Book Review | Doris Santoro’s Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay reviewed by Kathryn Bateman

In Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay, Doris Santoro tells rich stories of experienced teachers living in the era of accountability, evaluation, and increasing policies, who when seeking advice are often referred to as “burnt out.” Santoro differentiates between burn out and demoralization. Demoralization is not about teachers’ resiliency, growth mindsets, or adaptation to changing conditions. Demoralization centers around tensions between teachers’ beliefs and values and the expectations of practices imposed on teachers by national, state, district, and school policies. Unlike the exhaustion and disengagement that accompany burn-out from being overworked, teachers who have been demoralized experience feelings of inability to do their work in a way that aligns with their moral code due to external factors such as culture, policies, administrators, and colleagues.  Though at first, the process of demoralization seems a grim and permanent process, Santoro presents the audience with a counter process – re-moralization. In the process of re-moralization, teachers are enabled to regain a sense of purpose and fortitude in their teaching practice, often through the same attributes of their school community which can serve as venues for demoralization like administrators, or by taking control of their situation and making changes in their position.

The book is laid out to first describe the importance of studying demoralization as a contributing factor to teacher retention and subsequently the increasing teacher shortage in the US, and finally contextualizing and framing the concept of demoralization. Santoro dives into specifics of demoralizing aspects which concern teachers: being asked to comply with policies which harm students or denigrate the teaching profession. She then explains how re-moralization can occur, and outlines sources of demoralization in educational leaders and teachers’ unions.

Santoro’s methods follow a case-study format to describe demoralization. Santoro focuses on thirteen experienced teachers (six to twenty-seven years), and gets into the details of their story in their own words, often for pages at a time, to richly illustrate exactly what the demoralization and re-moralization processes look like in schools. She utilizes social media to recruit these teachers, looking for those who had moral concerns with their current teaching environment. Though this provides Santoro with a diverse participant pool, the information comes from the teachers alone, without the understanding from the leadership’s perspective. The teachers’ perspectives on the policies certainly have validity; however, the audience would benefit from hearing from leadership’s thoughts on the policies. For example, starting on page 92, Santoro relays Helen’s story- a veteran art teacher with thirty-five years of experience in public school. Her demoralization stems from standardized assessments being implemented at the state level. State level art education personnel were struggling to retain the values of art education on the state level, and to do so, needed to create testing standards like math and reading already had. Helen is quoted, “They started selling off the authenticity of art education, and that for me was one of the biggest betrayals” (p. 93.) Though this is clearly a place where Helen’s moral beliefs about teaching are in tension with those of the state administrators, Helen, and subsequently Santoro fail to account for the moral beliefs at the administrative level. Research has shown that when school subjects are accountable equally, resources are allocated more evenly. For example, when science is given equal weight in accountability measures, principals encourage teachers to teach science and provide teachers the financial, physical, and human resources to do so (i.e. Blank, 2013; Judson, 2010.)  This research would imply then that, accounting for art would create a sense of validity to art and allow teachers like Helen to maintain their status as teachers of importance. Though Helen sees herself as demoralized by doing harm to the students, failing to add art to accountability would remove some of the legitimacy of her practice.

In the process of re-moralization, teachers are enabled to regain a sense of purpose and fortitude in their teaching practice, often through the same attributes of their school community which can serve as venues for demoralization like administrators, or by taking control of their situation and making changes in their position.

Santoro makes a major contribution to the field of education by detailing how teachers who were demoralized can stay in the classroom through re-moralization. She classifies strategies for re-moralization as: student-centered action, teacher leadership, activism, voice, and professional community, which can overlap and interact to reinstitute teachers’ ability to remain in the classroom. The epicenter of the re-moralization process was a connection to a professional community. Teachers who experienced re-moralization were found to be engaged in inquiry practices, developing standards or curriculum with national organizations, and applying for fellowships to continue learning. Each of these moves allowed teachers to take ownership of their teaching in new ways. Policy and power remain an issue within the system. Most teachers who experienced demoralization did so as a consequence of actions involving higher levels of the educational system, which Santoro touches upon, but cannot provide a means to change for many of these teachers. The sentiment appears to be one of empowerment for teachers – that teachers can take action to change their situation, their view of the situation, or change their position. Teachers who cannot make that change leave the classroom. As Santoro says, “Sometimes, teachers fiercely committed to their students and relentlessly dedicated to the profession find that they are unable to remain the classroom when their values are continuously compromised” (p.109.) We are losing quality, committed, and passionate teachers because their morals are not in line with the neo-liberal approach of many of the schools in the US.

This book would serve as a resource for several groups of actors in and out of the educational system. First, groups of teachers within a school might use this book as a book study during a professional learning community to think about how they can better support one another. Analyzing the teachers’ case studies may better help teachers identify their own circumstances, and how they can help improve their feelings about teaching. Second, and what I feel is most critical, is to get this book in the hands of leaders and policy makers. These members of the educational system are often at the root of the demoralization, actively or not, and may very well not understand the impact their choices have on the teachers who serve with them. Providing administrators and policy makers with research in narrative form may help them empathize better with their teachers and understand how loss of autonomy and other changes may impact the “good” teachers they have in their building. Finally, researchers can use this book to think about how they, as teacher educators, may also be impacting this system of demoralizing teachers. As Santoro provides examples of how teachers are re-moralized, teacher educators can draw from stories like DeeDee’s. DeeDee becomes initially demoralized by leadership’s insistence on use of specific textbook, which she felt stifled her professional creativity and agency to do what she saw as right for her students. After a new principal takes the helm of DeeDee’s school, she asks to be relinquished from required fidelity to the textbook, which her principal supports. Teacher educators can look to these examples to help preservice and in-service teachers advocate for themselves in ways that create allegiances with administration, rather than feelings of warring objectives that can lead to de-moralization.

Kathryn M. Bateman is a post-doctoral fellow at Temple University in Psychology studying the practices of geologist and engineers to develop drone artificial intelligence. She is a recent Ph.D. graduate of the Pennsylvania State University in Curriculum & Instruction – Science Education where her research focused on educational policy, teacher education, and earth science education.

References

Blank, Rolf. 2013. “Science instructional time is declining in elementary schools: What are the implications for student achievement and closing the gap?.” Science Education 97 (6): 830-847.

Judson, Eugene. 2010. “Science education as a contributor to adequate yearly progress and accountability programs.” Science Education 94(5): 888-902.

Santoro, Doris. 2018. Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.