Teachers in urban communities are often unsupported in the schools they serve. This is especially difficult because in struggling communities, they should be receiving the most support. On top of developing their teaching, and finding their own resources, they must find ways to connect with and gain respect from students who have to deal with so much internalized struggle that school is their last priority.

For many teachers the burden is too much to bear and they drop out of the profession or abandon these communities only perpetuating the cycle.

In a Tedx talk on the importance of teachers in urban communities the speaker states, “…teachers typically drop out for two reasons. 1) They’re overwhelmed by the expectations and 2) they feel unsupported and isolated. It isn’t as strange though that the schools with the highest teacher dropout rates are also the worst performing schools in the nation- are typically schools in impoverished African American communities.”

Further he goes on to say, “If you’re a student what kind of pride can you have in your school or in yourself if your teachers don’t even want to be there. Right now this is the number we live within our country and the problem is that we often focus on this 50% that stays and we ignore this half that leaves and we forget that these are people that join the job with passion and enthusiasm and lesson plans in hand and a lot of them even had the years of experience and yet still they’re walking out of the job so that the next group of five year dropouts can take their place”. We must fix the problem with institutional changes and stop applying bandages that don’t get to the root of the problem.

“When teachers leave, the effects are far reaching students are negatively affected when teachers drop out. Research shows that students perform worse when teacher dropout rates are high especially for our at-risk students students that come from single-parent impoverished homes they need that support more than anybody and what does that look like it looks like stability it looks like talking to a teacher if one minute in the classroom every single day it looks like having an adult advocate in the building that you could talk to or when you graduate”. Serious systemic changes must be made to the way we fund the education of our youth.