The loop that eats good schools from the inside.
What you're looking at
Six stages in a circle. A good teacher arrives, children learn, parents notice and request her class specifically, the class size balloons to forty-five, she burns out and leaves, the replacement is worse. The arrows all say "+" except the last one, which says "-" — that's the only balancing force in the loop, and it comes too late. The two red nodes are where the system breaks the teacher.
Why I drew it this way
I could have drawn this as a timeline — teacher arrives in September, leaves in March. But that would make it look like a one-time event. This is a loop because it happens every year. The circle shows that the system eats its best and then wonders why the next hire is weaker. I put the burnout and the oversized class in red because those are the points where intervention is possible and where we do nothing. The rest is just gravity.
What it argues
The diagram argues that good teaching creates the conditions for its own destruction in under-resourced schools. We reward effective teachers by overloading them until they quit. The loop is not an accident — it is the system working exactly as designed, because we have no mechanism to say "this class is full" when parents demand access to the teacher who works.
What I left out
I left out the principal, the ministry, the budget meetings. Not because they are unimportant, but because they are everywhere and nowhere in this loop. The loop runs without them. It runs in every school I have worked in. Adding them would make it look like someone is steering, and that is the lie I refuse to draw.