In this episode, I talk with Education Professor Doris Santoro about why teachers leave the profession. She distinguishes between teacher burnout and teacher demoralization and argues that, if we want to counteract the persisting and large teacher attrition problems, we need to treat these as different sets of reasons. We also talk more generally about why teaching is such a demanding field and what teachers and administrators can do to guard against attrition.
Doris A. Santoro is Professor of Education at Bowdoin College. 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. She is the author of the book Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession the Love and How They Can Stay.