Leaving Academia for K-12 Teaching, Part 8/8
by Russ Mayo
Welcome back to my series for Ethical ELA called Leaving Academia for K-12 Teaching, where I’ve been writing about my experiences moving from K-12 teaching to working in higher education and back again. This is Part 8, my last post in the series. First off, thank you for reading and for sharing your opinions and experiences in the comments. It’s been wonderful to hear from so many of you who have found my posts resonant, interesting, and informative! I also appreciate how many of you have shared these posts with others.
At the close of my last post, Academic Isolation Drills, I wrote about what led to my career shift back to K-12 teaching after working in higher education for 8 years. Before starting my doctorate in English at UIC in Chicago in 2014, I had been a middle grades teacher in North Carolina for 10 years. After my doctorate, I managed to beat the terrible job market odds and was hired as an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue Northwest. But after only 2 years of college teaching, I decided to leave the position and make an unexpected return to K-12 teaching. Though such a trajectory may seem rare, it is surprisingly common. I’ve met dozens of secondary English teacher educators through our professional organizations of NCTE and ELATE who have also made such a move. Each teacher-scholar has their own reasons for doing what they do. I’m sharing my explanation of why I decided to leave academia, why I’m happy with my decision, and the steps you can take if you are interested in making a similar transition.
One important factor in my decision to leave academia is a professional concern. Namely, my frustrations with the state of academic scholarship. While I loved teaching college writers and pre-service teachers, teaching was not expected to be the primary focus of my work. No matter how good of an instructor I was, my continuing employment and promotion/tenure was based on how my tenured peers judged my scholarship and research impact. The only way to achieve tenure, with long-term job security and a pay raise, was through respected publications. While I loved writing and attending conferences, I found the research, grants, and academic publishing processes to be a terribly tedious, laborious, and ultimately unsatisfying experience.
For example, I recently published a co-edited collection of essays, Teaching Writing in the Age of Catastrophic Climate Change. Amazingly, we began working on this book in the summer of 2019—which feels like a completely different world. After gathering fantastic essays from writing instructors from across the U.S., we struggled to complete the book project. Two different academic publishers showed interest but ultimately decided to decline publishing it, though we finally found success with Lexington Press in 2024. While I’m thrilled to have this book out, and I’m extremely proud of the work, I am now increasingly skeptical of the academic publishing process in the humanities. Our book about how the ongoing climate crisis shapes our work as teachers, writers, and humans, couldn’t be more urgent. But an academic’s future is tied to successfully moving their research through a peer review process that relies on free academic labor, a service that is increasingly scarce due to the lack of tenure-track professors today. And while our book may be of interest to many, the $100+ price tag means it’s unlikely to sell much.
Returning to K-12 teaching didn’t mean I had to stop writing and publishing, but it took away any “publish or perish” pressure. While I have much less time to focus on writing today than I did as a professor, I am now free to pursue the projects that interest me—such as this series—without worrying about whether the perceived scope and impact of my publications will impress my colleagues enough so that I can keep my job. My teaching colleagues know that I’m a teacher-writer, and my principal supports my attendance at NCTE each Fall to present my work, but otherwise, my writing is my business.
Another factor is more personal. Though my commute was only 25 miles, I found a profound disconnect between my home and community in Chicago, and my work in Northwest Indiana, where most of my students lived. The crossing of state lines marked a profound disconnect in the politics and values between where I lived and where I worked. Today, I live half a mile from the school where I teach. My oldest son currently attends the school as a first grader, and we walk to and from school together each day. I know his teachers and his friends, and we are able to participate fully in the life of our shared school community. My younger son will start kindergarten there next year. It’s difficult to overstate the profound joy and convenience this arrangement offers our family.
A third factor in the decision was financial. In previous posts, I have written about the financial implications of teaching, both for myself as an underpaid K-12 teacher in North Carolina and for those underpaid professors who are forced into contingent teaching jobs due to a severe shortage of jobs in higher education that pay commensurate with one’s qualifications. What most people don’t know is that K-12 teachers can make more than many college professors, particularly those of us in the humanities. My current middle school job pays 30% more than what I made as an Assistant Professor. Yes, you read that right. Teaching young people not only pays a better salary, but I also have far higher potential future earnings and can qualify for a generous, defined-benefit pension. Most people are gobsmacked when they learn about this.
There are a couple of reasons for the pay differential. First off, I was an English professor at a smaller, regional university: PNW pays far less than the flagship Purdue campus in West Lafayette. Humanities professors also earn less than those in health and STEM, due in part to significant grant funding in their fields that augments their salaries. But also, Indiana is a “right-to-work” state, Purdue professors are not unionized, and public employees are not allowed to strike. Compare this with my current teaching situation: my union, the Chicago Teachers Union (AFT-IFT Local 1), is one of the strongest teacher unions in the US, representing over 25,000 educators, and the union has gone on strike in 2012 and 2019 to push for a variety of improvements to pay, benefits, school funding, and labor protections. I can earn because I have a PhD, and I qualified to start at a higher pay step due to my previous years of teaching experience.
Overall, I am very satisfied with my decision to move back to K-12 teaching. It’s impossible to put into words how much I learned from my time as an English education doctoral student and college professor, and I don’t regret it at all. My eight years of experience in academia has improved my teaching practice in myriad ways. Returning to K-12 teaching has given me an opportunity to implement many of the theories and practices I studied and taught at the college level. I remain connected to my fellow teacher-scholars through participating in conferences like NCTE, by reviewing journal articles, conference proposals, and book manuscripts, and by continuing to write and publish about composition, pedagogy, and the environment. And I have the opportunity to create innovative ELA and writing curriculum for my brilliant 7th and 8th grade students.
While I’m not the only person to leave college teaching for the K-12 classroom, I find that most discontent current or would-be professors fail to consider K-12 teaching as a viable career option, especially those who truly enjoying teaching. I hope that my series has presented a reasonable case for making such a move. To conclude, I’d like to offer a quick guide for those who might consider K-12 teaching:
(1) The easiest way to transition to K-12 teaching is to complete all the necessary coursework to earn a state teaching license, which will qualify you to become a high school teacher where you currently live or work. (Once completed, your license can be transferred to another state.) If you are currently employed at a college, whether as an instructor or as a graduate student, I recommend taking graduate-level education and methods courses part-time at your college, especially if you can do so for free or with a significant discount. These courses will require some fieldwork hours observing and teaching in local schools, and this will help you test your interest in secondary teaching. Each state has different requirements for licensure, so reach out to your colleagues who handle student licensure to clarify your options.
(2) There are also many alternative licensure programs now available that don’t follow the normal coursework requirements. These programs offer teachers an opportunity to find a full-time teaching job now and earn their license while teaching through accelerated night, weekend, and summer coursework. Note that these programs vary in their requirements, expectations, and quality, so I recommend speaking to individuals who have completed the program to learn more about their experiences before starting yours.
(3) If you aren’t interested in teaching in public schools and prefer working in a private or parochial school, you can be hired for one of these positions without a state teaching license. Many private schools are known for having high standards for instruction and behavior, while also giving teachers more autonomy and control over their curriculum and instructional practices. While this may sound ideal, private schools also pay teachers less than public schools, both in terms of salary and benefits. So if salary is a primary concern, you may want to try the public school route. Private schools also often expect extra, unpaid work outside of the normal teaching day, demands that teacher unions contracts protect workers from. But private school teaching can also be a way to try out K-12 teaching while gaining some valuable classroom experience; if you wish to earn state licensure and move to public school teaching at a later time, you can always start a master’s program to get a license while you work—though you will generally need to pay your way through the program.
(4) Finally, while I have worked mostly as a middle grades teacher, most academics would find high school teaching much closer to their current work, both in terms of curriculum and instruction. The number of AP and Dual Credit course offerings continue to grow at the high school level, and teachers are typically required to have a graduate degree to teach these courses. There was a time when new teachers with graduate degrees were looked at as “too expensive” to hire (compared to a new teacher fresh out of undergrad); those days are generally over. Today, most schools expect teachers to earn graduate degrees at some point, and they appreciate the gravitas that comes with saying their teachers have advanced degrees, particularly in their subject matter.
Which parts of this post, or of my “Leaving Academia” series, have resonated with you? If you have or would consider moving from academia to K-12 teaching, what questions or concerns do you have? Please share your thoughts and questions, and I will do my best to respond here.
**Note: The title of this post is borrowed from the stellar album Moments of Clarity (2023) by the Texas “heavy shoegaze” rock band, Narrow Head.
Russell Mayo is an English Language Arts teacher at Burley School, a public K-8 school on the northside of Chicago. Previously, he worked as an assistant professor of English at Purdue University Northwest, where he served as Writing Center Director and Writing Program Director. Russ completed his doctorate in English Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020. His research centers on writing studies, critical pedagogy, and the environment. Most recently, Russ co-edited and contributed to the Teaching Writing in the Age of Catastrophic Climate Change, (Lexington Press, 2024).