Restoring The Noble Incentive

Yes, wokeness is causing the teacher shortage but we can fix it.

The Noble Incentive

Why are we experiencing the current teacher shortage? Many say that it’s because teachers are not paid what they deserve to be paid. While this may be true in a general sense, this explanation ignores one historically ubiquitous and self-evident truth: Teachers do not teach for the money. All dedicated teachers know going in that a career as a teacher will not make them rich or in some cases, even comfortable.

Most teachers choose the profession out of a noble sense of duty, backed by a desire to impart knowledge of a subject they have a passion for. Whether it’s history, math, science, PE, or music, almost all educators can trace their choice of profession back to a teacher that influenced their personal passion for their chosen subject. But in recent years, there has been a fundamental shift in the foundation of this noble incentive — an incentive that has historically led to better student outcomes while holding off the drastic teacher shortages we see today.

Eroding “The Noble Incentive”

Those who become teachers based on the noble incentive, often prove to be the most effective and dedicated educators. But with this passion comes a righteous defensiveness for the content of the subject and how that content is delivered. They keep a watchful eye on its beating heart and will often fight vehemently to preserve its academic integrity. These teachers, many of whom are in the middle or later years of their career, have lived to see an institutional attack on the heart of their subjects coming directly from the administrators that sign their checks. It is in this attack that we find one of the major causes of the current shortage.

In 2021, Norman Oklahoma Public Schools Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Director Stephanie Williams, voiced an ever spreading moral mandate that is proving to erode the noble incentive:

“Our commitment to Equity cannot be optional… Imbedding and integrating this work in everything we do is so critical.”

- Stephanie Williams, “Teaching For Equity”

The DEI mandate to inject “the work” of “equity” into every subject, at every level, in every classroom, is designed to fundamentally alter the heart of all academic subjects. It is from this beating core that the teacher must project and promote this politically motivated, religious-like morality. It is braided within the subject itself, “not in addition to,” as said by Stephanie Williams. This braided mandate forces every teacher to internally accept, actively teach, and outwardly promote “inclusive” subject matter based in Critical Race Theory and Radical Gender Theory. As we have seen in recent months, the practice of these ideologies forces teachers to integrate and use pornographic and sexually explicit materials and to subject students harmful and false to race and identity stereotypes, all as a part of classroom instruction.

When teachers who are motivated by the noble incentive encounter this attack on the very reason they chose a profession that promises them less pay, they have two choices: fight or flight. As we have seen in recent years, those who have chosen to fight have served as fearful public examples to other noble educators — and as we can see today, far too many are understandably choosing the flight option. It is this flight of teachers that is one of the main causes for the ever increasing teacher shortage.

Restoring The Noble Incentive

Ultimately, this radical process seeks to replace teachers motivated by the noble incentive with teachers motivated by the woke incentive. But this systematic woke replacement process is not going as planned, and the teacher shortage is proof of that. Activist administrators are finding it difficult to keep quality teachers who are devoted to shallowness of woke ideology over the depth and integrity of their chosen subject, while maintaining standards. This fact, combined with less and less students choosing to become teachers (also because of the systematic depression of the noble incentive), could actually be a signal of hope for the future, but only if we make it one.

We must restore the noble incentive in our universities by divesting from the destructive DEI administrative complex that mandates the ideological policies and practices that are killing it. We must restore a love of knowledge for knowledge sake, divorced from pseudo-religious woke identitarianism. We must allow future educators to discover the pure love of their subject, for the sake of their subject. Because it is that noble teacher that will make it their mission in life to see that your child learns.