Mathematics Teachers Leaving Our Schools

If your child is currently struggling with mathematics or science at school, the reason could be the lack of a qualified teacher. At the moment, there is nationwide shortage of teachers in the US. This is caused by a number of factors one of them being the increased number of retirements. Another factor is the fact that many more teachers are moving from school to school. And the final reason is that many teachers are also leaving the profession. Amongst the teachers leaving the profession, this is much more frequent amongst new graduates and it is even more frequent teachers of the high demand areas such as mathematics or science. This article will explore some of the reasons why mathematics teachers are becoming more scarce in high schools and also, some of the reasons why these teachers are leaving their profession.

Experts in education have long said that schools more than other institutions need consistency in staff, for students to be most successful. For this reason the turnover of mathematics and other science teachers within schools is a cause for concern.

Common reasons given by mathematics teachers for leaving the profession were insufficient salary, problems with the student discipline, the fact that the profession has quite a low perceived status, problems with the parents and also difficulty relating to the school administrators.

Maths teachers are concerned not just with their salaries but with the amount of work they have to do in relation to their salaries. For example, one teacher said that in her former job outside teaching, she work approximately 40 hours a week and was earning $45,000.00 a year, however, as a teacher, she had to work many more hours but her pay was a lot less.

A lot of mathematics teachers feel that they were overburdened with too many out-of-hours activities like parent conferences or committee service or similar. Other maths teacher simply finds that their salaries are too low, so look for better paying jobs.

In addition to feeling that they had low salaries a number of math teachers also were unhappy about the amount of money they had to spend on either their own course material or the money available for things like copy machines and other school equipment. One teacher said that she actually had to spend some of her own money for course material and this was in a school department where the copy machines didn’t work 50% of the time.

Many mathematics tutors who leave their profession are unhappy with their district’s lack of supports of their desires to gain more professional development. There were cases where administrators had made money available for teachers to attend conferences and yet those same teachers were never allowed to go since they were not given release time to participate in mentor activities or attend conferences. This is due to teacher shortages, but of course the fact that the teachers are then leaving their profession worsens the shortages even further. Ambitious teachers like to further their education and many will find that school districts will not provide them this kind of support. As a result, some of the best teachers will naturally leave.

Finally, many mathematics and also science teachers have concerns about the disciplinary situation of students and also student behavior. A number of these teachers felt unsupported by their administrations when dealing with discipline issues. These teachers were frustrated by their inability to motivate students and also by fruitless time they were spending in certain unproductive parent conferences.

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