The decision to stay in the classroom or to get out...

               This is my third year teaching in a 6th grade classroom.  This is also my third year of working on a team where I was the youngest and most inexperienced member.  I knew going in to this profession, that the burnout rate was/is high.  I knew that there was/is a lot of discontent in the educational profession.  As many non-educators say, teachers are under-paid and under-appreciated.  However, as most teachers say we are overworked and understaffed.  The reason why I make the distinct difference between the two supporters is that teachers knew going in that we weren't going to be paid a lot.  I don't know any teacher that got into the profession thinking they were going to make enough money to live comfortably.  The truth is we need to be married, live with a roommate, or work another job to make ends meet.  We also knew going in that we will rarely EVER meet a child or a parent that appreciates the amount of work we do.  Because frankly, NO ONE except a fellow teacher knows how much work WE ACTUALLY DO.  I don't know any good teacher that comes in 5 minutes before the students get there, looks at their pacing guide, goes ok...this is the lesson I will teach today, and then leaves 5 minutes after the students leave.  THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY.  What about the copies? What about the presentation (smart board, PowerPoint, Elmo, etc.)? What about the GRADING? What about the numerous phone calls to administrators, parents, colleagues, human resources, etc.? WHAT ABOUT THE MASSIVE AMOUNT OF EMAILS YOU GET IN ONE DAY? What about the fact that we are the only profession that cannot just call out sick? Even when we are sick we have to prepare for it.
            This amount of work makes me think about the discussion that I constantly hear from my colleagues:  Should I stay in the classroom?  What can I do to lessen my workload? It is depressing to hear my teammates talk about how if they were looking to get into education now they wouldn't do it. I even had a teammate tell her daughter to not pursue becoming a teacher because it is too much work and not worth it. This was a teacher that had taught for over 20 years! With these new forced collaborative meetings, data dialogues, data analysis, data walls, data discussions, and harder end of year assessments, teachers are left feeling ineffective.  Does all the work we do even matter?  This amount of extra work that is being added each month forces good teachers out of the classroom.  I have seen effective teachers that love being with students, thrive on planning innovative, hands-on lessons, just not be able to do it anymore.  Instead they go into being an instructional coach, administrator, school based technology teachers, etc. just so they can still be with students but not have to do all of the extra work that being a classroom teacher entails.  This leaves all of the teachers that are either trying to survive or fly under the radar.  So this leads me to my ultimate question:  IF all this extra work is supposed to help students succeed, why is it pushing effective teachers out of the door?