Navigating Teacher Shortages and Political Pressures in Education - A Union Leader's Perspective

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So today's episode of the Engaging Leadership Show is a very special one because in our studio today, it's a great privilege for me to be interviewing John Wright. He's the senior director for strategy at the National Education Association. Welcome to the show, John.

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We support them in their professional growth. We work. To represent them at the bargaining table and negotiate their contracts. So we are the union for educators and we are the voice for educators in improving working conditions in order to improve student learning conditions.

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Is that true? What are some of the trends that you're seeing with regard to teacher retention and teacher attraction into the profession.

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g placed on, on, on schools, [: 00:04:00

And they're recognizing that in terms of a rewarding career that gives them lifetime earnings that can allow them to live a life that's comparable to professionals who have had the education and the preparation they have, that those opportunities just are not there often enough. That's the difficulty with recruitment.

They're smothered in the classroom. They're not compensated according to their abilities. And they're targeted as the problem with what's going wrong with our youth today, but then you have the retention problems, which of course, all three of those attraction or recruitment problems are still evident in retention because sometimes, an optimistic and enthusiastic young professional who wants to teach will say, but I can change that.

unities and again, they find [: 00:05:00

So one of the things that we're always trying to do in service of the profession, in service of good education and in service of retention is find ways to allow educators to move through a career with different responsibilities with growing opportunities for impact and ways to work collegially that don't necessarily require them to take on an administrative role.

So recruitment and retention, those are the two sides of the coin that and they really articulate the problem we need to address.

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And as many other professionals in many other industries lost the notion of a solid, comfortable, and trusted retirement, that is, pensions were taken away that was a benefit that teachers could count on. And health care as well was part of most people's compensation plan. It's been harder and harder to keep up with health care costs.

cial pressures that have put [: 00:07:00

In many states, the earning power of teachers is actually lower now than what it was 15 to 16 to 18 years ago.

learning, but the social and [: 00:08:00

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So we've gotten to a point where teachers are looking over their shoulders, and they're thinking twice. Oh my gosh, I'm about to teach a lesson on, on on slavery and conditions, in the Antebellum South. Am I going to get in trouble for doing that?

Am I going to be accused of CRT and driven out of my classroom? So you have significant social pressures in the culture wars, which are which make the teaching profession much less appealing. And in fact, they drive people away.

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That is heartbreaking.

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go too deep into the factors [: 00:10:00

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And it can be heated and then it can get stressful. But the point of fact is that the school districts themselves don't really control what's available to put on the table at a bargaining table. That's being controlled by political processes and the school district administrations are often just as as, as much handcuffed as the educators themselves, because it is a political process.

ack to Ronald Reagan and his [: 00:11:00

Because of that demonization of public work and the public commitment that we believe. Our schools really are it's hard to fully resource them and fully fund them.

Our focus is on students and learning and productive learning environments. But the fact that the resources, the funding, and the overall support for our institutions is a public good that makes it difficult.

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And you and I were speaking a little bit before this and one of the things that really stood out was once someone does join the profession and they do enter a school, then actually the ball is in our court, right?

How do we retain [: 00:12:00

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e find more success. When we [: 00:13:00

Then you're going to have a difficult time attracting. But on to your further question about what is it about community? We've all known for some time, anybody who has been involved in education, that, that education can be a very isolated or isolating profession.

One of the things that's glorious about it is spending your whole day with young people with their enthusiasm and their excitement and their optimism. That's a wonderful thing. But one other aspect of that is you've got grown adult professionals who might not see another adult for the better part of the day because they're with preschoolers or elementary schoolers or with adolescents or whatever.

talk to educators, they very [: 00:14:00

I'm missing a sense of community where I count on people. Now at NEA and with our all of our state unions and the local associations in the school district. That's one of the things we do. And we believe is a positive value of unionism is an immediate connection and belonging. You're in you're in it together.

Collective action is a strong bond. The saying that a thousand whispers in the forest will make more noise than one lone voice in the Canyon. That's part of unionism and collective action, but we're finding that alone does not create the community. That some people are really lacking. So I think it's important.

ationship, but that sense of [: 00:15:00

Each individual member and colleague is with me and we have something very strong.

Now, this does not, and I will push back on people who say our workplace is like a family. No, it's different from a family. Family is unconditional love, and that's not appropriate for the workplace. But it is a matter of knowing that you can depend and count on each other and you can anticipate and predict that you're not going to get something completely out of the blue that you didn't get any heads up about and that seems unrelated to what you're being asked to do on a regular basis.

So that's part of what I think is really important. It's a combination of important things. for leadership and important for long term social, emotional health of the professional, as well as the ability to do our jobs well. And once again, that ultimate outcome you mentioned at the very beginning, improved student learning.

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lationships in my workplace, [: 00:17:00

Because we've learned how to show that to each other. And how do we understand that the community has certain expectations of the school as a community institution that are aligned with what the parents are looking for, but they also might be a little broader in terms of what they're looking for in the students and in those student interactions with the community.

So I love the term the combination. of vertical and horizontal relationships and bonds and and dependencies even. And I think that, as educators when educators basic nation, basic nature is to be compassionate and reach out we might not think that it's necessary to be deliberate.

ps and bonds. I think one of [: 00:18:00

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But at the same time, you're working within your own team. And you're driving the team goals and team outcomes within your company. And there's mutual respect. For both the leaders within each company that respects the software engineering community because there is a pool of Talent that you need to tap into at the same time the software engineering community wouldn't be a community without the organizations that they work in

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I have five children and each of them is married, so I'm watching. 10 young people in different careers and these children and their spouses are between the ages of 30 and about 38, each in a different career. And each of them doing exactly what you're describing, working on finding their own close relationships in their working circle, and at the same time, growing as a professional and creating those relationships in their professional community.

It. If anyone's asked to, or believes they need to, sacrifice one or the other then you really risk a downward spiral of relationships. Either, either losing touch with individuals or becoming isolated from your profession.

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And I hear someone tell me, yes, I belong to the NEA and I belong in my state and I belong in my town, but I don't feel like I'm part of the community. It's oh man, it's exactly what we thought we want to be building for people. So we wanted to explore further and find out where do you find that?

ng this research right around: 2019

So as we came out of the pandemic my team in partnership with the Center for Labor and a Just Economy put together some Some community conversations and develop some ways to ask people to talk to each other to explore this issue. So we're having conversations in two cities that have some things in common and much about them is not in common.

Lansing, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi. Where we want to explore the notion of community building, community sustenance, community access. And we've put together a guide, we're working with a group that's out at MIT called Cortico, which really specializes in small group conversations to explore meaningful local community issues.

ime, maybe you were teaching [: 00:23:00

How did you build or maintain or look for a sense of community? How did you connect with people? What brought you back? What made you feel alone? And so by having these conversations in multiple places with the same guided set of questions, And by tracking these conversations obviously we're not in them.

We have people on who live in these communities who are hosting them for us. And we're able to record them, make use of some artificial intelligence tools that can extract common threads from these conversations in different places, in different times. Over a period of time to really try to understand those things.

of their lives? Did they do [: 00:24:00

that they do something new to create these relationships. And if they were able to create them, were they able to sustain them? And then what happened to those relationships? They might've been virtual relationships. What happened to them when we came back in person to, to work in schools again? So it's a series.

So these are the personal narratives of individuals during a literally once in a generation, Social experience to try to learn more about belonging, connecting community. And then finally, two things, what is it that, we're doing this as a national education association and as a labor group, what is it that worker collectives can do to encourage and support such community building?

talking about it in its own [: 00:25:00

So we're really excited about it. It's it's been a long time in development. These conversations are going on really as we're talking today and on into the fall. And we're looking forward to sharing the results in two ways. Internally with what does it mean for us as we try to build a union of educators and then sharing them outside with the rest of really with the rest of the communities and the world, take a look at this and see what matters to you.

Can you learn something about the way that you build? Relationships and make communities out of relationships.

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That people are struggling with in, in school sites and within educators.

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And we realized as a group, the pandemic changed everything, everywhere, for everyone. It just really did. It's a social impact. Unlike anything I used to teach history. I think the only other social impact that I can compare that to was the impact of World War II on England and Europe when their literal, when their countries were literally destroyed and they had to rebuild.

perhaps since the civil war. [: 00:27:00

nostalgic effort to recreate.: 2019

We need to rethink all of those things with both the technology we've learned, as well as the work habits, processes, and practices that we had to develop that many of us have become so comfortable with, or at least willing to explore. Witness what you and I are doing right now.

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And do you see that shift in how we prepare educators for this new world of work? And even. As an educator, like being looking forward to what the workforce needs because we're preparing kids for jobs, we need to teach in a different way, even.

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We no longer have that convenience. And so it's broken us of the habit in many places. So the the commonplace, lecture format or the Socratic method or other methods that were primarily spoken word led by an adult expert, quote, unquote. That was the standard, literally from kindergarten through graduate school.

And I think that we've broken that standard. And, I was just last weekend with a group of educators, most of them mid career, and we were doing a variety of activities that weren't necessarily about instructional delivery but their facility with moving to the spoken word and auditory cues.

talk with each other It was [: 00:30:00

I've got these students on a screen and I'm on this screen. How do we keep them engaged? Know if they're learning, know who's behind them, and so it's both Of the moment, because of the social times, and it's also generational, because there are so many other sort of intense media uses that younger teachers and adults are really facile with.

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Without necessarily going down the supervisory path or without necessarily going down an administrative path Like what are some of the innovative thinking that you've come across so far along this space?

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nd adult learning recognizes [: 00:32:00

So you have someone who's been a teacher. They've been in the classroom. They've done things. They've been in the classroom. They've reached a level of mastery that perhaps they're a nationally board certified teacher. And they've had great success and really a joyful time with students.

But this other opportunity now is for them to work to have an impact on any more numbers of students by helping their peer educators to succeed. All right, you're, I'm an instructional coach for social studies in a high school. And we've got a cadre of five social studies teachers that teach everything from world history to civics, to, economic geography.

I've taught all of that in many different ways to many different grades. And I'm going to spend my days working with each of you to hear what's your, what are your lessons? What are your students like? What are the challenges? Are you teaching something you haven't taught before? Have you tried this and it hasn't worked?

can, or perhaps it's a large [: 00:33:00

I'm describing a new community. So you're both building community, you're growing expertise, you're allowing new career advancements, and to maintain the joy and the collegiality. And I don't mean to be pejorative about the work that school principals, assistant principals, and administrators have to do.

Any teacher will tell you they will go to a school with a good principal in a heartbeat, rather than a school with a mediocre principal. Leadership in the, at the school level means everything. So I don't want to in any way sound pejorative. It's just that there are many educators who respect that and need that, but they don't want to do that.

ching that, and those really [: 00:34:00

The model was there early on, but it's really blossomed and it's been enhanced. You can have instructional coaches for media use and technology. You can have technology coaches so that all the new opportunities to use these new tools in the classroom, you actually have someone who's an expert in it.

And they can go from classroom to help people be their best. So it's a joke. I tell my colleagues, my father was a career educator too. So his career was through the late fifties, early sixties and seventies. And I'll tell you the only piece of advice he ever gave me was, John, never learn how to use the film projector because everyone's going to call you into their classroom when it breaks.

If you got an instructional [: 00:35:00

So there are lots of ways to growth. I'm rambling on. I realized,

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And as you were talking, one of the things that, that struck me was that how it just reminded me of one of those old sayings in, in management and leadership where, what's the best way to mess up a great salesperson is you promote them to a manager because that they don't always, they don't always.

come hand in hand, these two skill sets.

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And the trick in such organizations is really, how do you. Maintain that collegiality. maintain that collaboration between the administrators and the specialists? And I think, that's a conversation for maybe 20 years down the line, if something like this can be realized in education.

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The one thing that educators really look for in the management is both strong management and leadership, not just good management, but leadership and evidence that they really were good people. Instructional practitioners so that they know what they're going through. And, you use the medical model and I think you're absolutely right that you find a certain group of medicine professionals that might get to be chief of medicine.

medical officer in hospital. But they, in order to really, I believe succeeded that job, they need to have the respect of their peers to know they're not only managing us well, but they were damn good doctors too. The other thing that made me think of is that in fact, in teacher preparation, to use your medical example, we are having many more.

Teacher residencies [: 00:38:00

So there are more than a couple of corollaries there. And again, understanding your interest in the work that you do, those are so tied to good leadership practices, leadership development, competencies, and qualities, and an idea of what it means. To bring someone along the leadership continuum from where they are to where they want to go.

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going to be contending with [: 00:39:00

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And the notion of being able to have a career to help young people learn and grow and succeed is a very exciting prospect for literally millions of people. And that's exciting. That's good for the country. That's good for the world. But in, in particular around teacher leadership and what are the prospects for growth?

ultimately moving beyond the [: 00:40:00

And that's one of those times where the instruction and the leadership really do get linked hand in hand because those are leadership decisions to make as well as decisions about instructional practice. So I think the scope and the notion of learner centered education and the fact that if we shift more away from what do the adults think the students should know to more of how the, Delta's sensing what the students need and how do we address those needs and who best address those needs and where are those needs best addressed.

k we're probably looking at. [: 00:41:00

But I think that we might be enhancing The scope of what that credentialing looks like, how we determine students needs, and these are all leadership needs as well as where and at what point in their chronological lives, we are meeting their developmental needs.

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show notes, and many others. [: 00:42:00

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