Thunderous Quitting: An Exodus From Public Schools

The kids aren’t alright, and the quitting certainly isn’t quiet. 

It is Fall 2023, and anyone working in public education can see the writing clearly, if not misspelled, on the wall.

They called it The New Normal; the new reality of adjusting to life post-pandemic, yet nothing is as it was.

I’ve been a public school educator for nearly twenty years. I’ve taught seventh grade Math & Science most of those years, now teaching seventh grade Science exclusively. I teach in a wealthy school district in coastal California, South of the Bay Area, where the redwoods meet the ocean. The Santa Cruz Mountains are a beautiful place to live, and have been my home since 1998.  I love teaching Science, and the energy of middle school. 

Everyone had a hard time during the Covid-19 pandemic. Whether you were out of work, caring for a dying loved one, or going through breast cancer treatment as I was, it was a fundamentally challenging time for everyone. 

Closing schools seemed somewhat reasonable at the time, when bodies were piling up in refrigerated morgue trucks outside of hospitals, and little was known about the virus. Yet as time passed on, I could see the damage it was causing. Withdrawn, anxious, fearful students who didn’t want to show up to school despite being at home on Zoom; a complete loss of faith in the adults entrusted to take care of them. At my school district in California, it wasn’t until April, 2021, that we returned to in-person instruction with a hybrid model, where half of the students stayed home, and half came to school, as I juggled Zoom with an in-class camera for those at home, as if to recreate the magic that would happen in the classroom. By Fall of 2021, students were back full-time, but the cracks in their foundations were glaringly evident. Learning loss was the buzz term across all grade levels. The lockdown had affected them on so many levels.

Attendance was a huge issue post-pandemic. Students stayed home for days or weeks on end due to illness of a family member, or themselves, or perceived illness. We understood, however, as we were still emerging from a global pandemic. We reduced assignment loads; we gave extra time for work. We excused students from work if they were too overwhelmed, myopically focused on anything to keep them coming to school. In essence, we coddled the heck out of these kids – allaying their worries with platitudes and accommodations in hopes they would find that buy in so necessary to keep them engaged, and learning, at school. Fidgets were encouraged.

By Fall of 2022, our school counselors spoke frequently of upticks in anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues plaguing our students. We participated in Professional Development sessions aimed at encouraging students to come to school at all, despite behavioral and academic concerns. Many teachers stopped giving homework altogether; I barely give any now. We didn’t want to stress them out any more than they’d already been. Keeping them out of school so long was egregiously harmful, and I regret that we did it so long. The damage is perpetuating like ripples from a landslide, and has led to a thunderous exodus from the public school system that was supposed to nurture them.

I have never seen such a problem with absenteeism as I have over the last couple of years. Some are gone days on end. It’s not Covid-19 anymore, however; now, it’s a mix of avoiding school, going on vacations with family, and legitimate health issues. 

The kids are quitting, and it’s anything but quiet. 

Seventh graders are a notoriously difficult group to teach; it’s considered the hardest grade to teach. I knew this when I signed up. I taught sixth grade Math and Science for ten years before moving to seventh grade. The change was dramatic, despite only moving one grade level. I went from sweet, inquisitive, respectful students to still sweet, but more attitude, eye rolling, defiance; less enthusiasm, except when we’re doing a fun lab or something they’re interested in. They hate their teachers half the time anyway, as they do their parents, it seems. It is a rough age; no surprise there.

After we returned from the pandemic and Zoom school, it was joked that students had gone feral; they’d forgotten how to behave in a classroom. They’d forgotten how to display basic character traits, like respect for elders, for each other, for classroom materials. Yet they were curious, happy to be back in-person, and we teachers were compassionate to their challenges. We were happy to be back, too.

That 2022-2023 school year, I noticed a sharp rise in absenteeism as well. Students were protesting. I’d never seen so many absences. Many of them were for Independent Study, where they can get credit for their absences by completing the work and turning it in upon return. Many students come back with no work at all, though. When a nationwide study citing increased absenteeism was published earlier this year, it hit home. In California, chronically absent students had nearly tripled during the 2021-2022 school year when compared to pre-pandemic data. 

Now that we’re about a third of the way through the 2023-2024 school year, I am seeing a similar trend. Kids just aren’t coming to school like they used to. It’s not always an illness, either. Sometimes, they merely don’t want to go. Occasionally it’s mental health reasons that may keep a student from coming to school.

Sometimes, it’s a family vacation. In my community, parents are typically well off, so have the ability to travel mid-year to places like Disneyland, Vail, Hawaii, and other exotic places. The fact that parents are taking their kids out of school so regularly signals they don’t esteem public schools; they don’t hold the institution in high regard. It feels like some parents view us as glorified babysitters. Some view us as a buffet, picking and choosing what they see is best, ignoring all the rest. I realize not every lesson is a goldmine, but I am intentionally not giving busy work. Every lesson has a purpose and builds upon a thoughtful, sequenced foundation. 

It seems like many parents lost their faith in public education during the pandemic because yes, we failed them. American public schools failed our children when we kept them home so long, after vaccines were available, after the data showed students weren’t the main vectors for Covid-19 transmission. Some teacher unions fought to keep schools closed. While I understand the health risks some at-risk groups of teachers were facing, and surely it was a new virus that we needed to protect ourselves against, the longevity of at-home school ultimately hurt students more than it helped them. 

Thus, here we are: an atmosphere of distrust and lack of faith in our public schools and teachers, brought on by the damage incurred from too long of a lockdown. Now, no one trusts us. The kids don’t trust us; the parents don’t either. 

Something has to give. A paradigm shift is due – not only in the way we teach, but the way we operate. One idea I support is moving to a four-day school week, with the fifth day available as remediation, enrichment, and job skills training. Not all families can have their children attend school just four days a week; if we provided that fifth day as an optional school day, with meals and productive, differentiated programs, we might see better engagement from students overall. The USA has long stressed going to college as the end-goal to high school, but most people recognize our trades industries are just as valuable – and sorely needed in an economy lacking specialists such as elevator repairmen, automobile mechanics, and the like. There are many models out there that could work. Hearing input from parents and students is vital.

If there’s one thing we learned during the pandemic, it’s how short life is, and that we’re not just hamsters on wheels running toward some indiscriminate prize. We were reminded how important life-work balance is; that family and our loved ones are the ultimate reward in life. We appreciated the flexibility to work and do school from home, or some far off tropical island, for the lucky few. We relished long weekends, time off, and the reduction of stress from long commutes, frantic schedules, and a rat race that never ends. Time off is important. But we must educate our future generations; we must prepare them for the world ahead, which they will inherit, good and bad. We must instill a sense of responsibility and accountability to themselves and each other in the society we share.

I know from experience that structure and discipline get results. There has to be a balance between the two. We cannot just throw out all of the rules in the name of being sensitive to students’ needs, important as that is. Balance is the name of the game in teaching. 

We’ve pared down the amount of work we give. We are trying to meet kids where they are. At a certain point, though, we can’t dumb things down so much we’re not hitting standards. Standards – what each grade level in public school is tasked with teaching – matter. It’s what allows a student to progress on a metaphorical staircase in their academic journey. It’s what allows them to transfer schools mid-year and not be completely behind. Consistency matters. 

One of the principal issues rumbling in the background is the monster of social media, and how it’s affecting our youth. Multiple studies have already documented the multitude of negative effects on humans of all ages from using social media, but it is most pronounced in our youth. They are the instant gratification, Google-It generation, stuck in a cycle of doom scrolling on their phones, all the while comparing themselves to some unrealistic expectation of what pretty or popular mean based off someone’s perfectly curated Instagram profile, and the algorithms designed to keep them in a loop. They suffer from cyberbullying.

Many states have led the charge on holding social media conglomerates accountable for their damage to students’ mental health; they are part of a greater lawsuit, which multiple school districts, including mine, have since joined. This is a global, colossal problem bigger than the purview of an educator to tackle, but we are in the midst of it, and we must always act in the best interest of our students. Strict no-use policies regarding cell phones on campuses may help the problem at school, though there will always be rule breakers, but it doesn’t solve the greater issue at large. 

We need to do more as adults to protect them, but it’s not just teachers or public schools that carry this weight. It’s our community as a whole – parents, grandparents, employees of all industries. We need to provide options and differentiation for students, but we need to hold high expectations for them to live up to. 

There was a recent study on Department of Defense schools, and their high success. What made the difference? High expectations, behavioral norms, and consistent consequences made the difference. Call this old school, but it speaks to the importance of not lowering our standards so much that we lose our rigor. Surely other variables play into the success of these schools for military children, but the overall theme is that high expectations and consistency work. We don’t continually lower the bar; we help them reach it with support and encouragement. 

We also don’t turn a blind eye to misbehavior and disrespect. School-to-prison pipeline is a term used to describe how if students are disciplined in school, they are more likely to end up in prison. There has been a major pushback against discipline for this reason. In California, we teachers and administration are no longer allowed to give suspensions for willful defiance. Certainly, we want to keep students in the classroom as much as possible. At what point, however, do we allow a student who will not follow school rules to drag down the whole group? Parents, counselors, teachers, administration, and psychologists work together to support the student and provide services, but consequences are sometimes needed, too.

It is our job as public schools – public servants, actually – to prepare our students to be productive, well-rounded citizens; who feel a sense of belonging, empowerment, and happiness within their peer groups and greater community; people who are kind, compassionate, and supportive of each other. Our kids are struggling to recover from one of the strangest times in modern history.

We must not turn our backs on the thunderous quitting taking place in our public schools, lest we drown in the ensuing deluge.