Whooo-Hooo! Our Pre-sell crowdfunding campaign for my book, Invisible Excellence – the Hidden Value of Teachers Beyond Teaching is nearing it’s halfway point. The only way this book goes to press is if there are enough backers to get it to the finish line. You can find a link in the show notes, or if it is easier, you can go to Teachersintransition.com/calendar and there’s a link there too!
Make sure you are following me on Instagram or Tiktok @teachers.in.transition, or even on Youtube (Teachers in Transition) this week and you’ll be able to listen to me read little excerpts from the book.
Opening:
If you’re a teacher who’s thinking about leaving—but the unknown feels overwhelming—you’re not alone. Leaving the classroom can feel like walking into unfamiliar territory… and it’s hard to move forward when you can’t see the path—or worse, when you feel like you’re stuck in a hole.
I’ve been there.
That uncertainty? That hesitation? That’s normal. but you don’t have to navigate it alone. I’m Vanessa Jackson. I spent 25 years in the classroom, and I’ve also worked inside the hiring world—helping people get jobs and understanding how those systems really work. Now I help teachers just like you navigate that in-between space—so you can move out of burnout and into a career outside the classroom that actually fits.
This is Teachers in Transition.
Let’s get you out—and into what’s next.
Hi! Welcome back to Teachers in Transition. I’m Vanessa Jackson, your host. I taught in the classroom for 25 years before leaving education to go working in corporate America. Now, I work for teachers to help figure out what comes next.
Whether you're new to the podcast, or a returning friend, welcome! I’m especially glad you’re here. This is the place where we help teachers explore what’s next - whether that means finding more joy where you are, discovering a new career path, or looking at an all-too-familiar challenge from a different perspective.
Today, we’re continuing our four-part miniseries on the Four Horsemen of Education. This week, we’re looking for the Second Horseman: Resources—and examining how teacher generosity became an unofficial funding stream for education.
And in our Teacher Hack, I’ll share a keyboard shortcut I learned today that will save oodles of frustration and can magically bring a browser tab that you accidentally closed. Where has this been all my life?
Then, in our Career Transition and Job Search segment, we’re talking about ghost jobs, the finite resources consumed by every application, and why an unanswered application is not necessarily a referendum on your value.
Let’s get started.
Perspective Pivot: The Second Horseman — Resources (3:09)
Last week, I started a four-part miniseries on what I’m calling the Four Horsemen of Education. These are not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, exactly. They are more like the horsemen who were supposed to ride alongside education, protecting it from the problems coming over the horizon. Unfortunately, they have gradually disappeared, and now they cannot protect us from much of anything. Their absence is what has created our educational apocalypse.
Last week, we talked about the Horseman of Capacity. This week, I want to introduce you to the Second Horseman: Resources. And when I say that education has a resource problem, I do not simply mean that schools need more money. There is an enormous amount of money flowing through education, but that does not mean the money is being prioritized well or reaching the places where it is needed most.
We also have to examine how we decide what counts as a classroom expense. What are schools expected to provide, and what have we quietly decided teachers should provide for themselves? That line has moved considerably over the years. Every time it moves, another institutional expense finds its greedy fingers reaching into an individual teacher’s pocket.
I remember my principal telling me in 2001 that $88,000 had been removed from her instructional supplies budget. That was one campus, one budget, and one year. I do not think that money was ever restored, and what I watched over the years was more and more money being pulled away from the classroom. The cuts that were originally presented as temporary emergencies gradually became the normal way schools operated.
Every time money disappeared, we heard the same thing: “We’re just going to have to do more with less.” Well, we cannot do more with less anymore. That ship has sailed, struck an iceberg, and is currently resting at the bottom of the ocean. At some point, ya get less with less.
The reason we missed how bad it was getting is that teachers have been filling the gap out of their own underpaid pockets. Because they LOVE their students. When a school district cannot or will not provide something, teachers frequently buy it themselves because they do not want the children in front of them to suffer. In fact, they’re often guilted into doing it and then praised for being “dedicated,” as though dedication were a purchasing account.
Let’s start with pencils. If you need pencils for your classroom, maybe you can submit a supply request. Perhaps you work at one of those schools with a magical supply closet where teachers can obtain the things they need. I have seen those closets, so I know they are real, but they often feel like an educational fairy tale.
If the request process is difficult, the pencils are unavailable, or someone decides you should not need that many, you eventually give up and buy them yourself. They are only pencils, after all. Or maybe you stocked up during the beginning-of-the-year school-supply sales. Whatever - you acquired them. Then the pencils disappear almost immediately, the students still do not have pencils, and you are standing in the aisle at the store buying another box. Teachers have repeated that cycle thousands of times.
I remember the first time I heard the poem “I Ain’t Got a Pencil.” This poem asks us to consider what may be happening in a child’s life before judging that child for arriving at school without basic supplies. And OK, that is an important point, and children should not be shamed because their families cannot provide everything they need. I felt guilty the first time I heard that poem, and I bought LOTS of pencils.
At the same time, schools were removing many of the mechanisms teachers had once used to hold students responsible, deciding that students should not be penalized academically for non-academic behavior. That may have been well-intentioned, but it left teachers responsible for solving the practical problem. Somewhere along the way, we took “Do not blame the child” and turned it into “The teacher must personally supply the pencils.” Those are not the same statement. A child’s need might be real, but that does not automatically make meeting that need the personal financial responsibility of the teacher.
People will say, “It’s only a pencil.” OK, sure. One pencil is insignificant, but thousands of pencils across a teaching career are not. It reminds me of the growing-heap paradox: one coin does not make you rich, but if you keep adding coins, at some point you have an enormous pile, and you are rich. The individual coin may be small, but the heap is not.
The same is true of these pencils. Here is one pencil, there is another pencil, and then another box because somehow the first box has already vanished into another dimension. Multiply that across months, years, classrooms, and an entire career. At some point, we have to stop pretending the cost is insignificant simply because it is simply one pencil.
And if ONLY it were JUST pencils! Teachers buy pens, paper, glue sticks, project materials, classroom decorations, organizational supplies, and items for reward systems. Elementary teachers appear to go through a quantity of glue sticks that should probably require industrial shipping containers. Secondary teachers may buy different things, but nearly everyone has a category of supplies they have quietly accepted as a personal expense.
Teachers buy those things because they are excited about a project or because they want students to participate fully. They create these classroom environments that feel welcoming, and they fund rewards because they are trying to increase engagement. Those are generous choices made by people who care deeply about their students. The problem is not teacher generosity; the problem is an institution that won’t function without it.
To put it another way: Teachers have become institutional shock absorbers. The resources disappear, but teachers do not want children to experience the impact. So teachers place their own money, time, and energy between the child and the institutional failure. The child is protected, but the teacher absorbs the force.
We talk frequently on this podcast about the three ways teachers pay for things: time, money, and stress. Sometimes teachers choose to pay with money because doing so saves them time or reduces their immediate stress. It is easier to buy the pencils than to complete three forms, send four emails, wait six weeks, and discover that the request was denied because pencils were apparently not included in the approved pencil-acquisition window.
Meanwhile, schools and districts are spending enormous amounts of money in other places. Think about the money devoted to standardized testing—ironically requiring pencils—test-preparation curricula, benchmark testing, and whatever other shiny assessment might predict how students will perform on the Big State Assessment that officially counts. We have tests that help us prepare for tests so we can improve our results on other tests. At some point, the testing infrastructure starts looking like its own self-sustaining ecosystem. There really isn’t time to teach anymore.
Technology also consumes a substantial portion of school budgets. Districts now rely on large subscription-based administrative systems such as PowerSchool and Schoology, along with countless instructional programs, communication platforms, monitoring tools, curriculum packages, and other subscription services. You know what technology budgets aren’t allowed to buy with technology money? Pencils.
I am not arguing that all tech is bad. Please do not make me responsible for bringing back carbon paper. I am saying that every expensive system represents a choice, and we should be willing to examine whether the value it provides justifies the amount of resource pie it consumes. A district can spend millions on technology while classroom teachers are still purchasing pencils, and we are somehow expected to pretend those facts are unrelated.
Then we have consultants and professional development. Every teacher has attended a presentation while wondering, “How much did the district pay this person?” Occasionally, the presenter is excellent, the information is useful, and the investment makes sense. Other times, you sit there thinking, “Wow. This guy is an idiot.”
One of the most memorable examples from my career involved a consultant who spoke to our entire district. We knew the district had paid him at least $10,000, so expectations were reasonably high.
He opened with the popular story claiming that the standard railroad gauge can be traced back through wagons and Roman roads to the width of two horses’ backsides. It is a fun story, and it might work as a parable about the way old decisions continue shaping modern systems. But he presented it as literal, actual-factual history, and it is...not. Once the opening story fell apart, I began wondering how much of the rest of the presentation I could trust. Personally, I decided that most of his presentation was not trustworthy. Not a good use of the district’s money.
But that district wasn’t done adding insult to injury. They continued paying this consultant throughout the school year to guide us through some kind of journey. He told us from the beginning that we might never know whether we had reached our destination. That is a remarkably convenient business model: sell an expensive journey whose successful completion cannot be measured. Community tax dollars at work. Not buying pencils.
Education is particularly vulnerable to shiny new solutions. There is always a new program, framework, or platform promising to solve a complicated problem. Veteran teachers become suspicious (VERY suspicious) because we’ve seen the idea before. It has simply been given a new label, placed in a shinier package, and presented to the raccoon overlords, who immediately chase it because, you know, SHINY.
I know, schools need to evolve, technology can support learning, and excellent professional development can have real value (maybe). But money spent on one priority is money unavailable for another. A yes to one thing is a no to another. If there is always funding for the next shiny initiative but never enough money for basic classroom supplies, that is not simply a shortage. It is a statement about our priorities. Maybe if the pencils were also shiny somehow?
The resource problem became especially visible after the 2008 financial crash. In my experience, instructional budgets never fully recovered, even as expectations continued to grow. (Hello, Horseman of Capacity). Schools added new initiatives, new technology, new reporting requirements, and every year a new accountability measure was added to the list, but classroom-level resources did not grow at the same pace. Teachers were just expected to make everything work - somehow.
The Horseman of Resources did not disappear in one dramatic moment. It faded gradually—one budget cut, one supply request, one unfunded mandate, one expensive contract, and one teacher-funded box of pencils at a time—until it completely disappeared. Because teachers kept protecting students from the consequences, the system could continue pretending that doing more with less was working. Soiler Alert: No. No, it wasn’t.
It was never sustainable. Teachers continue to subsidize the system with their own money, time, creativity, and stress. Their generosity keeps classrooms functioning, but it conceals the true cost of the decisions being made above them.
Resources have probably always been a challenge in education, but over nearly two decades, the problem has become exponentially worse. We have normalized the idea that classroom shortages can be solved through teacher sacrifice. And no, that is not resource management. That is resource strip mining.
The Second Horseman was supposed to ensure that educators had what they needed to do the work. Instead, Resources slipped away while teachers quietly filled the empty space. If that Horseman is ever going to return, districts must stop treating teacher generosity as an unofficial funding stream, and the true cost of operating a classroom must finally be made visible.
Teacher Hack: Save a Tab! (17:23)
But now it’s time for our Teacher Hack.
Our Teacher Hacks are designed to save you one of the three ways we pay for things: time, money, or stress. I’m hoping this one will save you both time and stress.
I love Control-Z. Most of us know that one. (If you’ve never heard of this, you get a two-fer today!) But Control-Z is like a magic undo button, and it works in all sorts of programs undoing out mistakes. You can Control-Z, Control-Z, Control-Z until you have undone all the horrible things you accidentally did while working on a document or spreadsheet. I am forever erasing cells by accident.
But today, I learned a NEW keyboard shortcut I had never heard of before: Control-Shift-T—or Command-Shift-T on a Mac. If you’re a Mac person, you’re going to need to make that mental translation for the rest of this segment!
If you accidentally close a browser tab - and I’ve done it; we’ve all done it - this shortcut brings back that tab
Magic!!! Technological Sorcery!
You can even press it repeatedly to restore multiple tabs you’ve closed.
How amazing is that?
Control-Shift-T. May it rescue your lost tabs and save you a little time and stress.
Career Transition And Job Search – Ghost Jobs and Rejection Resilience (18:46)
And now we are going to move into our career transition and job search segment.
We’re going to talk about ghosts today - specifically, ghost jobs.
I recently read an article in Inc. titled “The End of Ghost Jobs: Why Companies Could Soon Face Huge Fines for Fake Listings.” Ya’ll, I cheered when I read it. The article talks about efforts by lawmakers in several states to address job postings for positions that companies either do not intend to fill or are not currently trying to fill.
It's a definite problem. I was recently working with a client on the job hunt and we stumbled across a ghost job very quickly – an obvious one.
Ya know, this connects directly to our earlier discussion about the Horseman of Resources.
When we talk about resources, we tend to think first about money and all the physical things required to do a job.
But time is a finite resource, too.
You can earn more money. You can order more pencils (and boy have we!). You can replace the glue sticks, although I’m not convinced there are enough glue sticks in the known universe to satisfy an elementary school.
But you cannot manufacture more time.
Once you have spent an hour of your life, that hour is gone. And applying for a job takes time.
You may research the company. You read the job description and try to determine what the company actually needs. You adjust your résumé to emphasize the experience and skills most relevant to that position. You may write a cover letter. Then you open the application portal and discover that, although you have already uploaded your résumé, you must now type your entire résumé into seventeen thousand separate little boxes.
You answer screening questions. You check everything for errors. You submit the application.
Then you wait.
Sometimes, you may complete an assessment or record a one-way video interview before you have had the opportunity to speak to a single human being. If you advance further in the interview process, you research the company again, prepare examples, practice answering questions, arrange your schedule, choose what to wear, and participate in one or more interviews.
That is ALL labor. Unpaid labor, might I add.
An application is not a raffle ticket that you casually toss into a bucket. It represents an investment of your finite resources: your time, your attention, your energy, and often your hope. And sometimes, the job at the other end of that investment doesn’t even exist.
That is what people mean when they talk about ghost jobs. A ghost job is an advertised position that an employer does not intend to fill - at least not under the circumstances or within the timeframe suggested by the posting.
The exact number varies depending on the study, the platform, and how they define a ghost job. But estimates suggest that somewhere between one in seven and one in four online job postings may be ghost jobs or stale listings that are no longer being actively filled. Another survey found that 40 percent of hiring managers said their companies had posted a ghost job during the previous year.
Whatever the precise number, this tells us that job seekers are not imagining the problem.
Companies post ghost jobs for several reasons. These same companies feel these are GOOD reasons.
Some want to collect résumés so they will have a pool of candidates when (or IF) they decide to hire later. Some want to remain open to an extraordinary candidate even though they do not have an immediate vacancy. Some may want to create the public impression that the company is growing.
And some of the reasons are considerably less benign.
A company may post jobs to make its current overworked and overwhelmed employees believe help is coming. It may use job postings to remind employees asking for raises that other people would like to have their jobs at considerably less pay. It may advertise a position because company policy requires the opening to be posted publicly even though an internal candidate has already been selected.
Whatever the reason, companies continue to engage in this practice because they get useful things from it without consequences.
The company has transferred part of the cost of its recruiting strategy onto people who believe they are competing for a real opportunity.
It's another way to transfer who pays for the resources. Resources are not limited (again) to money, supplies, and technology. Your time, attention, energy, and hope are your resources, too - and applicants are spending all of them in good faith.
It makes me so angry because a ghost job does not merely waste an application. It consumes a portion of someone’s finite life under false pretenses. And FINALLY lawmakers in several states have started responding. (Side note: Contact your local legislators to tell them YOUR state NEEDS to get on this bandwagon! Like, now!)
New York lawmakers passed a bill that would require certain employers and job-posting platforms to disclose whether they intend to fill an advertised position within 90 days, intend to fill it later than that, or are simply collecting résumés for possible future consideration.
Pennsylvania and New Jersey have considered similar measures. In Texas, the attorney general (he likes to sue people) has opened an investigation into whether LinkedIn has misled people, particularly paying Premium subscribers, by promoting and profiting from fake or misleading job opportunities.
The underlying shift seems to be this: companies can absolutely build future talent pipelines. They can collect résumés. They can advertise that they are always interested in meeting exceptional candidates.
They simply need to tell the truth about what they are doing.
“We have an open position, and we intend to hire someone” is materially different from “We do not currently have a position, but we would like to keep your résumé in case something becomes available.”
Frankly, applicants deserve to know which transaction they are entering.
And for those of you trying to leave teaching, I want you to understand what this means for your job search.
It does not mean you should assume that every job is fake. It does not mean you should stop applying for positions. And it does not mean that your résumé, LinkedIn profile, interview skills, and job-search strategy do not matter. Those things still matter.
But it does mean that you cannot interpret every unanswered application as a negative comment on your and your skills.
Teachers are accustomed to believing that effort produces results. If the lesson did not work, we revise it. If the students did not understand, we explain it differently. If the program is struggling, we work harder. If we do more, eventually we'll succeed.
When a job search does not produce results, it is very easy to turn that same instinct into a Blame Game against ourselves.
Maybe my résumé is terrible.
Maybe I don’t have any transferable skills.
Maybe leaving teaching was a mistake.
Maybe I need another certification, or another degree, or another hundred applications!
But you cannot win a position that does not exist.
You cannot write the perfect résumé for a company that is not hiring.
You cannot interview your way into a position that has been frozen.
And you cannot force a hiring manager to select an outside candidate when the company has already chosen someone internally.
Sometimes, you didn’t lose the game.
Sometimes, someone sold you a scam ticket to a game that was never scheduled to be played.
This is ANOTHER reason that networking and human connection matter in a job search. A person inside an organization may be able to tell you whether a position is active, whether funding has been approved, whether the company is genuinely interviewing, or whether the listing has been sitting there for six months collecting electronic dust.
Please remember that the dysfunction of this market is not indicative that anything is wrong with YOU.
You still need a focused strategy. You still need to identify and translate your transferable skills. You still need a résumé that clearly communicates the value you can bring to an employer. You still need persistence and resilience.
I’ll link that Incorporated (Inc.) article (and a couple of others) in the show notes so you can read more about ghost jobs and the efforts to bring greater honesty and transparency to the hiring market.
If you are pouring your time, energy, and hope into a job search that is not producing results, you can see that do not necessarily need to work harder. You may need a better strategy - and someone who can help you separate the parts you can improve from the dysfunction you cannot control.
That is exactly what I help teachers do. You can schedule a free discovery call with me at TeachersinTransition.com/calendar, and let’s talk about where your job search is getting stuck and what your next move should be. You do not have to keep throwing your finite resources into the void and hoping something eventually answers.
But until next week, guard your resources like a dragon
CONNECT WITH VANESSA
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That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!
