The Mayo Clinic describes a medical stress test this way:
A stress test, also called an exercise stress test, shows how your heart works during physical activity. Because exercise makes your heart pump harder and faster, an exercise stress test can reveal problems with blood flow within your heart.
It’s an invaluable diagnostic tool for assessing your cardiovascular health.
It’s important to remember, though, that any cardiac problems revealed by the stress test weren’t caused by the test. It just makes them easier to see and diagnose.
The challenges that teachers have faced in the 2020-2021 school year are not, fundamentally, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, either.
To be sure, the pandemic has elevated the challenges. But in essence, it’s been just like a stress test: the pandemic has made existing problems easier to see.
There is hope on the horizon for an end to the COVID-19 stress test. We should be able to have more normally functioning school buildings and interactions soon.
But if we do not take advantage of this test to consider the ways in which we should fundamentally change education in America, we will be like a cardiologist seeing an underlying arterial blockage after a stress test and prescribing “no more stress tests.” It won’t solve the problem, and eventually the patient will have a heart attack.
Teachers are leaving the profession this year at an alarming rate – alarming, but not unexpected. We knew we were going to have a major turnover in the teaching profession in this decade. They are leaving now because the stress test of COVID-19 has revealed all the unhealthy practices of modern public education, and are choosing to make the change themselves.
Send love to teachers doing their best to survive a prolonged stress test. But also recognize that this test has been a wake-up call for education. Now it’s time to do the work to heal.