Natalie Guest understands Indiana’s teacher shortage.
After teaching English at Northwestern High School for five years, Guest, 29, made the difficult decision to resign at the end of last school year because she no longer felt she could give students her best under the current climate of public education.
“It was a mixture of the environment the state legislature has created at schools,” Guest said. “It’s so much about data collection in terms of proving we are doing our jobs, instead of actually doing our jobs.
“We’ve gone from very meaningful content that’s difficult to measure to teaching non-meaningful content that’s easy to get data on,” she added. “We’re not creating a culture of learners. We’re training test takers.”
Even as Guest’s frustration mounted, from mandates affecting her classroom to salary and her benefits that made it difficult for her to afford to take maternity leave one year to generally not feeling respected as a professional, it was still hard for her to walk away from the classroom.
She made up her mind in the last month of the 2014-15 school year, when she saw her students spend so much time testing that she couldn’t do anything meaningful in her English classes.
“I felt this immense amount of guilt [resigning from teaching], but I did feel I was selling them something I didn’t believe in,” she said.
It’s no surprise to Guest that Indiana is facing a teacher shortage. She thinks schools need more state funding to offer teachers higher salaries and also provide them with the resources they need, noting she often bought classroom supplies herself. Indiana’s new teacher evaluation requirements and the emphasis on testing students has put undue pressure on teachers and students, Guest said, and she would like to see educators have more input in the legislative decisions that affect schools.
“I want to make it clear this is not the fault of my administrators. I worked for amazing administrators,” Guest said. “I feel like there’s just such a lack of respect for the profession.”
For now, Guest says she’s just on “hiatus” from teaching, and she still works as a reader apprenticeship consultant at Northwestern and helps out in high school classes a couple of times a week. She would like to get more involved in taking teachers’ concerns to the state level.
“There’s no shortage of good teachers,” Guest said. “We are out there. But you can’t expect to systematically tear down a profession, to demean a profession and not expect for there to be a fall out.”