I left teaching in a public high school in an inner city high school after 11 years. We moved and planned to have a child with me as a stay-at-home mom for at least 5 years, so the timing was convenient.
I knew I would never return. There's the union-driven barrier that they have to pay me for years of experience and education - so I would have to convince a new district to hire me at double the salary of a new teacher (masters + 11 years of experience), they also had to decide within 1 year whether to give me tenure or let me go.
But on top of that, I was burned out. I had more success with the struggling students than anyone else (meaning slightly more than 50% passed, when the average was aroudn 30%). So they rewarded me with more classes full of struggling students. I worked my tail off to individualize the instruction and teach them real-life number crunching skills. (These students had no use for algebra - but it would help them to be able to recognize when their employer cheated them by short-changing their paycheck, or to recognize when a bigger pack of toilet paper rolls was a rip-off because everyone "knows" that bigger is always cheaper.) I worked about 80 hours a week - and it was a very emotionally draining endeavor.
I can't imagine adding the strain of the threat of external violence to the violence which was part of the lives of many of my kids (which they often brought into the schools with them, in the form of street fighting/gang violence).
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