The other reasons were… everything else. Consistently toxic work environments across several schools, a culture of “just do a little more—it’s for the kids!”, shit pay, low social standing, watching students have mental health crises or terrible troubles at home and occasionally kill themselves while not being able to do much about it, corrupt petty-dictator superintendents, constant flailing between expensive “frameworks” implemented so incompetently that they plainly have no hope of working right, et c. The small part of summer they’re actually off and not prepping for the next year was the only good thing about it, by the end. The insulting demands, organizational dysfunction, and lack of support during Covid was the final straw—for her and lots of others, now the field has a severe teacher shortage.
This was definitely a fashionable thing to say last decade. But in a post-Covid world where we’ve seen meaningful deficits in skills as a result of disruptions to in-person elementary school attendance, I think we should re-evaluate this prior. It seems evident that there’s a lot more going on in school than just babysitting.
Why did missing school under Covid have such bad outcomes?
I don't know what happens in school (in person), but it must have been something or you wouldn't have seen such a dramatic change.
To be specific: there was a big decrease in resilience in the face of difficulties (in addition to knowledge).
To some degree elementary school has always been a large part daycare and small part teaching. But the one big change from my experience is that amount of standardized testing even 3rd graders do. Every month or two there's another day or two spent on testing and then several days before that getting them ready for it. I can't imagine being a teacher trying to craft lesson plans around all that.