[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Mike Beyer. Mike was an award-winning, National Board-certified K-12 teacher and principal, and he currently serves as a coach, speaker, and consultant.
[00:28] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:30] SPEAKER_00:
Mike, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:58] SPEAKER_01:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:59] SPEAKER_00:
So, your book focuses on the kind of thing that we often hear about in maybe a less polished form on social media, and that is teachers leaving the profession. You know, teacher quit talk is a big thing. We see a lot of posts and videos go viral from teachers who have left the profession and have a lot to say about it. Why are they worth listening to, and what prompted you specifically to put together this book?
[01:26] SPEAKER_01:
So let me start with the second part of that question first, which is, I left education around five years ago, almost exactly. Not by choice, as you can read in the book. It was quite traumatic, quite public. And afterwards, I faced a lot. My family, my children, my wife relied on me for...
[01:45]
You know, the breadwinner, insurance, all the rest. I bounced around quite a bit, but landed on my feet. But what's strange is that, you know, when I left education, even when I was still litigating my case, I ran into colleagues, principals and teachers, and they'd all say... You know, how do I get out?
[02:01]
How do I get out of education? And this will be for COVID, right? And so, you know, on a steady stream, it used to be once a month, now it's once every other month, I would get a text, an email, a call from former colleagues saying, you know, how do I get out? I need a change. And so, for a long time, I would just refer them to my co-author, Nayeli, who was my career coach. I hired her to go from education and nonprofit into the corporate sector.
[02:29]
And after around the 12th person I referred to her, I said, you know, Nayeli, I think this is a book, right? We saw everything in the media, all the press about teachers leaving, principals leaving, superintendents leaving. And so we decided to write a book, and originally it was intended to be a sort of technical manual, very dry and dull, like, how-to. You know, we were going to align teacher and principal skills to jobs in other markets, other sectors. And we started interviewing teachers. And the first teacher poured her heart out to us as to why she left.
[03:02]
And we thought, okay, well, that was interesting, right? We'll have to edit that one a bit. And the second one we had scheduled, it was a friend of a friend, I didn't even know this woman. And she called me up beforehand, and she said, listen, let me give you the heads up. I do not want to sound bitter. I said, what do you mean?
[03:19]
And she told me, and, you know, again, she had a story that she had to pour out of her. And one after another, every time we interviewed an educator, teacher or principal or superintendent, The same pattern. They felt really guilty. They felt ashamed for leaving, but they had to, right? And so it became more of a manual. It became testimonies as to why they're leaving.
[03:45]
So we included in the book a chapter on well-being. It includes burnout, work-life balance, and well-being. So it addresses that whole topic. And we also have a chapter on how to improve education to prevent this from happening. Because our goal isn't to encourage teachers to leave. You know, we say in the preface that if a teacher or principal is reading our book, most likely they've already reached the point where they're going to quit.
[04:08]
They're just looking for some very affordable advice. You know, $14.99 on Amazon. And then, of course, we kicked off the book with a chapter on how we got here. And I relied heavily on some other authors. One book by Dana Goldstein called Teacher Wars, one of my all-time favorites.
[04:24]
A new book that came out called Teachers, and it's a long subtitle as well, from a New York Times author. And we outlined the history of public education and why it's been under attack since the 1800s, right? So what we're experiencing is not anything new. It's just, you know, a new round. And education, public education, has long been, uh, Well, Mike, you mentioned the guilt and kind of the shock and the, like, the difficulty, the angst of potentially leaving the profession that a lot of people go through. But as you said, people also feel like they don't have much of a choice.
[04:57] SPEAKER_00:
Either they are in a position where they're
[05:11]
Yeah.
[05:40]
Yeah, that's a great question.
[05:45] SPEAKER_01:
One teacher we interviewed, Brian, he flat out said, when we asked him, what's your biggest regret about leaving? And his regret that I recall is that he said he felt bad leaving his colleagues behind. I compared it to, you know, when I was in the military, I wasn't in combat, but I knew plenty of people who were. And I compared it to like a combat veteran, like, you know, leave no man behind kind of thing. I thought, wow, that's pretty profound. Another person said, you know, teachers should not be martyrs.
[06:13]
But overall, one after another, they felt bad leaving their students, leaving their colleagues. They felt like they were giving something out. In America, especially everyone, every sector, every job we identify as our job, probably not necessarily healthy. But I would argue even more so educators because we went into it for, hopefully, the right reasons to help, right? We certainly didn't go into it to make a million dollars, despite what people believe. We didn't go into it for our pensions.
[06:40]
Many of us stay for pensions, but that's not why we went into it. And so, they feel guilty because they feel like they're quitting on themselves and their colleagues and their students.
[06:50] SPEAKER_00:
And Mike, not to encourage anybody to leave the profession if that's not right for them, but, you know, a lot of people also feel, in addition to feeling trapped by their feelings of commitment to the profession and the professional investment and identity that they have in the profession, they also wonder, what else could I do? Like, I'm good at being an educator. I'm not sure at this stage of my life that I'm good at something else or that I want, you know, to learn a new set of skills. So what have people done from your reporting that has successfully landed them in something else?
[07:17] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, that's a really interesting and fun question, because I experienced the same thing when I left, and I think there's a number of factors fading into that, that there's that old adage that if you can't do, teach, right? We have this belief, this cultural mindset that teachers can't do anything, which is completely opposite, right? We all know that teachers have very little resources. We throw them in last minute, very little preparation, go teach this. And they figure out a way, right? They're some of the most innovative, creative, resourceful people.
[07:45]
But then also, mind you, I was a principal. I was a principal of one of the largest, most diverse schools in Chicago. When I left, we had three campuses. I led a very contentious merger. 2,000 students from the Gold Coast to the West Side. I taught and led schools all over Chicago.
[08:02]
And in Chicago, the principals are almost like mini-CEOs. I know in other districts, they're more middle managers, but we created multi-million dollar budgets, we led the HR, we led the operations, we had to contract with vendors, yada, yada, yada. And so we have all these skills. I basically ran a business And I would go to interview at places, and I'd say, I was a teacher and a principal. And you just see the look on people's faces. They glaze over, like, oh, you're a teacher.
[08:28]
That's cute. Right? Or you're a principal, and we don't have children for you to, you know... Yell at.
[08:35] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah.
[08:36] SPEAKER_01:
And I'd have to explain, no, no. This is what I did. But I think the stereotype of an educator is so strong that it's very difficult for other people, including ourselves as educators, to imagine what else we can do. And so what I learned from my co-author, Nayeli, is how to reframe our resume, how to reword it. So we didn't serve students and parents, we served clients and customers, that kind of thing. And to be honest, when I first did that, it felt like I was, you know, being dishonest.
[09:05]
Your resume is accurate, but you have to use the right terms. Even more so now, because now companies are using filters, AI tools to screen resumes. A human being doesn't even look at your resume unless you pass it. So you have to include all those key words. So if you include education jargon, forget it. But to your question as far as what kind of skills, we include that right up front in the table of contents.
[09:27]
Every person has a, the kind of job they went into. And we also include, like, a phrase. So for example, Mary, life stages, customer success. So she made her career path based on her own life stages. She went into customer success, something I was not even familiar with until I interviewed some of these people. But real estate, sales, tax preparation, marketing, uh, one principal opened our own franchise, uh, restaurant, corporate training, consulting, DEI consulting, therapy, research, entertainment, management consulting...
[10:03]
Director of Innovation, Product Management, Entrepreneur, Chief of Staff, the list goes on. And one note is that this was their, oftentimes, their first career out of education, right? So it's your first stepping stone. After that, it becomes even much easier. Once you have, like, experience outside of education, it becomes even easier to go somewhere else because now you can show that you can do other things.
[10:28] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, and it sounds like part of that is, you know, your own understanding of your skills and confidence and being able to speak to those skills and apply them outside of the educational world, but it is a very, kind of, I don't want to say insular, but, you know, like, we're a fairly self-contained world in education, so I can certainly understand that that would be difficult to step outside of.
[10:47] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and that's a very good point, because you think of teaching, and what's strange about it is that you are constantly inundate, you are constantly socializing with people. If you're a classroom teacher, you have, you know, Yeah.
[11:22]
As a human and as a professional, you're isolated, right? And so one of the biggest obstacles we have is that teachers say, well, I don't know how to network. I can't network with anyone. And so one person we interviewed, Jeremy Scheifling, and he has his own book all about LinkedIn. He demonstrated, and if you go to our social media pages, we have some video clips of him, on how to network through LinkedIn by going through your university, going through this, and quickly it broadens this digital age.
[11:51] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Mike, before we pivot into the side of the equation around retention and how we can keep people in the profession, do you have any kind of top tips for people who are maybe looking, who maybe do need to make a transition?
[12:04] SPEAKER_01:
Absolutely. In fact, the key chapter that my co-author wrote is all about the job search. It's fantastic. It's amazing. It's a formula that I use. It's a formula, but it's not formulaic, so it's not generic.
[12:15]
It's basically kind of broad directions that you should take. But the one biggest key is networking. It's who you know. To this day and age, and probably more so, it's who you know, so you have to network. Two, it's how you reword your resume. And probably for me, the next biggest thing is just having patience and persistence.
[12:33]
It takes time. We have a tight job market, but it still takes time to make that jump, but it does come with time.
[12:41] SPEAKER_00:
Well, let's shift gears now and talk a little bit about how we can keep people, because, you know, certainly there are always going to be reasons that people change careers, that people move into new types of work. But we have a problem in education. We have a problem where, systemically, we're burning people out, we're driving people out, and things are happening in our society that are just making it harder and harder to be an educator long-term. As you spoke with so many people, as you reflected on your own career in education, what were some of your key insights about kind of what's going wrong and what we can do about it to keep people in the profession?
[13:18] SPEAKER_01:
Absolutely, and this is a significant issue, and the research that we've found is that there are far fewer people going into education, so that pipeline is constricting, far more people leaving, and so we're going to have a significant crisis that we'll be facing over the next generation, and so we have to get a handle on it. And, you know, we heard President Biden maybe a year ago or so say, well, we should just increase teacher pay. And it seems to be that is the only thing we can think of when what we found is that not a single teacher left because of pay. Not a single one that we interviewed. I have yet to meet one who said, you know, I'm throwing down a towel. And, like, most often when they leave, they've had at least five years in education, most often 10 to 15 years.
[14:03]
So they're making a decent salary for them to switch careers, and oftentimes they take a pay cut initially. The main driver in our findings is the lack of work-life balance, the lack of well-being. And what's interesting is that I spoke to principals and superintendents across the country, you know, friends of mine, and I said, what are you doing for well-being? And every single one would rattle off a long list of programs, initiatives, plans that they are doing in their schools for well-being. And after they stop, I'd say, well, that's great, but it sounds like that's all for the students. And they'd look at me like, yes, of course.
[14:40]
I said, what are you doing for the adults? Sometimes they'd say, well, we did a yoga session at the beginning of the school year. Okay, well, that's not much. And, um, it's almost flabbergasting to think that our theory of action here is that we are going to have healthy, productive children and students when they're surrounded by burned-out adults. You can't have it, right? And so, if you look at the corporate side, they've had programs like Great Places to Work, For, you know, well over a decade, there's an entire nonprofit called Great Places to Work.
[15:13]
But you have these lists in Forbes, the best places to work. And the best companies compete for them, right? Sometimes the worst companies or the companies with the worst cultures, like Twitter went through it recently, where people were sitting on the floor. We think that's corporate life. Quite the opposite. I was actually shocked.
[15:30]
I thought the corporate world would be this dog-eat-dog world. And actually, I had to tone it down from being a principal. So, okay, I can't just snap my fingers and give orders here. That's not how it works here. Whereas in education, education has more in common with military, with my experience in the military, than it does in the corporate sector. You know, we give directions, we give commands, initiatives, very little teacher voice.
[15:54]
You're expected to just follow. And very little principle of voice, right? You follow directions of the superintendent. And there's a reason for that. It's a very effective model for a very underfunded sector. So I'm not blaming anybody.
[16:07]
It's just the way it is. However, we can do something for well-being. We can, at the very least, measure well-being and monitor it and look for ways to improve it. And that's just not being done. I was just at a conference the other day, and there's a report coming out, and I'm looking forward to seeing this report, and...
[16:25]
There are districts who are starting to look at it, but we're decades behind the corporate side. And one thing to consider is that a lot of people who went into education, especially elementary, it's dominated by women. And historically, there's a reason for that. But a lot of people went into education thinking that you could have a nice work balance. It's a nice job if you have a family, because you can have your summers off. That's not the case.
[16:48]
You work evenings. You work weekends. Often you have to work the summers just to make ends meet. So then, during COVID, all of a sudden, all these professionals are working from home, and a lot of people are saying, wait a minute. I can have better work-life balance in a different career. And that's another reason why people are leaving.
[17:05]
We can't fix that, right? We can't have schools where teachers are working from home. So that means we have to double down on our efforts to improve well-being, to prevent this bleeding... of this workforce, because it's constricting so quickly.
[17:19]
In Illinois, the, uh, Principals Association did a report, and they found that not every district has teacher shortages. In fact, it's only a handful out of the, you know, dozens or hundreds, whatever. However, I would argue that even the best, and I put in air quotes, uh, the best school districts, the best schools, are negatively affected by this teacher shortage because when you take a pool of teachers or any kind of workforce pool and you shrink it, You're going to end up with lower quality overall. And so you might not have any shortages, you might have no openings, but you have less choice. And that's not what we want. We want more choice of teachers.
[17:58]
We want everyone wanting to be a teacher when right now we have the opposite.
[18:02] SPEAKER_00:
I think that's a great point, that, you know, often there are still people applying, but, you know, like, when I was a principal, we hired, I think, just a handful of, like, regular classroom teaching positions, and, like, we would frequently get 100 to 200 applicants per, you know, per opening, and that's just not the case, and the pool is very different. So, thinking about, for an individual principal, you've been a principal, thinking about the working conditions that matter the most to people. What are a few points where you see individual principals as having leverage? Because, you know, we can't do a whole lot about who goes into teacher education programs, we can't do a whole lot about the macro conditions of the society, and as you said, we generally can't let people work from home, even if that's what they really want. But what can we do as principals to just make this a job that doesn't chew people up so much?
[18:51] SPEAKER_01:
I think the key there is to make sure that teachers have voice in your school. Now that's difficult to say, right? The first school I was the principal of on the Southwest side of Chicago had been failing for 20 years. My first year, I pulled everything I could and I coached out half the staff and I intentionally hired the best staff that I could find. And so it changed the culture overnight. But once we have the right people on the bus, that's when, as a leader, you have to sit back and say, okay, I hired the right people, hopefully.
[19:20]
You tell me where we should go, right? You're still the captain, right? You're still driving the bus, but you're taking advice and input, and you need to increase that teacher voice authentically, genuinely, to where they feel like they matter, like they're valued, that they have reason to say. If you can do that as a leader, you can significantly change the culture and the climate of the school, and it's also just a smart move, because a top-down initiative, you'll never get the buy-in, whereas if you have an initiative that It might take a long while because you have to build consensus and you have to get agreement from a lot of stakeholders. But once it's there, they're doing it without you having to give commands. So as a leader, get that teacher voice activated in your school.
[20:02] SPEAKER_00:
I love it. Listening to people and letting them have, you know, significant input into the direction and the approach that you're taking. You know, I think there are so many things that people want to do to kind of cheer people up. You know, treats in the staff lounge and decorations and themes and parties and, you know, kind of cheer up stuff. But, yeah, long-term, people want to have input. People want to Well, Mike, thanks for indulging my question about what we can do as individual principals.
[20:31]
Now, if you had a magic wand and could change anything that you wanted, what would you do to make education the kind of profession that has absolutely no difficulty attracting and keeping the best and the brightest? What changes would you make in our profession?
[20:45] SPEAKER_01:
Wow, okay, yeah, if I had a magic wand, we'd need at least another half an hour, but I would definitely, you know, increase pay to be on parody. The research shows that In comparison, an educator, whether it's a teacher or principal, makes, I think it's around 20% less than their counterpart who has as much training and education. So we have to close that gap. And that's including, you know, quote-unquote, summers off, because they work just as many hours during the school year. So one is closing the gap. However, the second thing is probably most importantly is measuring and monitoring and doing something about well-being.
[21:21]
If we can do that in every district and every state... That would have significant differences, because right now, the driving factor, or the driver, I should say, is still accountability. And we saw that during COVID, we focused on mental health of students, of teachers a bit. And then once all these reports came out of learning loss, that was all just taken off the table.
[21:41]
Just forget about that. Let's go back to just focusing on test scores. And, of course, academic success matters, but anyone who knows anything about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, who knows anything about human development, no one's going to learn if they feel burned out. No one's going to learn if they don't feel safe and valued and supported. And so every school has to focus on that and focus on just making education enjoyable for both the adults and the students. If we can do that, problem solved.
[22:11] SPEAKER_00:
So, Mike, I really find this to be an interesting type of book where people who are definitely planning to stay in the profession can read it for the insights that we've been talking about, about how to make this a more sustainable career, and people who maybe are kind of on the fence might get some clarity about what their next steps might be, and people who are definitely headed out of the profession can get some very specific direction in what to do to land on their feet quickly in another career. So the book is Pencils Down, Career Journeys of Educators Who Left the Profession and What We Can Learn from the Crises in Education. Mike, if people want to get in touch with you or your coauthor or learn more, where can they go online?
[22:49] SPEAKER_01:
Uh, LinkedIn. Start networking. Reach out to us. Find us. Our LinkedIn addresses or profile URLs are in the book. Happy to chat.
[22:58] SPEAKER_00:
Mike, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[23:01] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
