A recent survey titled “The Georgia Teacher Dropout Crisis” by the state Department of Education is cause for deep concern: 44 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. And of the 53,000 educators who took the survey, two out of three said they were unlikely or very unlikely to recommend teaching as a profession to students about to graduate from high school.
The Macon Telegraph, in a recent editorial, rhetorically asks why— and then provided some answers. It cites “too many mandated tests, unfair evaluations and constantly changing standards.” It says “teachers also feel devalued and stressed.” (It quoted state School Superintendent Richard Woods, during a January budget hearing at the Capitol, saying Georgia gives standardized tests at a rate three times that required by the federal government.)
Woods warned state lawmakers about the alarming attrition rate, while also pointing out that many districts laid off personnel and resorted to furloughs in recent years.
Yet Woods and the editorial writers are not emphasizing perhaps the biggest reason for the dropout crisis: Too much permissiveness in public schools when it comes to student discipline.
The state superintendent has acknowledged that assaults on teachers appear to be on the rise (this is also true nationally). This writer interviewed a Fulton County educator who is appalled that, since the new year began, two teachers in her school have already been physically assaulted. One “foul-mouthed attacker” hit a teacher and was only given a two-day, in-school suspension. That, my interviewee said, “led other students to believe they can get away with such behavior.” Furthermore, she said, the principal has so far done nothing to the other student. “Obviously, teacher morale is low— and this is not a school in a low-income area.”
“Permissiveness needs to end, the local school board needs to get more involved with oversight and students who assault teachers must be permanently expelled and in some cases prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” the teacher concludes.
