Troy Stanley* has been a teacher for some 16 years and says he’s fed up with having to defend the profession against misleading headlines and ‘clickbaity’ education reporting – coverage that he says only reinforces the widespread idea that teachers are needy people with 9am-3.30pm schedules and holidays galore.
After seeing a headline reading “Teachers reject 28% pay rise” last week, his indignation prompted him to call out the situation on LinkedIn and demand publishers lift their game.
“Teachers are at the coalface dealing with young people, and we’re facing increasing disrespect in the classroom, increasing disrespect on our time, even in terms of our academic integrity.
“The respect for education as a discipline – as a body of professionals that have expertise in their area – in the public eye is just slowly being chipped away at, and it’s subtle, and then it’s not so subtle.”
The framing and implicit message within the headline in question is just one example of how teachers and their work is frequently misrepresented in the public domain, Stanley suggests.
“It’s never ‘teachers fight for better working conditions’. It’s never framed in a way that is around teachers actually advocating for conditions that most other professions wouldn’t stand for.
“I mean, the other day, an AI company asked me for all my resources for free to help them train their model, and I just think, [would somebody] would walk up to a tradesperson and say, ‘see all your tools in your trailer, all your materials, can we just borrow them and use them to construct something that we’re going to profit from?’
“…it’s the logic of it. You wouldn’t ask any other profession that.”
Tidy yet misguided narratives pushed by the media work to erase the well-documented emotional labour of the job as well as the significant overtime teachers are putting in each week, Stanley contends.
The comments that spring from these kinds of articles are telling as well, he adds.
“[They are] so divorced from the actual reality of teaching, of what it actually looks like.
“Those comments demonstrate that [teachers have the same arrangement as students] where they are at school from 9 to 3.30, and then we go home.
“No teacher leaves at 3.30 unless they’re rushing off to [perhaps] pick their own kids up.
“And then they’re normally [looking after them] until they go to sleep, and then they’re hitting the computer and planning and marking and preparing for the next day before they finally go to bed.
“Because it is not feasible [otherwise]. There is not enough time.”
As a secondary English teacher with two Year 12 classes, Stanley says there are some really intense marking periods that crop up throughout the year that will see him working late into the night ‘until the screen goes blurry’.
This is all missed in mainstream media reporting, he says, where a kind of implict teacher bashing reigns.
The narrative that teachers have got something of a sweet deal with school holidays is another source of deep frustration, Stanley says.
It’s something he’s had to correct numerous times over the course of his career, be that at family gatherings, online, in discussions with other professionals and even in the staffroom.
“My brother’s an engineer, he is on pretty good money. He’s worked really hard, trained really hard, because he values education, and that’s the irony – because if I ever say anything about my job, the first thing out of his mouth is always about, ‘oh, well, you get the holidays, the 12 weeks’.
“Part of me is like, ‘have you ever taught young people for 11 weeks in a row how to write essays?’ I mean, not that we’re doing that the whole time.
“But the break is for the students. It’s ‘school’ holidays, it’s not ‘teacher’ holidays, but [that’s what people think].”
Rather than relaxing on a hard-earned holiday, Stanley says the bulk of his school breaks are usually spent working from home with his own kids in tow, finishing up on tasks from the previous term and planning for the one upcoming.
“The actual face-to-face teaching is like the tip of the iceberg, and the rest of teaching labour exists underneath the surface that is not seen or acknowledged by the public.”
Even during school hours, teachers ‘breaks’ aren’t really a break at all, Stanley noted.
“I’ve got a 10-day timetable and I have eight yard duties over 10 days at recess and lunch. So our breaks aren’t our breaks.
“And when my brother [makes those comments about the school holidays] I’m like, ‘at least you can go to the toilet when you need to. I can’t.’
The logic here is botched, he suggests.
“If teaching is such an attractive job with all these holidays, why is there such a shortage of teachers? Why is the profession in crisis if it’s such a lucrative [job] in terms of benefits?”
Stanley applauds the Victorian AEU membership for turning down the Allan Government’s most recent offer on pay and conditions for public school educators.
He says the union’s past negotiations around time in lieu arrangements and other working conditions have “set the scene” for the independent and Catholic school sectors, showing teachers that goodwill and personal sacrifice shouldn’t be relied on to sustain the system.
For example, there's often an overarching expectation that teachers are required to carve out their personal time to serve their school, be that at weekly Saturday sport or otherwise. This sets education apart from other industries, Stanley adds.
The teacher would like to see the mainstream media actively re-frame the ‘deficit-based’ narrative he says they cling to.
“The narrative … is kind of one of the flashpoints that creates opportunities for people who probably maybe didn’t have the best experience in an education system – that has been historically underfunded, but still staffed with hard-working teachers – it just gives them an opportunity to resuscitate those old grievances about their own educational experience.
“So they [run with the line of] ‘lazy teachers’.”
Stanley says the constant pile-on is the thing that would see him consider quitting the profession altogether.
“It starts with media narrative,” he adds.
“It’s more powerful than people think...
“They have an ethical responsibility when they’re reporting to ask themselves, ’is the way I’m framing this narrative, is this actually going to be good for the profession? What is my purpose here when I’m writing this? Is it to actually create an opportunity for a flashpoint? Is that what I want? Is it click-baity? Or do I actually want to seriously engage in the tensions within the profession that are arising?’
“Because they don’t look the same. And it’s frustrating as someone on the other side that has to cop this kind of ignorant, meta-narrative about the profession I do every day and then defend it to them.”
A sweeping study involving analysis of 65,000 articles by Nicole Mockler, Associate Professor of Education at University of Sydney, found teacher bashing was the norm in Australian print media, at least from 1996 to 2020.
“I found stories about teachers were disproportionately negative in their representations,” Mockler flagged in an article for The Conversation from 2022.
“I did find ‘good news’ stories in my research but they were outnumbered by articles that focused on how teachers, collectively and individually, don’t measure up.”
*not his real name
