Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Christopher Saldaña: Hi everyone, I'm Chris Saldana and this is the National Education Policy Center's Talks Education Podcast. This month we're speaking with Lora Bartlett about her new book, Going the Distance. In Going the Distance, Lora and her co-authors Allison Thompson, Judith Warren Little, and Riley Collins examine the professional conditions that support career commitment among K 12 educators and the factors that threaten teacher retention, drawing insight from the period of significant teacher turnover and burnout, both during and beyond COVID 19 school shutdowns in the United States, the authors offer clear guidance for policies and practices that meet the needs of teachers and nourish a robust teaching workforce.

Dr. Bartlett is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where her scholarship aims to advance and develop knowledge related to teachers professional commitment to teaching, conceptions of teacher professionalism and the composition of the teacher workforce.

So in your book you and your co-authors focus on changes in the teaching profession in the post COVID world.

 I'm wondering for listeners who aren't familiar with the context of the teaching profession in the pre COVID world, what were the conditions like for teachers before the pandemic?

Lora Bartlett: Thanks, Chris. That's a great question. In 2019, actually, even in 2020, before the pandemic became a reality in our school lives, the teaching profession is widely understood to have been at a 50 or low, meaning it was a 50 or low for respect for teachers draws to the profession satisfaction in the profession and the salary levels of teachers, which is not to say that all teachers everywhere.

We're experiencing poor working conditions for many years. Researchers and leaders have emphasized the importance to the teaching profession of a strong collaborative workplace culture, responsive leadership, professional networks. And we anticipated that would matter in our study and it did but only a third of the teachers that we followed in our study had those conditions and the others were really struggling with that that very low conditions of the work.

Of the teaching profession. In 2018, not even half of U. S. teachers felt respected. They also didn't have access to the working conditions associated with satisfaction and prestige in the profession. So you could say that the teaching profession was already in a very precarious place. And then COVID entered the scene.

Christopher Saldaña: When we think about COVID 19, when we think about the pandemic, most folks will acknowledge it was a historic crisis. But I don't think oftentimes in our field we have a great conceptualization of what crisis is. I think you all did that really effectively in your book. So when you and your co-authors were thinking about crisis and what is a crisis, what did you come to use as your definition?

Lora Bartlett: It's really interesting my thinking about what a crisis was changed a lot through this work. We draw on the social science work on crisis and crisis theory to define crises as not an event, many people think a crisis is an event, but it's not an event.

It's the context in which an event occurs, and then the response to that event, those three things together create a crisis. Let me give you an example. I was a child in 1978 in Massachusetts when the blizzard of 78 hit Massachusetts and within a few hours, snow came down so fast, people were stopped in their cars on the freeways.

Some of them died in those cars, right? Now, I live in California. When we get a big blizzard in the Sierra Mountains it's not a crisis. In fact, it's a cause for celebration because it means in the spring there'll be a lot more water in California in the spring, right? So the snowstorm, an event, is not a crisis.

It's the context. Where it is, where is the crisis happening and how is that situation ready for it? And then the response. So in 1978, if they'd had snow piles ready to go, better weather predicting, right? More apt emergency response, better communication systems, right? Probably, it could have still been an epic snowstorm that stopped people and made them stay home, but didn't kill them.

A crisis only occurs when we have this interaction and we have a negative outcome. Now, the pandemic was a particular kind of crisis that theorists call a transboundary crisis. And a transboundary crisis is one that spreads rapidly from an ambiguous source, it crosses over, Organizational and societal boundaries disrupting all aspects of life.

There's no getting away from it. And it threatens a large number of people. And I think we can agree that the pandemic was a transboundary health crisis. For us, part of the question, though, is to what extent It was and or needed to be an education crisis.

Christopher Saldaña: I want to go back to when the project started. Where, how did it start?

Were you already working with these teachers? Was this something that you said, oh my God, I need to pull something together. How did this come to be?

Lora Bartlett: It came to be because all four of us who worked on the project have been working with teachers and in schools for years, decades, some of us, to be honest.

One of, one of my coauthors was working in teacher education and supervising teachers and placements when the pandemic started and that stopped. Another one of my coauthors is a long time sociologist of teachers work and former Dean of the Berkeley graduate school of education. And then another one has been a both a district school district, HR employee and a union negotiator.

And I myself have done research with schools and teachers for decades. When the pandemic hit, it affected all of us just like it affected everyone in this transboundary crisis, and most of everything we were doing came to a screeching halt. I got told to take a 300 student undergraduate Introduction to Educational Issues class online in one week, and when I pointed out that I didn't know what Zoom was, can you imagine a moment when we didn't know what Zoom was, that the camera on my five year old laptop didn't work, and that even this thing they called Zoom wouldn't support all 300 students at that point I was just told to figure it out.

At the same time, I had two seniors. I had twin daughters who were seniors in high school and overnight, their world went from announcements about the school musical roles, plans for a trip to DC, near mornings, and all of these things that were happening to being at my dining room table looking forlorn and depressed and hearing their teachers voices, just.

Just coming out of their laptops and this very happy chipper sound and me knowing those teachers and thinking that woman has three school aged children and one not preschool age at home. They're all home with her. She sounds really upbeat. What's going on for these teachers? So we started out just with this thought that we wanted to find out what was going on for teachers and we thought the project would be very short, to tell you the truth, Chris.

We thought that we would talk to so maybe 40 or 50 teachers and document the, how the spring went for them and then what they were thinking about the return to a more normal world for the fall of 20. And of course, That didn't quite plan out that way. So each time that it was clear, things weren't quite returning to our January 2020 reality, we asked teachers if they'd extend the project with us.

Yeah, we also thought we would have trouble finding teachers who were able and willing to carve out time to talk to us. So we used our networks. We use social media email lists just to push out a sort of intake survey. Hey, are you a teacher? Are you teaching during this time? Would you be willing to talk to us?

And in 48 hours, we got over 740 responses from over 40 countries, 40 states. And so we were like, okay, clearly teachers want to talk. But we were like, And that's how we found our sample. So no, they were all new to us, but it was actually our privilege to spend the pandemic with 75 of them for two and a half years in nine different states.

Christopher Saldaña: So I want to take us back to the beginning of the pandemic and ask you about what was it like for teachers at the very beginning? It's March of 2020. We get the news that everything's going to shut down. What were the initial. experiences of teachers. And you mentioned that you had folks in New York City, in Iowa.

How did that initial experience look different? Or maybe how was it the same?

Lora Bartlett: Yeah. First, I want to remind us that in those very early days of the pandemic, we had a remarkably cohesive shared response as a society, but also school buildings shut down everywhere, regardless of the rates of infection in that local area, regardless of state politics regardless of union strength.

Everybody for a fleeting moment of time, got on board with the flatten the curve moment. With the idea of people making sacrifice for one another. And I think that really set the tone initially. In some places, some schools had anticipated the closure, and I would say that was often in places where the infection rates were higher, and they were more viscerally connected to what was happening, or they had some connection to a place where it was higher.

So like in New York City, several of the teachers told us their principals had anticipated a few days before the closure. This was going to happen, whereas at that time in Iowa, there were really almost no infections. And there it came as a big surprise to many people, right? So we had that kind of variation.

So where they could anticipate those principles had done a little bit of get laptops to kids, make sure they take textbooks home, tell people to clear out their personal belongings when they leave school kind of thing. But at the same time there was a set of uniform policies that popped up that we called do no harm policies, right?

There was everywhere people decided that attendance should be relaxed, grading should either be stopped or become very cautious. Testing was suspended everywhere. Standardized testing. Most places agreed that no new curriculum should be taught and that instead schooling should become about connection that teachers were told everywhere to give grace, to make sure their students were still connected and okay, but to be very understanding of this widespread shift that was happening for everyone in the new challenges.

The other thing is that teachers really felt seen and appreciated. They felt that they were. stepping up to do a very big and important job, unprecedented, but that they were stepping into a need and they were taking care of their students, which is what every teacher we talked to wanted to do.

Of course, that looked really different in some, in different places. In rural Texas, some of our teachers told us that meant them driving around putting packages of handouts into mailboxes from their cars because the internet connections were really poor in rural parts of Texas and other places.

They already had a one to one policy and students had computers and pretty much overnight teachers were able to shift to an online platform. And then there were other variations in terms of how much autonomy and flexibility teachers had and how much they were being told to do. But by and large, teachers were told to figure it out.

They did.

Christopher Saldaña: What does that response teach us about what schools can be? I think oftentimes folks who are not in schools and just listen to the news, for example we'll hear policy makers or politicians say all those schools are failing all those teachers. What are they doing?

we need to really accountability like we need to really be on them and the principals and What does the experience of how teachers stepped up teach us both about the profession? But then how we should be thinking about folks who are working in schools with children.

Lora Bartlett: It's interesting You know the pandemic In 2020 happened on the, and really in the heels of two decades of a very managerialist orientation to schools for two decades there's been this fervent almost religious belief that the pathway to equity and educational improvement is to more tightly couple that you know the controls over curriculum testing and outcomes and tie that to ratings about teachers in schools and that when things don't improve or equity doesn't seem to be being achieved and we're not narrowing the gap that we need to tighten even more of those controls and script the curriculum and, ensure that teachers are all in the same place at the same time and make the test even more high stakes and that that all of that tight coupling was just a test.

all ceased all at once in the spring of 20. And we might have imagined that no one would do anything. But in fact, that's not what happened because the well of commitment that teachers have overall to their students and to their wellbeing and to their learning drives their work. As we all know, nobody goes into teaching to be rich.

And for a long time, we've understood that the satisfactions of teaching are intrinsic. Deep satisfaction, right? Around how well their students do, around the learning they see, around their student well-being, and that's what teachers are looking for. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pay our teachers well, but even a well-paid teacher is not on a pathway to wealth, right?

Teachers are motivated by that, and that's what drove their response in the spring. And that's what led them to be very innovative. We had a teacher in Texas. She was working with her colleagues and she said, okay, attendance just became optional. Problematic. I wish this district hadn't done that.

But they did, but we still need our students to show up. They still, we still want them to keep learning and we still want to make sure they're okay. So how can we get them to show up? And so they decided to start having a once a week topic based trivia game online. And students would go from maybe a few showing up to almost all of their classes showing up to play the online trivia game, which was based on the content that they were learning all week.

So they found a way to just motivate those students to actually engage with the curriculum and make it happen. And yeah, they didn't have to do that, right? They weren't required to, the teachers, but that was, Born out of their own core commitment to student learning and well-being.

Christopher Saldaña: It's interesting because what you're describing to me conveys a person who is essential to society.

And early on, we heard this word essential worker come up and it was tacked on to a number of different professions and fields and industries. And we just heard over and over essential workers and what they should be doing, what protections they should be offered in the beginning parts of the pandemic, what risks they're taking.

What did you learn about what that word meant to teachers? And. How does that experience map on to what you described in terms of the, how the profession had been treated before the pandemic?

Lora Bartlett: Yeah. It's interesting because we definitely heard about essential workers. And early on, I would say that essentially essential workers were, it's a term used to apply to healthcare workers and grocery and food industry workers.

It wasn't a term applied to teachers really until about August of 2020. And when the issue of when and how to resume schooling, whether it should be in person, remote, or hybrid really came to the forefront when we realized that things were not really going to change dramatically, and we were going to have to figure out a way to go into a new school year with the pandemic still ongoing.

The White House decreed in mid-August of 2020 that teachers should be classified as essential workers. The White House said teachers are now essential workers. But not all of the nine states we studied classified teachers as essential workers. They varied a lot. And the teachers themselves varied in their notion about essential workers.

All of them said yes, as teachers we're essential. We're essential to student learning and we're essential to student well-being. But many of them felt that they could do their essential teaching online. And what they raised was what they, what. When the framing of essential wasn't actually to do with student learning, it had more to do with a redefining of the crisis, not as a public health crisis but not even as an education crisis, but as a crisis of the economy, right?

And where places interpreted this really as a crisis of the economy was where we saw a big push to return to in person because you needed kids back in school in order for other workers to work. Often at home and where teachers recognize that framing, they objected. They objected to being asked to risk their lives pre vaccine to risk the lives of their community and they really saw their well-being pitted against the well-being of students, right?

It was like, a lot of people argued children you remember this, children don't get vaccine, don't get, don't transmit COVID at the same rate, and when they get it, they don't get as sick and they don't die as often. And teachers are like, but we are in the buildings too, and we're not children, right?

So they nobody, they thought, why aren't people talking about us? And where they were talking about them, often folks were saying that it was a reasonable risk. There was an acknowledgement in many forums that some teachers might die if we force them back into the buildings, but some would assert that was a fair trade off for the wellbeing of children.

And that there was definitely a difference. I would say that there were also some teachers who were willing to take the risk. And in some communities, they got the option. So some places said, okay, we're going to open hybrid and we're going to ask teachers, are you willing to go back in person? Or is that some, a risk you feel able to take, or are you?

Would you prefer to be at home for your own reasons? And in those places, there were teachers who volunteered to be in person. And there were teachers who said, for my personal health reasons or the health needs of my family, I need to be at home. And there, teachers went back much more willingly, right?

Where in the other places, teachers were told, you're going to go back. You're going to be in person. You don't have any choice. The very first teachers to leave our study were science teachers. To leave teaching, not leave our study. But they left our study when they left teaching. They were both science teachers, one in Iowa and one in Florida.

And for both of them, their districts announced that the schools were going back in person. that there would be no real distancing and that districts were not allowed to require students to wear masks. And both teachers said this is not safe. It's an airborne disease. We are not going back under these conditions.

And the teacher in Iowa didn't even ask to stay remote. She said, you must allow me to social distance students and have them wear masks or I'm not going back. And the district said, okay, and she left, she quit teaching. The one in Florida was in a very similar place and she left. So our very first exits were about this tension, if you will, about what does it look like for teachers to be doing their essential work during a pandemic and what are the conditions that they need to be.

They did, teachers agree that teaching and learning are essential for the well-being of children. But they were not in agreement about how much risk teachers should be asked to take, and they felt the teachers ought to have some say in deciding how much risk to take.

Christopher Saldaña: I want to ask you about, the politics of research.

It’s fascinating. It's like we, we do our work. We ask questions. We try to do the best to find, answers to important questions. But the politics of research is always fascinating. There have been a number of quantitative studies now that have come out showing that schools that went back early did better.

Obviously, correlation is a causation. So we don't, there are a number of confounding factors that could be shaping that relationship. I'm just curious. After having spent this time with teachers and heard their concerns and experienced with them, teachers who went back early, who wanted to go back early, teachers who felt it wasn't safe, and they weren't ready.

What would you want people to keep top of mind when they're looking back and thinking about the decisions around when school districts, schools went back in person? What do you think is the important thing to keep in mind there? In addition to, being skeptical of analysis that, that kind of put forward these claims, what I think do you, would you say teachers would say about this whole situation and experience?

Lora Bartlett: I think that a few things that should be kept in mind. What I'd ask folks to define what it meant to do better, right? Because we see now widespread attendance problems across schools, and I don't know that anything's been proven that's true. Those attendance problems and the mental health problems that we see in schools are showing up to a lower degree in places that went back early.

So what does it mean to do better? I think do better means achievement on the standardized state tests. So that's one form of doing better. Teachers argued throughout that there were other measures of doing better as well. And that they typically felt that the conversation about learning loss.

Was really highlighting concerns about academic learning that didn't take into account the need for students to return to school feeling once again reconnected, grounded, safe in the world, and that they shared the concerns about learning but felt the pathway to get there was different than what was being pushed.

One thing I want to do is challenge this idea that people who went back early were back in normal schooling. It's what I wonder every time I see one of these statistically oriented studies or reports on who did better based on the modality. The first thing I question is the accuracy of their ability to capture the modality that schools were in.

Because, for example, we know that some schools said that they were. In person, but in fact, everybody in the school was in the room on zoom, still learning online. They were just in the building. Other places said that they were a hybrid, but in fact, some students were completely remote. Some students were completely in person.

Some places they went back and forth, right? Some places it was a mix all the time. So the modality definitions to me are really, not an easy classification to use. And why does that matter in the measure? One of the things we heard from teachers is that what really mattered, what they really cared about was consistency of modality.

So if their schools would choose a modality and stay in it, then they could design pedagogical practice to match that modality. So it may be that the ones that were in person chose a modality and stayed in it for a longer period of time. We had some teachers who were asked to change modalities in the year of 2020, 21.

Eight times. Most changed three or four times, usually on a dime and in a moment. And repeatedly they said to us, we can teach well in almost any modality, but what we need is for that modality to stay constant. So I guess I'd like to see a large scale, a quantitative survey that is based on how often did your modality change rather than what modality was it?

I think that would change the outcome and understandings of how the endemic was navigated in schools.

Christopher Saldaña: I want to move to asking you about another issue that's come up a lot in the discourse around the pandemic and teachers, which is recruitment and retention. There have been. A lot of folks who have raised alarm bells that teachers were going to exit the profession in mass.

And we were already struggling with teacher shortages. We are struggling with teacher shortages. Burnout is real. Demoralization is real. Recruitment and retention are real problems. But I'm curious what you learned about teachers. Staying in the profession, teachers who left the profession and what that teaches us about recruitment and retention going forward, but also just how we treat teachers in these very particular moments of crisis.

Lora Bartlett: First of all, teachers did leave the profession in higher numbers and not in that first summer of 20. And not as many in summer of 21, but by the summer of 22, we were seeing significantly higher exit rates of teachers in our study, but across the nation and are the states for which we could get turnover rates and exit rates highlight that that same pattern, not just in our sample, but in the states that we were in.

But in addition to those, and in fact 20 percent of the teachers in our study left teaching during the course of the study, none of them had plans, none of those teachers had plans to leave before the pandemic, and they were clear that the pandemic facilitated their exit. But in addition to that, there were a whole bunch of teachers who want to leave, or are planning to leave, but haven't left yet.

There's often we see in the media when you survey teachers, large numbers of them say they intend to leave, but then they don't. So perhaps they're just a discontented lot that like to complain. But what we experienced in these close interviews and engagement with these teachers was some, barriers that prevented an immediate exit.

So we called them in fact, outgoing stayers, right? They were staying, but they were planning their exit that for some of them, that meant they were close to retirement, but they had intended to teach past retirement age, but now they were, had marked on the calendar the day that they were eligible for retirement.

And they plan to retire that day. They weren't going past that for others. That meant they were actively working with career coaches and applying for jobs and looking to plan their exit. And then for some others, they were in fact staying, but they were staying because they felt stuck, not because they wanted to stay anymore.

And they felt stuck because they were, this was their only income, and they'd been in the profession at least 15 or more years. And they weren't quite at retirement age or, so that they could see it on the horizon, but they also didn't feel like they could make a shift. Or they were stuck because they were the source of a health need.

insurance for their family and who leaves a job with health insurance during a pandemic. So they were staying put till they could figure that out or they might be stuck forever. We should really be concerned about these teachers who are still in schools but don't want to be. Not in the way that we often see in the media, like we need to push them out further, but we need to ask how we organize to restore their commitment, engagement, and their capacity to sustain that commitment in the long term.

We only had 25 of our 75 teachers come through the pandemic as what we classified as satisfied stayers. They I like to say that those teachers are the ones who said, wow, that was a rough winter. That was just like a lot of snow shoveling. I'm exhausted, but I'm glad it's over. Now it's spring and things are okay.

And I'm satisfied still. And I'm staying I'm going the distance if you will. And they were going to stay long term, but the other teachers were really struggling. And we need to address the organizational conditions of teachers work so that we don't have a profession where we have so many teachers feeling dissatisfied, disrespected, unheard, and marginalized.

It's possible. We know how to do it. And we could take the steps to create the conditions. to get the teachers that we want to organize for.

Christopher Saldaña: You're already going into my last question, which is about recommendations. You provide, you and your co-authors provide really powerful examples of events in history, crises, where we can look back and say, okay, society learned from that crisis and it prevented disaster in the future.

Other examples, we can look back and responses to a crisis. we’re not so great and resulted in disaster and death, and just a clear indication that we did not learn from our experiences. When you think about what we should take away from the pandemic and the experience of teachers, what are a few things that you think should be top of mind that we can implement now, and that we should be thinking about?

in preparation for a potential future crisis.

Lora Bartlett: Yeah. There's an interesting thing we discovered and that is that the conditions that emergency responders need to be effective emergency responders, and I'm not talking about teachers right now, I'm talking about your mainstream emergencies, fire, 911, those kinds of emergencies and crises.

The conditions that they need are similar to the conditions that jazz musicians need to make really good improv jazz music and are similar to the conditions that teachers need to teach really well in any context. And that is a deep technical knowledge expertise, experience, contingency plans, but also the ability to adapt the freedom to adapt in an emergent way to what the needs are.

So for a long time, emergency response preparation looked like drill, skill, practice protocol preparation, but long ago it was debunked that's effective. There is an importance, but at the same time, an insufficiency of that kind of emergency planning. You need it. You need to have protocols, but you also need to have the working conditions and the professionals who know They, they have the autonomy to make decisions in the moment in an emergently responsive way, which means that what we need to do between now and the next massive crisis is create the conditions that provide the space for teachers to enact adaptive capacity and emergence.

And what does that look like? It means respect for the profession. It means autonomy for professional decision making about needs and how to respond to those needs. It means voice, teacher voice, in professional capacity in decision making, not just in their classroom, but decision making in relation to schools.

It means collaboration and space for collaboration among and between teachers. It means looser coupling of the systems and policies that govern and guide schooling and teachers work and trust that teachers will behave in a way with students interests at the core of their decision making. And that requires us really to back away from this, fervent commitment that's existed in our policy systems to tight coupling to a belief that it is through control that will get the kinds of schools we want.

That doesn't mean there's no space for planning. That doesn't mean there's no space for student testing. It means that those things are placed within the purview of teacher expertise and teacher voice and respect. I'll also add Chris that when I say teacher voice that we need to center teacher voice and a lot of teaching decision making.

I don't mean that all teachers should get their way all the time. In fact, teachers in our study would say to us, we went through this long process and teachers were consulted and we engaged in even a short process of sharing our views. Ultimately, the decision went in a direction that I wouldn't have chosen, but I understand that was the decision that needed to happen.

And I feel respected. So there are ways of centering voice and including teachers and decision making that are essential. One of the disasters you're talking about, of course, where it's heat waves in Paris, and there were two very big heat waves in Paris, about two decades apart.

And in the first heat waves a catastrophic amount of people died, mostly elderly, mostly in isolation. And Paris then went about creating some very specific organizational, societal, systemic changes in the way they communicate about heat, but also in the way they prepared to minimize the impact of heat, right?

They created new zoning and building regulations that required more insulation. They required that there be more of a greening of the city. And they created more cooling rooms and they created better communication systems. So the next time they had a heat wave, they saw a tenfold reduction in deaths in the city.

So what we need to do is make, we essentially need to do the how do we create the conditions for the teaching profession for adaptive capacity? How do we make sure that the teaching profession is one where teachers are and feel the respect for their professional knowledge and expertise, and how do we support them, so that if we have teachers having adaptive capacity now, then they will be in a position to enact that adaptive capacity in any crisis.

And I do believe that will mitigate the negative effects for students, learning, and for teacher commitment in the profession.

Christopher Saldaña: Thank you, Professor Bartlett, for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc.colorado.edu.