Big Ed puts the blame for teachers' mental health issues squarely on ... teachers
A recent EdSource commentary rightly spotlights the urgent mental health crisis facing special education teachers, but it regrettably fails to situate this crisis within the broader context of chronic systemic underfunding, lack of structural support, and the precarious status of the profession itself. Rather than critiquing the policies and societal values driving teacher burnout, the article places an overemphasis on individualised solutions, missing a valuable opportunity to call for collective political action.
The vast workloads and intense emotional labour special education teachers are expected to shoulder must be understood as the direct result of a system that has long undervalued their vital contribution. With special needs support the first on the chopping block amidst budget cuts, special education teachers are continually asked to do ever more with ever less assistance. The author notes the lack of classroom support staff as a stressor, yet does not highlight how this flows from the systemic deprioritisation of special education funding across multiple administrations.
Moreover, the article fails to situate its analysis within the wider context of the marketisation of education and the erosion of teacher pay, conditions, and autonomy across many Western countries including the US. The teaching profession itself has been systematically depleted of resources, status and stability – with special education on the sharpest end of this stick. Individualised self-care strategies can provide vital lifelines, but cannot substitute for collective demands for increased staffing, resources, and professional compensation frameworks that reflect the invaluable expertise teachers provide.
As such, whilst spotlighting teacher wellbeing is crucial, this article regrettably pulls its punches when it comes to issuing a full-throated call for political and economic reform. We must move beyond an atomised model fixating on individual resilience to properly resource, fund, and elevate the teaching profession itself. Teachers hold the keys to transformational change, but cannot drive this change alone. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
When the system favors extraction over care
The article fails to examine how the marginalisation of care-centered vocations, including teaching, stems from the historical legacy of extractive settler-colonial policies that have shaped social hierarchies and economic systems.
Western capitalist societies have traditionally privileged occupations that generate direct economic value, such as mining, engineering, banking, whilst systematically undervaluing feminized caretaker roles like nursing, social work, and teaching. This reflects the extractive logic of settler-colonialism, which commodifies land, resources, and people for profit, whilst discounting the relational, spiritual, and ecological values that sustain communities.
We can see the continuation of this extractivist worldview in stark wage disparities that deem stock brokers as more valuable than special education teachers. The average salary for a stock broker in the US is in excess of $100k, more than double the $40,000 average special education teacher wage.
This economic hierarchy obscures the true social value of care-centered work underpinning community wellbeing. As argued by feminist scholars, a healthy society requires care and nurturing. Yet gendered notions of care as a ‘labor of love’ rather than skill perpetuate poor working conditions and lead to burnout. We must challenge these legacies to elevate care-giving and relational skills, not just individual productivity and extraction-based growth.
Beyond higher wages, care work requires system change - smaller classes, increased paraprofessional support, and crucially, a redefinition of how we assign value in society. A government budget or economic policy centered on care rather than extraction may be one avenue towards this shift. Sadly, I don’t see this happening anytime soon.