On chess, teaching, and a book that keeps resonating: A Q&A with author and educator Salome Thomas-EL

When Salome Thomas-EL finally published the book he had been working on for the last five years, I Choose to Stay: A Black Teacher Refuses to Desert the Inner City, publishers warned him that the book’s staying power would be about one year, tops.

That was in 2003.

Now, celebrating its 20th anniversary, I Choose to Stay still resonates, especially as the nation deals with a teacher retention crisis.

“We have lost 600,000 net teachers since the spring of 2020 and will never get them back into the profession. We have thousands that leave every month,” Thomas-EL said. “They’re traumatized. And you compound that with politicians and all these outsiders telling you what you can and cannot teach and what you can and cannot say. Teachers lose their ability to be creative.”

» READ MORE: These Philadelphia teachers considered leaving the profession. Here’s why they decided to stay or go.

When Thomas-EL first started writing, he was a teacher at North Philadelphia’s Roberts Vaux Middle School confronted with the dilemma that opens the book: the opportunity to move up to an assistant principal role at another school that would have paid $20,000 more a year, the equivalent of $38,000 today.

But it would have meant leaving the children he had worked hard to engage in academics in the middle of the school year. “The kids would have thought I left for the money,” he said.

Thomas-EL turned it down, worried that he had ended any chance of a future school district promotion.

Now, he said, “I receive messages often from teachers who say I Choose to Stay encouraged them to continue in the profession.”

Raised in North Philadelphia, Thomas-EL has spent his career working in high-poverty schools looking for ways to keep children from dropping out. One tool was chess, which he first used to help him teach math. Later, he developed a chess team at Vaux Middle School that became eight-time National Chess Champions.

He said he understands the worldview of his students. “I came from the same community and I’m able to relate. I had a single mom, a large family of eight children. I witnessed my mom work two, three jobs; volunteer in the community while trying to go back to school. I was sensitive to that.”

Today, he is head of school at Thomas Edison Public Charter School in Wilmington, another community that has been hard-hit by violence and poverty. His current students are two-time national chess champions. But he sill grapples with staying and leaving.

“Delaware has embraced me and I love it there. Although one day I may come back to be superintendent in Philly, I have no plans to leave Delaware any time soon.”

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Then or now?

Then, people were leaving because of pay, which has always been an issue. But also, just the stress of working in urban schools was a challenge. But today, those that can even deal with the stress of urban schools — there is all kinds of outside interferences. Teachers are not feeling celebrated, not feeling appreciated and, of course, pay is always an issue.

“The teakettle has been boiling for decades. The pandemic made it boil over.”

Today, with the stressors of society and all the issues, with the school violence and the gun violence, I think it has sucked the air of passion out of the educators. Although the book is I Choose to Stay, I fully understand the people who may exercise that choice to not stay because the system is very hard.

The teakettle has been boiling for decades. The pandemic made it boil over.

The stress back then was students being disruptive, lack of parental involvement, some of the issues that have always been a part of working in urban schools. And then you had the struggles of working in schools and maybe you didn’t have leadership that really understood how to serve teachers and families. That makes a big difference in any organization — leadership.

With the pandemic, you had cameras in the kids’ homes. Before the pandemic you just imagined what they were facing. But now you saw first-hand how some students were living and what they went through on a day-to-day basis. It made you appreciate the fact they came to school everyday but it also made you feel a sense of compassion and empathy because you saw how much they weren’t cared for. You saw the trauma firsthand, up close.

It affected the teachers’ mental health and socio-emotional well-being.

There needs to be more joy. Kids need that joy and educators need it, too. Back when I was at Vaux, you could see that people were going to work and it was their passion, their mission.

With the pandemic, you had the kids home so much. These kids had been in isolation for so long and those that did find joy in school, for two years that joy wasn’t there for them. There were students that were in depression and struggling and then they came back. I think that is when we saw a rise in student violence against teachers.

Testing is two weeks out of the whole year, and you are going to use that to measure my performance and my effectiveness?

The real issue is that all the data show what really impacts student long-term success is critical thinking, the problem-solving, all the things they learn from playing chess.

The self-regulation, the reasoning, the kindness, the compassion. None of that is measured on a state test. Yet, when students talk about what did they draw on to find success in high school, and college, and business and beyond, they talk about all these other areas that never get measured on a state test.

I never had a kid come back and say, “I want to thank you for helping me be successful because you gave me a state test every year. And that made me enjoy school.“

“The self-regulation, the reasoning, the kindness, the compassion. None of that is measured on a state test.”

Tests are important. We have to be able to find ways to measure the success of our instructional program, measure the progress of our students. We know assessment is important. But it doesn’t have to be high-stakes, high-pressure. Kids don’t have to hear teachers and principals say “If you don’t pass this test, I’m going to lose my job, lose my house, lose my car.”

Neither educators nor students should be living in those conditions.

We’ve had lot of success, but wholesale we have not seen the kind of success we need to see. There are too many people graduating and not finding success. We need to overhaul the system.

One big one is we have to fund our schools better. We’ve got to find a way to pay teachers. Trying to hire teachers, it’s like The Hunger Games because you are interviewing [a potential teacher] and probably 10 other schools are interviewing them. It is very competitive. Start with better pay and better working conditions.

And then I think — 20 or 30 years ago this would not have been as high on my list — but today you’ve got to get mental health support. I read somewhere [that] 20% to 30% of students have requested mental health support and not received it yet.