were able to enact the values that motivated and sustained their work.
There is a before and an after to demoralization. Unlike disillusionment that
may provoke a teacher to say, “I realize that I will never be able to do x . . . ,”
demoralization involves a teacher saying, “I once was able to do x as an
essential component of my work, but now I cannot.”
Outwardly, demoralization may seem remarkably similar to burnout.
Exhaustion, disappointment, and frustration may be just a few of its
manifestations. However, the source of the symptoms makes all the
difference in the diagnosis and treatment of the problem. The current
fascination with building teacher resilience is an apt response to burnout but
ineffective for addressing demoralization. Burnout is a depletion of personal
resources that makes the act of teaching intolerable or unsustainable. The
source of burnout is located in the individual psychology of the teacher who
cannot find balance, maintain sufficient boundaries, or withstand the
emotional demands of the work.
The inability to access the moral rewards of teaching may not be the result
of a lack of personal fortitude or a wavering moral sensibility. Rather, we
need to look outward to the teaching contexts that may make it difficult for
practitioners to engage in good work. To better understand what conditions
contribute to demoralization, the next chapter looks at the ways that good
work is undermined when teachers believe their work harms, rather than
helps, students. Chapter 4 examines the ways that good work is challenged
when teachers believe they degrade the profession by following the mandates
or implicit expectations of their jobs.
In contrasting demoralization with burnout, this chapter showed:
• The emotions associated with demoralization are often misunderstood as symptoms of burnout.
These can affect:
– feelings about their profession;
– consequences for their health;
– impact on their families;
– relationships with students; and
– expectations for their longevity.
• Individuals who see teaching as a way to do good work are more prone to demoralization than
those who approach the work from a more functional perspective.
• The dilemma in demoralization is not a question of what should be done; the problem is that what
should be done is not possible.
• Demoralization is a problem with the context of teaching, not the psychological well-being of the
teacher.
• Demoralization is not an inevitable by-product of teaching.
CHAPTER THREE
“They’re Suffering and They’re Struggling”
SOURCES OF DEMORALIZATION: CAUSING
HARM TO STUDENTS

Testing became increasingly high stakes for students as well as teachers in

Hilary’s southeast state. Hilary’s son attends the school where she has
worked as a media specialist for twelve years (she completed her first year of
teaching at another school). She is concerned about his level of anxiety. In a
school labeled one of the nation’s best, she didn’t see this coming. Her school
avoids the relentless test prep and drill that she knew occurred at lower
performing schools. After a bit of investigation, Hilary learned that word had
drifted down from her son’s friends’ older siblings. They told the third
graders that how they performed on the test would determine if their beloved
teachers would keep their jobs.
Hilary believes that the tests also have outsized implications for students’
futures. As early as the fifth grade, placement decisions are made based on
test scores and grades as a result of the district’s choice plan. Despite the
potential significance of the exams for students (through placements and
promotion) and teachers (through VAM [value-added measure] calculations
and merit pay), the state-mandated tests must be administered regardless of
the conditions students are in when they enter school. She illustrates with a
scenario. If a student walks into school distraught after witnessing her
parents fight that morning, Hilary believes it would be absurd for her to ask
the student to sit down and take an exam. That is precisely what the state
requires: if the child is in school, she must sit for the exam.
By following the mandates of the state, Hilary may violate her moral
center as a teacher. If Hilary administers the test under these conditions, she
may signal to the student that her problems at home are inconsequential.
Sending that message while following state mandates violates Hilary’s
commitments to care for the social-emotional, physical, and academic needs
of the child. She may feel that she is violating trust that she worked to
establish with the student. Hilary’s professional integrity is also disregarded.
She knows that the exam results may underreport the child’s level of
competence if taken under conditions of distress. The poor performance
could be a problem for the student (possibly limiting her school placement
options), the teacher (potentially contributing negatively to her VAM), and
the state (receiving data that may be faulty).
When she follows the rules, Hilary goes against what she believes is right.
She is caught between responsibility to her employer and the citizens of her
state (assuming that the policy’s makers were democratically elected), and
her professional standards that include duties to care for and act in the best
interest of children. The pressure builds as she describes the impossible
position she occupies. “It’s just so frustrating! Ahhh!” It’s one of the few
times Hilary raises her voice in the three hours I spoke with her.
Hilary describes herself as a person who has always held herself to high
ethical standards. When she worked in another field prior to entering
teaching, Hilary was dismayed by her boss’s creative interpretation of
regulations. “I’m not that person. I, I can’t break the rules or see how far I
can get away with things.” She believes that it is essential that she follow the
clear mandates and procedures set by her school, district, and state. Yet,
following the rules could make her very uneasy.
The hypothetical situation Hilary posed seems almost trivial in comparison
to the actual situation that still haunts her. This is her shame. In the library,
she proctored an exam for a small group of students who were given
extended time due to their 504 or Individualized Education Program (IEP)
plans that ensure that students receive accommodations due to disability or
other needs that require learning support. One fifth-grade student with
cerebral palsy who used a wheelchair was part of this group. Computer-
based testing had become mandatory for the state exams, but the student had
never been tested using a computer.
Before computer-based testing was implemented, the student’s teacher
would fill in the answer bubbles for him. Now, it was a physical challenge for
the student to move the mouse. Additionally, to answer problems, he had to
manipulate various objects and engage in multiple steps. Hilary is visibly
rattled as she recounts this incident. “It was a test that took all of our other
students 160 minutes over two days. [It took the student with cerebral palsy]
ten hours [to complete the exam] over two days. That just doesn’t feel right to
me. Watching him struggle with the mouse to drag the ruler tool over. It’s
very fine motor skill stuff that a kid with cerebral palsy struggles with. And
there’s not a thing we can do; there’s no alternative.”
She continues, highlighting the violation of trust she committed while
following the rules. “This is a kid I’ve known since second grade, so this is
the fourth year I know you. I have a relationship with you. It bothers me. I
would not want to see my kid in that position. I certainly don’t want to see
anybody else’s kid in that position where they’re suffering and they’re
struggling. And suffering is a really harsh word, but I don’t feel like it’s
overused in this instance.”
Students should experience productive struggle, Hilary believes. She does
not think school should be effortless or an easy experience at all times for
students or teachers, for that matter. Critics of the math section of the
Common Core claimed that early elementary school students were asked to
engage with mathematical ideas that were developmentally inappropriate.
Bottom line: it was too difficult for young kids, claimed some teachers and
parents who didn’t understand the new approach to math.
Hilary believes that young children should be exposed to foundational
concepts in math and encouraged to grapple with abstract problems, even if
they would not grasp the material fully. Going through the reflective process
of earning her National Board Teacher Certification helped Hilary see what
students could be capable of when they were appropriately challenged. She
suspected that teachers and parents were primarily reacting negatively to
change. They were expressing their own worries about moving into new
curricular and pedagogical territory.
Seeking ways to connect with innovative peers and experimenting with new
ideas have been hallmarks of Hilary’s thirteen years in teaching. If she
encounters a problem, she reaches out to her professional network and seeks
their advice. When a claim was made about the purpose of VAM, she read up
on what educational researchers have identified as statistically problematic.
After encountering polarized perspectives on state policy, she joined a group
that focused on finding common ground. Facing a change in leadership at
her school, she investigated strategies for transitioning to a teacher-led
governance model.
The testing issue feels harmful and immovable. Hilary can’t find a way to
reconcile her duty to administer exam after exam with the negative outcomes
of narrowing the curriculum, closing libraries and computer labs for weeks,
and diverting school resources that could be used to enrich students’
experiences. She is nagged by the ways in which testing dehumanizes
students and teachers by providing few ways to respond to individual needs
and particular circumstances without flouting the law. “Equal is not always
fair,” says Hilary, “And that bothers me.”
Teachers across her district decided to gather regularly to support each
other. Hilary applied to and was accepted into a national organization that
supports teacher leadership and provides training and platforms for teacher
voices. These professional learning communities and opportunities for
further development have been integral to keeping her in the classroom. The
winner of a school-level teacher of the year award and, more recently, formal
recognition from the state’s governor, Hilary was considering leaving the
profession a few years ago.
Hilary emphasizes that teachers need to be able to grow and advance in
their careers without leaving the classrooms they love. This intervention on
the relatively flat career trajectory of teaching is incredibly important.
However, I also hear the opportunities these professional communities have
provided Hilary to make sense of and respond to some of the moral concerns
she has encountered in her practice. These leadership roles have offered a
route into action that staves off the hopelessness of demoralization.

This chapter examines how experienced teachers describe the causes of

demoralization in their work in relation to students. Many teachers enter the
profession to advocate for and empower students. The moral dilemma these
teachers may encounter is not “What should I do?” but “I know what I should
do, but I am told I must do something that harms children.” In this category
of demoralization, teachers usually cite the ways that they were told to
engage in practices that they believed were developmentally inappropriate,
pedagogically ill-advised, or damaging to students’ social-emotional well-
being.
Research reveals two characterizations about teachers. The first is that
most enter teaching out of a desire to improve others’ lives or due to an
affection for children. The second is that teachers tend to be rule followers.
There are exceptions to every generalization, of course, and we know that
secondary school teachers may be more motivated by their subjects than their
students and that their personality profiles are slightly more prone to rule
breaking than elementary school teachers’. Nonetheless, the typology of
public school teachers holds: generally, they are people who are rule and law
abiding and they care about kids.
 This personality profile, while possibly serviceable for teaching in other
times, places teachers in a bind. Teachers are told that the policies and
practices are enacted for the good of children. Teachers, by and large, want to
do what is good for their students and to be in compliance with the
expectations outlined by their supervisors. However, when educators witness
the negative outcomes of following the rules for their students’ learning or
well-being, they face a dilemma. How can they fulfill both of their
obligations?
Teachers may experience cognitive dissonance when they are told that in
order to provide students with the education that they deserve, they must do
things that appear to harm the students in their classrooms. While Hilary has
not drifted into demoralization, the potential is great for teachers who feel as
though they have no voice.
Authoritarian school leaders who demand compliance without dialogue
may silence teachers’ voices. However, teachers’ voices may be muted in
other, more insidious, ways. Exhortations to “leave no child behind” or to
ensure that “every student succeeds” position the mandates that emerge from
those policies as inherently good and in the service of children and society.
Teachers’ concerns leave them open to criticisms that they are not willing to
contribute to the betterment of society, or that they are satisfied with leaving
some children behind, or not interested in helping every student succeed. The
ways policies are written may exert a powerful moral force designed to be
visionary and inspirational as well as to quell criticism. School
administrators, curriculum consultants, and legislators can draw on this
irrefutable policy language to enforce compliance through moral
manipulation. For teachers like DeeDee, a thin interpretation of professional
community may lead them to betray their expertise and moral centers.

DeeDee’s personality aligns closely with the profile of a rule-following

teacher who loves children. I considered her the most self-effacing teacher I
have ever met, especially when her extreme humility stood in stark contrast to
her credentials and awards. Although DeeDee might be an outlier, many
teachers underplay their expertise.
A teacher with thirty-five years of experience, DeeDee worked in a small,
well-supported rural elementary school in New England for her entire
career. She had won multiple state-level awards for her excellence in
teaching math to young children, and she received a teacher of the year
award from a multinational nonprofit. She also was a certified instructor for
a nationally recognized approach to math that emphasizes student discovery
through manipulatives and understanding of concepts. She continued her
education through reading practice-based research such as Jo Boaler’s work
at Stanford University and taking online courses.
A former principal, whom DeeDee respected a great deal, determined that
it was necessary for the entire school to use a single publisher’s textbooks for
K–6 math instruction. This decision came on the heels of new data collection
suggesting that students were not scoring well enough in math. Although
DeeDee doesn’t remember it this way, it seems to coincide when the federal
government offered funding for “research-based” instructional materials as
a component of No Child Left Behind.
The principal empowered the teachers to work together to select the
textbooks from a selection of three or four mathematics textbook publishers.
As someone already highly trained in mathematics instruction, DeeDee had
strong feelings about the options. Yet, she remained silent when her
colleagues selected a series that provided a step-by-step teaching manual.
She muted herself purposefully out of a desire to be a team player. DeeDee
recognized that her colleagues did not have as strong a pedagogical
background in math as she did and needed the support of the manual.
The years went on, and DeeDee attempted to teach from the textbook to be
a team player. All along, she felt sick inside. She knew that she was not
teaching to the best of her ability. “At one point, through tears,” she
explains, “I went to the principal and explained, ‘I can’t do this.’ Anybody
can come in and turn the page. And he quietly came to me at one point and
said, you don’t have to use the book, but don’t tell anybody. And I felt like
that was not fair. I have to do underhanded things because you don’t trust
[my colleagues] as much as you trust me? And you really don’t trust me any
more than anybody else, but I’m making waves!”
DeeDee was mortified that the principal’s demand for uniformity involved
a request for her to be duplicitous with her colleagues. Yet her real anguish
could be attributed to how her lackluster math instruction affected her
students. She recalls, “The word fidelity—that was the big f-word in my
mind! You know I hated to go to meetings where they said were going to ‘use
this with fidelity.’ Come on! Can we watch kids with fidelity instead? Can we
watch and see what they need and [help them to] grow from there?”
The effects of teaching the textbook with fidelity demoralized DeeDee.
Gone were the days when her students named math as their favorite subject.
She felt dead in her teaching, and she worried that by teaching with the
textbook, she lost the ability to help students fall in love with math and
explore its concepts more deeply. “I left my soul out of the picture for a few
years. That’s an easy way to say it. My passion was gone. My teaching soul
was gone. It was almost like that drugged feeling where you just do what they
tell you to do. And you don’t have any fight left in you.” She planned on just
following the rules and distancing herself from the work she was doing. It
hurt less that way. Retirement wasn’t too far off.

DeeDee’s demoralization could easily be the final, and tragic, stage in a life-
long teacher’s career. Fortunately, for DeeDee and her students, she offers us
an example of a veteran teacher whose work can be re-moralized, as we will
see in chapter 6.
Teachers like DeeDee encounter a terrible dilemma: as a dedicated rule
follower, she is trapped because she knows that the rules that she is following
are not serving students well. Furthermore, the repetitive language of fidelity
made her feel as though she had been lobotomized as a teacher and that it was
her students who suffered the most. The combination caused her to lose
spirit, hope, and pleasure in her job. She experienced an inability to access
the moral rewards of her practice. Only by generating a thicker understanding
of professional community did she find a way out of the bind she experienced
with fidelity to the textbook.
Being a team player for DeeDee initially meant following the rules set by
her administration. It also entailed submerging her professional expertise
when faced with her colleagues’ discomfort with teaching math. However,
when empowered by a principal who placed trust in teachers and a researcher
doing subject-specific observations, DeeDee imagined a new role for herself
among her fellow teachers. Colleagues had remarked on her dissatisfaction
and asked, “Does it really matter at this point, DeeDee?” While some
teachers with thirty-five years of experience might be willing to bide their
time, DeeDee thought, “Yeah, it does. I didn’t know it did until they asked
that question.” DeeDee realized that it mattered: she wanted to conclude the
final years of her career teaching in a way that served students well and that
honored her expertise. She thought, “I’m supposed to be part of a team, but I
[began to wonder]: Can you be part of a team in a different way? Can you
have yourself back? Can you have your soul back?”
 DeeDee moved from a place where she had ceded her professional
responsibility to a new orientation where she could embody and enact her
professional responsibility. Even though DeeDee would likely recoil from
this description, she became a teacher leader that day. She was able to
articulate and stand by her moral center as a teacher and to help her
colleagues see why that mattered. “I started making plans in my mind that I
can be me again. For the little bit of time I have left because I know it’s not
that long. I’m going to be sixty this year. I’m not the little person that I used
to be. I’m still crawling around on the floor, but it’s not easy. It’s a little hard
to get up!”

Unlike DeeDee, Gavin found a way to articulate his moral center early in his
career. Five years into teaching, he started an online movement that called
for teachers to articulate their core beliefs about teaching in the face of an
onslaught of reforms that seemed insensitive to children and their needs.
Although Gavin taught in a large metropolis known for advocating
standardized approaches to reform, he was able to make incremental
changes that ultimately proved transformational for the well-being of his
students.
Gavin’s impulse to engage in social justice emerged while in college, but
his professional moral center was shaped by a teacher education program
that articulated a clear set of values. He sought out a graduate program with
a clearly articulated philosophy statement. One of the most significant of his
values is that children receiving special education services should not be
segregated from other students. His moral concerns were activated when he
was offered a position at the school where he continues to teach. Although he
thought he was interviewing for a mixed-mainstream classroom, he realized
that he was being considered for a self-contained special education
classroom when the secretary told him how many students were in the class.
Even though he was a junior member of the faculty, Gavin attempted to
intervene on school practices that he believed were harmful to children. Due
to the low skills of many students receiving special education services in his
class, Gavin was placed on a planning team that was two grades below the
age of some of his students. He advocated that he plan with the grade-level
team appropriate to the age of his students.
Soon, Gavin began collaborating with a member of the grade-level team to
combine classes and trade off teaching mixed-mainstream and special
education sections. Eventually, they officially team-taught a single mixed-age
class.
“All students should be together with all students. It’s all one group of
human beings,” explains Gavin. “From the kids’ point of view, I absolutely
saw the isolation that they were experiencing. I feel that the social isolation
was complete. They were understanding that they were being seen as
different.” Gavin recalls a situation when his special education students from
the self-contained classroom had been wrestling with each other on the
playground. Gavin tells me that “Keshawn was just really, really visibly
upset. He told me, ‘Kids are looking at us like there’s something wrong in
our faces.’ He was articulating that you’re different or you’re doing
something else so wrong that he was actually perceiving that there must be
something wrong with his face.”
Knowing the overrepresentation of students of color, especially black boys,
in special education, Gavin took prior assessments of students’ capabilities
as a snapshot that required more evidence. He believed that there was a good
chance that his students could do more than what was revealed in a special
education file.
Gavin returned to a principle that many special educators may know:
operate with the least dangerous assumption. This principle asks more of
teachers than to identify the least restrictive environment as federal law
requires. It demands that teachers engage in imaginative displacement and
consider what the effect of an assumption, and the actions and decisions that
may follow, may have for a student today and into the future. Gavin was
clear that he would rather be wrong erring on the side of inclusion than
living with the potential damage that could result from the social isolation
these older elementary school students experienced.
Working from the principle of the least dangerous assumption enabled
Gavin to meet the needs of individual students as well. A girl in his class with
selective mutism was being evaluated for special education services. Worried
that others on the child study team might assume that she had low cognitive
capabilities, Gavin sought ways to enable Nilda to demonstrate her
understanding. Although she could, and would, read aloud, she could not
demonstrate an ability to draw on the text to support her answer.
Gavin noticed that Nilda would become animated if working with a small
group. He had a hunch that he could gather evidence of her ability to make
sense of text if he were not present as an evaluator. “So I said [to Nilda’s
group], ‘Go out into the hallway and plan out your whole project.’ They got
started and I said, ‘And I’m just going to put a camera here, because I’m
doing guided reading [with another group] and you can do your independent
work.’ Nilda spoke the entire time. She showed the attitude of the character
that demonstrated that she actually understood the deeper aspects of the
book. She added all of this dialogue that wasn’t just pulled from the text, but
it included her interpretation.”
This fierce commitment to finding ways to demonstrate what students know
and to fostering student well-being came to a head with federal- and state-
mandated testing. For the first few years of his work, Gavin administered
alternative testing that included portfolios and performance tasks. Then,
working in a mixed-mainstream and special education class, he had to
administer tests associated with the Common Core State Standards.
Kids from his class sat through [the tests] saying, “I feel like a dummy. I
feel like a stupid dummyhead.” Some broke down, put their heads on the
desks, and sobbed. Gavin felt wounded because he was contributing to
students’ distress. He explains, “I had built a relationship with the kids that I
would always give them work that I felt was within their capabilities. In other
words, at a level that they could access. I felt like I was betraying them. That
I was saying that [giving a test that was several grade levels above what they
could currently do] was okay . . . As a person that works in an institution, or
a school, I have to feel confident that it’s in some way rooted in an ethic that
I can stand behind and that I can feel that I can do the work that I’m
comfortable with.” Ultimately, Gavin took a stand with other teachers in his
school and refused to administer the state examinations.

REBELS, RULE CHANGERS, RULE FOLLOWERS, AND

RECLUSES: PART I
Teachers who have moral concerns about their work may deal with these
problems in a multitude of ways. I have written about teachers who quit their
jobs as conscientious objectors, but not all teachers have the financial or
personal means to take a stand in that way.1 Likewise, not all teachers’ moral
concerns necessarily rise to the level of resignation. While published
statements—“quit lit”—and public stands make news and may go viral on
social media, teachers find various ways to cope with moral concerns about
their work. Some will make a full-frontal attack that, while not public, may
entail significant risks. These rebels may risk their jobs or the goodwill of
their school leaders. Rule changers make efforts to alter the policies or
practices with which they disagree. Rule followers enact and enforce
mandates despite their deep misgivings. Recluses may shut the door and do
what they think is right.
Were they all working in the same school, Hilary, DeeDee, and Gavin
might not be teachers who would gravitate toward each other in the teachers’
lounge. They might find themselves at odds during discussions about new
pedagogical policies during a professional development day. They might
even avoid working with each other if required to participate in a mandated
and preassigned professional learning community. Nonetheless, they share in
common a concern that by fulfilling the expectations of their work, they are
harming children.
Hilary’s criticism of high-stakes testing reflects her concern for the social-
emotional welfare of her students. She witnessed students, her own high-
achieving son included, becoming increasingly anxious over their
performance on the state tests and how their performance would impact their
teachers. Hilary was troubled by her role in upholding policies that subjected
students, like the young man with cerebral palsy, to testing conditions that
seemed dehumanizing. Accommodations that enabled him to take more time
did little to alter a situation presenting physical challenges that tested his
motor skills, stamina, and determination more than his subject matter
knowledge.
Deeply engaged in educational policy and comfortable with the role of a
public figure, Hilary is a rule changer. She writes blogs that have been picked
up and republished by national outlets, she seeks out opportunities to
collaborate with other stakeholders to revise state laws, and she is developing
a plan to start a teacher-led school. In the meantime, she is also a rule
follower. She reveres authority and wants to stay on solid, rule-following
ground so she can remain credible and beyond reproach while advocating for
change.
DeeDee’s concern about the mandated use of textbooks could be read by
some as a resistance to adopt new curriculum. However, because she is an
accomplished and recognized innovator in math teaching who continually
seeks out new opportunities to learn, this characterization does not seem apt.
Instead, I interpret her criticism of the textbook as reflecting an awareness of
the pedagogical and curricular methods that serve students best. This concern
for her students becomes clear when she comments that her students once
named math as their favorite subject, but few did when she toed the line with
her colleagues. DeeDee cares about the intellectual engagement and
achievement of her students and believes that she was committing a form of
malpractice by going through the motions of the textbook.
Also a rule follower, DeeDee persisted in teaching from a textbook that she
believed shortchanged students. She carved out time in her schedule to offer
students an inquiry approach to math. She tempered her distress about using
the textbook by creating another time of the day to teach math as she believed
it should be experienced. Under the cover provided by her identity as a rule
follower, DeeDee created freedom as a recluse.
Acting in the role of rebel entailed that Gavin forge alliances in his school.
These alliances enabled him to make changes at his own school while taking
a public stand in response to city, state, and federal policies. Collaborating
with other teachers enabled Gavin to be a rule changer when it came to
desegregating his special education class. Likewise, his very public defiance
of high-stakes testing, alongside the same stance of his coworkers, eased the
way for others in the city to take on the role of rebel.
Whether recluses, rule followers, rule changers, or rebels, these teachers
are disturbed by how their work, intended to be good work, negatively
impacts students. They share the common moral concern that what they are
expected to do as part of their professional duties conflicts with the
professional commitments that motivate them as educators. They feel as
though their professional moral centers are compromised and need to be
righted. When teachers cannot resolve moral dilemmas posed by their work,
demoralization is likely.

NAMED AS AGENTS OF HARM

This chapter begins with the premise that most teachers enter the profession
because they want to contribute positively to the lives of children. The
teachers described earlier in this chapter were troubled, and may have
experienced demoralization, when they believed that fulfilling their
professional duties caused harm to students.
Another key source of demoralization occurs when teachers are accused of
harming students. With over twenty-three years in the same urban district,
Carla’s days still involved clocking long hours and weekends at the school.
For over fifteen years, Monica had worked in the same suburban middle
school in a nationally recognized district where she lived with her spouse and
school-aged children who attended public schools. Carla and Monica each
had experiences of being accused of harming students that upended their
moral centers. Teachers with long records of innovation and dedication, they
were alarmed and disheartened that their professional reputations were
disregarded when faced with allegations of misconduct.
The experience of being accused of harming students in their care was
devastating. Carla and Monica’s recollections of these events take place
against the backdrop of very difficult years with challenging groups of
students. Each felt unsupported and alone in the months prior to and during
the allegations. In their accounts, the isolation they experienced throughout
the year was amplified and became intolerable when they were singled out
for abusing students.

Faith offers direction and purpose in Carla’s work. She has spent her entire
twenty-three-year career working in a two-mile area of a Midwestern central
city that has become increasingly racked by poverty and hypersegregation
after busing was abandoned in the 1990s. Although she did not always
envision going into teaching, she took on the work as her mission. “I knew
that my mission wasn’t going to be easy, and I knew that, and at times I
would, I would feel very frustrated or feel like I had no control, but
ultimately, I’m being called to do something. That’s pretty much the way I
looked at my whole career, but every missionary gets a furlough.” Carla’s
professional moral center is informed by her religious commitments, but she
did not describe her students as individuals needing to be saved by a teacher
or religion. It is Carla’s faith practice that keeps her centered and present in
the work.
Carla describes herself as “the sort of teacher that will jump into any job
that they need done.” When a budget crisis left her school with no teachers to
offer specials, she organized her grade-level team and developed a rotation
schedule that would allow all students to have music, movement, and art
every week. She’ll step in to conduct choirs for special events and give
presentations to the entire staff when new initiatives are rolled out.
In the year before we met, Carla felt totally depleted. She attempted to
transfer to the other side of town where there was less segregation and
poverty. In seeking an elementary teaching assignment in a different part of
the city that would be less demanding, she did so as much for herself as for
her students. She knew that she was having trouble connecting with them and
that they deserved more than she was able to offer at that time.
She warned me that she might cry when we start thinking about those last
years, and she does. Although she had always been strong in the area of
classroom management, she was overwhelmed by the needs and behaviors of
the students in her new class. In her state, teachers may be excessed, or laid
off from the school, after the official student count. The principal and her
colleagues were confident that Carla would succeed in taking over a fifth-
grade class whose teacher was excessed. “They were all very encouraging.
‘Carla, you’ve handled this before. We know you’d be really good in fifth
grade. You’re so strong.’ I had a hard time saying no.”
In assuming responsibility for the fifth grade mid-year, Carla encountered
a class with no norms or community established. She persevered. Even
though students would still occasionally tell her to “f-off” and “rip each
other’s hair,” she could bring their behavior up to expectations so they could
begin attending schoolwide assemblies. “That was the first time I felt I had
no control over kids; that I couldn’t teach.” Even though she asked to not be
placed in fifth grade the following year, she was assigned a fifth-grade class.
She decided to take her chances and transfer voluntarily to another school.
Again, Carla took over a class after the start of the school year. This time,
the school had too many students, and teachers were removing students off
their rosters to develop a new first-grade class. Without bitterness, she
explains, “As much as you don’t try to dump on the new teacher coming in,
my class was loaded. I had kids stabbing each other with pencils. I had kids
running out of the room, and they really didn’t have a classroom for me.
They put me in a long rectangular computer room. I had two doorways. I had
windows all around me. I felt like I was in a fishbowl.”
In a new school, with a new principal, with a new class that she took over
later in the year, it was the first time in Carla’s career that she was given a
written warning about her attitude. “I didn’t disagree with the letter. Hang
on,” Carla wipes her tears away and gathers herself. “It was more the
disappointment in myself for having become a teacher I didn’t like.”
A few years later, teaching third grade in the same school, Carla was
overwhelmed by the behavior challenges in her class. She felt unsupported
and undermined by the school’s disciplinary procedures. She had initiated a
restorative justice process with the class in which they would meet weekly
with a local restorative justice provider and school social workers. Due to
the students’ behavior, the community partner and social workers agreed that
the weekly meetings should be abandoned.
Against this backdrop, Carla describes a “devastating” meeting with her
principal. She was summoned to the principal’s office while her students
were in gym. At this meeting, the principal confronted Carla with the
comment, “Maybe this school isn’t for you.” Carla cried in shock, anger, and
frustration as a result of the accusation that challenged her dedication and
effort. Likewise, she was absolutely flummoxed that the principal would drop
this on her in the middle of the school day, minutes before she had to pick up
her students from gym.
In her final evaluation for the year, Carla was cited for speaking
disrespectfully to the students. Although she had an opportunity to write a
rebuttal, she opted to let the evaluation stand. “I just accepted it the way it
was because, in my mind, I was not being the respectful person that I know I
can be, but at the time, I was just getting through as best as I could.”

Carla is absolutely demoralized at this point in her career. She told me that
she is counting down the days until her retirement, but that isn’t for another
seven or eight years. She is worried that her body can’t handle the work
anymore. A few years ago, she hurt her shoulder breaking up a fight among
her elementary school students. She doesn’t physically intervene in fights
anymore. She muses, “If I were looking at going into a career right now,
would I choose teaching with all I know? I wouldn’t.”
Although the year-end evaluation and the comments from her principal
sting, the most hurtful assessment is made when she compares her practice
now to the teacher she has been and knows she can be. Carla wants to do
right by students. When she describes students’ out-of-bounds behavior, she
attributes their actions to unmet needs as well as policies and practices that
cluster students who struggle. Many of these contextual factors are outside of
Carla’s locus of control. Nevertheless, she is devastated when she looks at
herself from the perspective of her professional moral center. In chapter 8, I
will describe the transformation that leads Carla back to being the kind of
teacher she admires and a healthier person in love with life. Monica, a middle
school teacher in an elite suburb of a major city in the Mid-Atlantic, was
likewise struggling with student behavior. She was a member of a
thematically focused program that faced increasing scrutiny. After her first
few years working in her own subject area, she was energized by the cross-
disciplinary focus and ability to team with another teacher. During the
program’s inception, the long-term principal gave Monica and her partner
the freedom to design, recruit, and enroll students in the program. Together,
they were reflective and always looking to modify or improve on their
offerings.
When she thinks about why she teaches, Monica describes her purposes in
moral terms. Her moral center honors the particularity of individuals who
make up communities. “Ideally, [good teaching is] finding what’s good in
every student and, I don’t know if I live up to this, helping draw that out and
helping them see that. Helping students recognize their own interests and
follow those. Helping them see the value, to value, the diversity that is right
here. And to learn how to be part of a community.” Monica is particularly
cognizant of the function of ideals in teaching. She recognizes that although
she may not meet her ideal, the ideal is necessary to direct her purpose.
It is easy for Monica to provide a list of the district’s privileges, for
students and for teachers. The community supports public education and
shows that support through financial and personal investments. Families are
engaged in their children’s school lives and can be present for special events
as well as individual conferences. Many teachers, like Monica, hold
advanced degrees, although Monica is unique because she earned her PhD
at an Ivy League institution prior to determining that secondary school
teaching was how she wanted to spend her career. In this community,
teachers are very well compensated and usually given a lot of autonomy
when it comes to curriculum and pedagogy.
However, the district has also been challenged to ensure equity for all
students, having been scrutinized as a result of a lawsuit in which families of
lower-income black students alleged discrimination in accessing all
educational programs. District personnel were on tenterhooks and had
grown vigilant as a result of the case. Where the program teachers once were
able to select interested students, that discretion was removed in the interest
of racial and socioeconomic equity. Monica worried that not being able to be
selective in enrollment could lead to students who were less invested in the
program. Serving previously disenfranchised students best, she believes,
entails creating engaging curriculum where their voices matter.
Over the years, Monica had witnessed long-term leadership shift, and she
perceived that the district’s current priorities were short-sighted and
misapplied. Monica did not respect her new principal. She described him as
a “weak leader” who had little classroom experience. Compared to her first
principal who had been a longtime teacher and who would “say ‘yes’ or ‘no’
and why,” Monica perceived this new principal as easily cowed and lacking
an intellectual backbone. She had asked him several times to intervene on a
“toxic combination” of students in her class that constantly disrupted
lessons, but he offered little by way of advice or support.
One member of the toxic duo was Ahmad, an African American boy. Given
that the chemistry of the class was challenging that year, Monica solicited
letters of feedback from her students to suggest ways they could function
better as a learning community. Ahmad wrote that the special program
“sucked” and that he wanted out. Monica conveyed that information to the
principal who said that Ahmad had to stay despite his desire to exit.
As Monica begins to recount the accusations she faced in her thirteenth
year teaching, she tells me that “it was so disturbing that it sent me into an
anxiety tailspin that had me going to the psychiatrist and going to therapy.”
Two years ago, during the principal’s first year in the school and in the role,
he called Monica into his office on Monday morning where she found the two
assistant principals as well. She had no idea why she was there. When the
principal asked if she would like a union representative present, Monica
knew that whatever was going to be discussed would be serious.
The union representative arrived, who happened to be Monica’s partner in
the special program, and whispered, “Holy shit!” The principal thumbed
through his notebook and began asking Monica questions. Soon the reason
for the meeting became apparent. Monica recalls, “He was asking me if I had
physically hurt children!” Apparently, Ahmad’s parents had come into
school and reported that Monica had put her hands on their child and hurt
him. The principal turned to Monica and asked, “Did you?”
Her mind raced through countless, and honestly, difficult encounters with
Ahmad. The principal became more specific, “Did you put your hand on his
chin and turn his head, like this, and hurt his neck?” Monica thought, “Oh
my God! There was a time in class where I was so frustrated that he was
refusing to pay attention and he was such a distraction to everyone else. I put
my hand on his chin and I moved his head to be facing in the right direction.”
The principal then asked Monica if she had grabbed the arm of another
student (the other member of the toxic duo) while on a field trip. She recalled
aloud that she had given his arm a light squeeze because he was distracting
others, and she was trying to wordlessly indicate that he should move to
another location. Finally, he asked if Monica had broken up a fight, which
she had not. Yet, she wondered, why wouldn’t I do that?
“I was sitting in this room with three principals and crying. They told me
that they didn’t want to have this conversation on a Friday and ruin my
weekend.” After the questioning, Monica asked what the next steps would be
to no response. She now had to face her class, not knowing if she would be
disciplined, fired, or publicly humiliated. Moments thereafter, the three
principals entered Monica’s classroom. The principal pulled up a chair
alongside Monica, clearly taking a new tack in this encounter, and assured
her that no disciplinary action would be taken. Monica asked what part race
played in this situation, since she is a white woman and the student, a black
boy. The principal responded that race “never occurred to him.” Later in the
day, the principal sought her out and inquired how she was doing.

Monica describes this scenario as a traumatic event in her professional life.

At least three different concerns may contribute to the trauma. The first is
being profoundly isolated and misrecognized as a teacher. She wonders: How
could my principal think that I would hurt kids? Why are the principals
asking me about student discipline now when I’ve been requesting assistance
all year? Why is it only at the point where grave lapses in professional
conduct were suspected that she was engaged in any substantive conversation
about the difficulties she was experiencing in her classroom?
With a thirteen-year career hanging in the balance, Monica’s lack of
confidence in her school leader heightened her anxiety. The stakes were high
but were treated flippantly. She took the accusations seriously and wondered
about the impact of the district’s racial history as well as interpersonal race
dynamics. This serious—and pertinent—inquiry was dismissed and rendered
irrelevant.
Finally, the trauma stems from the apparent lack of regard for the moral
and professional regard for teaching. A third teacher, Edwin, was accused of
inappropriate behavior. However, he knew that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless, he was disturbed by how unprofessionally his principal handled
a situation that could be a career-ending event.

Like Monica and Carla, Edwin was accused of harming students. A student
who had already been reprimanded for spraying a teacher with a fire
extinguisher had his phone out in class. Edwin walked toward the student’s
desk, so as not to have to yell across the room, and asked him to put away his
phone. The student blurted, “Get your dick off me!” Before the end of the
day, the principal was screaming at Edwin, in front of his class, demanding
to know if he had made a “lewd gesture” toward a student. It was only when
a student later approached the principal and told her that Edwin was being
polite by walking toward the accusing student and did nothing wrong that he
was exonerated. However, forget about an apology for berating him in front
of his class.

Both Monica and Carla were called into their principals’ offices to face
serious accusations and criticisms about the harm that they allegedly inflicted
on students. Their principals thought nothing of sending them back to face
their students. Edwin was not given the courtesy of a private conversation.
Each of the teachers recognized that any accusation made by a student needs
to be taken seriously, but they were aghast that decades-long careers
generated no sense of respect. All three wondered if they are romantic, old-
fashioned, or just anachronistic to still hold their profession and its attendant
responsibilities in such high regard.
In the next chapter, I examine the experiences of teachers who have moral
concerns stemming from their participation in the degradation of teaching.
They believe that practitioners have a responsibility to maintain the dignity,
integrity, and worth of the profession. Their shame emerges when they
realize that they have failed to uphold their vision of what teaching should be.
Some situations that teachers describe as demoralizing in terms of harm to
students include:
• failing to meet students’ learning needs due to a scripted curriculum or mandated textbook
• proctoring a student with cerebral palsy on a computer-based high-stakes assessment that is
excruciatingly slow to complete
• following school practices that increasingly focus on academic achievement, even though students
arrive at school with profound emotional needs
• witnessing students feel worthless as schools are ranked and closed
• requiring professional development that makes teachers chronically absent
• standing by as a principal intimidates students regarding their test performance
• witnessing the most vulnerable students receive the fewest resources and most pressure
CHAPTER FOUR
“I’m Admitting to Being Disingenuous in My Craft”
SOURCES OF DEMORALIZATION: DEGRADING
THE PROFESSION

Gina walks with a cane and settles herself gingerly into an antigravity chair.
Her two young children run around her, animated by the presence of my
daughter. I worry that Gina will be jostled as the three begin a game of
chase. “This,” she grimaces, “is what being Teacher of the Year gets you.”
Gina is at the end of a year of disability leave and eyes returning to her
classroom with a mixture of sadness and trepidation.
Months ago, Gina felt like a fraud as she faced her colleagues from the
podium where she received her district’s teacher of the year award. She had
become ashamed of her work in the last several of her seventeen years
teaching because of the dumbing down of teaching, the unrelenting negative
press about her beloved profession, and the inequitable practices of her
district. As she spoke to the eight-hundred-plus teachers, administrators, and
staff members who filled the auditorium, she hoped to elevate the profession
and help her colleagues feel recognized for the fine work they do each day.
As someone who finds pleasure in thinking through the challenges of
teaching and learning, Gina loved that the profession called for ongoing
reflection that could lead to renewed action. Gina typically enjoyed being
observed because it could lead to professional conversations and growth. She
recalls, “It always felt great to have another pair of eyes. I always had a
great conversation afterward.” She was energized by the prospects of the
state’s new peer-review system that had been developed in collaboration with
her union. Yet, Gina was concerned with the terms that would be used to rate
teachers: highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective. “In a learning
environment,” Gina argues, “all of us should be ‘developing.’”
The teaching standards referenced in the peer reviews were
noncontroversial, from Gina’s perspective. The problem rested in the use of
standards as a means to deliver an evaluation. She believes that the
standards and the assessment process should be a starting point for serious
professional conversations. She views the standards as opportunities to
stimulate “some really meaty conversations about how we teach. What does
student engagement look like? What does it really mean to have cognitive
engagement? Does it look like them really focused? And what does focused
mean?”
However, the attention to ratings suggested an evaluation system that
could make individual teachers’ ratings public to the school and the
community. This had happened in places like Los Angeles. Also, tying the
ratings to merit pay subverted an opportunity for peer-driven professional
learning. Gina explains, “The teachers I know who I most respect and
connect with are learners. None of this is about learning. By attaching this
process to fear, this [evaluation method] took away all potential for
learning.”
Instead of being engaged in meaningful conversations about teaching and
learning, Gina found herself isolated in front of a computer. “I spent so much
time proving that I was teaching, it left no room for teaching.” She describes
the paperwork associated with the assessment process as “excruciating and
obscene.” She says she stopped counting when she had reached fourteen
hours developing materials in preparation for her observation. Gina reflects
on her experience and those of the teachers she respects. Education reforms
aimed at teacher accountability, she believes, didn’t affect the scofflaws.
“The teachers who don’t care weren’t made to care because of [these
accountability efforts]. They just bullshit differently now. The people who
were really damaged were the people who were already invested and caring
and dedicated.” In the midst of school budget cuts, Gina describes a
systematic chipping away of morale and support because her colleagues left
the school, district, and profession.
Articulating student learning objectives (or outcomes, in some states)
(SLOs) proved to be one of the most time-consuming aspects of the
assessment process. Gina scoured student records trying to anticipate the
projected learning outcomes she could expect for students whom she had yet
to meet. “I had to come home and use these tests where all of [the students]
failed and figure out how to predict how many would pass in June. My
husband said, ‘You’re crying again.’ I care about teaching, and I felt like this
was part of teaching. And I was literally crying every night for a month, a full
month. As this district and the school and the state figured out what these
things were meaning, they kept changing it. They kept saying, ‘Oh, no, it
actually means this . . .’ And then it turned out to be a total BS phrase that we
were all supposed to copy from each other that basically said 60 percent of
my kids will get a 65 or above . . .”
Gina admits that she battles a perfectionist tendency, but she also believes
the stakes were higher due to her public recognition. As her district’s teacher
of the year the same year that the new ratings were established, she
understood that she would be under special scrutiny. She not only believed
her work needed to be of the highest quality but also felt that her teaching
now took place in a fishbowl. Now, everyone could review her ability to meet
her stated student learning objectives and determine if she truly deserved the
honor of teacher of the year.
Articulating the SLOs, preparing for her evaluations, and maintaining her
high standards for her classroom teaching left Gina with no time to properly
care for herself. Gina devoted whatever additional time she could to family.
As a result, she did not exercise regularly. For many, this situation might
simply lead to putting on a few pounds or not having a productive outlet for
stress. For Gina, this meant that a chronic tissue disease resurfaced that left
her in excruciating pain.
The avalanche of new paperwork was borne out of her state’s adoption of
the Common Core State Standards as well as a new assessment system.
Documentation associated with professional assessments intensified without
seeming to offer commensurate professional learning. More than a mere
distraction, Gina felt that the so-called professional development associated
with these efforts compromised the quality of her teaching. She was left with
little energy to dedicate to what she loved most—engaging students with
literature and helping them express themselves through writing. She was left
demoralized and disabled by the effort she felt was required to be evaluated
as “highly effective” and live up to her teacher of the year status.
“I wish [former US Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan would come to
my living room,” sighs Gina. “I don’t think I wasn’t who they wanted me to
be. I think I was the teacher they would’ve wanted, you know? And yet, they
broke me.”

I previously examined teachers’ experiences with demoralization that arose

from their sense of complicity in harming students. These were “norms of
client commitment” (What do students, their caregivers, and the school
community deserve?). Gina, and others included in this chapter, also
experienced these types of concerns. Gina’s description of professional
learning highlights the importance of the intellectual work for her
professional moral center. Her concern for student learning and well-being
fuel her intellectual interests about teaching. Gina reveals that she was
thinking of leaving public school teaching. “I cannot be a part of a system
that is damaging children anymore.”
However, Gina also expresses serious concerns about the damage she is
doing the teaching profession. For many teachers, dissatisfaction rooted in
the condition and status of the profession is inseparable from concerns about
students. This chapter highlights the demoralization that occurs when
teachers believe that they are harming the profession that they were once
proud to be a part of. These are what Lortie calls “norms of craft” (What does
good teaching entail? What do my colleagues and I deserve as
professionals?).1 Most teachers experiencing demoralization feel a
combination of concern for their students and their profession. Nevertheless,
distinguishing these student- and professional-based facets of demoralization
can result in developing distinctive and multiple approaches to re-moralizing
teaching.
In a social and political climate that often interprets teachers’ concerns as
grievances and gripes, it is necessary to reframe the moral dimensions of
teachers’ work in terms of caring for the integrity of a profession, not simply
caring for students.2 Caring for the integrity of a profession entails protecting
it from degradation and maintaining its boundaries that enable the profession
to be recognizable as teaching. There is a subtle difference in these types of
concerns. Caring for students involves asking general and specific questions
such as “How does x affect all students? How does x affect Miriam, my
student in third period? How does x affect Miriam, my student in third period,
today?” The thorniest ethical questions emerge from context-rich situations.3
The fact that the answers to each of these questions may be different is not
the result of relativism, but a deep awareness of how context matters. What
Miriam needs is not always identical with claims we would make about “all
students.” What Miriam needs on Monday is not necessarily what Miriam
needs on Thursday.
Caring for the integrity of the profession shifts the focus to teaching. For
instance, “What does it mean to engage in good teaching? What are the
responsibilities of teaching? What does it mean to engage in good teaching
with Miriam? What does it mean to engage in good teaching with Miriam,
my student in third period, today?” While the answers to these questions may
not remain constant, we can be sure that teachers are able to articulate when
they have failed to uphold good teaching and when they have entered
territory that they would describe as something other than teaching entirely.

CARING FOR THE INTEGRITY OF TEACHING

Caring for the integrity of teaching is a form of professional ethics. It entails
a different set of questions that invite teachers to reflect on their work as
professionals. These questions include, “Would other teachers I respect
consider my actions good teaching? Am I engaging in conduct that honors
the ideals and purposes of the profession? If others emulated my behavior,
would the profession benefit?”
Many teachers may think of professional ethics as making the right
decision when faced with a time-sensitive moral dilemma that calls for a
response to determine the proper course of action. For instance, should Gavin
have intervened during a state-mandated test when students began crying and
calling themselves “dummyheads”? Ethical decision making may occur with
colleagues: should DeeDee have spoken up and told her colleagues that she
believed they were selecting the lesser of the math textbooks?
Most instances of moral decision making are more quotidian. Some are
also time sensitive and require an immediate response: Should I let Amir go
to the bathroom? Do I need to call on a girl after hearing three boys’ voices in
a row? Teachers make these decisions multiple times every day of their work.
Yet, they are moral because they convey messages about value. They also
require a teacher’s judgment. There is no rule to follow that will ensure the
right answer. Sometimes, respecting Amir will be to let him know with a
quick signal that he should use the bathroom. Sometimes, it is reminding
Amir privately that he asks to use the bathroom each time he becomes
frustrated. In this case, respect might mean helping Amir develop new tools
to manage his frustration.
Other aspects of moral decision making are also built into the scope of
many teachers’ work but may allow for more planning and reflection. When
designing lessons, teachers convey values about the kind of learning, the
scope of topics, and the forms of participation they deem worthwhile. When
establishing classroom norms, teachers send students messages about the
ownership of the space they inhabit, the purposes of their time together, and
the ways in which they should relate to each other.
 Caring for the integrity of the profession involves embodying the ideals
and purposes of the profession. This broadest form of professional ethics
surfaces when teachers feel that they are contributing to a worthwhile form of
good work. While it will take into account moral decision making, this form
of professional ethics refers to teachers’ holistic appraisals of their work. Do
the teachers view their own embodiment of the profession as worthy of the
profession?
Demoralization occurs when teachers evaluate their practice holistically
and find that they are consistently moving away from the ideals and
principles that they associate with the work. In these cases, they may believe
that they are “giving teaching a bad name.” These practitioners may believe
that they are nominally teachers due to their employment and assigned role in
a school. However, they would not call what they are doing teaching, in the
sense of upholding the ideals of what it means to be an educator.
Gina’s questions about what it takes to be recognized as exemplary
highlight her holistic assessment of the state of the profession and her
contributions to its degradation. As a well-prepared, driven, experienced, and
passionate teacher, she was able to meet the metrics that garnered
professional accolades. However, she recognized that the cost was not only
her health. She believed she compromised the teaching profession by
promoting an image of success that was unattainable, undesirable, and
hollow.
For several consecutive years, Gina spent increasing amounts of time on
initiatives promoted as professional learning, but that she found subverted the
principle of ongoing professional growth and reflection. Furthermore, Gina
realized that she contributed to unhealthy popular depictions of the teaching
profession. She criticized the unrealistic demands on teachers and her own
self-sacrifice to demonstrate excellence and commitment. Individuals in any
profession may go to extraordinary lengths in the name of their work.
However, Gina regretted, personally and professionally, that she propagated
the teacher-as-martyr image. She posed these questions ironically: “Is this
what it looks like to be teacher of the year?” and “Is this what it takes to be
‘highly effective’?”

RECEIVING THE PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT THAT

STINGS
This chapter begins with Gina’s demoralization in the face of degrading the
profession because it might seem, to many, that she has done nothing wrong.
Her experience highlights the overall assessment that takes place when
teachers believe that they are giving the profession a bad name without
engaging in behavior that involves students directly or that breaks specific
rules or standards for teacher conduct. Nonetheless, Gina felt as though she
had undermined the integrity of teaching as a profession by fulfilling all the
mandates for teachers in her state, district, and building.
It is difficult to maintain a commitment to work that is historically
underpaid as well as emotionally and intellectually demanding when
outsiders seem to undervalue or denigrate it. Sometimes, teachers experience
an inner judgment about their performance that reveals the value they place
on the profession. More than simply an inner critic that issues the incessant
reminder, “You could do better,” the internal critique that Gina faced was that
she was participating in the degradation of the profession itself. Worse than
an outsider passing judgment on the poor condition of teaching is the
practitioner who implicates himself or herself as a cause for that condition.
Philosopher of education Thomas Green has called this critical practitioner
assessment “craft conscience.” Statements of craft conscience can be
accessed by reading teachers’ resignation letters.4 When teachers make
claims such as “I’m no longer teaching,” they do not mean that they have left
the building or that they are sitting at their desks with their heads down.
Instead, they are indicating that by following the rules and expectations of
their jobs, they are degrading their profession. Demoralization that comes
about by following the rules can occur because teaching is not identical with
being employed in the role of a teacher.
When craft conscience is activated, it is
the rootedness of that voice in membership that gives the judgment its sting. That judgment hurts
because it comes to us as the voice of an insider, speaking out of a shared memory and turning it
against us to reveal how great a distance there is between the ideals we espouse and the realities into
which, willy-nilly, we always seem to lapse.5
When teachers feel complicit in the degradation of the profession, they do
not express remorse about failing to meet the expectations set by policy
makers or disappointing their school leaders. Instead, they speak of failing to
uphold the idea of good work that attracted them to teaching. They imagine
the voice of the person engaged in the kind of teaching they admire, and that
is what is shameful.
FAILING THE PROFESSION BY FOLLOWING THE
RULES
Helen entered teaching thirty-five years ago because she found child
development fascinating. As an artist, she discovered that she could satisfy
her need to create and support herself through teaching. “I love using art as
a tool for helping beings grow, learn, and figure out the world.” Her
experiences are wide-ranging—from teaching special education in New York
City to working as a full-time professor of art in a rural branch of a state
university to gifted education. Her passion is for teaching elementary school
art.
After all this time, Helen still loves teaching. When she had a child, she
took some time off but returned to the classroom inspired by her self-initiated
study of Reggio Emilia. Her Reggio interest connects her with a community
beyond her rural school. She joined a listserv, started a local study group,
regularly attends conferences across the United States, and finally traveled to
Reggio Emilia about a decade ago. The Reggio philosophy of teacher as
researcher appeals to her, and she was “blown away by what they were
doing with young children through the arts to bring out their expressive
potential.”
Teaching remains a vital and compelling interest for Helen because she
continues to be enthralled by studying children as learners. By observing
them and her responses to the environments she builds for them to create and
learn, she feels confident in the quality of teaching she offers. “The
affirmations that I get from children remind me of how important it is to stay
true to the [Reggio] values.” She has also built a professional community
that is committed to investigating how they can promote student
empowerment in the art room that enables young children to work as artists.
During our conversation, Helen peppers her commentary with research
from Harvard’s Project Zero and books by Diane Ravitch, and she discusses
her advocacy with the state-level arts education association. Nothing about
her confirms the popular image of life-long teachers as out-of-touch,
ineffective, and beleaguered. Instead, her vitality has me taking notes
frantically as I try to keep track of her scholarly references and activist work.
She recounts studies on the effects of arts education on student achievement:
that it enables them to develop capacities of experimentation and risk and
cultivates the qualities of concentration and attention. “I feel very
intellectually, spiritually, and creatively alive in this stage of my life, and I
really love learning about how kids learn.”
Giving students the opportunity to engage with art is a matter of equity for
Helen. She worked on the development of learning standards for art
education in her state. Given that art teachers were part of the standards
development, she felt confident that they would be developmentally
appropriate for children and true to the purposes of art. Her uneasiness
surfaced when state leaders in art education clamored to be taken as
seriously as other subjects and began agreeing to testing standards in order
to confirm art’s value. “They started selling off the authenticity of art
education, and that for me was one of the biggest betrayals.”
Standardization began to transform her building colleagues’ lessons. No
longer able to collaborate on project-based curricula, Helen became
increasingly isolated. Colleagues resent that she still has a degree of freedom
while they move to more scripted teaching. Everywhere in her rural public
school, Helen feels the devaluation of art. She is excluded from IEP meetings
where she used to have an important voice. She is not invited to grade-level
team meetings. Her principal assumed that she can close the art room
regularly, and not teach her classes, in order to allow other teachers to have
prep periods. Helen is dismayed thinking of the quality of art education that
children in elite private schools receive compared to that of her students.
During our interview, Helen tells me that she will leave teaching before
she has to administer a state- or district-designed test to assess her students’
learning. Fewer than ten months later, Helen sheepishly admits that she
relented even though she said that doing so would be “not ethically teaching
art to children.” This is her shame. Helen believes that what she is being
asked to do violates what her role should be as a teacher. “There’s too much
emphasis on data and proving levels and not enough on creating a culture of
learning.”
Helen sighs, “I’m counting the years to retirement now, in a way I never
did before.” Learning, as she understands it, is no longer valued in her
school. She views her colleagues who unquestioningly go along with any
initiative as technicians who are not living up to their professional
responsibilities. Helen believes that professionals should question authority,
asking “Why do we need to do this?” She is dismayed that her coworkers do
not participate in local and national conversations about teaching. “I’m an
intellectual, and that’s hard to be in a school.”
Helen possesses a sophisticated and well-articulated vision of teaching as a
profession. She views investigating one’s own practice as essential to
responsible work. Teachers, she believes, must engage in inquiry and
reflection about their students’ learning and the principles that shape their
planning. These investigations, Helen has realized, prove more fruitful if
undertaken with thoughtful colleagues.
Increasingly alienated from the colleagues in her building, Helen found the
intellectual dimensions of her professional self atrophying at school.
Unfortunately, her engagement with other educators interested in thinking
about student and teacher learning amplified the distance between her vision
of good teaching and the priorities of standardized, rather than standards-
based, learning that her school leader emphasized.
By following the rules of her school, by administering the pre- and post-
test for her art classes, Helen committed the transgression that she had vowed
not to do. Helen’s demoralization can be understood as her own
disappointment in what her practice has become. Being a good employee,
someone who abided by the dictates of her superiors, conflicted with Helen’s
understanding of what it meant to be a good teacher.
Helen rarely took the silent approach that she criticized in her colleagues.
Likely, the relatively young principal viewed Helen as an irritation to be
tolerated and a liability to be managed. Where the school leader may have
seen only insubordination or stubbornness, Helen probably interpreted her
questioning as a fulfillment of her professional responsibility.
Institutions threaten to corrupt or pervert professions, according to
philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.6 The role of practitioners is to uphold the
integrity of the profession in the face of challenges to its purposes and values.
Compromises will be inevitably necessary. The question will be, How far can
a profession bend and still be called the same profession? For instance, Helen
questioned how standardized art education could become and remain art
education. For Edwin, whose experience follows, it explains how following
thinly veiled demands from his supervisors “cheapens everything that I do.”

Although Edwin thought he would be a college professor of Latin American

and Puerto Rican Studies because of the intellectual challenge, he became
more interested in working with high school students because of their energy
and authenticity. He has worked at a large New York City comprehensive
high school serving a majority immigrant population for eleven years. While
his subject is history, he has also taught special education. Edwin also works
at an evening program that supports students who have fallen behind in their
studies.
In possession of two master’s degrees and multiple leadership
certifications, Edwin hopes to find a position where he can exert more
influence in his school. “I’ve been kind of the utility guy. You could put me in
anything and I’ll do it. I volunteer for coverages. When teachers are absent,
I’ll sub their class. You want me to, I’ll watch the suspension room.”
However, without connections in the Department of Education, Edwin feels
that he’s been at a disadvantage when applying for leadership positions. He
would really like to participate in planning the master schedule.
Under his former principal, Edwin had applied for a leadership position in
the school. The principal did not speak to him about his application. While
Edwin sees the person who was awarded the position as extremely capable
and worthy of the role, he’s disappointed that he was not extended the
common courtesy of acknowledgment. That principal retired last year, and
with a new school leader, Edwin is more hopeful that he will be better
utilized.
Given focused attention on school-level statistics, Edwin finds himself
frequently asked to undermine his professionalism when it comes to passing
students. When he teaches a class for seniors, he is under substantial
pressure. These pressures come from individual students who have attended
no more than thirty days of school; they walk in the last day of the year
saying, “You will pass me.” The pressures also come from principals who
advocate on behalf of individual students and who ask teachers like Edwin to
be mindful of publicly available statistics and their consequences.
There was a girl who did nothing. Did absolutely nothing. Showed up late, did zero. And the
principal stops me one day and said, ‘Look, I know so and so failed your class, but she really needs
to graduate. And all she needs is your class and two other classes to graduate. Could you change her
grade? You know, I don’t want to pressure you.’ But, come on! You’re my boss. This is the way I’ve
kept my job. When they’ve given me shit, I’ve eaten it. And so she tells me, ‘Oh, you know, I don’t
want to tell you . . . I just want you to look into your heart.’ I’m not born yesterday. I know what that
means, so I passed the kid.
It’s issues of equity that get to Edwin when principals advocate for specific
students. He relates another instance when he was pressured to pass a
student who was chronically absent but still seen on school grounds. The
student had been accepted into college and was slated to play on the football
team. The school leaders stated that they were worried about how it would
look to not graduate a student whose house had been destroyed by Hurricane
Sandy. For Edwin, the logic didn’t add up:
You know, the student reminded me of the Zach Morris type [from television’s Saved by the Bell].
He was cool, good-looking, and he was able to socialize with adults, you know. That sort of kid who
could schmooze with adults. I told them that it’s not fair to go to bat for him when I have some kids
from Uzbekistan . . . if you guys would put some of that effort in with these kids from Uzbekistan, who
put in tons of effort, but who have trouble passing the Regents Exams, these kids would graduate.
Edwin tells me he cringes when recounting all of this gaming of the system.
This is his shame. “It cheapens everything I do.” To balance the scales of
justice, a girl who possessed none of the advantages of a Zach Morris type
approached Edwin about her failing grade. He marched her down to the
guidance counselors’ office and passed her. He explains, “Normally, I
wouldn’t have done that. I’m a pretty easy teacher.”
With the school’s threat of closure looming, the pressure to pass students
extends beyond the individual case to the impact on the community, the
students in the school, and all those who are employed by it. Edwin isn’t
demoralized because he feels there is something within his control that he
can do. He wants to, in his words, “quit up,” and begin to address the
systemic inequities that plague his school and schools everywhere. “I want to
quit up because I feel like the push is more on squeezing teachers. I know
they’re squeezing administrators, too, but at least it’d be better to have a
little more status to fend off against some of the external pressures.”

Edwin’s case provides an opportunity to witness the ways that school policies
and mandated practices can corrupt teaching. For Edwin, violating rules and
acting unprofessionally were in accordance with the directives he was
receiving from his school leaders. Even when teachers like Edwin do
transgress clear rules, the sense of not contributing to the good of the
profession is what causes demoralization. It is the sense of undermining the
integrity of what they do; in Edwin’s words, it “cheapens” teaching. Rather
than the fear of being caught and suffering the consequences, it is feeling as
though the value of the work that gave his teaching purpose is eviscerated.

“I’M BEING DISINGENUOUS IN MY CRAFT”

Marnie’s entry into teaching was deliberate and studied. After she finished
high school, her parents told her that she needed to work, so she found
employment as a nanny and sometimes took a class or two. In her mid-
twenties, she made a commitment to finish her undergraduate degree and
then landed a good job at a multinational corporation where she worked for
about five years until the birth of her daughter.
Throughout the time working in the business sector, she tutored students at
a credit recovery program. This experience solidified her hunch that teaching
was the route to utilize her talents. Marnie possessed a purposeful sense of
what she wanted out of a graduate school. She sought a teacher education
program that thought about students and their communities, not just test
scores. She found a school that she thought was out of her reach financially
and in terms of prestige. However, she took a risk and applied for a program
that offered free tuition in exchange for three years of urban teaching in the
state. It was too good an opportunity to pass up just out of a lack of
confidence.
The program fulfilled its promises in terms of opening opportunities to
engage with the community, think deeply about the purposes and practices of
teaching, and learn how to channel students’ energy for learning. Marnie is
entering her sixth year teaching in a small New England urban high school
with over 90 percent of the majority Latinx student population qualifying for
free or reduced lunch. The school was reconstituted the year before Marnie
was hired, and it has yet to establish a level of stability. Much of the
academic staff has turned over. Three teachers in her department left last
year. Marnie and I met in the second week of August, and she still did not
know what grades she would be teaching in a few weeks.
Marnie misses the opportunities for reflection and constructive feedback
on teaching that were available in her graduate program. Interested in
continuing that professional learning, she proposed asking about support for
new teachers during a mock interview. Her district mentors told her to avoid
that question at all costs because the district wanted to hire people who were
“good to go.” Even so, Marnie always tells her colleagues that her door is
open and that she wants to receive their feedback. “I encourage people to
come in because you’re going to see something that I’m not going to see. I
might miss something that you see. And that, to me, is going to make me a
better teacher . . . I think good teaching is acknowledging that my way isn’t
always going to be the best way, and I need to be open to and receptive to
what others have done.”
As an educator who comes with the perspective that good teachers are
always learning and growing, Marnie was baffled by the evaluation
procedures. As the stakes raised, components of the evaluation process
ultimately became the source of her shame. Her first year, before the
adoption of the Danielson framework for assessment, she was given a perfect
score. “There’s no way I’m a perfect teacher. I’m good, don’t get me wrong.
But, really? A perfect score my first year of teaching?”
The high stakes of testing at Marnie’s school created tensions and
compromised the integrity of assessments and the quality of relationships. In
the middle of a class period, the principal called an impromptu meeting for
all the sophomores in the cafeteria. Due to the school’s low test scores, the
principal told the students that they had to practice using an online program.
He distributed contracts that he directed the students to sign, affirming that
they would follow through on this additional math help. The contract, Marnie
heard the principal say, needed to be signed; otherwise, he would begin
paperwork to transfer the students out of the school.
Listening, Marnie thought about how she would feel if her daughter came
home saying that she was asked to sign something without looking it over
together. She raised her hand and said, “Just to clarify, should their parents
see it before they sign it? And, if they don’t sign it, they’re going to be moved
to a different school?” The principal denied the threat but was met with over
fifty “yes-you-dids” from the teenagers in the room. In hindsight, Marnie
realized that she might have handled the situation with more tact, but she was
very concerned with her students’ rights being violated at that moment. She
sees her role as an advocate for her students, not simply an instructor of a
subject.
Marnie believes that she was targeted for unfair treatment as a result of
that interaction and other times when she asked relevant questions as an
exercise of her professional responsibility She soon learned how using a
teacher assessment model that is rubric-based, like Danielson’s, could
produce radically different results. After three years of receiving threes and
fours (effective and highly effective), the principal with whom she had
conflict rated her with ones and twos (ineffective and developing). The
following evaluation cycle, someone else conducted the process and she was
back to threes and fours.
Confident in her abilities as a teacher and now with tenure, Marnie is not
terribly concerned about the numbers associated with her evaluations. Her
shame arises from her dishonesty when assessing student learning outcomes
now that they are associated with teacher evaluations. She shakes when she
begins to tell me about her collusion with a colleague to inflate scores when
scoring essays to ensure that her coworker had met student learning
outcomes. Although she knows other pairs of teachers feigned “objective”
scoring, too, she still finds her behavior inexcusable. Her voice quavers as
she whispers, “I’m admitting to being disingenuous in my craft.”
She lives in fear that someone will ask her to provide evidence to support
her data. Yet, that moment has not come. As a form of self-imposed penalty,
she chose not to claim that she had met 100 percent of her student learning
objectives and earned the designation “effective” rather than “highly
effective.” Marnie felt pressured by the more experienced teacher with whom
she was supposed to trade papers for scoring who refused to have anything
less than 100 percent of her student learning objectives met. The teacher
insisted Marnie meet with her after school and off the grounds. She had
prepared all of the scoring sheets but pressed Marnie to re-create them all in
her hand. Marnie did not ask the same from her coworker. “All of this
defeats the purpose of an evaluation.”

Some teachers, like Marnie, believe that school policies and practices created
the conditions that induced them to violate their ideals about good teaching.
She found that it was nearly impossible to have an assessment process that
contributed to authentic and honest professional development, even one that
was rolled out as expensively as the online Danielson component. Marnie’s
shame is not simply about feeling guilty for wrongdoing, it is connected to
questions about good teaching and if what she is doing has the value she
imbues it with.
Many teachers, including Diane, who will be introduced in the next
chapter, are unsure of where to turn when they believe that they are engaging
in wrongdoing or believe that they are being asked to engage in illegal
practices. Diane, after taking a stand against the role of standardized testing
in her school, was told by her union that she was on her own.
It is not obvious if many of the kinds of concerns raised by these teachers
would meet the criteria for whistleblower protections. The most clearly
articulated whistleblower provisions exist at the state level, but not all states
offer these sorts of protections. Federal law is muddier. Supreme Court cases
such as Lane v. Franks (2014) and Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) have not
offered conclusive descriptions of the conditions that need to be met for
public employees’ speech to be protected.
 In the absence of obvious and safe channels to explore professional ethical
dilemmas, teachers are left to navigate these complex emotions and situations
on their own. The experience of feeling isolated with these challenging
dilemmas may lead to demoralization.
My exploration of the interaction between school policies and teacher
behavior is not meant to excuse or justify wrongdoing. However, it does
provide a backdrop and context for the violation of professional ideals and
sometimes even laws. Some of the sources of demoralization teachers
described in terms of degradation of the profession are:
• colluding with colleagues on grading assessments that are used to determine teacher ratings and pay
• being pressured by school leaders to pass students to improve publicly available graduation rates
• experiencing an onslaught of one-directional communication about teaching that does not include
the voices of practitioners (inside and outside schools)
• witnessing school leaders’ rejection of teacher expertise and initiative in favor of adopting
expensive products and services that yield dubious results
• observing and undergoing threats to due process
• observing alternative and fast-track licensure programs that degrade and deprofessionalize teaching
• being assigned to sham professional learning communities that provide the illusion of teacher voice
• having school leaders who do not tell returning faculty what they are teaching until the week before
students arrive
• witnessing colleagues fail to pull their weight or be unwilling to improve their practice
• witnessing colleagues leave the profession
CHAPTER FIVE
“I Can’t Be That Kind of Teacher”
RE-MORALIZING STRATEGIES FOR CAREER
LONGEVITY

Yesi is a first-year science teacher, but this year marks her twenty-first year
teaching. About twenty minutes into our conversation, we are interrupted by
a school tour. Yesi welcomes prospective families beginning the daunting
process of New York City kindergarten admissions into her early elementary
classroom. She describes the school garden accessible through an exterior
door on the eastern wall, talks about how she meets the needs of all students
by differentiating her instruction, and discusses the routines of the school
day.
The parents are visibly on edge as they imagine what it would be like to
send their children to a progressive public school of choice. Some want to
ensure that their children will meet state-determined benchmarks for
achievement. Others are concerned about English acquisition. Still others
inquire how the enrollment of one child might affect the prospects of a
younger sibling. Throughout all these questions, Yesi makes the parents feel
as though she has no other obligations: no interviewer crouched at a pint-
sized table, no students about to burst onto the scene in fifteen minutes.
None of the anxious parents and guardians know that Yesi’s mother-in-law
passed away yesterday. Aware that I was traveling especially for the
opportunity to speak with her, Yesi arrived at school today ready to meet with
me. I try to impress that we can find another time to talk, but she insists that
we use our time together well.
This year marks the start of Yesi’s science teaching and her first time
working with first- and second-grade students. Because she has taught for
over two decades, it would be reasonable to describe Yesi as closing in on the
third act of her career. Instead, Yesi chose to begin again, despite the
difficulties, to renew her love of the work.
Yesi’s new position has presented novel challenges. More accustomed to
working with later elementary grades, she told me that she has made her first
and second graders cry unintentionally this year. She’s learning to gear the
material to the correct level and present students with manageable
challenges that are not tear-worthy.
When she first began in the New York City public schools, in the early
1990s, Yesi was hired in a school slated “for revision,” which meant it was
about to be closed by the district superintendent. She recalls sitting on her
desk, students rapt as she read an African story told in the oral tradition,
when she was startled to attention by the principal shouting across the room,
“Ms. Garcia, What are you doing? This is the ‘golden reading’ hour. Why
aren’t they all reading?” Never mind that the textbooks that students were
expected to read from during the “golden hour” were at least a quarter-
century old, explains Yesi, they were “racist, noninclusive, the worst.” The
principal made the students get up, retrieve the textbooks from the back of the
room, turn to page thirty-five, and start reading. Yesi never recovered her
students’ trust that year. She recalls, “I was completely usurped. Those kids
were like, ‘You can’t protect us and we don’t care about you.’”
Her strength that first year came, in part, from a group that met at a local
college. She says that she would not have made it without a place to find
emotional support, access teaching materials, and be reminded regularly of
the progressive ideals that inspire her. Tapping back into these progressive
roots is the reason that Yesi made the move to science.
Yesi had been “feeling very stale” and considered leaving the school
where she has taught for the last five years. She attributed her dissatisfaction
to having taught the same grades for twenty years, but also to the ways
curricular practices, even in a somewhat progressive school, make it difficult
to develop a curriculum that emerges from students’ interests. In the past,
Yesi’s classes
studied immigration because a little girl came in and said that the newspaper guy on 190th Street
was getting deported . . . We had this huge [public transportation] strike, and we started to talk
about human rights and . . . what it meant to be a worker and what worker’s unions were, and that’s
how curriculum developed. It was never the way it is now; you preplan it, and Understanding by
Design, and backward planning . . . it’s not ever coming from kids anymore.
Yesi finds science a way to stay connected to her progressive roots.
Scientific inquiry enables her students to pursue questions that come from
their lives and the material under investigation.
A commitment to the ideals of the profession and high expectations for her
own performance set Yesi looking for other positions. Her self-assessment:
“It’s good enough, but [I was] just doing the bare minimum. It’s not [good
enough], when you know what you can do. I can’t be that kind of teacher.”
When a position for a science teacher opened in her current school, she
leapt.
Having participated in a number of STEM-related professional
development grants at her previous school, Yesi was ready to make the switch
to science teaching. Currently, Yesi is collaborating with a team at the same
local college that offered her a space to grow her first year. The
professor/practitioner team is developing a physics curriculum for young
children based on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Yesi is
hoping to bring the team’s work to the district, to the state and, ultimately, to
the national level.

Teacher resilience, whether seemingly innate or consciously cultivated, is

touted widely as the answer to the problems of teacher retention.1 Those who
promote resilience in teacher education literature present it as the silver bullet
that will enable teachers to keep teaching, against all odds. This chapter
highlights the shortcomings of deploying resilience as a means to address
teachers’ moral sources of dissatisfaction with institutional policies and
practices. It also presents re-moralizing strategies that can help teachers take
action when their moral motivations for teaching are challenged.
Popular and scholarly calls to cultivate teacher resilience presume that
teachers currently lack resilience. Those who suggest that teachers lack
resilience point to dismal retention figures, especially for those in their first
five years of teaching. The linkage between poor retention and teachers’ lack
of resilience reflects a leap in logic that is not borne out by the data. Current
survey measures are not sufficiently fine-grained to reveal if some attrition
may be the result of “leavers’” refusal to engage in practices and follow
policies that they perceive as damaging to students, their communities, and
the teaching profession, rather than a poor ability to rebound from challenges.
Teachers need to have personal reserves and interpersonal resources that
enable them to withstand the challenges inherent to teaching. That point is
without question. However, the experience of demoralization reveals that
resilience as a response to teacher retention challenges has its limits.
Teachers’ professional moral centers may require that they push back with
resistance rather than bounce back with resilience.
Teachers may leave the profession when they are not able to resolve moral
concerns about their work. They may refuse to be complicit in practices that
harm students and that denigrate the practice of teaching.2 Teachers
committed to the profession often go to great lengths, as Yesi’s experience
shows, to resolve concerns and conflicts so they can remain in the classroom.
Sometimes, teachers fiercely committed to their students and relentlessly
dedicated to the profession find that they are unable to remain in the
classroom when their values are continuously compromised.

ARE TEACHERS LACKING RESILIENCE?

Resilience, as it is commonly understood, calls for teachers to find balance,
practice mindfulness, and reach out for emotional support. Often, resilience
entails accommodating one’s behavior and expectations to accept and adapt
to conditions as they are. Cultivating resilience is an important achievement;
my argument in no way disparages practices that enhance mindfulness or that
build an individual’s capacity to face life’s challenges. However, as a
response to demoralization, calls for resilience can be experienced as an
ineffective and insulting recommendation. Diagnosing teachers as requiring a
dose of resilience fails to address the institutional, systemic, and policy-based
origins of a moral problem. It suggests that accommodation is always the best
answer when realistically strategic resistance may be necessary.
Inundated with calls to become more resilient, teachers likely hear the
message as an indictment of their supposed lack of strength. For example,
urban teaching researcher Christopher Emdin criticizes practices that call on
black male teachers to enact punitive school policies that perpetuate the
criminalization and devaluation of black and brown minds and bodies. When
black male teachers realize that they cannot in good conscience contribute to
this cycle of failure, he says, they may quit. Then, it is likely that those
teachers are condemned for lacking resilience or, also popular, “grit.” In
Emdin’s words: “The source of this often sits at the precipice of pessimists
who get to spit a less legit hypothesis about my grit, when it’s obvious that I
am forced to fit in a system. So, I quit.”3
Researchers, school leaders, and teacher educators need to investigate the
sources of teacher dissatisfaction and attrition before leaping to
recommendations to cultivate resilience. Yesi persevered through an
incredibly challenging first year of teaching. She found a community of like-
minded educators through a university-based mentoring program. Today, she
continues to collaborate with professors and other K–12 teachers by
developing curriculum aligned with the NGSS.
Yesi possesses personal and professional resilience. She met with me the
day after her mother-in-law’s passing, and she applied for a new position in
her school to ensure that she continues to stay engaged in her work. However,
Yesi continues to teach due to a degree of luck, not only resilience.
The year prior to our conversation, Yesi determined that she could not, in
good conscience, administer high-stakes tests to her students. She joined a
coalition of other teachers in her school to declare their conscientious
objection to the tests. When Yesi refused to administer the state proficiency
exams to her fifth-grade students, she was not fired, was not ostracized by
faculty, and faced no retribution from her school leaders. Had Yesi faced
formal or informal negative consequences and decided to leave teaching,
suggesting that she should have cultivated greater resilience would have
missed the mark. Instead, her problem was with the moral problems that
arose in her teaching, not her ability to withstand challenges.
Consider Edwin’s experience (detailed in chapter 4) as an example of
personal and professional resilience. During his first teaching job, Edwin’s
mother succumbed to brain cancer. Edwin continued his semester of master’s
work at a local college but was not able to keep up the B average required to
maintain his tuition funding. The next year, while he was in his second year
of teaching, he transferred to another college where he had also received an
acceptance. He completed his master’s degree and graduated with a 3.9 grade
point average.
Although Edwin had a lot to be proud of in his early years, he also faced
some shameful failures. In his first few years of teaching, he received a letter
of reprimand from a principal for poor teaching. Recognizing the elements of
truth in this official rebuke, he redoubled his efforts and made a point to tutor
students before and after school. Without his personal and professional
resilience, it is highly unlikely that Edwin would be in his eleventh year of
teaching.
Edwin’s current dissatisfaction with his work, however, cannot be
remedied with an added dose of resilience. Instead, he is worried about the
ways in which he is implicated in a system that renders academic integrity
meaningless. He is concerned about perpetuating practices that offer distinct
advantages to the already-privileged. These are moral concerns that, left
unaddressed, could lead to demoralization.
Diane has taught in the same Midwestern school district for twenty-one
years. It is a district that regularly makes the list of top schools in national
magazines, and Diane says that it is a place that she has, at times, described
as “visionary.” She has spent the majority of her career working with sixth,
seventh, and eighth, grades. Recently, she took a two-year sabbatical to finish
her doctorate.
Returning to her school activated Diane’s moral concerns. While she was
completing her degree, the district hired a full-time substitute teacher to
cover her classroom. Diane believed that she would be contributing to the
damage of the profession by stepping right back into her old position and
displacing the substitute. “She’d done this great job, and they were just going
to kick her to the curb. So, when I came back, I specifically said that I did not
want that position.”
Diane did not want to participate in the labor practices that made it easy
to discard an employee who had been a valuable member of the school. She
recalled that when she was first hired, members of the district informed her,
in front of her students, that her contract was going to be terminated.
Someone who had seniority was returning from sabbatical and needed a
position. “It put me in the worst place possible with the kids. I had been
teaching sex ed, so it was already completely silent. I can remember turning
around to shocked faces. That felt really uncomfortable.”
Diane’s concerns about displacing another teacher who had demonstrated
commitment and success were motived by more than a desire to avoid
harming others and an expression of labor solidarity. Diane’s moral center
includes commitments to the professional distinctiveness and responsibility of
teachers. Her values direct her to resist policies that treat teachers as
interchangeable, even when those policies would be to her benefit.
It would seem that Diane should be inoculated from demoralization. She
was allowed a two-year sabbatical in a highly regarded district that
prioritizes innovative approaches to teacher learning. She has National
Board certification, multiple advanced degrees and certifications, and now, a
doctorate. She has taught frequently for the district’s summer professional
development program. Local colleges and universities call on her to teach
courses and mentor student teachers. Diane has won numerous grants that
have benefitted her own classroom and the district.
Diane returned from sabbatical reflecting on her time away and her role
as a teacher leader. To her mind, earning her doctorate raised the stakes for
her own practice. “Getting those three little letters behind your name means
something morally and ethically. At least it did to me.” Diane viewed her role
as exercising moral leadership by practicing her professional values
publicly. This modeling also involved taking a stand against high-stakes
testing.
When Diane began teaching in the mid-1990s, she recalled that teachers
feared the arrival of the “proficiency police.” Supposedly, the “proficiency
police” would ensure that classrooms met the testing environment
requirements. “Your room needs to be stripped down, everything has to be
covered. You can’t have any bulletin boards up. You can’t have the American
flag up.”
Diane recalled administering her first high-stakes practice test. She had
dutifully prepared her room and read from the script provided by the state.
Frightened that the “proficiency police” were outside her door, Diane
followed the regulations to the letter:
So, I go to sit at my desk. We were told not to walk around. We were told not to really even make
much eye contact with the kids. I had kind of prepared them that this isn’t going to be a typical day.
Usually, you can ask me questions anytime you want to, but you’re not allowed to [during the
practice or actual test]. Ten minutes go by, and Molly raises her hand. I give her the teacher look
like, “How dare you raise your hand?” and she puts her hand down. Then, she tentatively puts her
hand up again.
Since it was practice, Diane rationalized that she could at least let Molly
know that she was not allowed to assist her. She approached her student’s
desk. Molly pointed as she whispered, “I don’t know this word.” The word
was “selection” as in “Read the selection and answer the questions.” Diane
remembered telling her, “‘I’m sorry, honey, I’m not allowed to pronounce
the word for you. Do the best you can’ . . . Bawling.”
There is enough emotion in Diane’s voice that I needed to ask who was
bawling. “She was bawling. I was feeling like the worst person on the face of
the earth. She could not keep it together. She asked to go to the restroom and
I let her go. That evening I got a phone call from her parents. They were
calling to apologize because Molly was pretty sure that I would lose my
teaching license because she asked me a question. Now, never in one
instance, had I mentioned the ‘proficiency police.’”
More than twenty years later, the testing stakes have increased, and the
exams are more frequent. After that first year, Diane was determined that she
would learn everything possible about the test and prepare her students to
beat it. She believed the “torturous” testing conditions could be allayed
through readiness. Diane developed what she called “boot camps” where she
would ensure that students like Molly were familiar with the vernacular of
the tests. Because the boot camps stressed her students and were unauthentic
interruptions to the school’s well-planned curriculum, Diane eventually
abandoned them. “I’ve just decided that the scores aren’t going to be the
thing that drives me. I performed the worst of my colleagues once I chose not
to play the game.” This year, Diane’s colleagues agreed that the boot camps
detracted from good teaching, and they all stopped engaging in intensive test
preparation. The empty promises made by the test company to return student
data in time to inform teachers’ work have made Diane and her colleagues
even less invested in the process.
With more than two decades of experience, Diane possesses a clarity of
purpose that takes precedence over her desire to follow the rules. She aligns
her actions with her professional beliefs rather than mandates dictated by a
testing company.
As a teacher, my job is to answer questions for kids. As a teacher, it’s my job to make my students
feel safe and cared for and part of a community. These kids were nine years old. They have certain
adults in their lives that they’re supposed to be able to trust and that they care for. The fact that
Molly felt that she was hurting me in any way, shape, or form by not being able to perform was
wrong. It was wrong that I couldn’t answer a child’s question or that I couldn’t read a word for her.
Everything I’d been taught had already said that these are the things you’re supposed to do for kids.
You’re supposed to help them to get to the next level. And, if you are giving them a test, it should be
appropriate to what they know and are able to do. I had words and actions of things that I wanted to
be as a teacher, and I was able to enact it until this point. At this point, I was no longer able to be
that person that I know I want to be. I have to be this other person who feels monstrous, actually.
Diane estimated that in the last five years, she has written over two
hundred letters to legislators, departments of education, and newspaper
editors. Prior to Diane’s taking her PhD, few recipients responded to her
letters. Earlier this year, she wrote a letter telling parents about their right to
opt their children out of high-stakes testing and posted it on Facebook. Her
state’s Badass Teachers Association reposted the letter, then the local
parents’ group posted it on its blog, and soon television media and national
news services wanted to talk to Diane.

REBELS, RULE CHANGERS, RULE FOLLOWERS, AND

RECLUSES: PART II
Teacher resilience, defined as an educator’s ability to withstand difficult
situations and bounce back from adversity, is prevalent in all the teacher
narratives that appear in this book. Without resilience, it is unlikely that any
of the teachers would have continued past their first year of teaching. Some
of them, decades later, still recalled those early profession-rattling
experiences. Nevertheless, they continue to teach five, ten, twenty, and thirty
years later.
Resilience, however, does not immunize teachers from the threat of
demoralization. Demoralization occurs when teachers believe that they are
complicit in harming their students or damaging their profession. These are
moral challenges that threaten their definition of good work. If these kinds of
challenges become endemic and persistent, they may lead to demoralization.
Demoralized teachers may leave the profession that once was the source of
their good work. Quitting may seem to be the only option for those who
cannot find a way to resolve ongoing and persistent moral conflicts.4
Experienced teachers who resign for moral reasons may, in fact, be
demonstrating resilience by finding ways to live their values that are less
fraught with conflict or contradiction. Some teachers who experience
demoralization take a stand against policies and practices that they believe
undermine the integrity of teaching and that cause students’ harm.
Experienced teachers describe a number of actions that they took to stave
off demoralization or to re-moralize their teaching practice. The strategies
that contributed to their re-moralization in the face of moral challenges are
more proactive and community-oriented than the kind of personal bounce-
back usually invoked in the teacher resilience literature.
The strategies used by teachers to re-moralize their practice fall into five
broad, and often overlapping, categories: student-centered action, teacher
leadership, activism, voice, and professional community, as shown in figure
5.1. The variety of the categories enables teachers to take possibly re-
moralizing action that aligns best with their professional contexts and
individual dispositions.
Figure 5.1 Strategies for re-moralization

Student-centered action often takes place between teachers and their

students. It may take the form of a shift in perspective that guides teachers’
curricular and pedagogical choices, such as Diane’s decision to end test-prep
boot camp. Student-centered action may guide a teacher’s, like Edwin’s,
decision to pass a student with less social capital in order to preserve a sense
of justice. This re-moralizing strategy may also involve applying for a grant
to offer students summer support to prepare them for honors classes, as Lee
did with incoming immigrant and refugee ninth graders.
 Educators engaged in teacher leadership do not need to hold a specific title
to enact these strategies. Teachers engage in leadership that may re-moralize
their practice when they involve their colleagues in practices or actions that
reestablish their ability to do good work. Diane took this step when she
persuaded her fellow teachers to stop using curricular time for test
preparation. When Gavin advocated for his self-contained special education
students to be integrated with their grade-level peers, he acted in the best
interest of students (student-centered action) by demonstrating teacher
leadership. Hilary deployed teacher leadership as a strategy when she began
exploring ways to shift to a teacher-led school.
When teachers engage in activism, they take a specific public stand for or
against a policy or practice. The activism may be supported by the union, as
was the case with Jason (upcoming in chapter 7) when he demanded that
Teach For America not receive a contract in his city that was flowing with
newly certified teachers looking for work. Yesi’s letter to district leadership
saying that she refused to administer high-stakes tests also is a form of
activism.
Voice plays a significant role in re-moralization. Many teachers attribute
their demoralization to an inability to have their voice heard. Diane wrote
hundreds of letters without a single response. Suddenly, her voice, in the
form of a Facebook post, was amplified by the Badass Teachers Association
and a local parent advocacy group. United Opt Out validated Diane’s use of
voice in ways that felt essential to her at a time when she was being vilified
for speaking out. Vanessa, whose experience is discussed in chapter 6, felt as
though she was going mad when she criticized and questioned her district’s
shift in policy. She found an outlet in blogging where she quickly developed
an audience that affirmed the critical lens she brought to district decision
making. Voice may be spoken, written, or signed.
Professional community is positioned at the center of figure 5.1 because it
is the category that permeates all others. Some aspects of this strategy involve
simply being with like-minded individuals and identifying allies. Strategies
for re-moralization are weakest at the outermost edges of the figure, where
individuals work alone to enact a strategy. We can see this effect clearly in
Diane’s experience. After utilizing her voice on her own, she felt vulnerable
and isolated. When she linked into the United Opt Out network, which
recognized her courage, she found strength and support.
Even though Diane’s professional community is strong, it was not
connected to her use of voice. Professional community is also weak when not
combined with another strategy. Sometimes, professional community
provides the base for action, such as the partnership that Gavin established
for an inclusive classroom. However, at other times, professional community
may arise out of shared action in other categories. For Helen, the Reggio
community across the United States and in Italy provided her with a
touchstone as she enacted student-centered art education.
Teachers who have moral concerns about their work do not necessarily
need to raise their voices as conscientious objectors, whether or not their
conscientious objection involves quitting as a form of refusal. Some teachers
do embrace the role of rebel, but others identify strongly as rule followers.
Some work to change the rules through advocacy and alliances, whereas
others try their best to avoid detection as recluses while they quietly teach
according to their professional conscience. Even the most reclusive teachers
in this study referenced professional values and commitments, not simply
personal ones. Even though the decisions individual teachers made might not
be agreed upon by others, they existed within a professional vernacular that
could be recognized as a legitimate teaching option and discussed.
Even though some recluses may alter the rules and hope to continue
undetected or unmolested, many teachers remarked that it was no longer
possible to “just close your door and teach” due to frequent monitoring by
school leaders, district and state personnel, or paid consultants. Even
recluses, like Nina, usually found professional community through
conferences as well as professional literature and research. Many teachers
spoke of the quality of professional community that they found online that
extended their possible colleagues across the United States and throughout
the globe. Specific online-generated communities such as the Badass
Teachers Association, the Network for Public Education, and United Opt Out
not only introduced teachers to colleagues from afar but also helped them
better identify nearby allies.
Figure 5.1 includes specific strategies described by the teachers in this
study to offer examples of actions that rebels, rule followers, rule changers,
and recluses may employ to re-moralize their work. In some situations,
teachers can transform and interrupt the conditions that contributed to their
demoralization. While some teachers are politically active, others avoid
politics and focus on teaching and learning within their school community.
Figure 5.1 is not meant to be an exhaustive list of re-moralizing actions.
Instead, the specific examples within each category are presented to stimulate
ideas about possible actions in different teaching contexts by teachers with
distinct dispositions.
Figure 5.1 enables teachers to envision multiple points of entry and various
types of re-moralizing actions. Re-moralizing action can be taken on one’s
own or with a well-recognized group. Action may entail the invisible—for
instance, a conscious reframing of one’s work—or the highly visible, such as
a public protest. The strategies are represented circularly to indicate that no
form of re-moralization is better or more praiseworthy than another. The
strategies that teachers use to re-moralize their work will depend on their
teaching context, their ability to engage in professional risk, their personality,
and their personal circumstances.
Let’s take Diane’s experience as an example. Although Diane had always
identified herself as a rule follower, she unexpectedly found herself
occupying the role of rebel. As a rule follower, her first strategy to re-
moralize her practice when confronted with high-stakes assessments was to
“beat the test.” This is an example of student-centered action. Diane sought
to empower her students with the knowledge they would need to be prepared.
She hoped that such preparation would stave off future emotional harm, such
as that experienced by Molly.
Diane’s student-centered action moved from the outer circle of the
diagram to the inner when she collaborated with her team members on the
testing “boot camps.” Here, she enlisted her professional community to
engage in student-centered action. When Diane later convinced her team
members to abandon the boot camps due to the ways they detracted from
their curriculum and added unnecessary weight to the high-stakes tests, Diane
moved along the middle ring to the intersection of student-centered action,
teacher leadership, and professional community.

The sudden media attention Diane received after her letter to parents about
their opt-out rights was distributed led to her sobbing in a middle school
closet. “I couldn’t handle it anymore and just went in there and cried. I was
so sad because I felt so alone.” Due to her appearance on television news,
people throughout the district began to refer to Diane as a celebrity. Her new
status was even more fraught because she had returned from sabbatical with
a PhD. She faced a mixture of resentment and awe in response to both her
degree and her decision to take a stand. Her board of education had called
her an “unruly teacher.” During a faculty meeting, her principal accused her
of unprofessionalism. The union’s local chapter leader told Diane that she
was on her own since her state did not grant teachers whistleblower status.
Her union would not support her speaking out against the value of the tests
and ignoring district directives to tell students and their families that they
were obligated to take the tests. Her colleagues shunned her. “Most were
like, ‘You go! Keep going, you’re doing a great job! By the way, don’t sit
next to me.’”
Diane learned that principals in every school building across the district
were reading statements denouncing her actions as unprofessional. “I realize
words have consequences,” Diane explained, “but [my actions were] done
out of a place of professionalism, so don’t discount that.” As an example of
her motivations based on moral leadership, Diane let her superintendent
know that a district office employee was providing families with false
information about their obligation to take the test. Diane was concerned
about possible legal action that the district might encounter as a result of the
falsehood. Her more powerful motivation came from a place of professional
ethics. Individuals in positions of power or with specialized knowledge, she
believes, have the obligation to tell the truth and inform families and children
of their rights. Even though the district described Diane’s actions as
“unprofessional,” she knew that she was acting from her own professional
moral responsibility.
A pariah in her district, Diane turned to her computer and contacted
United Opt Out for support. The leaders of the national movement
immediately recognized her on the website for her courage in defending the
rights of children and their parents. “Just the fact that other people were
calling me brave meant something,” Diane recalls. She could also turn to
this online community to hear the experiences of other teachers who had
spoken out in accordance with their professional conscience. Additionally,
she received practical advice about handling media inquiries.
As a science teacher, Diane would not be required to administer the
proficiency exams. Nonetheless, her district wanted her to sign off on the
confidentiality contract required by the test makers. Diane refused; she
would not see the test anyway, so what was the point? “The principal asked,
‘Are you going to be morally and ethically opposed to giving the [end-of-year
subject area test]?’ And I said, ‘I probably am.’ This is hard for me because
there’s this piece of me that wants to protect my kids from it. I don’t want
them to have to be in the room with anybody else. Since the first test [where
Molly broke down], I go around, I pat them on the back. I give them words of
encouragement. I try to be as supportive of them as I can, in that moment.”
The principal later returned to explain that the social studies teachers
would administer both the science and social studies tests that year. Diane
explained that the principal’s plan to avoid conflict put her in an ethical
bind. “I’m not sure how to feel about that. Why are my social studies
teachers having to give the test? Now, I’m thankful that [my students] will be
with their teacher . . .” Diane struggled with how her commitments to avoid
harming may result in her harming her colleagues and the school’s
professional community.

When Diane used her voice to address her letter to parents, she knew that she
was taking a risk and that her writing was public. However, she had not
anticipated the degree of public attention she would receive and the isolation
she would feel in a community where she had felt strongly connected. Her
use of voice existed first at the outer ring of the diagram. It was here that she
felt most vulnerable and exposed.
When she connected with United Opt Out and was recognized for using
her voice, she moved into the middle ring that combines voice with
professional community. Her conversations with leaders from United Opt Out
precipitated her decision not to give the state proficiency test in her subject
area. Her strategies then moved to the intersection of voice, activism, and
professional community.
Diane employed a number of strategies, in a variety of categories, but
those actions did not guarantee that she would resolve all of her dilemmas.
The strategies enabled her to feel less morally conflicted about her work in
terms of harming students and denigrating the teaching profession. Yet, it is
clear that these strategies did not eliminate questions about professional
ethics. Strategies for re-moralization are ways that teachers, like Diane, find
they can partially reconcile substantial and ongoing moral concerns about
their work.

AUTHENTIC PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY AT THE

CENTER
While no one strategy promises success and no particular category in the
figure is better than another, whenever strategies intersect with professional
community, they seem to provide a stronger and more sustainable base from
which to act. All strategies that involve professional community (everything
except the outermost ring) do not depend on the singular actions of one
teacher. However, at the same time, professional community itself (the hub)
is usually insufficient to spark re-moralization on its own. When an
individual teacher’s spirit or energy flags, authentic professional community
supplies other colleagues who can continue the work until the teacher is
restored. This continuity combats feelings of futility and the myth that one
person can do good work isolated from others. Professional community can
provide support and an opportunity to share acquired wisdom. Furthermore,
when teachers act with professional community, the risk that individual
teachers may bear in taking action for re-moralization can be shared and
potentially minimized.
The majority of the strategies that led to teachers experiencing re-
moralization involved connecting with their professional community:
identifying allies at their school and in their district, participating in
leadership opportunities in their unions, finding education and support
through participation in online activist organizations, identifying and
informing parents of their shared interests and concerns through blogging,
and forging partnerships with local higher education faculty. Even those
strategies that seem individualized (such as committing to humanize a
dehumanizing experience for students) reference an implied community of
teachers who could recognize the professional and moral value of the action
or approach.
Professional community appears at the center of this diagram of re-
moralization strategies because it serves as the hub for all others. I define
professional community as the other professionals who give meaning,
purpose, and direction to teachers’ work. These are the people that teachers
seek out for advice, support, and collaboration. Professional community does
not mean the professional learning community (PLC) a school leader might
direct to meet between 2:30 and 3:15, although in fortuitous instances, this
might turn out to be such a resource. Almost always, authentic professional
community is chosen by those who make up its membership.
Vanessa, introduced in the next chapter, recalled proposing a districtwide
PLC to her principal. As someone running a special program at her school,
she felt that she could benefit from collaborating with others doing the same
in another building. Instead, the principal insisted that she work with building
colleagues. The principal-determined PLC was not conducted professionally
nor did it result in learning. Although sometimes school leaders have goals
that need to be met through particular group configurations, teacher-directed
opportunities to collaborate may produce more significant and meaningful
results.
In authentic professional communities, teachers articulate and refine their
professional values and accompanying practices in conjunction with
colleagues and partners who seek to do the same. The pace of instructional
days and the loss of curricular and pedagogical autonomy in many schools
may offer morally motivated teachers few opportunities to enact or reflect on
their professional moral centers. Engaging with professional community,
collaborating with a coteacher, participating in live monthly Twitter chats, or
meeting regularly with a local union caucus may provide teachers with an
opportunity to feel productive in their commitments to their students and their
profession.
I am a teacher educator who depends on experienced teachers to offer their
limited time for insufficient monetary compensation to mentor my preservice
students. Analyzing these re-moralizing strategies revealed some surprises.
Although teachers are experiencing intensification in their work, college,
university, and community organizations should not predetermine that
teachers are not interested in opportunities for collaboration. For many of the
teachers I have interviewed, connections with professors and university
programs contributed significantly to their professional longevity. These
collaborations provided teachers who were experiencing demoralization ways
to enact their moral centers that felt meaningful and impactful.
This chapter discussed the strategies that teachers can employ to try to re-
moralize their work. However, some strategies are facilitated or enabled by
school leaders and teacher unions. The next two chapters examine the ways
that these influential groups in the professional lives of teachers may
contribute to demoralization and also how they may facilitate re-moralization.
Almost all the strategies that led to teachers experiencing re-moralization
involved connecting with their professional community. When teachers take
action with members of their professional community, those actions seem to
be the most secure, sustainable, and efficacious. Teachers can find strategies
that align with their concerns, contexts, and dispositions. Some examples
include:
• identifying allies at their school and in their district
• participating in leadership opportunities in their unions
• finding education and support through participation in online activist organizations
• identifying and informing parents of their shared interests and concerns through blogging
• forging partnerships with local higher education faculty
• pursuing independent research on good teaching, e.g., attending a conference on Reggio Emila
• developing new curriculum using the Next Generation Science Standards
• working with colleagues to move to Total Physical Response Storytelling to teach languages
• joining civic groups that enable teachers a voice at the policymaking table
• creating a code of ethics with colleagues
• taking a stand to refuse to administer high-stakes tests
• pursuing National Board Teacher Certification
• arranging a teaching schedule to ensure that students still take art, music, and physical education in
the midst of faculty firings due to budget cuts
• getting release time through a foundation fellowship to research practice
• changing grade level or subject
• attending teacher-led protests
CHAPTER SIX
SCHOOL LEADERS: SOURCES OF
DEMORALIZATION AND RE-MORALIZATION

“I’ve always been a rebel,” Vanessa tells me. Lately, Vanessa has found her
voice through blogging and connecting with education activists from across
the United States. She had entered a deep depression in her thirteenth year of
teaching when she initially began bumping up against the standardization
that was becoming the watchword in the affluent, suburban district where she
works. Her school borders a major city in the Mid-Atlantic where she has a
newfound solidarity with urban teachers who have been fighting the
privatization of public schooling for over a decade. She recently attended an
educational justice event in the city that forfeited this alliance.
Now in her fourteenth year of middle school teaching, Vanessa is
reenergized, but this is partly due to her hypervigilance against corporate
involvement in public education. She can tell me where each district and
building administrator has been trained, the sources of funding that support
the various initiatives being rolled out in the schools, and the management
techniques that consultants are deploying in their work with faculty.
Vanessa’s assessment of her school leadership altered dramatically over
the course of her tenure. In the first part of her career, she worked with a
principal who demanded a lot from her faculty but ultimately trusted them.
When Vanessa thought aloud about the kind of educational space she’d like
to work in, her principal challenged her to write up a proposal. Diving into
the opening presented by her school leader, Vanessa collaborated with
another teacher and professors at a local university to develop a new team
model that combined classes to focus on a specific area of inquiry. This
program continues to draw students and has been replicated in other schools
in the district.
With this principal, Vanessa believed that her voice was respected and
heard, even when her ideas were not embraced. “We had big discussions as a
grade level with an administrator once a week, or maybe once a month. We’d
sit in a circle with an administrator and sometimes teachers get passionate. I
wouldn’t always agree, or I would say something, and people wouldn’t
always agree.” Nonetheless, she believed that they usually found common
ground by asking, “Is it good for kids? Let’s do it if it’s good for kids.”
For the last several years, Vanessa’s voice has been “muzzled.” Faculty
rarely engage in conversations about their work and do not have a chance to
ask, “Is it good for kids?” Instead, they sit through slide-based presentations
where they are told what is good for kids, and there are no opportunities to
ask questions or offer alternatives. Teachers who want to ask a question or
make a comment are encouraged to do so through an online form.
Vanessa describes the highly paid, well-educated faculty in this affluent
suburban school as having “low morale” because “everything’s fake and
phony and prepackaged and scripted.” In particular, Vanessa points to
“forced PLCs” that she believes expect all members of a so-called
professional learning community to develop the same products. She explains
that she hopes that her colleagues will find creative space within these
mandated work groups. “I want everyone to collaborate, but don’t fall in line
so much, you know? Do good work for kids, but don’t be a robot. Question
things.”
Vanessa attributes what is happening in her school and district to market-
based trends in education reform that are widespread across the country but
have been felt most acutely in cities.
I probably spent a year and a half in a pretty deep depression about the attack on public education.
And I felt stupid and naïve that I didn’t see the attack on cities—that I just live so close and was in
my suburban white privilege bubble. I mourned for the cities, I mourned for the families, the
children. I mourned for all of us who have great schools, who are going to lose them. The quality of
education was going down. What [the district and school leaders] were asking us to do didn’t make
sense.

Vanessa sought to redress her ignorance and plunged into researching

corporate-style reform of public education with the same fervor that she used
to write a program proposal.
Finding no space to ask questions or to raise concerns in her school or
district, Vanessa started blogging. Her blog provides a place to distill her
research findings and connect initiatives and leadership approaches at her
school with national policy trends. For instance, she has shown how punitive
disciplinary practices and regimented pedagogies reserved typically for low-
income students served by charter schools are starting to be utilized in her
district: “I’ll be damned if I want someone teaching my children or
anybody’s children like that.” Realizing that these practices are damaging
for all students, Vanessa uses her online voice to highlight the intertwined
fates of suburban and urban districts. Online and in person, she forges
alliances with teachers, parents, professors, and activists across the urban
border.
Vanessa longs for the opportunities she once had with administrators who
“welcomed discourse.” She recalls, “I had an administrator who was
interested in staff input. It was wonderful. You could really disagree on
things. You could go into his office and he’d welcome you. He’d sit down
with a pad of paper and he would take notes. He would think about what you
were saying, and he would take action on things that he processed with you.
If he didn’t agree, he would say it.” Now, she feels “underappreciated” and
“invisible.” “That’s why people leave, you know? When they feel like nothing
I do is heard or considered and it’s demoralizing.”
Vanessa views the attrition of veteran teachers as an intended effect of
management styles that value compliance over critical thinking. It is a shame,
she believes, because her district is uniquely rich in “intellectual resources.”
She and her colleagues resisted the imposition of simplistic explanations and
the inability to engage with ideas. “They’re saying things like ‘Certainly,
nobody can argue with that.’ But, oh, I can argue that!” Vanessa believes
that the district and school leadership are alienating experienced teachers
when they present initiatives from a perspective of moral and practical
certainty.
Vanessa’s understanding of her moral center entails that she must always
question her purposes and practices. Comparing her current teaching self to
when she first entered the profession, she explains, “Now I have maturity,
perspective, experience . . . I’m more aware of my professional ethics . . . I’ll
go down teaching right. Some teachers say, ‘I’m just going to close my door
and do the right thing,’ which is important to do. But I feel like it wasn’t
enough for me. I’m a teacher and I want to educate my community.” Refusing
to take on the role of recluse, she uses her blog to fulfill her professional
commitment to use her voice to reach beyond her classroom and school. Her
blogs pose an insistent question: “Is this good for kids?”

Vanessa, a self-proclaimed rebel, presents school leaders with a pressing

question. How do you harness the energy that this dedicated teacher brings to
the school? Unabashedly outspoken, opinionated, and organized, Vanessa is
also uncommonly passionate, dedicated, and willing to put in additional work
for the good of the school and its students.
 What happens when a teacher like Vanessa feels “muzzled” by her school
and district leaders? Inexperienced school leaders initially may view Vanessa
as a threat. They might interpret Vanessa’s questioning and challenging as a
sign that she is bound to undermine the priorities that they have envisioned
for the school.
More seasoned school leaders might recognize Vanessa’s assets and
harness her energy. When Vanessa expressed displeasure with her classroom
space, her first principal listened to her criticisms and invited Vanessa to
write a proposal. The result was a collaboration with a local university to
develop a program that has been replicated throughout the district. When
recalling the productive relationship with this principal, Vanessa repeatedly
remarked that she and the principal did not always agree but that they were
able to communicate respectfully.
In contrast, Vanessa approached her current principal with a proposal to
form a PLC with teachers in a similar program at another district school.
Feeling as if she was spinning her wheels in her dysfunctional department’s
“fake” PLC with no clear purpose, she sought to find a productive resolution.
Her inquiry was rejected without further discussion.
The current district and school leaders have not earned Vanessa’s trust.
They have not initiated, invited, or participated in conversations that
addressed the question “Is this good for kids?” Vanessa perceives them as
interlopers or pawns in projects originating outside her district and school.
Most of the schoolwide initiatives and mandates are communicated through
paid consultants. Vanessa finds few opportunities for teachers to ask
questions or to provide feedback that might stimulate dialogue about the
purposes or methods of the initiatives teachers are expected to implement.
Instead, she and all other teachers who have questions are invited to make
comments on an online form.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF TEACHERS’ MORAL

MOTIVATIONS
Experienced teachers like Vanessa are often suspicious of new school
leaders, especially those who are younger than they. However, discrepancies
in age and experience do not need to result in combative standoffs or
unproductive stalemates. School leaders who engage teachers in
conversations rooted in the question “Is this good for kids?” create
opportunities for teachers to relate the expertise of their craft and their moral
commitments to their work. Conflicts arise when school leaders presuppose
that teachers lack expertise, moral motivations, and the desire to do good
work. Vanessa begrudged her principal’s out-of-hand rejection of her
customized PLC request. She wanted to be productive, not waste time.
As discussed earlier, sociologist of teaching Daniel Lortie has shown that
teachers articulate “normative,” or moral, commitments about the well-being
of their “clients” (students, families, communities) as well as the well-being
of their profession. If school leaders ignore the moral dimension of teachers’
concerns, they risk cutting off valuable communication that may yield
common ground. What if school leaders recognized the significance of
teachers’ moral concerns, even while acknowledging moral disagreement
might still prevail?
Vanessa explained that she has more fully developed her professional
ethics over the course of her career. Throughout my time talking to Vanessa,
I did not interpret this statement as an indication that her beliefs had become
more rigid and fixed. Instead, I understood her as saying that she was more
likely to look at her own teaching and the initiatives she was asked to enact
through the question “Is this good for kids?” Vanessa has developed
sophisticated criteria for what an affirmative answer is to that question.
However, her development of a moral center should not be read as rigidity.
She is still willing to ask “Is this good for kids?” and would like to engage in
dialogue with her colleagues and leaders about the principles that motivate
their policies and practices.
Facing a nationwide teacher shortage, school leaders must prioritize
retaining and working effectively with experienced teachers. Positive school
climate, for staff and students, depends on a satisfied and cooperative cadre
of experienced teachers. When school leaders perceive teachers like Vanessa
solely as obstacles to be overcome or liabilities that require damage control,
they miss opportunities to enhance the school climate for all.
School leaders need training to improve working conditions at their
schools and to improve teacher retention.1 From a shortsighted management
perspective, some school and district leaders might prefer novice teachers
whose lower salaries provide relief to tight budgets and whose inexperience
could translate into less resistance and influence. Yet, research shows that
school climate and student performance improve when there is less teacher
turnover.2
 Overall, there is a dearth of research on experienced teachers and their
beliefs about teaching; this allows images of veteran teachers as resistant to
change and set in their outmoded ways to proliferate.3 Partly, this gap can be
attributed to a focus on the first five years of induction to the profession,
when attrition is greatest. Another reason arises from research design.
University-based researchers have easier access to early-career teachers who
were once students. Even when experienced teachers are included in studies,
the inquiry might not focus on beliefs about their work. Due to this gap in the
research, in addition to the ageism that permeates US culture, stereotypical
representations of veteran educators as unwilling or unable to innovate
prevail.
School leaders commit a serious error when they interpret all teacher
resistance as teachers’ unwillingness to change or that their proposals seek to
meet their self-serving needs. While these sources of resistance can be
present in teaching (just as they may arise in any organization), they are not
the only sources of teachers’ dissatisfaction about their work.

MORAL BLACKMAIL AND MORAL MADNESS

Vanessa’s dissatisfaction with teaching comes, in part, from an inability to
engage in dialogue about her moral concerns with her extremely well-
educated and accomplished colleagues and their school leaders. She is
stupefied by policies that appear to come out of nowhere and are justified
simplistically as the way to serve all students. The result is that she and her
colleagues have faced the equivalent of moral blackmail. When school
leaders (or, in Vanessa’s case, the consultants) present new mandates as the
only answer to meeting the needs of students, they may deploy the language
of meeting students’ needs, or inclusion, or rigor to shame teachers into
compliance.
Multiple teachers described experiences of moral blackmail when they
questioned mandates and raised concerns about the implications of their
implementation. The titles of the initiatives themselves can be phrased in
ways that place teachers in a moral bind. For instance, the title of scripted
curricula like Success for All may place critics on the defensive. Teachers
who question the efficacy and value of this corporate product may find
themselves addressing accusations that they do not want success for all.
Experienced teachers described having the latest educational buzzwords
weaponized. A veteran teacher who participated in a re-moralization retreat
recounted how her principal used this strategy to shut down dialogue about
the ways that standards-based grading was being implemented. She reminded
teachers that they must have a “growth mindset.” When school leaders turn
important conceptual frameworks, like Carol Dweck’s theory of mindset, into
a weapon for compliance, they lose opportunities to utilize concepts that
could help educators better discuss, plan, interpret, and assess their work. A
growth mindset does not entail unquestioning compliance, and its usefulness
and significance to teachers’ work become diminished, or even meaningless,
when the term is deployed in this way.
The moral landscape of education has been winnowed by the important,
but limited, language of achievement that eviscerates full moral discourse
about teaching. In a morally constrained pedagogical policy environment,
teachers’ criticisms regarding pedagogical policy are cast in binary terms,
either for or against the proposed initiative. Teacher researchers Betty
Achinstein and Rodney Ogawa explain that this current form of “moralistic
control compounds the stifling effect that technical control can have on
teacher reflection, discussion, and debate of instructional practice.”4
Elsewhere, I have described the environment in which teachers currently
work as “morally constrained.”5 It is a policy environment in which only one
version of what counts as moral is valued or entertained. Within this logic,
criticism by teachers is cast as immoral or self-serving. For instance, New
York State Commissioner of Education MaryEllen Elia has characterized any
teacher who criticized state tests as “unethical.”6 Teachers’ moral concerns
may be described by school leaders as either unsupportive of the stated equity
goals of pedagogical policies or as personal resistance to change and growth.
Both imputed stances leave teachers with little moral ground from which to
articulate and defend their concerns about the profession. This is a particular
problem when teachers lose moral credibility whenever they engage in
criticism of pedagogical policy.
Diane’s experience in the preceding chapter provides a vivid example of
the ways that the discourse of educational policy can become weaponized
when it is placed on an unimpeachable moral high ground. Diane was
publicly censured by her principal for speaking out against high-stakes
testing. He and the district leadership characterized her actions as
“unprofessional.” However, Diane understood her behavior as coming from a
place of profound professional responsibility. By disregarding her voicing her
moral center as “unprofessional,” he negated her ability to be viewed as
someone who possesses professional ethics.
The erasure of Diane’s moral agency and the description of her actions as
“unprofessional” may provoke moral madness. Moral madness, I have argued
elsewhere, is a symptom of moral violence.7 The violence occurs when an
individual is not recognized as a moral agent or when an individual makes a
moral claim that is refused to be recognized as moral. This is what happened
to Diane when she presented her case to parents about opting out of high-
stakes tests. Moral recognition does not need to entail agreement. Yet, the
leaders in Diane’s school and district instead rendered her moral concerns as
not morally motivated.
Despite there being little dispute that teaching is a moral profession and
that teachers are expected to conduct themselves as moral exemplars,
teachers may find that they struggle to achieve recognition as moral agents.
In fact, Domain 4 of the Danielson assessment model used by many states
rewards teachers who act as advocates for their students and the profession.
This behavior is grouped with other professional and ethical indicators.
The moral claims of teachers, I argue, are often not examined alongside the
moral claims of leaders or policy makers, but are rendered irrelevant, and
even immoral, by those with more institutional power. Because current policy
sets itself up as moral in that it seeks to remedy unequal educational
outcomes, and this is a worthy goal of legislation, it renders all other criticism
as immoral or only personal and selfish.

RE-MORALIZATION BY PRINCIPAL
School leaders have much to gain if they acknowledge teachers’ moral
commitments and engage teachers in discussions about their moral concerns.
When this happens, regardless of the ultimate policy decisions, school leaders
and teachers can be engaged together in the practice of professional ethics. In
chapter 3, DeeDee was left demoralized. She had ceded her professional
responsibility to her grade-level colleagues and submerged her expertise in
math education to be “part of a team.” Here is where we left DeeDee, but it is
not how her career is going to end. A school leader acknowledged the moral
source of DeeDee’s curricular concerns and altered her career trajectory.

The effects of teaching the textbook with fidelity demoralized DeeDee. Gone
were the days when her students named math as their favorite subject. She
felt dead to her teaching, and she worried that by teaching with the textbook,
she lost the ability to help students fall in love with math and explore its
concepts more deeply. “I left my soul out of the picture for a few years.
That’s an easy way to say it. My passion was gone. My teaching soul was
gone. It was almost like that drugged feeling where you just do what they tell
you to do. And you don’t have any fight left in you.” She planned on just
following the rules and distancing herself from the work she was doing. It
hurt less that way. Retirement wasn’t too far off.
After thirty-five years of developing expertise in math pedagogy, DeeDee
had become resigned to bringing a much-reduced version of herself to the
classroom for the final years of her career. Surreptitiously, she would use an
inquiry-based math approach during unstructured time in her class, usually
only once or twice per week. A visitor researching math pedagogy observed
DeeDee’s approach to teaching math and asked her why she didn’t use it all
the time. The conversation with the visitor led DeeDee to wonder, “I’m
supposed to be part of a team, but I left that afternoon going, Can you be part
of a team in a different way? Can you have yourself back? Can you have your
soul back?” The visitor gave DeeDee the inspiration to approach Amy, her
new principal, and ask if she could stop using the textbook. “And [Amy’s]
response was, ‘Do you want help setting the bonfire?’ And I just said,”
sighed DeeDee, “I think I even said it out loud. ‘I love you.’”

Amy, a school leader whose age comes closer to DeeDee’s years of teaching
experience, was able to listen to DeeDee and hear that she did not want to use
the textbook due to moral concerns, not a self-serving resistance to change. In
another school or district, Amy may not have had the latitude to endorse
DeeDee’s abandoning the textbook. In a more restrictive situation, the
conversation, based in acknowledgment of teacher expertise and a shared
concern for professional ethics, likely could have yielded creative
alternatives. At the very least, a conversation that acknowledges the moral
motivations of some teacher resistance can support the mutual recognition of
shared values and commitments, such as meeting the needs of students and
the responsibilities of professional educators.
To reiterate, DeeDee experienced demoralization, not burnout. DeeDee
was still excited about teaching math, and she possessed the skills and ability
to engage young children in mathematical concepts. Her dilemma was not
how to teach math well, but that she felt she could not teach math well given
the pedagogical mandates that had been established. DeeDee felt that she had
“lost her soul” when she could not give her students the best learning
experiences that she was able to provide. Now, after thirty-five years of
teaching, she had her soul back.
DeeDee is not the only teacher whose work was re-moralized as a result of
her school leader. Wanting to pursue a teacher leadership role, Hilary
(chapter 3) was supported in applying for a fellowship that allowed her to
have a hybrid role in her school. This opportunity launched her into research
about teacher-led schools. With the support of her school and district leaders
and an educational foundation, Hilary plans to launch a teacher-led model in
her district.
Growing stale after twenty years of teaching, Yesi (chapter 5) was
prepared to transfer to another school because she needed to try something
new. When the science teaching position opened in the early grades, Yesi’s
principal offered her the job. While Yesi has been learning, sometimes with
tears as feedback, about how to gear her lessons appropriately to the school’s
earliest grades, the move has re-energized and re-moralized her. She is
quickly becoming a leader in aligning the district’s curriculum to the Next
Generation Science Standards.
School leaders have the potential to re-moralize teachers’ work, but this
process requires that teachers are able to have their moral concerns heard. At
the very least, it behooves district leaders to investigate whether teachers’
moral concerns contribute to attrition in their schools. My past research
revealed that when experienced teachers left teaching due to moral concerns
about their work, not a single school leader asked, “What could we do to
address your concerns?” or “What would it take for you to stay?”
Furthermore, not a single teacher was given an exit interview.

SOURCES OF DEMORALIZATION
Just as school leaders can be the source of teacher re-moralization, they also
can be the source of demoralization. Not asking teachers with years of service
to a school what could be done to retain them is a prime example of
professional disregard that can lead to demoralization, even for teachers who
stay. In a number of incidents, school or district leaders behaved in ways that
exceeded the bounds of professional behavior or revealed extremely poor
judgment. Quinn’s principal (chapter 2) retaliated against him over the school
loudspeaker while classes were in session. Yesi’s first principal humiliated
her in front of students (chapter 5). Monica’s principal leveled accusations of
abusing a student just before she needed to teach her students (chapter 3).
Edwin’s principal failed to acknowledge his application for a leadership
position and asked him to alter students’ grades (chapter 4). Vanessa’s school
and district leadership deflected conversations to an online portal (this
chapter).
School leaders communicate their beliefs about the dignity of the
profession directly and indirectly. While few school leaders would disparage
teaching outright, they do denigrate the profession when experienced teachers
in their school do not know what they will be teaching with fewer than three
weeks before the beginning of the school year. This was the case for Marnie
and Edwin (both in chapter 4). Even though personnel instability or
enrollment insecurity may make predicting teaching assignments challenging
on occasion, this situation, which many teachers experience as a norm,
communicates that teachers do not prepare in advance and that any teacher is
interchangeable with any other. Teachers described their sense of
professional indignity when colleagues with more seniority can bump another
teacher from their placement, as was the case in districts such as Marnie’s,
Diane’s (chapter 5), Carla’s (chapter 3), and Patty’s (discussed in this
chapter).
Nearly all teachers referenced the Danielson model for teacher assessment.
Many found the domains to be “copyrighted common sense” and were
comfortable with the parameters on which they would be evaluated.
However, Gina (chapter 4) reported that preparing a pre-observation
document alone required over twelve hours of work. As budget and curricular
pressures winnow opportunities for teacher planning, collaboration, and
independent work during the school day, school leaders need to be vigilant
about unnecessarily contributing to the intensification of teachers’ work.
Teachers were demoralized by having to spend time on tasks that did not
appear to improve their practice or enable them to better serve students.
Nearly all the teachers with whom I spoke discussed the labor that they put
into developing achievement goals for their students known as student
learning objectives (SLOs). As I traveled to several different states, I was
struck by the uniformity of the supposedly state-level expectations.
Furthermore, the teachers described nearly identical processes of directives
from school and district leaders, teacher confusion, and intense teacher
investment in fulfilling the expectation. The process concluded with school
and district leaders letting teachers know that the intense period of labor was
unnecessary and that they would provide the language and formula for the
SLOs.
Most teachers received no training on developing SLOs. However, they
knew that these metrics were incredibly important because they were the
measures that would, in part, determine evaluation rankings as well as merit
pay, in some states. The teachers wanted to do their jobs well but were at a
loss as to what made a good SLO. For many, the process proved even more
frustrating because after they spent dozens of hours puzzling over and
crafting SLOs (instead of meeting with students, planning curriculum, or
responding to student work), districts then informed teachers that the SLOs
were actually formulaic and required a template statement that negated the
value of all their prior work.
Recall Gina’s experience:

Gina scoured over student records trying to anticipate the projected learning
outcomes she could expect for students whom she had yet to meet. “I had to
come home and use these tests where all of [the students] failed and figure
out how to predict how many would pass in June. My husband said, ‘You’re
crying again.’ I care about teaching, and I felt like this was part of teaching.
And I was literally crying every night for a month, a full month. As this
district and the school and the state figured out what these things were
meaning, they kept changing it. They kept saying, ‘Oh, no, it actually means
this . . .’ And then it turned out to be a total BS phrase that we were all
supposed to copy from each other that basically said 60 percent of my kids
will get a 65 or above . . .”

Teachers expressed significant concerns about initiatives, especially

technological ones that created additional, unnecessary labor. They were livid
about software applications that sent precious resources out of the school or
district but were cumbersome, rolled out too soon, and had insufficient
support from the developer. Teachers like Patty, who has taught for sixteen
years, reported spending dozens of hours after school entering student data
into a program that could have been patched in by the central office or the
publisher. She also took it on herself to train her building in the report card
software. A self-proclaimed rule follower, she does the work even when she
is not sure about the purpose. Some initiatives made her a better teacher, but
she questioned the value of one of the several assessments she administers
each month: “I’m sitting there and entering that data into a program, I don’t
even know who looks at it. I know I have to do it and I do it, and I do it on
time. And if I’m supposed to give a test every two weeks, I give a test every
two weeks. I did it today. It’s in my plan book.”

Patty has been working in urban elementary schools in a Midwestern district

for thirteen of her sixteen years of teaching. This is her second career, and
she takes mandates in stride. Even though she works three jobs to maintain a
lifestyle focused on travel during her breaks from school, she assiduously
completes new requirements that come her way. This year, however, the level
of documentation that the district requires has overwhelmed her.
“The paperwork is a low point for me,” Patty explains. She quickly
enumerates a staggering array of tasks. “I am being asked to cocreate and
enter intervention [response to intervention (RTI)] plans for my lower
students in math and reading. I test those students biweekly [in math and
reading] and the data is entered on the computer. Report cards, grade book,
parent contact logs.” Fluidly, she moves into the new assessments that her
grade-level team is writing to align with Common Core reading standards,
then two new curricula that the district just adopted. The new curricula come
with new computer-based assessments that she must administer at regular
intervals.
Patty’s very excited about the depth that she can go into subjects on
account of Common Core. She appreciates the kind of feedback that she
receives from the computer-based assessments. “They’re making me a better
teacher; it’s helped me identify [student needs] better. You have to enter all
that data in, so it’s a lot of work, but it’s very valuable.” She is not sure that
all of the scanning she needs to complete in order to submit artifacts for her
teacher evaluations is making her a better teacher, however. Patty has yet to
see the value in entering all the data for RTI plans and biweekly assessments
into the computer, but she believes the targeted instruction helps the students,
so she is happy to do it.
“Ooh, I forgot!” Patty interjects. She now recalls that the district requires
her to develop SLOs and articulate a professional practice goal (PPG). Hers
is to “have more hands-on engaging math lessons.” She’s excited about
articulating and pursuing this development in her teaching, but she is not
motivated by the ways that SLOs will be tied to her compensation. “If I’ve
done my best, and I don’t meet my SLO, that’s just fine by me.”
“I don’t know where a lot of these things [initiatives like SLOs] come
from, to be honest with you. I mean, I was in business for a long time. [I
recognize that] the other side of the coin is teachers aren’t held very
accountable for too much, you know. So how do you change that? This
accountability was awful. How do you make teachers accountable, and
what’s the best way? I don’t know if that’s something that can be solved. I
don’t think it can be solved in a year.”

The teachers I interviewed took their jobs seriously. Even if they did not
understand the purpose of a task (in the case of SLOs) or were provided with
insufficient resources with which to perform the task well, they described the
lengths they went to do good work. Many teachers mentioned the fatigue that
accompanies a rotating slate of initiatives and technology innovations. School
and district leaders could find ways to protect their staff’s time. A number of
teachers’ experiences suggested that the haste in introducing new computer
applications expected teachers to do work that would have been better
handled by the software developer’s employees or the district’s operations
staff.
None of my interview questions focused on leadership, but almost all the
teachers mentioned the ways in which school and district leaders were
significant sources of demoralization and re-moralization in their careers.
These responses suggest that much more research is needed to understand the
ways that school and district leaders contribute to the moral sources of
teacher satisfaction and dissatisfaction. This feedback also indicates that
school and district leaders need to better acquaint themselves with the moral
motivations that many teachers bring to their work. As is said in special
education circles, understanding teachers’ moral commitments to their
students and to the dignity of their profession may be the “least dangerous
assumption.”
The teachers I interviewed often expressed empathy toward their school
leaders. They recognize that school leaders face an onslaught of mandates
and intense pressures from various constituencies, often without the same
employment protections teachers may enjoy. Every teacher I interviewed
preferred productive and collaborative relationships with their school leaders.
They were in agreement that effective school leaders enacted a clear vision,
valued teachers and their experience, and investigated teacher dissent or
resistance. The best school leaders acted as gatekeepers of policies and
mandates, assessed them in relation to the school’s vision, and sheltered
teachers and students from an onslaught of rotating initiatives.
Here, then, are some recommendations for school leaders who care about
improving teacher satisfaction and retention:
• Listen for, recognize, and respond to teachers’ moral concerns.
• Facilitate discussions about what good teaching looks like. Learn what faculty members believe
enables them to and prevents them from engaging in good teaching. Ask teachers what they need to
engage in good teaching.
• Become curious about teachers’ resistance. Teachers value administrators who provide
opportunities for them to use their voices and expertise, even when they do not ultimately agree.
• School board members can institute a listen-to-teachers tour throughout the state/district.
• Separate federal, state, and district initiatives into three categories: nonnegotiable, desirable, and
better-off-ignored. Protect teachers from unnecessary new initiatives. Sustain focus on the initiatives
that advance the goals and mission of the school. Communicate the relationship between the mission
and goals to the expectations you have for faculty.
• Practice teacher-led principles, even in traditionally governed schools.
• Create hybrid roles for teachers to exercise leadership while remaining in the classroom. Only three
of the twenty-two teachers interviewed were interested in moving into non-teaching leadership roles.
Hybrid and leadership roles work best if they are coupled with a limited teaching load.
• Institute exit interviews and collect data on why teachers leave a school or district voluntarily. A
teacher working in a hybrid role may collect the best data.
• Enable teachers to exercise choice regarding topic and composition in their professional learning
communities. Consider expanding professional learning communities beyond the school building.
• Differentiate professional development to meet needs across the career span.
• Share responsibility for difficult decisions with teachers (e.g., passing or suspending students).
Avoid passing the buck.
• Establish an ombudsperson for the district.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TEACHER UNIONS: SOURCES OF
DEMORALIZATION AND RE-MORALIZATION

On my ride out to the south side of Chicago, I imagined the person I was
about to meet. Frank would be fiery, combative, tough, and fiercely
committed to the profession. I knew that he wrote a blog about teaching and
race on a national online news outlet. Frank’s writing is insistent,
demanding, and unflinchingly honest. I expected the same energy from his in-
person presence.
While Frank delivered in being fiercely committed to his profession, I
learned quickly during our conversation that he is even more devoted to his
students and his family. He is gentle, self-effacing, and demanding in his
expectation that he enable students to make sense of their lives in his
classroom. Justice, for Frank, isn’t a remote ideal. It is a felt imperative that
motivates his choices about where to live and work and how to embody the
roles of husband, father, son, teacher, and community member.
Despite being untenured, Frank felt confident taking on his school’s union
delegate role early in his career because he trusted the principal. He noticed
that she followed the rules and referred to the union handbook. Looking
back, he admitted that he wasn’t sure what he was getting into. Nonetheless,
someone needed to take on the role. Frank’s the guy who is not going to let a
job be left undone.
He recalled feeling alienated by union meeting agendas and conversations
that bore little resemblance to the questions and issues that urgently required
attention in his school. However, when Chicago Teachers Union [CTU]
President Karen Lewis took the helm and delivered a message of social
justice unionism, Frank took notice of the change. “When I first started [with
the union], before Karen Lewis was the current CTU president, I was like,
‘What the hell are these meetings?’ Then, she came in and I was like, ‘Oh,
you’re talking about really making schools better. And, you’re also caring
about the rights of gay students, and you care what’s going on in
Honduras.’” Frank wanted to be involved in a union that brought the
problems faced by teachers and students locally and globally under one
umbrella.
The shift in the union’s message altered Frank’s level of engagement in the
CTU. The union “started caring about everything and really caring about
our kids. [The message was that we need to] care about ourselves, too, but it
wasn’t just money and benefits.” As his involvement in the union deepened,
Frank started learning more about the role of unions and union members in
effecting social change. Identifying a historical narrative enabled Frank to
see the significance of his participation in the union.
One way that Frank embodied his role as a union member was to make his
teaching public and transparent. He explains, “Being the union delegate, I
felt a moral responsibility to be like ‘Here’s what I’m doing in my classroom’
publicly.” With his first principal, this stance posed no threats of
insubordination or significant risk to his employment. The second principal
expected deference rather than reasoned rationales. The pedagogical choices
Frank made in good professional conscience contradicted the principal’s
directives. His practice of making his teaching public now appeared defiant.
“The last few years before I left were focused on testing. [The message from
the school leaders was] we only care about testing. Test prep. Test prep. Test
prep. I would send out e-mails to just the teaching staff saying, ‘I’m not going
to do test prep. I’m going to teach. I’m going to make sure that my kids are
learning skills they need to learn, but they’re not going to sit there and do
test prep.’”
These communiques, when Frank’s first principal was at the helm, would
stimulate substantive conversations in faculty meetings. These meetings might
result in teachers finding alternatives to test prep in order to build students’
skills. Teachers were given opportunities to meet in departments and by
grade level to determine where they could close skill and content gaps.
However, the second principal provided no space or time for faculty
collaboration or dialogue about policy. The unilateralism of the second
principal drove Frank more deeply into his union involvement and eventually
led him to seek another position. He also began entertaining the idea of
becoming a principal. He had witnessed the enormous impact a leader can
have on the quality of teaching and climate in a school.
Frank’s increased involvement in the union coincided with the 2012 CTU
strike. Leading up to the strike, Frank initiated conversations with his
students and their families about the problems they perceived in their
schools. While the union could legally strike only on the issues of salary and
benefits, Frank and other delegates found that students’ and families’
concerns aligned with their own as educators. Union members, like Frank,
found ways to counteract the “greedy teachers” narrative and articulate
shared concerns across stakeholders prior to initiating the strike. The
teachers held a practice picket line at the school in May, and it provided
another opportunity to communicate with the public, including students,
about the teachers’ concerns. Frank ensured that his classes were able to
articulate arguments for and against the strike.
Frank sees the union as providing a voice for students as well as teachers.
Reflecting on the challenges facing Chicago Public Schools—mayoral
control, the absence of an elected school board, and the six different leaders
of CPS in eight years—Frank remarks, “I mean the kids are who are really
getting screwed over.” He recalls a recent school closing hearing where
thousands of people packed a huge auditorium. “Little kids are talking about
‘please don’t close our schools because we have this great program.’ I mean
thousands of people are yelling at CPS, but CPS wouldn’t let them talk,
wouldn’t answer questions.”
In the face of what Frank views as an unresponsive organization are real
people inhabiting schools and communities with immediate needs. He
explains, “The per pupil funding is just morally wrong. In the school I used
to work at, we had a nurse for half a day on Fridays. That was it. We had a
library with no librarian. We had one social worker. One counselor in one of
the most violent neighborhoods. Excuse my language, but just shit you
wouldn’t want done to your family or your friend’s family. Now I think about
it as a father, I’m like, are you kidding me? . . . As teachers, we have to speak
up for our kids.”
Understanding that the union also protected the profession, not just the
employment of individual teachers, came more slowly. Frank had not
realized that his first job in Chicago was at a turnaround school. At a social
justice conference, Frank met the person whose position he occupied after all
the faculty were dismissed when the school was restructured. Frank sat with
the irony and the embarrassment of meeting this person at a union-sponsored
social justice gathering. This experience was part of a constellation of events
that opened Frank’s eyes to the politics of school reform in Chicago. He
began to develop a consciousness as a member of a profession and an
understanding of the role a union might play in both protecting its members
and articulating and upholding professional principles.
 As significant as the union has been to Frank’s sense of empowerment and
moral center as a teacher, he is not currently as engaged in the CTU as he
once was. After two years of working with a principal with whom he clashed
in terms of school priorities and leadership approach, Frank transferred to
another school in the south side of Chicago. He believes that his active union
involvement impeded his job search, and he is currently more cautious about
how he is making his voice heard. Frank continues to write for a national
online news outlet but is circumspect about taking on another leadership role
in the union.
Frank thinks his trouble transferring to another school derives from a
widespread assumption that “you get viewed as a good union person or a
good teacher. People don’t view it as you can be both.” He was granted
interviews only after removing his union involvement from his resume. In
pursuing National Board Teacher Certification (NBTC) this year, Frank aims
to show that being a strong union person and a great teacher are not
mutually exclusive. He hopes that NBTC might provide him with an added
layer of pedagogical and moral authority when he needs to take a stand. He
also believes that NBTC will provide him with a bit of a reality check. “It
would prove to me, too, that if I applied for another school and I am not
getting interviews [that] people are afraid of the outspoken teacher as
opposed to not being qualified. Because that messed with me, and it still
messes with me. It bothers me.” It is difficult for Frank to digest the fact that
a school leader would rather take a substandard teacher than a strong
teacher who was engaged in union activity.
This first year at a new school, Frank is committed to keeping his head
down. He will focus on teaching—no serving as union delegate, no working
as department chair, no coaching spoken word. Just work on being a great
teacher. I wondered if that limited, classroom-based view of teaching was
possible for a guy like Frank. I said it aloud, “I’m curious how long you’ll
contain your voice.”
“You know,” replied Frank, “I do, too.”

Frank’s engagement with the union remained superficial until he heard CTU
President Karen Lewis’s message that the union and its members are
advocates for students, public schools, and their communities. He could not
commit to deeper involvement when the union seemed to care solely about
the well-being of individual teachers. When concerns about social justice and
the teaching profession coalesced under the auspices of the union
leadership’s focused message, Frank found a way to live and communicate
his professional commitments on a grander scale.
As a teacher motivated by issues of justice and community, the union’s
initial focus on individual teachers’ rights and benefits did not resonate as
relevant or reasonable, especially when Frank compared those to the needs
his students faced in his classroom. The union leadership also effectively
identified the talents in its membership. Frank would not be the person to
rally a crowd with a megaphone, but given a platform for writing, his voice
would travel.
While Frank did not need a union to help him articulate his professional
values, his involvement with the CTU enabled him to amplify his voice. As
building delegate, he shared his teaching principles and practices with his
faculty through e-mail messages, regular meetings (some were facilitated by
his first principal), and an open-door policy. After he wrote hundreds of
letters to newspaper editors, a union organizer gave him a much wider
platform by connecting him to a national online news outlet where he now
has an audience of millions.
Becoming involved in the union provided Frank with an education that he
passed on to students. The union offered Frank a framework to make sense of
Chicago’s school governance and education policy, especially in terms of
how it affected students, teachers, and their communities.
He learned about the historical contributions that unions and their members
had made in advancing social change and advocating for justice. Frank
developed skills about organizing communities that he used to shape and
share the message of the CTU strike.
Social justice unionism takes the well-being of all in a community as its
concern. The strategies for organizing are available to all, not only those with
a union membership. When students undertook what Frank calls “the most
poorly planned [protest] I’ve ever seen” to lodge a complaint about the
school’s heating system, he designed a series of lessons to teach them how to
protest more effectively.

CAUTIOUS ASSOCIATIONS
Just as with school leaders, teachers recounted that their union could be a
source of demoralization and an opportunity for re-moralization. Teachers,
like Frank, felt disconnected and disheartened with their union when they
perceived it as promoting organizational interests over advocacy for teachers
and students. However, many also commented that opportunities available in
the union enabled them to build professional allies, a sense of purpose, and
enriched connections with their communities.
Sometimes, serving as a union building representative or delegate created
untenable conditions and employability challenges. Participation in union
governance posed a risk for Frank and others, like Quinn, whose experience
was described in chapter 2. The effects of punitive education reform such as
turnaround schools, usually limited to urban districts with high-need student
populations, decimates experienced faculties and, with it, seasoned union
leadership.
When building representative or delegate roles are taken up by untenured
faculty who are more vulnerable in terms of employment status and are still
establishing themselves professionally, they may face substantial hiring
hurdles in the future. When this happens, the union may meet short-term
needs at the expense of well-meaning but inexperienced teachers. Even mid-
career teachers like Frank may find that strong union ties hamper their future
employment prospects.
While there may be no way to eliminate assumptions employers may make
about union-affiliated employees, teacher unions could anticipate and attempt
to attenuate challenges faced by their members. Unions might consider other
mechanisms to ensure union representation in buildings where no suitable
tenured member is able to serve. One possibility could be a union mentorship
program that offers classroom-based support to new teachers while providing
building representation. Retired members might be particularly well suited
for positions like these as a form of professional service. In cities where tense
relationships between the union, school leaders, and elected officials are the
norm, union leadership and experienced peers could coach members about
ways to account for the skills developed and service rendered through union
activity without unnecessarily jeopardizing their employment prospects.

Jason checked his phone intermittently throughout our conversation. He was

waiting to hear if he was elected to a leadership position at his school.
Already he has made himself an invaluable asset to the school, which helps
when he’s in the midst of thorny relations with his school leadership. Jason
has coached multiple sports teams; works on a school-level team to ensure
students are being appropriately challenged by their course selections; and
serves on another school-level team that supports students facing social-
emotional, drug, and/or alcohol challenges. He has mentored student
teachers. Jason is the union representative for his building and is a local
teacher leader for his national union.
Jason teaches in an urban district because he loves it. He supplements his
salary with summer landscaping work in order to support his family. He grew
up in what he describes as an “anti-union house, attending religious schools
which aren’t really keen on unions.” Yet, he decided to “get engaged with the
union . . . If it’s not going to change from outside, maybe we can upend it
from within.” He and some colleagues started a rank-and-file campaign
against the local union leadership. Losing by a narrow margin, Jason has
noticed that the leaders have become more receptive to members who share
his concerns. Getting involved with the union is all about trying to repair it
from the inside. Jason said, “I don’t know for sure if the union’s primary
purpose right now is protecting me or protecting its own power.” Although
he sees his union as flawed, Jason wants to use it to leverage power.
Ask a question about educational policy, governance, or philanthropic
involvement in Jason’s urban district, and he’ll help you connect the dots. He
distinguishes himself from his colleagues who “just teach” and by
highlighting his dedication to uncovering the network of influence and impact
in the city’s schools. The city’s student population has declined dramatically
due to a loss of industry over the past fifty years, but it benefits from a vibrant
cultural scene and many institutions of higher education.
The city’s schools have been a focal point for studies and initiatives
conducted by so-called research arms of philanthropic organizations and
nearby universities. Over $80 million was pumped into the district to reform
teacher evaluation. Jason is the first to admit that prior to the initiative, he
had witnessed no systematic supports to assess and improve teacher
performance. “We needed a change,” he explained. Some of the elements of
the new evaluation program had the potential to lead to improvements in
teaching. However, he distinguished what was being measured and rewarded
in the evaluation process from an articulation of good teaching. Jason
unpacks the validity of the district’s current measures for teacher
effectiveness and merit pay. He unabashedly discusses his role in subverting
their validity.
In his role as union rep, Jason felt a responsibility to help coworkers
understand the stakes and how to game what he understood to be a flawed
evaluation process. The goal of the evaluation system, he learned, was to fire
15 percent of the district’s teachers. “I told everybody in my building, ‘Rank
yourself distinguished on every category and tell them to prove that you’re
not.’ That’s terrible for teacher growth. Teacher growth relies on honesty
and systematic reflection. But your evaluation system tells you if you can pay
your mortgage.” The premise of firing 15 percent of teachers in an urban
district struck Jason as remarkably unsound, especially in a low-status and
poorly paid profession. He hypothesized that the effects of this punitive
evaluation model would be to drive the better teachers into the higher-salary
suburbs and leave the city district understaffed by qualified teachers.
As part of the evaluation process, Jason’s union successfully negotiated for
building-level climate surveys about the teaching and learning environment.
Principals were expected to utilize the results in their annual planning
reports. Through this feedback mechanism, the teachers were able to
eliminate the district’s mandated scripted curriculum. Jason argued that the
curriculum “wasn’t good for kids,” but the worst aspect was that the
“terrible” materials were required only for the “mainstream and remedial
students.”1 He focused on the injustice. “These are the kids that needed more
engagement. One of the reasons they didn’t mess with the gifted curriculum
was because the parents would have slaughtered [the district leaders] before
it even came out. Somebody would have e-mailed the curriculum to a parent;
they would have a little house party and said, ‘This is the curriculum.’ They
would have slammed down their wine glasses and marched down to the
Board of Ed, saying ‘We’re not sending our kids to your schools.’ They buy
crap for the needy kids.”
Jason began to connect the dots between the Gates Foundation money that
was funding the district’s teacher evaluation redesign and Teach For
America. The plan to fire 15 percent of the teaching force would manufacture
a teacher shortage. Several universities in the district had teacher education
programs whose graduates clamored for positions in the city. Jason had just
returned from a Gates-funded conference that felt like a lavish vacation. “We
get a chance to stay in a hotel that I would never stay in. There was an
infinity pool! That’s not what happens in normal life for me.” While he was
there, he was really excited to talk about college readiness. He recalled,
“This is really high interest for me, but then they start talking about this
‘effective teacher’ stuff and it just smells weird.”
Although Jason had used Twitter in the past, he mostly used it for
entertainment, following sports-related news. He started live-tweeting the
conference and followed the presenters. He began to realize that everyone
presenting was connected to Teach For America. “I start a list. I’m at this
conference and in my hotel room at night and look up everyone in [my
district’s] central office. I’m looking them up: Teach For America, Broad
Institute. It’s sort of like weird bunnies replicating at district headquarters.
All of the talking points are about closing schools, effective teaching, and
buzzwords like “rigor.” Everything’s sort of clicking. The plane lands on a
Friday. On Saturday, buried in the paper, is that [our city] has a hiring crisis
and we’re going to hire Teach For America.”
Along with a union organizer and some colleagues, Jason organized a
press conference to expose the contradiction in the resources to improve
teacher effectiveness and giving Teach For America a contract in the city.
“We can’t talk about teacher effectiveness and talk about investing in [the
city’s] teachers—which was what the Gates grant was supposed to do. We
can’t talk about that and hire temps. Doesn’t make sense.” Their efforts
included coordinated protests at city hall and at the board of education
meetings. Teach For America was not awarded a contract with the city.
Teachers in the district became engaged and activated when they learned
that they had to protect their profession, not just their own jobs.

It might appear that Jason lacks a moral center when he takes the ethically
dubious tack of recommending that his fellow teachers game the teacher
evaluation system. However, Jason draws a clear distinction between an
evaluative process that affects contracts and remuneration and one that yields
constructive feedback for improving teaching practice. His distinction echoes
Gina’s concern, described in chapter 4, about the evaluative rankings. “All of
us should be developing,” she remarked. Unfortunately, that designation,
while appropriate for the growth mindset that teachers are encouraged to
foster in their students and the ideal for professional learning, has negative
effects for all teachers when applied to a system intended to determine salary
increases and contract renewals.
Contrast Jason’s disposition with DeeDee’s, described in chapter 3. Jason
echoes DeeDee’s unease with “managed curriculum,” but with a dramatically
different approach. Jason, unlike rule-following DeeDee, is a rebel. He pulled
no punches when criticizing the mandated scripted literature program. His
supervisor attempted to placate him by suggesting that he treat the managed
curriculum “like a recipe.” Jason then extended the metaphor. He said, “What
you gave us was a recipe for vomit and so we won’t make that again. That’s
what you do with a recipe that tastes like this curriculum, you just don’t make
it anymore.” Jason explained that the “recipe” of the scripted curriculum did
not engage his students in literature, and it damaged the learning environment
he worked hard to establish.
Jason was also able to take a strong stance in relation to his school leader
by strategically filling various service positions that were necessary for the
school to function. He uses his role in the union to generate support for and
protect the things he cares about most in teaching: high-quality pedagogy and
justice for all students, especially the most vulnerable who have little social
and political capital. He prizes the teaching profession and is willing to
defend it against those who cheapen it through what he sees as misguided
experimentation or nefarious doublespeak. Jason’s commitment to teaching
reaches well beyond the classroom into all kinds of cocurricular supports for
students.
A good deal of Jason’s political education has come from the action
research that has been sponsored by his union. He recognizes that sometimes
his union makes concessions in order to get a seat at the bargaining table.
This practice enabled the union to require building-level teaching and
learning environment surveys as part of the Gates-funded teacher evaluation
overhaul. These surveys provided an outlet for teachers to roundly criticize
the district’s scripted curriculum. Because these surveys were included in
building administrators’ annual evaluations, they became a mechanism by
which teachers could improve teaching and learning.
As a teacher leader with his local union chapter, Jason was able to meet
other engaged educators in his district and participate in action research.
Through this initiative, his union linked professional community, teacher
voice, teacher leadership, and student-centered activity. This combination is
an especially powerful antidote to demoralization and offers a strategy for re-
moralization that unions are well positioned to support.

CHANGE FROM WITHIN

Jason recognized that he raised a perennial question that could be posed to
any labor union: Is the union meeting the needs of its members or primarily
interested in preserving its power as an organization? Jason was willing to
tolerate some of his qualms with the union to ensure that its priorities, at least
at the most local level, aligned with his values about teaching.
For some teachers, union collaboration with philanthrocapitalists, like
Gates, reeks of capitulation rather than cooperation. Teachers like Vanessa
(chapter 6) felt let down or betrayed by their union. By accepting Gates
Foundation funds, she feels as though the very people who are supposed to
protect the core values of the profession have sold out. “Our state union and
our national union took Gates money. We have no great unions. And there’s
just so much [anti-union] propaganda out there, but they’re very, very weak.”
The unions may lose credibility from their members who are becoming
more politically attuned about the role of private capital in public education.
Online movements such as the Badass Teachers Association (BATs), United
Opt Out (UOO), and the Network for Public Education (NPE), which
includes high-profile public scholars and bloggers such as Diane Ravitch and
Anthony Cody, are raising consciousness among teachers. While not anti-
union, these independent associations of teachers and their allies are willing
to point out union collaborations that may raise some concerns from the
perspective of transparency, democracy, and teacher professionalism.
Teachers who have been “following the money” that influences reform
have trouble viewing philanthropy as neutral or beneficial when the same
organization seems to undermine the teaching profession. Vanessa considered
it hypocritical that her union would accept funding from a source that also
promotes antiunion and antiteacher initiatives. Helen (chapter 4) believes that
the unions have negotiated to the point that they have compromised the
integrity of the work teachers do.
I think our unions have been bought out to a certain degree; they’ve been complicit in the
standardization. Nobody wanted to say we don’t believe in standards. Of course not. So they went
along, they tried to compromise, you know sort of shape this whole, runaway train . . . I think in that
process, a lot of compromises, serious ethical compromises, were made, and then it almost became
too late. I mean like we’re now in a position where we’re overtesting kids so extensively across the
country and teachers now, the majority of teachers that I see, don’t really feel like they have the right
to complain. They’re just holding on. They need their jobs.
Here, Helen points out that the union has failed on both normative
commitments Daniel Lortie explains are of importance to teachers:
obligations to do the best by their students and to uphold the dignity of the
profession. When teachers view both of these norms as being violated by
their union, they may wonder about the value of holding these norms and
become demoralized.
Furthermore, when teachers believe that their union has yielded too much,
they may begin to question the purpose of the union as a body that will
uphold the values of the profession and that will protect its members. As
Helen mentions, teachers do not stand up for themselves and their profession
if they do not see examples of others doing so, especially when they perceive
their union as conceding core values.
Holding a job cannot be equated with being a professional. Helen believes
that teachers who follow the rules unquestioningly “don’t act like
professionals in the sense of participating in the dialogue on what’s going on
or even saying, wait a minute, why do we have to do this?” At their best,
Vanessa also believes that unions should enable teachers to make the
distinction between following the rules and engaging in morally defensible
work. “Unions are important to protect children, and I really don’t think
people understand that,” argued Vanessa. Teachers, in solidarity with their
union, could let school leaders know a practice or behavior is harmful to
children or the profession without feeling quite as vulnerable individually.
Helen highlighted the sympathetic watchdog role that the Badass Teachers
Association has played with the union. She recalled that when the National
Education Association took a stand against the outsized role of standardized
testing during the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act (ESEA), “the Badass Teachers said, ‘Here are the e-mails of the
leadership. Send them a note. Tell them thank you.’ So I did two block e-
mails, one was to the [union] president . . . NEA President Lily Eskelsen
[Garcia] e-mailed me back, she said ‘Thank you! Keep it up!’ and it was so
cool.”
After teaching for thirty-five years, Helen has renewed faith in her state’s
union as well. “[The union] has become responsive to teacher dissatisfaction,
and they’re starting to put forth bills that speak to the problems that are going
on.” The problems that Helen addressed were not only the bread-and-butter
issues about teacher pay and benefits. The union was taking a stand on the
well-being of students and the principles that guide good teaching.
However, challenges still remain. In chapter 2, Lee found her building
union representatives to be of little help when she was deeply troubled by
discriminatory teaching practices in her school. The union building delegates
advocated for procedures that undermined equitable student achievement.
The union felt like an irrelevant resource for the professional problems she
faced.
A VOICE OF PROFESSIONAL CONSCIENCE
Teacher unions could play a much more significant role in conveying the
message of professional conscience, or craft conscience, in the words of
education philosopher Thomas Green. Not all teachers were as willing to
parse their job responsibilities and professional ideals as Jason. Unions could
be guides in helping teachers determine when good work and job
responsibilities diverge and what course to take in those situations.
Patty, whose experience is detailed in chapter 6, viewed her moral
responsibility as fulfilling the expectations as they were outlined by her
supervisors or described in policy. As yet, nothing that Patty was asked to do
rose to the level of concern for students’ well-being. However, Hannah
Arendt has shown that the “banality of evil” is fulfilled by civil servants
following orders. By generating statements such as “An Ethic for Teachers of
Conscience in Public Schools,”2 the unions could provide teachers with better
guidance with what is within the bounds of responsible teaching and what
deserves to be questioned.
Unions can improve their messaging to their members, letting them know
when they are preserving their power in order to protect not only their
members but also the profession itself. Even though the power of unions as
labor representation is weakened in some states, as Paul describes what has
happened in his state of Wisconsin, unions can continue to establish
themselves as a moral force and professional conscience. Examples of this
approach can be seen in American Federation of Teachers President Randi
Weingarten’s weekly advertorials that appear in national news outlets.
Targeted messaging of this type at a local level could provide teachers with a
common moral vocabulary with which to talk about their profession among
themselves, with school leaders, and the broader public.
Teachers often spend a few minutes to several hours a week reading BATs,
UOO, and NPE-related posts. These teachers are eager to better understand
the policy forces that are shaping their work; they engage in voluntary
professional development while they read blogs and participate in
synchronous Twitter chats. They form professional learning communities that
enable them to interpret their work lives and address the needs of their
students. Unions are increasingly using social media to connect their
members beyond the boundaries of their schools, districts, and states.
When teachers believe that they have no voice, especially in regards to
their daily work, it is possible to become demoralized in addition to
disempowered. When teachers become demoralized due to a lack of voice,
they may feel isolated by what appears to be a disregard for the moral
motivations that drive their work. Teacher unions have an opportunity to
elevate individual teachers’ voices, which happened with Frank, but also
serve as the voice for the profession and public schools. Helen remarked,
“The union is our voice, it’s our collective voice, it isn’t perfect.” Unions
already possess the power to connect teachers and could use that
organizational leverage to stave off demoralization.

LESSONS LEARNED
Teachers want to be proud of being members of a union, but some may need
to be convinced that union membership is aligned with the values that
attracted them to the profession. Inducting new members into the union will
require tapping into the motivations that bring them to teaching.
Union leaders and organizers may consider the following:
• While any organization requires a degree of procedure-based conversation about rights and
regulations, limit those to communication that can be accomplished in writing or over e-mail.
• Educate members and the social-justice-oriented left about the history and significance of teacher
unions.
• Establish building-level teaching and learning environment climate surveys. After results are in, ask
teachers to identify action items and assist in developing an action plan.
• Harness rank-and-file energy. Jason’s initial involvement with the union began due to his
dissatisfaction with it.
• Provide clear guidance for teachers navigating education law and their professional ethics (e.g.,
What will happen if a teacher refuses to administer a high-stakes test or informs students of their
right to opt out? What are state protections for whistleblowing?).
• Develop messages that are craft-based, rooted in advocating for and protecting the good work
teachers are doing.
• Use union platforms to amplify individual teachers’ voices in local, state, and national media.
• Offer guidance on teachers’ rights regarding the use of social media for professional purposes.
• Connect like-minded activists at different schools, in various districts.
• Raise funds to support hybrid teacher roles that enable a reduced teaching schedule.
• Create member-based inquiry teams to research teachers’ concerns and have them publish or
present their findings to their peers, leaders, and the media.
• Develop messaging and share resources about the contributions of unions and union members in
improving teaching and learning conditions for all in public education.
• Remind members that most teacher assessments include advocacy as a form of ethical behavior so
that they can cite this as their reason for speaking up.
• Call on retired union members to publicly voice concerns of professional conscience.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HARNESSING THE POWER OF RE-
MORALIZATION

It was a glorious June day in Maine. After I had traveled the United States
interviewing teachers, now the teachers were coming to my workplace for
what I called a re-moralization retreat. One of my colleagues joked that it
sounded as though I was hosting a religious revival. My goal for the weekend
was more modest. Nine of the teachers I interviewed were able to attend, and
four additional experienced teachers joined the group for the weekend. I
wanted to learn if the concepts I developed for this book resonated with them
and to see if we could put some of the re-moralization strategies into
practice.
On the doorstep of a house on the Bowdoin College campus, I welcomed
teachers with whom I had spoken for about ninety minutes but who now felt
like friends. I had been living with their words for months. Although reuniting
with the teachers reminded me of details that I had forgotten, I was able to
quickly put names and stories to faces.
A woman I didn’t recognize approached. I started mentally running
through the list of invitees and wondered if I had made a mistake. Did I invite
someone with whom I had an initial phone conversation but did not decide to
interview? Had the intervening months resulted in my misconnecting words
with the memory of a face? No, I determined I had not met this woman
before.
She strode toward me with confidence and a buoyant energy, and clearly
recognized me. That was a relief. Nonetheless, during our embrace, she
sensed my unease. She leaned away, beaming, but still grasping my
shoulders, “Doris, it’s Carla!”
When I last saw Carla, she looked fifteen years older and, I know now, was
eighty pounds heavier. But it was not only her physical appearance that had
been transformed. Carla had looked defeated when we spoke eighteen months
earlier. She cried multiple times during our conversation. I walked away
from the interview wondering if talking with me had caused her more harm
than good.
 Even after Carla confirmed her identity, I struggled to reconcile this
vibrant person, who was easy to laugh and invited others to go out for a jog,
with the woman I had interviewed. Prior to the retreat, I would have
characterized Carla as the most demoralized teacher I interviewed. Still
fiercely committed to doing a good job, she regularly put in twelve- to
fourteen-hour days. She found no joy in her work. She had been written up by
her principal, who had suggested that she look for another job.
The transformation involved Carla’s teaching as well as her physical
appearance. After I had bit of time to take in Carla’s metamorphosis, I
shared my earlier internal monologue and asked, “How did the Carla I met a
year and a half ago become the Carla I’m encountering now?” Carla
grinned and informed me that this year the very same principal who
suggested she should transfer to another school presented her with the
building’s teacher of the year award. Here’s what she told me.
After several years that involved personal and professional challenges,
Carla reassessed her life at work and at home. She attempted unsuccessfully
to transfer to another district school. Realizing that she would remain at her
current school, Carla took a number of strategic actions related to her
teaching. First, she put some distance between herself and a dysfunctional
grade-level team that was “sucking any joy, hope, and energy out of me.”
She made a concerted effort to address what had been a clear indication of
her demoralization: the principal’s censure of Carla’s disrespect for her
students. Instead, she became mindful of how she responded to students, even
when their behavior was out of control. She mentioned that a professional
development series on trauma was instrumental in helping her understand
the challenges her students were facing. She realized that she must take care
of herself in order to be the teacher her students needed. Carla used the
summer to recharge and reset her nutrition and fitness regimen.
The principal took notice. Whether by her school leader’s design or as a
stroke of good luck, Carla’s grade-level team membership changed, and now
she has collegial support. She has regained the ability to feel as though she is
doing good work. The truth is that Carla is still counting down the years until
retirement (five and a half), but she says, “My tanks are full and I’m ready
for the challenges.”

TRANSFORMATION AT ANY ST(AGE)

Through my experience interviewing teachers with moral concerns about
their work, I have learned the following lessons:
1. Burnout is not inevitable for experienced teachers.
2. Demoralization may be misdiagnosed as burnout.
3. The remedies for demoralization are not the same as those for burnout.
Carla’s transformation, as well as DeeDee’s, confirms that it is possible to
resuscitate the moral rewards of teaching and revive good work. Both Carla
and DeeDee had become teachers who had lost the ability to teach in ways
that aligned with their professional commitments and values. They had
resigned themselves to going through the motions until retirement. This
realization led to their feeling shameful, resentful, and isolated.
Demoralization occurs when teachers can no longer engage in what they
consider good work. Carla was overwhelmed by her students’ challenging
behaviors and her inability to meet their needs. Earlier in her career, Carla
had drawn strength from collective action with her colleagues. When the
school district had cut funding for specials, she and her grade-level team
members established a rotation schedule to ensure that students could still
access art, music, and physical education. The last few years had been
marked by toxic colleagues who left her unsupported when she faced
difficulties developing a healthy learning environment in her classroom.
Carla was devastated because she believed the principal’s letter of reprimand
was an accurate assessment of her behavior. She knew that students needed
her respect and love, and that it was her mission to teach and support them
even though she was not currently fulfilling her mission.
DeeDee also lost her connection to what made her work good. An expert in
math pedagogy who cares deeply about her colleagues, she silenced her
concerns about the math textbook they preferred. Then, in the spirit of
teamwork, DeeDee followed the textbook to the letter, even though she
lamented her own and her students’ lack of engagement in the subject. Her
students used to say that math was their favorite subject, but no more. For
DeeDee, teaching out of the textbook was torture. She knew there was a
better way to harness students’ enthusiasm for learning and to develop their
understanding of mathematical concepts, but she felt she had no choice
because the curriculum had been set.
Resorting to conventional accounts of burnout would mischaracterize
Carla’s and DeeDee’s problems. Each teacher possessed clear norms about
what students need and deserve. They had well-developed understandings of
what it means to be a responsible member of the teaching profession. A great
deal of their unhappiness involved the distance between their actions and
their beliefs. Carla and DeeDee were not devoid of energy, interest, or
expertise. Paradoxically, as with many of the teachers I’ve interviewed, their
deep dissatisfaction with the trajectory of their careers could be attributed to
their commitment to the teaching profession and its ideals.
Popular accounts of burnout often depict inexperienced or midcareer
teachers who care too much but who fail to conserve their personal resources.
They give too much, too soon, and then run out of gas. Carla and DeeDee had
already taught for over twenty years when they began to experience deep
dissatisfaction with their work. Although it is likely that physical energy will
flag as teachers age, waning enthusiasm and energy for the profession are not
preordained.
The narrative of teacher burnout depicts the problem as personal and
internal to the individual. Teachers, in this account, begin their careers with
limited resources that are apportioned in distinct amounts and conserved to
varying degrees. One teacher may receive an abundance of resources and use
them up quickly, whereas another teacher with fewer resources portions them
out slowly, over a longer period of time. According to the burnout narrative,
when those individual resources are spent, whether quickly or slowly, a
teacher’s career ends or sputters along until resignation, retirement, or
dismissal.
The ways in which personal resources in teaching are characterized
through the burnout narrative are problematic for a number of reasons. The
burnout explanation presumes that the resources needed for a career are
readily available within each teacher and are apportioned at the beginning of
a career. In this account, individuals are solely responsible for managing the
resources that have been bestowed by luck (in the case of abundance) or
misfortune (in the case of scarcity). In this account, individual teachers are
solely responsible for conserving or squandering their limited resources.
The diagnosis of burnout renders the possibility of generating new or
renewable resources unlikely. This perspective contributes to ageism. The
more experience teachers possess, the more likely they are facing a
diminishing shelf life. Like a candle that burns quickly or slowly, the
understanding is that so long as it burns, illumination’s end is imminent.
Ageism in teaching is connected to its feminized status. The feminized status
of teaching affects how we see the value of teachers themselves. This is
influenced by US cultural assumptions about the value of women as they age
and the expertise needed for the work. This reading of teaching helps explain
why programs promoting young, inexperienced, and temporary workers are
viewed with enthusiasm. Those working in masculinized professions, such as
business, law, and medicine, are often valued for the wisdom that
accompanies experience and older age.
Moral rewards are the renewable resources that teachers can access when
doing good work. To review, individuals engage in good work when they
believe (1) the work serves a social purpose that contributes to the well-being
of others and (2) the way the work is conducted is aligned with that social
purpose.1 Morally motivated teachers engaged in good work can, as Carla
explained, “fill their tanks” at any point in their careers. Good work does not
need to become less good over time. Teachers can forge meaningful
relationships with students year after year. Teachers can develop lessons that
help students make sense of their most pressing questions, even as those
questions change. Teachers can develop environments that cultivate respect
for others and for learning, and those environments shift as students and
teachers themselves change.

DEMORALIZATION AND RE-MORALIZATION IN

CONTEXT
The renewable resources of moral rewards are found in doing good work;
they are not discovered as the necessarily limited personal possessions of
individual teachers. Therefore, good work depends on the conditions of
teaching, not just an individual teacher’s motivations, skill, and expertise.
The context of teaching provides the backdrop for the action needed to
generate the moral rewards. When the context prevents teachers from
generating those rewards, demoralization is possible.
Contexts for all kinds of work inevitably change. When shifts occur,
teachers and their allies need to develop strategies to ensure that good work
can continue. These situations may call for resisting challenges to good work,
building new alliances to sustain good work, and revisiting understandings of
what it means to do good work. This is the moral work of authentic
professional community and the basis for professional ethics.
The approaches that once enabled teachers to access what is good about
their work may no longer be effective under the current conditions in which
they work. Sometimes teachers will need to readjust their practice to be able
to tap into the renewable resources available in good work. Sometimes
teachers will need to join together to challenge factors that block their ability
to engage in good work. At times, teachers will need to come together to
remind themselves of what good work entails.
The profiles of teachers in this book reveal that educators do not need to
arrive at a consensus about the methods of good work. In fact, morally
engaged teachers may become embroiled in heated disagreements with other
morally engaged teachers. Some teachers, like Nina, will focus on the
developmental needs of their students. Others, like Edwin, will focus on
issues of professional integrity and fairness. What the teachers with a moral
sense about their work share is a recognition that their work involves
responsibilities to their students and responsibilities to their profession. The
particular content and emphasis of these responsibilities may be unique to
each teacher but should be recognizable and defensible to others.
For Carla and DeeDee, teaching had once been an outlet to engage in good
work. Then it became the source of shame. While experiencing
demoralization, neither teacher believed she was contributing to the well-
being of students or the integrity of the profession. For Carla, the context of
her professional community became toxic and her students’ needs intensified.
For DeeDee, her pedagogy and curriculum became a straightjacket that filled
her with regret. Their work environments created obstacles to accessing the
moral rewards of teaching they once enjoyed.
However, in considering their re-moralization, more happened for these
experienced teachers than just an internal and personal shift in attitude. They
were able to reestablish good work that aligned with their moral motivations
because the contexts in which they taught also shifted. Some of the changes
came about as a result of their actions and some because of the
responsiveness of others (school leaders, colleagues, etc.).
When Carla’s principal held her accountable for failing to treat her
students with respect, she was devastated. She knew the reprimand to be
accurate and justified. Reconnecting with her moral motivations enabled
Carla to recalibrate her work and home life. She made a decision to pull away
from destructive influences of her colleagues. She then had created enough
space to be mindful in her responses to troubling student behaviors, take in
what the trauma workshop offered, and develop productive and supportive
relationships with a new grade-level team.
DeeDee taught a discovery-based math curriculum during one period she
had carved out of the weekly schedule. Yet, this period was insufficient to
counteract the damage she felt she was doing by continuing to teach math out
of the textbook. Students deserved the best possible instruction, and she was
not making it available to them. Fortuitously, DeeDee opened her classroom
to a math consultant who was conducting research at the school. At the
urging of the consultant, DeeDee approached her new principal to discuss her
dissatisfaction with the math curriculum. The principal encouraged DeeDee
to abandon the textbook and pursue math instruction guided by her deep
pedagogical expertise.
Demoralization occurs as a result of a number of factors that impinge on
teachers’ ability to do good work. These factors may be changes in policy,
curriculum, and personnel. Therefore, re-moralization involves addressing
those changes in relation to one’s vision of good work, not just changing
one’s attitude or perspective. Carla and DeeDee proved capable of growing
and changing as veteran teachers; they were guided by their professional
commitments to do good work in fortuitously responsive contexts. Unlike
accounts of burnout that suggest that resources lost are often gone forever,
teachers can realign their practices with professional values if they are given
the opportunity and support.

WHY DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN BURNOUT AND

DEMORALIZATION MATTERS
Teachers may feel affronted and misrecognized by explanations of teacher
dissatisfaction and attrition that rely on the concept of burnout. Burnout rests
on the assumption that something is wrong with the individual teacher that
prevents him or her from succeeding in the job. In demoralization,
experienced educators understand that they are facing a conflict between their
vision of good work and their teaching context.
Teacher educator and researcher Mary Kennedy has warned educational
researchers about what social psychologists call a fundamental attribution
error:
[W]e have veered too far toward the attribution of teaching quality to the characteristics of teachers
themselves, and are overlooking situational factors that may have a strong bearing on the quality of
the teaching practices we see . . . It is time to look beyond the teacher to the teaching situation itself.2
An op-ed in the New York Times reveals how medicine is shifting away
from the individual blame-game, too. Most discussions of disproportionally
high rates of hypertension in the US black population focus on individual
lifestyle and personal choices. However, the cardiologist authoring the article
asks: what if high blood pressure is the body’s reasonable response to the
environment for black Americans?3
The diagnosis of demoralization does not absolve teachers from any
responsibility for their current condition. All the strategies for re-moralization
involve teachers taking some form of action. The difference is that the action
is not all an “inside job” and may require that they alter their contexts or find
alternative outlets for good work. I suspect that teachers experiencing
demoralization will be in enough pain to be motivated to take some form of
action. Recall that those facing demoralization still want to do good work
through teaching but find that they are prevented from doing so. Removing or
finding ways around those obstacles is a relief.
Over the course of my decade of research on teachers’ moral concerns
about their work, I have noticed the rhetorical refrain of the painful loss or
disappearance of one’s profession, usually through metaphors of death,
divorce, or abusive relationships. These feelings were illustrated by the
teachers who participated in the retreat. In teams, I asked them to draw how
demoralization felt.
The images ranged from trying to extinguish a volcano with a garden hose
(hopelessness, impotence), learning that a loved one has a terminal illness
(grief, mourning, powerlessness), crawling while concealed by a dark cloud
as others looked on from the distance (isolation, shame, self-indictment),
being burned alive by relentless requirements and initiatives (overwhelmed,
punished), shouting with a megaphone and separated from school leaders and
policy makers by a soundproof wall (voiceless, impotent, hopeless), and the
familiar images of Sisyphus endlessly trying to push a boulder up a mountain,
only to see it roll back (futility, despair, sapping of energy and strength).
The retreat participants and the interviewees experiencing demoralization
explained that these feelings were manifested physically as well as
emotionally. Teachers experienced feelings of nausea, drowning, and
suffocating; felt a need to take flight or disappear; had gastrointestinal
problems; were diagnosed with clinical depression; and gained weight. They
missed school days, even after having years of perfect attendance.
Demoralization has consequences for teacher well-being that may lead to
chronic absenteeism as well as attrition.
I later asked participants to provide the definition of demoralization that
they took away from the retreat. They understood demoralization as a
professional problem as opposed to burnout, which indicates that they have
personal issues that impair their professionalism. They remarked that their
professional concerns disrupt both their personal and professional lives—
meaning the negative impact of demoralization is widespread. The sense of
powerlessness to protect the profession they love felt devastating and
overwhelming.
Here are some of the definitions provided by the retreat attendees:

Before the retreat, I thought [demoralization] was a combination of people

being personally and professionally depressed. I would now consider it
strictly a professional life “cause” though the effects certainly can bleed over
into someone’s personal life. I consider demoralization a teacher’s way [of
indicating that] the profession has not been what he or she thought it would
be or should be. I think it can wax and wane. It can make you leave or make
you take no joy in your work or make you a bitter and depressed person even
outside of your work.

Demoralization is extreme discouragement bordering on despair that

affects teaching, learning, and professionalism. It is brought on by a feeling
of helplessness in the face of top-down or bureaucratic systems that seem
resistant to change.

Demoralization is losing sight of the thing(s) that inspired you to teach in

the first place and then falling in line with the “system” as it exists.
Demoralization is when you have lost your passion for the job and it is just a
job, but it was the job requirements that “others” created that did it to you
and not the job itself. Demoralization means that given the right mix of
circumstances (admin, coworkers, funding, etc.) you could re-moralize and
thrive. Demoralization means that it was stolen from you, not willingly given
up. There is a light and a hope, but it gets further away the more it is not
addressed.

When teachers have a conscious or unconscious dissatisfaction that they

did not previously have with the teaching profession, due to ethical/moral
conflicts from corporate education reform and the attack on public
education.
 Not feeling “good” about what I am doing.

The distinction between demoralization and burnout was also important for
the teachers who attended the retreat. The difference enabled them to reframe
themselves as agents who continue to strive to do good work. While the
distinction does not automatically alter the challenging contexts in which
many of them teach, naming the experience of demoralization enabled them
to better identify the obstacles to good work. The professional community
that we generated reduced their feelings of shame and isolation, replacing
them with a sense of solidarity and possibility.

I think using two different words is so important. Because burnout is some

kind of personal deficiency . . . but demoralization is definitely imposed on
good teachers by outside corrupt or misguided forces. And demoralization
needs to be treated by addressing the disease (those forces) rather than the
symptoms (the teacher’s negative experiences).

Helping understand the difference between demoralization and burnout

has helped me immensely mentally. It has allowed me to reflect on the harder
times of teaching and reaffirm that I’m not tired of teaching, I’m tired with
the BS that I have to fight while simultaneously teaching.

I think the way you described it—watching a loved one die

[demoralization] versus being sick yourself [ burnout]—is perfect. Because
there is this sense that you have little control over what is happening, and
you’ll have to live afterwards. If you stay or leave, you still have the good
and bad memories, and what you loved has basically been taken from you.
And to further the disease metaphor, there are people and foundations who
have intentionally given this disease to your loved one. So that makes it even
worse.

Because burnout implies being tired and just needing a break. Burnout
also implies that the fault lies within. Demoralization implies that the fault
lies with the exterior and outside changes we feel when we have no control
over. Burnout can possibly be fixed [more easily than demoralization] with
time off and self-care. Demoralization is much more difficult to fix and the
repercussions are more pervasive.
 If you can label it and talk about it, you can better address it and face it.
Burnout is such a huge, nameless, faceless blob of a problem that it seems
all-consuming . . . but re-moralization feels like it can be targeted and
confronted. To “re” anything is to remind yourself of why you do what you
do and for whom—it feels like there is an “again” coming. Burnout means
the fuel/wick is spent and there is nothing more to give. When there is nothing
more to give, there is no more hope, motivation, or struggle for self. YOU
burn out, but it feels like re-moralization comes from other places, which
means it can be addressed.

Burnout comes from within each person. Perhaps a teacher wants to retire
but needs a few more years and is just putting in the time. If students and
colleagues sense this, it is often written off as burnout. Demoralization comes
from society and is like a million tiny spears puncturing a teacher who loves
his/her job and feels it is an important and ethical career. As the media
promotes the lies of corporate ed reform and the public internalizes those
messages as truths, students, families, and community members who once
trusted and respected us no longer do. There is no evidence in the ed reform
lies, and because people believe what they hear without questioning it,
teachers become defenders of themselves and their practice instead of
respected professionals. The deprofessionalization of the teaching profession
is demoralizing and is totally different from burnout.

Demoralization can be fixed.

With a better diagnosis, teachers with moral concerns about their work can
have less dis-ease. They come to recognize the worthiness of their pursuit of
good work in a professional community composed of others who also bring
moral commitments and values to teaching. These specific values do not need
to be identical, but the recognition of a shared commitment to good work
provides the basis for many of the strategies that may promote re-
moralization.

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS IN PRACTICE

These are demoralizing times for many teachers. Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi,
and Damon explain that what they call difficult times “expose the threats to
good work and may mobilize people to struggle productively, to confirm the
essence of their calling, embrace high standards, and reaffirm their personal
identities.”4 The upside of demoralization is that it indicates a situation or
context that needs to be changed or altered. When teachers work together to
alter the situations that need to be changed, they begin to reverse the process
of demoralization and build professional community.
When teachers engage in conversations about the challenges of enacting
their professional commitments in relation to the conditions of teaching, they
are engaged in professional ethics. In those conversations, they are making
public the values they bring to their work. They are making public what
enables or prevents them from cultivating good work. If teaching conditions
present ongoing and persistent challenges to good work, teachers need to ask:
Can I fulfill this responsibility in a new way? If not, is this a value that is
worth fighting for? What would need to change in order to be able to enact
this value? Can I continue to work with my moral center being compromised
in this way?
Teachers who cannot find ways to resolve the value conflicts that they
encounter in their work may leave as conscientious objectors to teaching.5
They will leave teaching rather than seriously compromise their professional
commitments. School leaders, unions, and colleagues can intervene before
teachers resign as conscientious objectors and prior to experiencing
demoralization.
Nearly all the teachers I have met explained that they have had few
opportunities to articulate their understanding of good work. Those who did
often used their individual voice, through blogging or letters to the editor, to
speak to a wider audience. Few of these teachers, absent those who had
engaged in activist activities, had articulated their vision of good work in
conversation with other teachers. Nearly all the teachers remarked that they
have no structured opportunities to reflect on how school policies and
practices affect their ability to engage in good work.
Engaging in conversations about good teaching and good work is different
from determining who is and is not a good teacher. Educational researchers,
like myself, can leverage our status and access to publishing and speaking
outlets to amplify teachers’ voices. We need narratives, not of heroes who
persevere through impossible demands, but of teachers who weigh how they
can do good work in the face of everyday requirements that might subvert
their professional commitments. We need to listen to the moral claims that
experienced teachers make when they criticize their work conditions,
policies, and practices. We need to hear teachers’ claims as moral
commentary on a moral profession. Their collective voices are persuasive and
give us insight into the status of the project of public education in the United
States.
Professional ethics take place through deliberation and conversation. At
times, professional ethics will entail questions about what is the right course
of action in a particular situation. Other times, conversations about
professional ethics will entail asking the broader questions about what it
means to participate in and enact good work.
When engaging in conversations about what good work entails with
individuals outside the profession, teachers need to be prepared that the
conversation may be assumed to be self-interested. Teachers can be better
prepared to hold their ground by naming their moral concerns as moral and
refusing the attribution that their concerns are personal preferences.

After fifteen years of experience, Reggie knows where he stands as a teacher.

He is confident in his abilities and unwavering in his dedication to the work.
With two master’s degrees, he serves as visiting faculty in prestigious
universities nearby. He is well compensated—at the top of the pay scale in
his district, which has the highest salaries in the state. Nonetheless, he was
looking for a way out and was applying for doctoral programs in urban
education.
Reggie is passionate about teaching. His accounts of his first year were
enough to convince his girlfriend to enroll in a teacher education program
and enter the profession. He has threatened me that he could tell me stories
about teaching all night. He is enamored of the diverse and challenging
community where he works, describing it as “magical.” His goal is to “do
the right thing by kids.”
Difficult times have become the norm. Reggie had seventeen
administrators come and go in the last ten years. He witnessed the entire
faculty in a nearby school receive pink slips. Even though all the staff
ultimately were extended new offers at the same school, the strongest
teachers had already accepted other positions. He watched his teaching
environment move from a place where he was highly valued for his
innovative approaches to engaging students in literature to a “top-down, fill-
in-the bubble” context.
With extensive background in linking literacy and the arts, Reggie’s
classroom used to be a hum of activity. Students would be updating a
Japanese folktale, turning a Shakespeare sonnet into a play, cutting up an
Emily Dickinson poem to make a new text. He saw his role as designing these
engaging and purposeful learning opportunities so that he could then support
students through critique and encouragement. Ongoing collaborative
projects enabled students to develop the skills of self-monitoring and team
building.
Now, Reggie monitors a classroom where students click through an online
literacy program that supplies student data directly to the district. His
experience, he believes, “is endemic of a cultural shift to teacher as worker
rather than teacher as professional. Teacher as the deliverer . . . the
curriculum delivery machine.” He believes that this shift has allowed
programs like Teach For America to proliferate, and that is demoralizing. “It
galls me that with six weeks of training, you are allowed entrance into this
profession to which I have devoted my entire career, significant amounts of
money, and education, and training, and practice.”
For a person like Reggie, finding nowhere to place his intellectual energy
in teaching has become disorienting and depressing. “The expertise that I
may have and bring is no longer really wanted,” he explained. The desire to
be valued as an intellectual attracts Reggie to higher education. His
affiliations with local universities have been his lifeline. Ending his work at
the school and then working at the teacher education program “is night and
day. Suddenly, I’m in a place where people value what I have to say and I
feel productive. And smart!”
When working with student teachers, Reggie stresses that they find allies
and be able to provide pedagogical justification for everything they do. When
you are a break-the-mold teacher, he recommends, you want to be able to
provide a clear rationale and purpose for each and every move. Reggie is
passing along what he sees as the core of professional integrity. It is
necessary to provide reasons and to hold the line when needed.
“My teacher education program gave me the intellectual vocabulary to say
‘no.’”

Reggie, like so many teachers I spoke to for this book, entered teaching
because it was an intellectually vibrant way to do good work. Over the course
of his career, he has found it increasingly difficult to live the professional
values that sustained him for many years. The intellectual dimensions of his
work disappeared.
Educators who experience demoralization are not saying “no” to the
teaching profession. They are struggling to enact good work in a pedagogical
policy environment that is often deaf to their moral concerns. When teachers
cannot uphold professional values and commitments, when they cannot
access the moral rewards of their work, they become demoralized.
These are demoralizing times for public school teachers, but they need not
be defeatist times. Experienced teachers, and retired teachers as well, can
recognize their collective power to shine a light on the ways that students are
not being well served, and when appropriate, when young people in public
schools are being harmed. Collectively, teachers can point to ways that the
profession is being degraded. Difficult and demoralizing times issue a
challenge to a profession. They inspire practitioners to declare what they
stand for.

WAYS TO ATTENUATE TEACHER ATTRITION

Effectively remedying teacher attrition is impossible if we are examining
only a portion of the problem of teacher dissatisfaction. Educational
researchers need to refine their inquiries so they may capture the moral
dimensions of teacher attrition. When teachers bring moral motivations to
their work, it is possible that moral concerns could cause them to leave.
The US Department of Education School Staffing Survey and the Teacher
Follow-up Survey do not include items that enable teachers to signal moral
concerns about their work. Additional items that could capture these types of
concerns could be: Do you believe that you are able to teach in ways that
serve students well? Do you believe that fulfilling your job responsibilities
has harmed your students? Your profession? There may be concern that
teachers’ responses could criticize and undermine federal and state policies.
However, the current teacher shortage may provide sufficient rationale to
gather as much data as possible to stave off teacher attrition.
Heather Carlson-Jacquez has developed an instrument to measure teacher
demoralization.6 School leaders and unions could use this survey to assess the
degree and type of moral concerns among teachers. A more finely tuned tool
such as this reveals both the kinds of moral commitments that teachers bring
to their work and the ways that they are unable to enact them.
Teacher educators, like myself, can help novice teachers develop a vision
for good work. This usually takes the form of an articulated “philosophy of
teaching.” Our role is to enable new teachers to sustain and enact the
normative commitments when they are inducted into the profession. In
preparation for that transition, we can present teachers with cases that ask
them to envision how they might continue to live their values in the face of
challenging policies and environments. We can also give teachers the
intellectual vocabulary to say “no,” when necessary.
Notes

INTRODUCTION
1. Christopher Day and Qi Gu, “Variations in the Conditions for Teachers’ Professional Learning
and Development: Sustaining Commitment and Effectiveness over a Career,” Oxford Review of
Education 33, no. 4 (2007): 423–43; Caroline F. Mansfield, Susan Beltman, Anne Price, and Andrew
McConney, “‘Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff’: Understanding Teacher Resilience at the Chalkface,”
Teaching and Teacher Education 28, no. 3 (2012): 347–67; Janice H. Patterson, Loucrecia Collins, and
Gypsy Abbott, “A Study of Teacher Resilience in Urban Schools,” Journal of Instructional Psychology
31, no. 1 (2004): 3–11.
2. Susan Moore Johnson and The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, Finders and Keepers:
Helping New Teachers Survive and Thrive in Our Schools (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
3. Doris A. Santoro with Lisa Morehouse, “Teaching’s Conscientious Objectors: Principled Leavers
of High-Poverty Schools,” Teachers College Record 113, no. 12 (2011): 2671–705.
4. One notable limitation of this group of interviewees is the lack of racial diversity. With the dearth
of teachers of color entering and remaining in the profession, it is especially important to hear their
voices and to learn if moral concerns weigh into their decisions to enter, stay, or leave. Here are some
characteristics of the twenty-three experienced teachers who expressed moral concerns about their
work, at the time of the interviews in 2014–2015:
• Seven taught for five to twelve years, six from thirteen to nineteen years, and eight for over twenty
years.
• The total teaching experience of the group is 370 years.
• Fourteen taught in urban schools, six in suburban, and two in rural.
• The schools are located in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and the South.
• Fifteen taught in schools considered high-need. Some have been “turnaround” schools or have been
operating under the long-term threat of closure.
• One worked at a school that is internationally recognized and visited for its inquiry-based approach.
• Three of the districts where the teachers taught appear regularly in magazine lists of the US’s best
schools.
• Eight of the teachers I interviewed worked in elementary schools, four at the middle school/junior
high level, and nine in high schools.
• They taught art, English, English language learners, history, library media studies, math, science,
special education, and world languages.
• Three had won state- or national-level awards for teaching.
• Two were National Board certified teachers, two were pursuing National Board Teacher
Certification.
• Some identify as ardent rule followers, whereas others characterize themselves as renegades.
• All but two, who identify as Latinx, are white.
• Fourteen are women. Nine are men. All are cisgendered.
• Some are in same-sex relationships.
CHAPTER 1
1. Leib Sutcher, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Desiree Carver-Thomas, A Coming Crisis in
Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. (Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy
Institute, 2016).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Richard Ingersoll, “Teacher Turnover and Teacher Shortages: An Organizational Analysis,”
American Educational Research Journal 38, no. 3 (2001): 499–534.
5. Sutcher et al., “Coming Crisis,” 4.
6. MetLife, The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School Leadership (New
York: MetLife, 2013); Office of Performance Evaluations, Workforce Issues Affecting Public School
Teachers (Boise: Idaho Legislature, 2013).
7. American Federation of Teachers and Badass Teachers Association, Quality of Worklife Survey
2015, http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/worklifesurveyresults2015.pdf.
8. Dave Umhoefer, “For Unions in Wisconsin, a Hard and Fast Fall Since Act 10,” Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, November 27, 2016, http://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-
wisconsin-fast-and-hard-fall-since-act-10.html.
9. Geraldine J. Clifford, Those Good Gertrudes: A Social History of Women Teachers in America
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
10. Kristin Buras, “The Mass Termination of Black Veteran Teachers in New Orleans: Cultural
Politics, the Education Market, and Its Consequences,” The Educational Forum, 60, no. 2 (2016): 154–
70.
11. Richard M. Ingersoll and David A. Perda, “The Status of Teaching as a Profession,” in Schools
and Society: A Sociological Approach to Education, eds. Jeanne Ballantine and Joan Spade (Los
Angeles: Pine Forge Press, 2008), 106–18.
12. Gallup, The State of America’s Schools: The Path to Winning Again in Education, 2014,
http://www.gallup.com/services/178709/state-america-schools-report.aspx.
13. Ingersoll and Perda, “Status,” 117.
14. Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in
Finland? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2014), 99–103; H. Richard Milner, Policy Reforms and
De-Professionalization of Teaching (Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center, 2013),
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/policy-reforms-deprofessionalization.
15. Linda Valli, Robert G. Croninger, Marilyn J. Chambliss, Anno O. Graeber, and Daria Buese, Test
Driven: High-Stakes Accountability in Elementary Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008),
161.
16. Michael W. Apple and Susan Jungck, “‘You Don’t Have to Be a Teacher to Teach This Unit:’
Teaching, Technology and Gender in the Classroom,” American Educational Research Journal 27, no.
2 (1990): 227–51.
17. Andy Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in the
Postmodern Age (London: A&C Black, 2001).
18. Steve Suitts, A New Majority Research Bulletin: Low Income Students Now a Majority in the
Nation’s Public Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2015),
http://www.southerneducation.org/Our-Strategies/Research-and-Publications/New-Majority-Diverse-
Majority-Report-Series/A-New-Majority-2015-Update-Low-Income-Students-Now.
19. Southern Poverty Law Center, The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Presidential Election
on Our Nation’s Schools, 2016, https://www.splcenter.org/20161128/trump-effect-impact-2016-
presidential-election-our-nations-schools.
20. Anne Podolsky, Tara Kini, Joseph Bishop, and Linda Darling-Hammond, “Sticky Schools: How
to Find and Keep Teachers in the Classroom,” Phi Delta Kappan 98, no. 8 (2017): 19–25.
21. Elizabeth Campbell, “Ethical Intentions and the Moral Motivation of Teachers,” in Handbook of
Moral Motivation: Theories, Models, Applications, eds. Karin Heinrichs, Fritz Oser, and Terence Lovat
(The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2013), 517–32; David T. Hansen, The Call to Teach (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1995).
22. Daniel C. Lortie, “The Teacher’s Shame: Anger and the Normative Commitments of Classroom
Teachers,” The School Review 75, no. 2 (1967): 155–71.
23. Thomas F. Green, “The Formation of Conscience in an Age of Technology,” American Journal
of Education 94, no. 1 (1985): 1–32.

CHAPTER 2
1. This chapter draws on an argument that I made originally in Doris A. Santoro, “Good Teaching in
Difficult Times: Demoralization in the Pursuit of Good Work,” American Journal of Education 188,
no. 1 (2011): 1–23.
2. Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence
and Ethics Meet (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

CHAPTER 3
1. Doris A. Santoro with Lisa Morehouse, “Teaching’s Conscientious Objectors: Principled Leavers
of High-Poverty Schools,” Teachers College Record 113, no. 12 (2011): 2671–705.

CHAPTER 4
1. Daniel C. Lortie, “The Teacher’s Shame: Anger and the Normative Commitments of Classroom
Teachers,” The School Review 75, no. 2 (1967): 155.
2. Doris A. Santoro, “‘I Was Becoming Increasingly Uneasy About the Profession and What Was
Being Asked of Me’: Preserving Integrity in Teaching,” Curriculum Inquiry 43, no. 5 (2013): 563–87.
3. See Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016).
4. Doris A. Santoro, “Teachers’ Expressions of Craft Conscience: Upholding the Integrity of a
Profession,” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 23, no. 6 (2017): 750–761.
5. Thomas F. Green, “The Formation of Conscience in an Age of Technology,” American Journal of
Education 94, no. 1 (1985): 23.
6. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1984).

CHAPTER 5
1. Christopher Day and Qi Gu, The New Lives of Teachers (New York: Routledge, 2010), 156.
Christopher Day and Qi Gu, “Variations in the Conditions for Teachers’ Professional Learning and
Development: Sustaining Commitment and Effectiveness over a Career,” Oxford Review of Education
33, no. 4 (2007): 423–43; Caroline F. Mansfield, Susan Beltman, Anne Price, and Andrew McConney,
“‘Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff’: Understanding Teacher Resilience at the Chalkface,” Teaching and
Teacher Education 28, no. 3 (2012): 347–67; Janice H. Patterson, Loucrecia Collins, and Gypsy
Abbott, “A Study of Teacher Resilience in Urban Schools,” Journal of Instructional Psychology 31, no.
1 (2004): 3–11.
2. Doris A. Santoro, “Teachers’ Expressions of Craft Conscience: Upholding the Integrity of a
Profession,” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 23, no. 6 (2017): 750–761.
3. Christopher Emdin, “The Failure Cycle Causing a Shortage of Black Male Teachers,” PBS
Newshour, January 26, 2017, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/failure-cycle-causing-shortage-black-
male-teachers/.
 4. Santoro, “Teachers’ Expressions”; Doris A. Santoro with Lisa Morehouse, “Teaching’s
Conscientious Objectors: Principled Leavers of High-Poverty Schools,” Teachers College Record 113,
no. 12 (2011): 2671–705.

CHAPTER 6
1. Leib Sutcher, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Desiree Carver-Thomas, A Coming Crisis in
Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. (Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy
Institute, 2016).
2. Matthew A. Kraft, William H. Marinell, and Derrick Shen-Wei Yee, “School Organizational
Contexts, Teacher Turnover, and Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data,” American
Educational Research Journal 53, no. 5 (2016): 1411–49.
3. Jim Knight, “What Can We Do About Teacher Resistance?” Phi Delta Kappan 90, no. 7 (2009):
508–13; Kathryn B. McKenzie and James J. Scheurich, “Teacher Resistance to Improvement of
Schools with Diverse Students,” International Journal of Leadership in Education 11, no. 2 (2008):
117–33; Ewald Terhart, “Teacher Resistance Against School Reform: Reflecting an Inconvenient
Truth,” School Leadership and Management 33, no. 5 (2013): 486–500.
doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2013.793494.
4. Betty Achinstein and Rodney T. Ogawa, “(In)Fidelity: What the Resistance of New Teachers
Reveals About Professional Principles and Prescriptive Educational Policies,” Harvard Educational
Review 76, no. 1 (2006): 30–63, 55.
5. Doris A. Santoro, “‘We’re Not Going to Do That Because It’s Not Right’: Using Pedagogical
Responsibility to Reframe the Doublespeak of Fidelity,” Educational Theory 66, no. 1–2 (2016): 263–
77.
6. John Hildebrand, “NY Education Commissioner Says Opt-outs ‘Not Reasonable,’” Newsday,
August 20, 2015, http://www.newsday.com/long-island/maryellen-elia-nyeducation-commissioner-
says-test-opt-outs-not-reasonable-1.10759569.
7. Doris A. Santoro, “Cassandra in the Classroom: Teaching and Moral Violence,” Studies in
Philosophy and Education 36, no. 1 (2017): 49–60.

CHAPTER 7
1. For a more detailed account of Jason’s criticism of the curriculum, see Doris A. Santoro, “‘We’re
Not Going to Do That Because It’s Not Right’: Using Pedagogical Responsibility to Reframe the
Doublespeak of Fidelity,” Educational Theory 66, no. 1–2 (2016): 263–77.
2. Teachers of Conscience, “An Ethic for Teachers of Conscience in Public Education,”
https://teachersofconscience.wordpress.com/ethics/.

CHAPTER 8
1. Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence
and Ethics Meet (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
2. Mary M. Kennedy, “Attribution Error and the Quest for Teacher Quality,” Educational
Researcher 39, no. 8 (2010): 591.
3. Sandeep Jauhar, “When Blood Pressure Is Political,” New York Times, August 7, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-blood-pressure-is-political.html.
4. Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon, Good Work, 6.
5. Doris A. Santoro with Lisa Morehouse, “Teaching’s Conscientious Objectors: Principled Leavers
of High-Poverty Schools,” Teachers College Record 113, no. 12 (2011): 2671–705.
6. Heather A. Carlson-Jacquez, “Development of an Instrument to Measure K–12 Teacher
Demoralization in a Test-Based Accountability Context” (Unpublished dissertation, Virginia
Commonwealth University, 2016), http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4541/.
Acknowledgments

Many expressions of gratitude are required for ten years of research:

To all the teachers whose experiences have contributed to this book and beyond, thank you for
trusting me with your stories.
To the Bowdoin College students who have supported this research, you have provided an invaluable
service: Leah Alper, Elina Berglund, Kate Berkley, Ramaa Chitale, Kaitee Dailey, Sammie Francis,
Diego Guerrero, Anna Martens, Sophie Meyers, Roya Moussapour, Mitsuki Nishimoto, Luke Potter,
Perla Rubi, Sarah Steffen, Ryan Szantyr, Serena Taj, and Anna Williams.
To my Education Department colleagues past and present, especially Dino Anderson, Katie Byrnes,
Chuck Dorn, Nancy Jennings, Casey Meehan, and Alison Miller, thank you for listening to my
processing and for harborside working lunches. Special thanks to George Isaacson, who educated me
about whistleblower cases. Lynn Brettler made the retreat a success.
To Bowdoin College for indispensable funding.
To David T. Hansen, you provided me with a model for how to integrate philosophical and empirical
research.
To Katharine Atwood, you transformed my thoughts into a polished graphic.
To Nancy Walser, you empowered me to write what I know.
To my parents, you made all this possible.
To my finest motivators, Toby and Nat, you encourage me to get my work done efficiently so we can
go have adventures together.
About the Author

Doris A. Santoro is an associate professor at Bowdoin College, where she serves as chair of the
Education Department. She teaches courses in educational studies and teacher education. Her
philosophical and qualitative research examines teachers’ moral concerns about their work and their
moral arguments for resistance. She has taught high school English in Brooklyn and San Francisco,
GED prep at an alternative to incarceration program in Manhattan, and worked as a bilingual literacy
consultant in Jersey City.
Index

accountability, 28, 85
accusations, against teachers, 72–82
action research, 163
activism, 116, 118, 124
ageism, 136, 176
Arendt, Hannah, 167
arts education, 93–95
authority
—imposed, 17
—questioning of, 94, 95
autonomy, 26, 27, 40, 77, 126

Badass Teachers Association, 20, 115, 118, 120, 164, 166

behavioral issues, 74–81, 174
black students, 78, 80
black teachers, 25–26, 110
brain drain, 26
Brown v. Board of Education, 25
burnout, 3, 5, 6
—vs. demoralization, 11, 14, 39–55, 179–185
—experience of, 43–44
—narrative of, 175–176
—signs of, 39
—source of, 44, 54–55

career longevity, strategies for, 105–128

career trajectories, 61
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), 152, 153–154, 156
civic role, 31–32, 37
classroom management, 74–81
client responsibility, 4, 32, 34, 87
cognitive dissonance, 62
collective bargaining, 21
Common Core State Standards, 8, 52, 60, 69, 86, 145–146
compensation, 15–16, 19, 27
compliance, 52, 62–63, 132, 136, 137
computer-based testing, 59–60
conscientious objectors, 8, 70, 119
conversations, 185–187
craft conscience, 35, 91–92
craft performance, 4, 32, 33, 34
curriculum
—mandated, 52–53, 64–65
—narrowing of, 28
—scripted, 7, 29, 53, 82, 94, 136–137, 160–163
—standardization, 93–94

Danielson assessment model, 100, 101, 102, 138, 143

democratic values, 37
demographics, 15, 16
demoralization
—See also teacher dissatisfaction
—vs. burnout, 11, 14, 39–55, 179–185
—concept of, 8, 43, 49, 181–182
—in context, 177–179
—denigration of the profession and, 11, 83–103, 142–143
—experience of, 44–45, 51–53, 181, 189
—harm caused by, 14
—identification of, 13
—measurement of, 190
—moral concerns and, 47–48, 111–116
—process of, 5, 8
—remedies for, 173–177
—resilience and, 116
—school leadership and, 129–134, 142–149
—sources of, 54–55, 57–82, 83–103, 142–149, 179
—teacher attrition and, 116
—of teachers, 1–5, 9–10, 37–38, 53–55
—teachers’ unions and, 157–163
denigration of profession, 11, 83–103, 142–143
deprofessionalization, 29–31, 103, 184
despair, 36–37
disillusionment, 54
disingenuity, 98–103
documentation, 145
drug addiction, 30

educational reforms, 27–29, 31, 85, 131

emotional support, 107
equity, 97–98
ethics, 59, 88–90

fast-track certification, 19–20

feminization of teaching, 4, 26, 176
fidelity, 65, 66
fundamental attribution error, 180

Garcetti v. Ceballos, 102

Gates Foundation, 161, 164
global education reform movement (GERM), 27, 31
good work, 49–53, 92, 116, 174, 177–178, 190
government policies, 21–23, 28–30, 64
—See also state mandates
growth mindset, 137
harm to students, 11, 57–82
high-poverty schools, 16, 17
—teacher turnover in, 18–20
high-stakes testing, 28, 57–61, 70–71, 100, 110–111, 113–115
honors classes, 42
Hurricane Katrina, 26

ideals, 32
illegal practices, 102, 103
institutional practices, 40–43, 51, 95, 102–103, 133–134
instructional materials, 64–65, 71–72
intensification, 28–29, 31
internal critique, 91
isolation, 4, 43, 67, 73, 102, 123–124, 181, 183

labor practices, 112

Lane v. Franks, 102
leadership
—school. See school leaders
—teacher, 61, 117, 118
learning outcomes, 85–86, 101–102, 143–144
least dangerous assumption, 68, 147
local control, 29
loser identity, 17

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 95
market-based reforms, 31, 131
material rewards, 50–51
merit pay, 84–85, 143–144
mindfulness, 109
minority students, 78, 80
moral blackmail, 136–139
moral centers, 34–37, 39–41, 49, 51, 132
moral concerns, 3–4, 7–11
—acknowledgement of, 134–136
—demoralization and, 47–48, 111–116
—denigration of profession, 11, 83–103, 142–143
—framed as unethical, 137–138
—harm to students, 11, 57–82
—as professional ethics, 14
—reactions to, 70–72
—vs. self-interest, 33–34
—teacher dissatisfaction and, 10–11, 15–38, 43, 49
moral decision making, 88–89
moral dilemmas, 45–46, 62, 88, 102
moral madness, 138
moral violence, 138

National Board Teacher Certification (NBTC), 155

National Education Association, 166
Network for Public Education (NPE), 120, 164
Next Generation of Teachers, 6
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), 108
No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 7, 28, 64
normative commitments, 32
norms, 48–49

online communities, 120, 122–123, 124, 164, 168

organizational conditions, deterioration of, 25–30
overwork, 36

pedagogical policy, 137

peer review, 84
performance-based metrics, 23, 30
philanthropy, 164–165
placement decisions, 58
policy discourse, 137–138
policy initiatives, 145–147
poverty, 30
principals. See school leaders
professional community, 66, 117, 119, 120, 122–127
professional conferences, 52
professional conscience, 167–168
professional development, 84–87, 90, 99–100
professional ethics, 8–9, 14, 33, 59, 88–90, 122, 132, 135, 185–189
professional integrity, 57–58, 87–90, 95
professionalism, 26, 28–29, 165–166
professional learning communities (PLCs), 23, 125, 131, 168
professional values, 4, 48–49, 67, 120
public schools. See schools

Race to the Top Initiative, 8

racial issues, 41–42
rebels, 70, 72, 117, 119, 120, 162
recluses, 70, 72, 119–120
recruitment strategies, 15–16
Reggio Emilia philosophy, 92
relativism, 32, 88
re-moralization, 5, 10, 12, 14
—in context, 177–179
—examples of, 65–66
—power of, 171–190
—by principal, 139–142
—professional community and, 124–127
—strategies for, 105–128
resilience, 5, 54
—cultivation of, 11–12
—definition of, 44, 115
—demoralization and, 116
—lack of, in teachers, 108–115
—promotion of, 108–109
respect, 17
response to intervention (RTI) plans, 145–146
rule changers, 70–72, 120
rule followers, 62, 70–72, 117, 119, 120
rules
—following, 92–98
—transgressing, 98

salaries, 15, 27
school culture, 42–43
school environment, 31, 40–43, 51, 135, 137–138
school leaders
—accusations against teachers by, 72–82
—advocation for students by, 97
—authoritarian, 63
—demoralization and, 129–134, 142–149
—pressures on, 147
—recommendations for, 147–149
—re-moralization and, 139–142
—role of, 12, 14, 129–149
—union delegates and, 152–153
schools
—impact of 2008 recession on, 30
—local control of, 29
—policies, 102–103
—in poor areas, 16–20
—staffing levels in, 30
—suburban, 14, 17–18
—turnaround, 154, 157–158
—underperforming, 29
science education, 107–108
scripted curriculum, 7, 29, 52, 82, 94, 160–163
self-assessment, 49
self-deprecation, 17
self-help practices, 5
self-interest, 33–34
shame, 23–25, 39, 94, 178
social isolation, 67–68
social justice, 67, 152, 157
social media, 70, 168, 169
special education services, 67–69
staffing levels, 30
standardized tests, 57–61, 69–71, 88, 100, 102, 113–115, 166
state mandates, 57–61, 63, 69, 88, 110–111
student-centered action, 118, 121–123
student learning objectives (SLOs), 85–86, 101–102, 143–144, 146
student relationships, 23
students
—with behavioral issues, 74–81, 174
—care for, 87–88
—challenges for, 60
—with disabilities, 59
—under distress, 58, 59–60
—diversity of, 16
—engagement of, 52
—focus on learning by, 22–23
—harm caused to, 11, 57–82
—living in poverty, 30
—minority, 78, 80
—needs of, 30
—passing, 96–98
—rights of, 100–101
—special education, 67–69
suburban schools, 14, 17–18

teacher attrition
—demoralization and, 116
—management styles and, 132
—rates of, 18
—reasons for, 5–8, 11, 19
—ways to attenuate, 189–190
teacher dissatisfaction
—attrition and, 19
—deprofessionalization and, 30
—moral sources of, 10–11, 15–38, 43
—reasons for, 3–4
—surveys on, 20
teacher preparation, 15, 19–20
teacher retention
—decline in, 3
—as priority, 10
—problem of, 16–17
—shortages and, 18
—working conditions and, 135
teachers
—accused of harming students, 72–82
—black, 25–26, 110
—career cycles of, 6–7, 61
—characterizations about, 62
—demographics of, 15, 16
—demoralized, 1–5
—despair of, 36–37
—deteriorating conditions for, 25–30
—distress felt by, 23–25
—evaluation of, 84–85, 100–102, 138, 143, 162
—experienced, and demoralization, 53–54, 135
—government policies impacting, 21–23, 29–30
—lack of resilience in, 108–115
—leadership by, 61, 117, 118
—leaving profession, 1–3
—moral motivations of, 134–136
—new, 53–54, 135–136
—professional demands on, 28–29, 31
—rule following by, 92–98
—shortages of, 15, 17–18, 38, 135
—status of, 15, 16, 25
—voice of, 62–63, 118–119, 123–124, 131–133, 156, 168, 186
—white, 26
teachers’ unions
—credibility of, 164–166
—demoralization and, 157–163
—recommendations for, 168–169
—role of, 12, 14, 46, 151–169
—as voice of professional conscience, 167–168
teacher turnover
—in high-poverty schools, 18–19, 20
—negative impacts of, 3, 13, 16–17, 37
Teach For America, 161–162
teaching profession
—criticism of, 26–27
—denigration of, 11, 83–103, 142–143
—dissatisfaction in, 3–4
—feminization of, 4, 26, 176
—integrity of, 87–90
—material rewards of, 50–51
—moral rewards of, 50–51, 55, 174, 176, 177
—status of, 21–22, 25, 26–27
technology, 144–147
test preparation, 28, 32, 57, 114, 118, 153
theory-practice divide, 54
transformation, 173–177
trust, violations of, 59–60
turnaround schools, 154, 157–158

United Opt Out (UOO), 119, 120, 122, 124, 164

value-added measures (VAM), 58, 60

value conflicts, 3, 7
values, 32, 36, 37, 48–49
voice, 118–119, 123–124, 131–133, 156, 168, 186

whistleblower protections, 102

white teachers, 26
women, in teaching profession, 26
working conditions, 31, 135, 186