Added concern: The flight of teachers

By AMY HETZNER, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 19, 2002

Bridget Andrews spent five years at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, working on a college degree in special education. She spent only one year as a teacher before calling it quits. "I loved the students, and the hardest part about not teaching anymore is I don't get to see those cute little faces every day," said Andrews, 26, now a financial adviser in Fond du Lac. "I miss that part. The parts that were difficult were administration, lack of support."

Andrews is emblematic of one problem special education faces. For the last decade, teachers have left the special education profession at almost twice the rate that they have left regular education positions. Read Teacher Stories: Mix, Andrekus, Van Zuidam, Settlegoode for more understanding of why Special Education teachers are even more dissatisfied - or more abused.

In the mid-1990s, the situation was so bad that two years saw more than 14% of the state's special education teaching population leave each year. At that rate, nearly half the state's special education staff could turn over every three years.

Compounding the problem is the number of teachers who leave special education to become general educators, about twice as many as those who do the reverse. In fact, so many teachers leave special education or choose not to enter the field in the first place, about half of the emergency licenses the state issues every year to people who don't meet all the requirements for full licensure are for the special education field alone.

Teachers and administrators give a number of reasons why: the amount of paperwork involved is voluminous; meetings with lawyers or in courtlike hearings are always a threat; the children they work with can be difficult; the parents can be more problematic than parents of non-disabled children; and there are too few or too lengthy special education certification programs in state universities. Note how the real reasons are omitted - being forced to lie to parent and being harassed for reporting non compliance of special education laws. Administrators have more at stake with Special Education teachers; they can report non compliance and become quite a nuisance to their agenda to ignore children's needs.

Only one institution in the state - Silver Lake College in Manitowoc - has a program to prepare teachers of visually impaired students, who numbered 453 this year, said Mark Riccobono, director of the state's Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired.And that's only for instructional aspects such as teaching Braille, he said. No school has a full program to prepare teachers for instruction in orientation and mobility for blind students, even though Wisconsin requires a license in that area, he said.

Add the pay scale of a teacher to the amount of work it takes to be in special education, and it's not surprising many find other professions more attractive after a while, said Amy Schlieve, a former special education teacher who is now a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. "I was in the field in direct services for almost 15 years, and that's a long time," she said. "Most special education teachers burn out after five. So it is a field that requires an enormous amount of energy and commitment." She neglects to add an enormous ability to lie.

For Andrews, the problem in her Oshkosh school, Roosevelt Elementary - where she oversaw a classroom of 15 kindergartners, first- and second-graders with mild cognitive disabilities - was administration. "You were left to figure it out," she said. Andrews had problems with a teaching assistant but wasn't able to get them resolved until she threatened to quit over it. She also felt that a colleague was left to deal with a significant classroom problem, one that involved numerous meetings with parents and their attorneys, by herself. Common retaliatory practice is to assign an UNDESIRABLE teacher several special needs children so that teacher has to expend far more time in meetings that are required by law.

In fact, a teacher at my former school was assigned two inclusion students (students who were formerly taught outside the regular classroom due to severe needs) when the Contract guaranteed only one inclusion student would be assigned to a teacher. That teacher had to hold weekly meetings with the parents for each student on her own time before or after school, while her colleagues received free time during the day, while their classes were covered with substitutes. You are probably wondering what she did to deserve that punishment. She stood in her integrity and supported me and told the truth at my dismissal hearing. Let's think about who was punished in addition to the teacher YOU BET. Institutionalized child abuse roars its ugly head as teacher abuse dominates the entrenched top down management - or described more accurately, the tyrannical regimes in public education.

"I think I was a very good teacher," Andrews said. "And they took someone who was so excited about special education and they made me think it was terrible."

The principal at Andrews' former school, Jami Kohl, declined to discuss some of the details of Andrews' departure, saying it was a personnel issue. But she noted that the district started a teacher-mentor program the year after Andrews left, recognizing the difficulty that the first year can be for many teachers. "She was a great teacher, and it's a loss to the special education teaching staff; it's a loss to the students," Kohl said.

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