Responsive Not Reactive: Addressing Crisis Cycles in Teacher Attrition Through Systemic Change

While I was initially encouraged by the idea that the pandemic might serve as a portal (Roy, 2020) to another possible way, not just for education, but for our world and relationships within them, the cynic in me wondered if it would just make teaching even harder, less supported, and less sustainable than the conditions that had caused me to leave my own eighth grade classroom almost a decade prior. Given that less experienced, uncertified teachers may have the least formal preparation and experience to meet the needs of diverse students, these statistics are important, particularly as research implies lower long-term retention rates for teachers who enter teaching uncertified (or through alternative certification pathways that provide very little teacher support) instead of through more rigorous traditional teacher education pathways (Freedman, & Appleman, 2009; Zhang & Zeller, 2016). In this commentary, however, I focus predominantly on a third, but related, teaching crisis, that of deprofessionalizing and dehumanizing working conditions that push teachers out of teaching and how teacher educators, educational leaders, and policy makers can take explicit steps to reprofessionalize and rehumanize teaching, and to make teaching a more attractive and sustainable position for current and future teachers. On top of this, restrictive curricular pressures due to external challenges by parent advocacy groups, some of whom formalized their challenges after running successful school board campaigns (Sinha et al., 2023), have