Former NC Teaching Fellow says low wages, heavy workload made him leave teaching

Dion Beary was one of them.

Like many high school graduates, Beary looked for ways to finance his college education. He found the Teaching Fellows program, which provided tuition help and leadership training to students in exchange for a promise to teach in North Carolina for four years.

Beary applied with the intention of becoming an English teacher. Ultimately, he was accepted and attended Queens University in Charlotte from 2008 to 2012.

Seven years later, Beary now looks back on his time as a Teaching Fellow with mixed emotions. The program did as a much as it could to prepare him for the realities of teaching, he said, but nothing could have prepared him for the stress and emotional toll of being a full-time teacher.

"I think it’s tough to really be adequately prepared for teaching," he said. "One thing they didn't prepare us for was the lack of support and how much you would really have to come into it on your own."

After teaching off and on in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools for nearly four years, Beary left to work full time in marketing.

"I love kids and I love teaching, but the constant shifts in administration, direction, low pay, and lack of work-life balance drove me out of the profession," he said. "Some might argue that if I loved the kids enough, I would be able to sacrifice for the sake of staying in the profession, but I think that's just an attempt to shame former teachers for having the courage to move on to careers where they can make more money, experience less stress and receive more respect."

Most of Beary's Teaching Fellows colleagues have also moved on to other careers.

"I graduated with 25 other teachers who were very, very close. At Queens, the cohort did stuff together and we all knew each other," he said. "Now every time we get together, we kind of count up who is still in the classroom. It’s probably down to four or five of us at this point still teaching."

Beary's first teaching job was at a high-performing middle school in Mecklenburg County. His experience at the school began with an interview that he remembers well.

"At my very first job interview at 22, we were talking about what kind of students I'd be teaching," he said. "My first principal I ever had said to me, 'I could see you becoming kind of a father figure for some of these students.' That's the kind of micro-aggression that you kind of just hear and you just get used to it."

The principal's expectations were "completely off base," according to Beary. Had the principal been African-American, he or she "probably would know better than to say something like that and might have a more nuanced viewpoint of what it is to bring a black male into a classroom of black males," he said.

From the beginning, Beary says, he felt a lot of pressure to turn around the lives and academics of his black male students.

"They view black males as artifacts they can drop into failing schools, and we'll instantly turn things around as if all black people automatically relate to each other. Then, when we don't succeed, they treat us as failures despite the fact we were never given the resources to be successful," he said. "The weight of solving academic performance in deeply segregated schools should not be placed on the shoulders of black males in their early 20s."

Black teachers were also not given as many opportunities to teach AP level classes as their older, white colleagues, Beary said, "so we get burnt-out after years of failure and quit."

In his first year of teaching, the pressure to change lives only increased. His days were organized on an A/B schedule. On A days Beary taught high-achieving students, and on B days his classes were filled with what the school called "emergent learners."

"I had two completely different worlds of students, in two completely different days," he said.

He also taught classes of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders throughout the day.

"You had to teach them differently and there’s three different grades as well," Beary said. "So we have to teach those three grades differently. The experience of having to work so heavily from period to period, day to day – it was very tough, that first year, to get my feet under me."

Administrators consistently applied pressure, he says.

"I felt like I was being spied on." he said "There was always an administrator coming to my classroom for good or bad."

He believes his administrators were strict because of the school's high-performance status and location in one of the most affluent areas of Charlotte. He also says there was a high turnover rate of administrators. Each new leader came with new pressures and less autonomy for teachers, he said.

The environment made Beary feel as though he had to take on multiple positions at the school.

“I was coaching soccer,” he said. “I was helping out with the drama program. I was doing a lot of stuff there, because that’s the kind of pressure I felt.”

High pressure combined with low wages ultimately influenced Beary to quit and apply his passion for writing to a career in marketing.

“I know some extremely intelligent former teachers who are now in the private sector,” Beary said. “They're making money for businesses in the private sector and they're succeeding in those jobs and they could be succeeding in a classroom right now. They could be succeeding for someone’s kid in Charlotte, North Carolina, but they're not.”

Beary has a few suggestions that would encourage more young teachers to stay in the classroom – higher wages, less pressure, more African-American administrators, more benefits and smaller class sizes. He believes school systems need to begin competing with the incentives provided in the private sector. If they don’t, they will continue to lose some of their most qualified educators.

"The best thing for kids, however, is for school systems to invest in retaining a talented workforce," Beary said.

He would also like to see more respect for young educators of color at the college level.

"Colleges will need to start seeing men and people of color as talented individuals who are in high demand," he said. "Colleges need to treat men and people of color as if the colleges are in competition for some extremely valuable members of their workforce. Rather, most education programs I've seen tend to treat men of color as missing father figures within underperforming schools."