A friend of mine is a teacher in Chesapeake, VA public schools. Last week, they posted a “staffing update” of current vacancies in the school system:

• 23 Elementary teachers
• 19 Middle school teachers
• 24 High school teachers

While vacancies during the pandemic are not surprising, these staffing shortages existed long before the pandemic. Similarly, a number of school systems around the country, are adding ‘holidays’ during the school year to address the ‘stress”https://www.sweetstudy.com/”burnout’ levels of the teaching staff. Again, while stress/burnout levels are high during the pandemic everywhere, these problems with teacher ‘stress”https://www.sweetstudy.com/”burnout’ have been an issue for years (decades) for K-12 teachers.

The ‘solutions that have been offered in the past have all been individual-level interventions: (a) better self-care, (b) teachers need to be more committed, (c) higher standards for teachers, etc. When these kinds of problems of staffing are found across decades, it’s clear that there is a systemic problem. What is needed is a redesign of the job itself – a change in the ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE of the K-12 school system.

The questions are as follows

 You’ve been hired as a consultant to a K-12 school to help them redesign their organization to improve the working conditions for teachers. 

 Given your understanding of the K-12 education system, and the theory and research discussed in Chapter 14 (and the entire course), what do you think the fix for K-12 will look like?