Overview:
Drawing on 27 years teaching at his own alma mater, the author argues that veteran teachers—once sustained by a "contract" of modest pay in exchange for job security, pensions, and community respect—are now being treated as expendable budget liabilities amid eroding tenure, shrinking benefits, and political attacks on the profession, and calls for that contract to be restored.
In the late 1990s, during my teacher-assisting semester at Grand Valley State University, I was placed in an urban middle school near the Kent County jail in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was a world entirely foreign to the rural schools of my youth. Every morning, students filed through metal detectors at the front doors.
Soon enough, I learned the hierarchy of the student population. A distinct group of 7th and 8th-graders had figured out how to smuggle straight-edge razors past the detectors by leaving them wrapped in the thin cardboard they came in and hiding them in their mouths. If a fight broke out—and they frequently did—the blades came out, tucked neatly between knuckles. These children were actively learning how to protect themselves in a world that felt fundamentally unsafe.
Then, Columbine happened.
As the nation panicked, administrators told us to speak to our classes and ensure they felt safe. But my students were not phased. The world shown on the cable news coverage was not a shocking aberration to them; it was a Tuesday. When I asked my class if they felt safe, a slight girl named Miranda looked up at me with a perpetual smile and a fierce work ethic. “I feel safe,” she shrugged. “Because if Michael takes out a gun to shoot someone, Jacob would take his out and take him out first.”
That was the moment I knew I wanted to be a teacher.
I did not just want to work with students who were hungry for growth and upward mobility; I wanted to work with the students who were just plain hungry. I wanted to reach the kids who felt trapped by the boundaries of their circumstances. I wanted to teach them that while a razor blade smuggled in the cheek offered a modicum of temporary protection, a real education was bulletproof.
When I graduated high school, I had walked out with my diploma and sworn to my best friend that I would never set foot in that school again. Fate had other plans. I just finished my 27th year of teaching at that very same alma mater.
When I entered the profession wide-eyed and full of confidence, I knew the terms of the contract. I knew my salary would always pale in comparison to my peers who went into plastics engineering or dentistry. But the trade-off made sense. In exchange for lower base pay, we were promised a solid pension, reliable healthcare, and the unwritten backing of a community that lifted you up when the days felt long.
Slowly, over nearly three decades, I have watched that world slip away.
We have watched state governments methodically strip the value of tenure and alter the structural safety of pension systems.Healthcare premiums have skyrocketed while benefits shrink. More painfully, the cultural contract has curdled. Teachers are routinely accused of indoctrination. The strides we were making toward celebrating diversity, protecting LGBTQ+ students, and honoring students of color are actively eroding under political pressure.
Even the integrity of the degree itself feels compromised. In a desperate, reactionary push to solve a national teacher shortage, states have promoted alternate pathways to certification—effectively watering down the credentials that veteran educators earned through years of rigorous study and practice.
Now that I am in the later stages of my career, I find myself facing a bizarre corporate paradox: my experience has become a financial liability.
On paper, my salary represents 27 years of dedication, curriculum mastery, and institutional knowledge. But based on my direct, personal classroom research and observations over the last decade, school districts operating under crushing budgetary constraints view a veteran teacher at the top of the pay scale less like an asset and more like a line-item expense to be trimmed. Like private equity firms looking to shave costs before selling off a subsidiary, the system increasingly favors replacing seasoned veterans with cheaper, revolving-door labor.
In my own building, I watch the compounding data of this shift in real-time: school bonds fail, chronic absenteeism rises, and the weight of keeping the system afloat falls on fewer and fewer shoulders. Burnout is no longer a theoretical concept discussed in academic journals; it is a daily reality in my school’s faculty lounge.
Yet, despite the shifting tides, the magic of the classroom has not vanished. I still close my door, look at my students, and find joy in teaching Shakespeare and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I see the young people leaving my classroom who are choosing to enter education themselves, and I desperately want them to experience the profound fulfillment that this career has given me.
But if we want the next generation of educators to survive, society must reawaken to a fundamental truth: education is the backbone of democracy and industry alike. Critical thinking is not synonymous with indoctrination. Teaching has alwyas been, at its core, a profession of sarifice. But that does not mean teachers should be sacrificed on the altar of politics, religion, or socio-economic greed. It is time to restore the contract, protect veteran voices who hold the walls up, and make the profession bulletproof once again.
