More than 1,000 Arizona teachers have quit since July. Why?

When applying for a job, it’s considered wise to ask why the position became open in the first place. Was the previous occupant promoted? Did that person seek greener pastures? Or did they die at their desk of exhaustion and stress?

If you want to be a teacher in Arizona, the good news is that there are plenty of openings. The bad news is that many are vacant because hundreds of fed-up teachers decided to take their rulers and leave.

On Thursday, the Arizona Department of Education released a study on teacher vacancies in the state, finding that a whopping 1,055 public school and charter school teachers have quit since July 1. Of those, nearly 300 have quit since the current school year began.

At public schools, nearly 2% of teachers have hung up the grading rubrics since the summer. The trend is worse at charter schools, which have proliferated in Arizona — nearly 6% of charter school teachers have quit in that same span.

In a press release announcing the study, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne called those numbers “intolerable,” adding that “we absolutely must raise teachers’ salaries.” Horne did not return a request for comment, but few would argue with that assessment.

In Arizona, the average teacher salary is less than $63,000, which is about $10,000 less than the national average, according to the National Education Association. That a thousand teachers would bail on the profession may be surprising, said Arizona Education Association president Marsiol Garcia, but the number is “not shocking to anyone who works in public schools.”

“It’s a clear indicator that the lack of investments in our public schools results in quality educators leaving the profession,” Garcia said.

Horne has another theory as to why teachers are quitting, one that many teachers don’t quite buy. Teachers are leaving, he said, because administrators are not supporting teachers in disciplining students. “Actions have to have consequences,” he said in a video posted to the department’s YouTube page.

Like with Horne’s war against Pride flags and diversity programs, education advocates say he’s missing the real story. There are “bigger fish to fry” than disciplinary issues, said Tyler Kowch, a spokesperson for advocacy group Save Our Schools. Garcia added that if schools only suspend students when they get in trouble and don’t do anything else, those students come back and no real change is accomplished.

Teachers don’t feel supported, they say, but in a much more basic sense. Arizona’s schools are underfunded, ranking 48th in the nation in per-student spending, according to the National Education Association. Meanwhile, according to the Common Sense Institute, the state spent an estimated $882 million in taxpayer money for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts — much of which went to kids who were already in private schools to begin with.

Classrooms are overcrowded and school districts can’t afford support staff like reading interventionists, teacher’s aids, nurses, librarians and counselors. When seasoned teachers leave, inexperienced ones take their places, leaving to the “exploitation of the veterans who are (still) there” to fill the experience gap and take on the extra burden, Garcia said. 

“Whose gonna pick up the slack for that? Teachers,” Garcia said. “I can’t have a kid just bleeding in my classroom and not address it. I cannot have a student who comes in hungry and not address it.”

For all that, teachers have to be wary of not stepping on the many culture-war landmines laid down by increasingly right-wing school board members and conservative parent groups. Kowch pointed to the group of math teachers in Vail who received more than 3,000 death threats for wearing Halloween costumes that hyper-online right-wingers — including several Arizona politicians — wrongly claimed were meant to mock the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Notably, despite firing off press releases about Black Lives Matter stickers and other right-wing talking points, Horne hasn’t put out any statement of support for those embattled teachers. No wonder so many leave, Kowch said.

“If I’m a teacher and I’m seeing teachers getting death threats because they wore silly Halloween costumes,” he said, “that’s going to make me really second-guess what I’m doing in my job.”