Why I left teaching

I loved being a teacher and working with students. My students were the best part of my workday, but there were other things that convinced me I shouldn’t be in the career long.

A lot of education is too vibes based

I went into education to either eventually work in education policy, or science or climate communication. I had originally assumed that a lot of pedagogy was backed by rigorous science, and that good schools used top-down management styles to enforce pedagogy that actually worked. Turns out to not be the case. Education in most schools is incredibly vibes-based. People run with big heroic sounding ideas and restructure their whole curricula around them, and they often turn out to not replicate or even make things worse. The big culprit when I was teaching was “inquiry-based learning.” A basically very bad method of teaching that consistently gets worse results than other methods of teaching like direct instruction. It’s easy to spend years of your life as a teacher without anyone around you noticing that most of the ideas that are popular around you don’t replicate. Popular education podcasts and publications basically don’t seem to focus much on what actually works and replicates. You sit through long professional development sessions of ideas that are basically a social game all the teachers are playing with each other. If you get lucky like I did, you can carve out a bastion of methods that actually work in your classroom because qualified physics teachers are rare enough that you get tenure pretty quickly.

One of many great examples of how disastrously vibes-based a lot of current education is is the podcast Sold a Story. This covers a crazy fad where teachers all around the country got really into a method of teaching reading (three-cueing) that left their students unable to read. It never had any data backing it up to imply it was a good way to teach. The teachers got into it purely for the vibe.

I was in one of the first cohort of teachers where every student was given a personal laptop by the school. I was interested in ed policy because I was expecting technology to be able to make education much better. I figured there would be a lot of low hanging fruit. The general lack of interest around replicable educational science, and the school and district’s overall lack of control over how teaching actually happened in each classroom, made me realize there would be way fewer opportunities to scale my career into something that could have an impact than I expected.

Another great series on this is Matt Yglesias’s four part “The Strange Death of Education Reform” series.

I wanted to be around more ambitious people

I knew really amazing teachers who were putting a ton of effort into their classes, but it was hard to find many who wanted to work on big ambitious projects like flipping our classrooms or trying to figure out what in teaching science was actually real. I was considered one of the more technical teachers in the school because I could set up a Google Site. There was a lot I learned as a teacher, but once I was around much more ambitious people I began to move through life much faster and more effectively. It made me realize how much I had been missing in my time in education.

My school was falling apart

My entire science department quit the same year that I left. My school had become a bad place to teach. We lost a lot of great administrative talent as people quit during COVID and the new people who came in were pretty crazy.

I found myself as a 29 year old sitting in a tiny desk in a hallway doing hall monitor duty with no enforcement power. “Man, I’ve put a ton of effort and time into making my courses better and my administration doesn’t even know my name, and they don’t have the people power to keep the hallways safe without assigning me. No matter how hard I work as a teacher I’ll never reach a guaranteed level of comfort and respect basically all my friends from college have.” I already knew I didn’t want to teach longterm, but this hammered it home.

Learning to be more ambitious

Looking back it was obvious that I had underestimated what I was capable of in other places. College had been somewhat difficult for me due to some external circumstances, and I had left a little down on myself. I had gotten great grades and was well-liked in my friend groups and was considered smart, but hadn’t really learned how to push myself or reach for things beyond that. I learned that on my own and with friends over time, and was lucky to eventually get to a point where I felt like I could easily step out of teaching into something better for me.

Not wanting to be associated with some colleagues

Almost all of my colleagues were wonderful, but there are some truly crazy teachers students are subject to. Each of the three schools I taught in had at least a few who were notoriously cruel to their students and didn’t teach, and who the administration was unable to act on. I’m broadly sympathetic to the idea of unions, but it was incredible seeing how much awful teacher behavior was tolerated because the unions had made them basically unable to be fired. I went into teaching an educational progressive, supportive of public schools and skeptical of documentaries like Waiting for Superman or education leaders like Michelle Rhee. Rhee specifically was famous for making it much easier to fire bad teachers and administrators, going so far as to fire a principal on national TV. I came out of my career much less sympathetic to teacher unions, and had deeply internalized how bad some teachers could get. Consistently finding myself in organizations where students were regularly bullied or harassed by adults was getting to be too much, so it was another good push to leave. Say what you want about students learning with ChatGPT, but an advantage is that ChatGPT will answer their questions and isn’t going to harass them.

Low pay

It’s easy to take a low paying job in your early 20’s when your. Once I internalized how easy it would be for me to make a lot more money for a lot less work and with a lot more dignity elsewhere, it was hard to consider staying in teaching once I realized I probably wasn’t going to have an impact there.

A dream job elsewhere

I had been involved in effective altruism networks for a while and was offered a role leading the DC EA group. in my last year of teaching. This was a dream job for me. Leaving for that has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself.

Advice to people considering teaching as a career

I very strongly advise young ambitious people against teaching, unless they’re incredibly sure it’s what they want to do. This is not at all because the day to day experience with students was bad for me. It was good on a life-changing level. But it’s really important in your early career to be around other thoughtful, ambitious people trying to make outsized impact in whatever field you’re working in. Once I saw how common this was in other fields, I really regretted entering teaching. It’s too swamped in weird or bad ideas there’s no real pressure to make things better. Individual teachers and teams of teachers can do a great job, but the field as a whole doesn’t seem promising as a way of making the world better for people who want to be ambitious with what they can do.