The Atlantic

How to Keep Teachers From Leaving the Profession

After 38 years in education, Judith Harper thinks what teachers are missing is more time to learn from one another.
Source: Judith Harper / The Atlantic

Editor’s Note: In the next five years, most of America’s most experienced teachers will retire. The Baby Boomers are leaving behind a nation of more novice educators. In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just three years leading a classroom. The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project is crisscrossing the country to talk to veteran educators. This story is the seventh in our series.

When Judith Harper was graduating from Arizona State University in May 1981, she felt fully prepared to take on five classrooms on her own that fall. After all, Harper had majored in English education, and the program was highly regarded. Plus, during her senior year, she had gotten to work in a real classroom, as an apprentice to a veteran educator.

But a few months later, as Harper finished her first week of work at Westwood High School in Mesa, Arizona—a diverse, sprawling suburb near Phoenix—she realized how much she struggled even with the basics, such as keeping 22 teens paying attention to her lesson for 15 minutes, much less an entire hour. “On the first day, I had a student who refused to work, a student who was interrupting the work of his friends, several students using inappropriate language with each other and me,” Harper recalled. “As a novice teacher, you have no idea what you should be responding to and what you can ignore. Every day I felt like a failure.”

By the time she finished her first year of teaching, Harper, who has a thin, small frame to begin with, had lost 20 pounds. She routinely worked 12-hour days and spent her weekends preparing for the classes ahead.

Like many graduates of teaching programs, Harper had strong content knowledge of the subject she was going to teach, but she lacked the skills and practical experience that would enable her to effectively impart this information to her students. When she worked with a veteran teacher in

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic4 min read
Private Equity Has Its Eyes on the Child-Care Industry
Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET on February 22, 2024. Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care s
The Atlantic5 min readSocial History
The Pro-life Movement’s Not-So-Secret Plan for Trump
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he regards his party’s position on reproductive rights as a political liability. He blamed the “abortion issue” for his part
The Atlantic4 min readAmerican Government
How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t
Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking

Related Books & Audiobooks