Why Teachers Leave Traditional District Schools
Reynolds is not alone. In interviews we conducted with a dozen teachers who decamped from district to classical schools, a striking pattern emerged: The conditions that drove Reynolds out are not idiosyncratic but common.
These teachers’ stories also align with national data showing a sustained collapse in professional satisfaction. In 2024, a Pew Research Center survey found that a third of teachers described themselves as “extremely or very” satisfied with their work, compared with more than half of U.S. workers overall. More ominously, less than half said they would recommend the profession to a young person starting his or her career. In a five-decade review of teaching prestige, preparation, and morale, Brown University economist Matthew Kraft and political scientist Melissa Lyon of SUNY Albany found that interest in teaching among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen by nearly half since the 1990s, and teacher satisfaction has declined 26 percent in just the last decade. Kraft and Lyon concluded that “the current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.”
While it is common to hear laments about teacher pay, hours, or burnout, the teachers we interviewed don’t fit these familiar narratives. They spoke of a slow erosion of purpose, the sense that their craft was being hollowed out by incoherent curricula, ineffective instructional orthodoxies, politicization, and ever-shifting priorities and pedagogical fads.
Teachers who once imagined themselves as stewards of literature, history, science, and mathematics described feeling instead like troubleshooters, counselors, compliance officers, or test-prep technicians. Many still loved children—fiercely—but increasingly questioned whether their schools still loved learning.
Repeatedly, the refugee teachers we interviewed described a misalignment between their belief in knowledge as the foundation of learning and the district schools in which they worked. “We were changing curriculum every three or four years,” recalled Sammi Knigge, a kindergarten teacher at Liberty Common. This relentless curriculum churn made it nearly impossible to build mastery or give students a sequenced education across grade levels.
Sometimes, there was no curriculum at all, especially in history and science. First-grade teacher Jen Brown, also at Liberty Common, described being handed “big plastic bins with science materials” at her former school with no guidance or expectations on what to do with them. “There was a box of rocks—literally a box of rocks—and then there was a box of flashcards with planets,” she recalled. And a pacing guide? “I was told so many times, ‘That’s a great idea. Feel free to make a pacing guide!’” she said.
In other words, curriculum was something for teachers to assemble, not a body of knowledge to be mastered. Course content was fungible, even optional.
Other teachers pointed to problems with pedagogy. The dominant instructional assumptions they encountered and were expected to use—discovery learning, group-based tasks, “equity grading”—ran counter to what they believed made learning possible.
Deanna Randle, now a grammar, history, and physical education teacher at the classical Thales Academy in Raleigh, North Carolina, reflected on teaching 2nd grade in an affluent school district in the area. “There just hasn’t been enough direct instruction—not enough phonics, not enough basics,” she said. Her school used the widely discredited Fountas & Pinnell leveled-reading approach and pushed student-led group projects. Randle could see her students becoming frustrated and impatient with these methods.
For math teacher Craig Kompelien, now at the classical Christian Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia, “equity grading” undermined seriousness and accountability: “I started having to do things I didn’t believe, like if a kid turns in nothing, I’ve still got to give him a 50. Or everything I put in the grade book, it’s implied a kid is going to get a redo,” he recalled. “And so I’m grading 150 tests twice because nobody studied the first time. My whole career, I had never done that. I had told kids on day one: Retakes are off the table. And when kids know that, believe it or not, they study.”
Math teacher Torgun Lovely, now a department chair at Liberty Common, explained, “I continually found myself saying, ‘That’s a nice sentiment. It would be nice if the world worked that way, but it doesn’t.’ . . . I don’t know why we’re basing our policies and procedures on how we wished children would behave and not on how they actually behave.”
These refugee teachers did not claim that students lacked the ability to succeed. Their argument was simpler: If schools lower expectations in the name of compassion or convenience, students will meet those standards—with lower performance. And when demanding instruction is replaced with dubious pedagogy, teachers trained to cultivate knowledge begin to feel compromised and complicit rather than effective.
Some number of teachers pointed not to pedagogy and curriculum but to culture clash and mission creep—pressure to embrace political symbolism, conversations, or activism that conflicted with their view of the teacher’s role or their values.
“I had a student who didn’t identify as he or she, and there were conversations I was supposed to be having with the student surrounding their gender,” explained one early childhood elementary school teacher. “That was not something I was comfortable with as an educator. I think that is more the role of a parent.” Similarly, math teacher Kompelien recalled that his son, who attended school in the same district where he was teaching, “started coming home from 3rd grade asking questions that were super politically charged.” Kompelien wondered, “You’re supposed to be learning how to add and subtract and read and write at eight years old. Why are we talking about this?”
To be clear, none of the teachers we spoke with argued that schools should avoid civic formation or social awareness. Rather, their concern was that instruction had become laden with political overtones while the foundational academic lift grew lighter by the year. Furthermore, though not all refugee teachers are politically conservative, many do hold traditional values that can lead to tension with progressive school districts.
The most poignant theme to emerge among refugee teachers leaving district schools for classical academies was a feeling of professional diminishment—the sense that teaching had been redefined as therapeutic caretaking rather than intellectual stewardship. Latin teacher Lori Brown, now at Veritas School, captured this shift vividly. Over time, she said, her duties expanded to include mediating social conflict, managing students’ emotional needs, and implementing a steady stream of training agendas: “There was always this ‘You can do this, it’ll only take 15 minutes. You can add this,’” she remembered. “Every year Virginia would get a bugaboo about something it wanted kids to learn that wasn’t academic.” She also recalled a school culture that didn’t take ideas seriously: “There was a lack of intellectual rigor even among the teachers. . . . So many of the teachers were almost anti-intellectual.” She felt like “the weird geek and the weird Christian” and was dismayed as the school increasingly removed books from the curriculum.
Taken together, these voices reveal a clear consensus: The refugee teachers who left traditional district schools have not abandoned teaching, nor do they recoil from challenge or change. They left because they believed that the core work—instruction in rich content, high academic standards, and the cultivation of intellectual virtues and character—was increasingly incompatible with the policies, expectations, and priorities of the systems in which they worked. Their circumstances are certainly not common to all public schools, but their stories do track with recent research on the deteriorating workplace conditions many teachers face due to mismanaged schools, classroom disorder, leadership churn, and poor preparation.
If Reynolds’s hallway epiphany marked the precise instant when his disillusionment crystallized, the teachers we interviewed lived out versions of that same realization over months or years. And when they walked away, they left not with a feeling of cynicism but with conviction—the belief that somewhere the craft still mattered.
