Doris Santoro’s Demoralized is a groundbreaking work in that it captures much of what contemporary K–12 educators have been communicating for some time. Demoralized provides today’s educators with a vocabulary for precisely describing what they have been feeling since passage of NCLB ushered in the Accountability Era. Having been in office as president of the Education Association of Camden, New Jersey, for nearly three years , I receive calls and emails about a wide range of concerns, from innocuous inquiries — for example, “Why wasn’t/was yesterday a snow day?” — to questions regarding some of the very serious and consequential issues raised in this text.
As Santoro describes, administrators regularly compel educators to, as a condition of their employment, do things in their classrooms that they feel conflicted about and view as antithetical to their calling to educate and care for children. The endless testing, the daily lessons hijacked to prepare for standardized tests, the mandated pacing guides to keep students on schedule for the tests — the reality is that no educators point to carrying out these tasks as a reason they entered the profession, but they are, nonetheless, required to perform these tasks in order to stay in the profession. The “teaching” profession as it is practiced today is not the kind of career that motivated teachers to become teachers, nor does it reward teachers for providing — or, in many cases, allow teachers to provide — the kind of teaching that any parent would want for their child. Most importantly, it is not good for our children and, by extension, not good for our country in the long term.
Demoralized does an excellent job fleshing out the realities of crying first-graders and special education students whose love of learning and imaginations are being stifled by their teachers — people they trust, the people closest to them outside their parents — because of the requirement that they adhere to mandates such as NCLB. Similarly, teachers desperately want to nurture their students, care for them, and protect their students’ educational best interests, but they are tormented because of the competing dualities of serving their students’ interests versus adhering to educational policies. This book captures such feelings and emotions and conveys them in an authentic way that avoids hyperbole. The struggles illustrated in this book are identical to the distress my own union members express far too often in their communications with me.
What seems to me most valuable about Santoro’s analysis is the concept of re-moralization, the idea that teachers can become renewed and re-empowered through engagement with like-minded and purpose-driven educators who want to take their profession and its ideals back — reclaiming teaching, in a sense — and that teachers unions like mine could and should have a role in educators’ personal and professional re-moralization. As president of a teacher’s union, I have seen how important it is for our educators who feel demoralized to understand that they are not alone — it’s not just them — and that we must lean on one another in such moments of doubt and fear. I would like to believe that, even if it does not change their classroom realities or sense of purpose, our association’s approach of highlighting our classroom teachers’ successes and their sacrifices in both local and social media while imploring them to become more present and vocal is at least helping them find agency and a renewed drive to reclaim their students, their classrooms, and their schools in a way that reflects their sense of morality in education. Santoro offers rational yet important suggestions for how teachers can re-moralize, for example, through finding support systems within one’s building or online, ensuring through creative scheduling that students still have time for elective-type learning such as art and music, or joining local civic groups and attending teacher-led protests.
One apparent flaw in the book is that white teachers’ voices dominate the narrative of Demoralized. Indeed, the views and experiences conveyed in Demoralized are universal in the sense that they describe realities that teachers across ethnicities and races face. When an analysis allots only one group space and a voice, readers should proceed with caution. Such accounts often attribute value and worthiness to the voices that are included, and not to those that are excluded. The implicit message that one might glean from the dominance of white voices in Demoralized is that only the views of white teachers matter. White voices, therefore, represent normalcy and so become the standard by which other teachers who are experiencing any semblance of demoralization will be judged.
As a black male educator, socialist, and standpoint theorist, I look for those voices that are not included in any public discourse because we know that marginalized groups can experience the same things as the dominant group, but they often perceive and feel the impact differently. I could not help but feel that the lamentations highlighted in the book by overwhelmingly white teachers are, in a sense, ouroboric. The ouroboros is the mythical snake that, in eating its tail, is understood to represent wholeness or infinity. From my perspective, the ouroboros is a metaphorical rendering of American racism and those policies that perpetuate and reinforce it in their coupled exploitation of the nonwhite and the underclass. In other words, the efforts to target and harm black and brown communities and the poor in America through fixed structures and policies, the dominant culture ends up harming itself.
Certainly, teachers of color — specifically, black teachers — have railed for decades against curriculum bias, standardized testing, unequal school funding, and the comparatively unequal disbursement of educational opportunity more broadly. Teachers of color in urban America have been sounding the alarm about Teach for America, the charter movement, district takeover, and the targeting of educators of color by the very edu-philanthropists and edu-capitalists referenced in Demoralized. But for decades, the concerns we voiced were met with near total silence from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, as well as from white teachers throughout the profession, including those across the hall. This collective silence indicated acceptance and complicity. There is little doubt, in my mind at least, that the federal and state education reforms instituted to “target failing schools” deliberately target local black urban communities, where most educators of color teach.
I do not view the victimization of black schools, children, and teachers as accidental or an unintended consequence, but as deliberate and purposeful. All the while, many suburban teachers and parents have remained silent or extended their tacit or enthusiastic approval to go after those in “failing schools,” even when it meant that their fellow educators would be on the hook. But like the viper, predatory in nature and out to subdue and devour its prey, the ouroboros ended up targeting and victimizing itself. Thus today, the white teachers included in this book, along with those all over the country, are feeling targeted, victimized, and demoralized by the same policies that were initially intended to hurt educators who look like me, who teach students that look like me, in communities like the one where I reside.
I so wish Santoro’s book included the voices of educators of color more substantively so that we could have learned how this era of demoralization impacts teachers of color in addition to white teachers because their experiences are likely to be markedly different. Many teachers of color are aware of a sustained bleaching of the workforce in urban districts that black teachers historically found welcoming. Yet, in addition to feeling that they are doing their students a disservice by adhering to policy mandates, teachers of color may also feel demoralized by the knowledge that what they are being mandated to do is likely to harm their own professional trajectory. Teachers of color in urban public schools are forced to follow directives that hurt their students while hurting their careers in the process — and many probably already suspect that the goal all along was to simultaneously hurt both students and teachers of color. There seems to be an intersectionality to demoralization that Santoro’s book does not expose to readers. A question that certainly warrants further exploration is this: How do teachers of color cope with being forced to oppress their students while feeling like specific targets of oppression themselves? Nonetheless, Demoralized is an excellent book, one that I recommend to our teachers’ union members throughout the city and state, and to anyone concerned with the impact recent education policies are having on our educators and our schools.
Smith, B., Benson, K., Levinson, M., Stengel, B. (2019). Book Review Symposium Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Educational Theory. 69(3).
