Most K-12 teachers unhappy as staffing shortages, learning losses persist, report shows

Most K-12 public school teachers are unhappy with their jobs as staffing shortages and pandemic lockdown learning losses extend into the current academic year, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The advocacy group reported in a compilation of recent studies that only 46% of teachers responding to a 2023 Merrimack College survey said they would advise their younger selves to enter the profession. Only 1 in 5 said they are “very satisfied” with their careers.

Heather Peske, the council’s president, said teaching has become more difficult since schools switched to virtual and hybrid learning during pandemic lockdowns. Studies have tied historic declines in math and reading scores to the lockdowns, particularly in low-income and minority schools.

“Teachers are doing their best to recover from those setbacks,” Ms. Peske said. “We need to think about the best ways to support and keep effective teachers in the schools where we need them the most.”

The National Council on Teacher Quality said job dissatisfaction is the top driver of teacher turnover. The group pointed to federal data showing that teachers most commonly reported only one to three years of experience in 2016, down from 15 years in 1988.

Schools in many rural and urban areas have reported increased staffing shortages, student emotional problems, special needs challenges from undocumented migrants, chronic absenteeism and misbehavior.

In recent years, struggling school districts have fast-tracked credentials for new teachers, shortened school weeks, extended hybrid learning and reactivated retired teachers, but the report suggests those efforts have failed to overcome a nagging scarcity of special education teachers, language specialists, bus drivers, and qualified math and science instructors.

Officials at the National Council on Teacher Quality emphasized recent data showing that just 40% of public schools in low-income and minority-dominated areas are fully staffed.

The report recommends team teaching, flexible scheduling and more pay to teach some bigger classes. It touts state policies in North Carolina, Texas and North Dakota that have placed top teachers in professional development roles implementing such policies.

“It means going from one teacher in a class of 30 kids to five educators, including specialists and non-teachers, handling up to 150 students,” Ms. Peske said.

Reached for comment, several K-12 stakeholders agreed with the substance of the report.

“The pay is not great, the respect is not great, the workplace is not great, and there are additional challenges of violence,” said Susan D. McMahon, chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violence Against Educators and School Personnel. “So why would people stay in the profession? I do think collaboration, mentoring and rethinking is good.”

Ms. McMahon, a psychology professor at private DePaul University in Chicago, said physical violence against teachers surged after public campuses reopened from COVID-19 lockdowns.

Reports show students, parents, co-workers and administrators hitting, kicking, punching, threatening, insulting and cyberbullying teachers. In some cases, students even repurposed classroom objects into weapons.

Some conservative groups object to expanding class sizes to cope with these problems.

Sheri Few, president of the U.S. Parents Involved in Education, said such policies disrupt teachers’ ability “to maintain classroom discipline, making classroom disruptions a regular occurrence.”

“System ‘improvements’ like those suggested in this report undermine their ability to establish close relationships with their students, a key factor of a successful teacher-learner engagement,” Ms. Few said.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education think tank, said experience shows that boosting teacher pay by at least $10,000 on needy campuses attracts better candidates. It also noted that teachers unions have opposed differential pay scales in most districts.

“We’ve chosen to hire more teachers and more staff in general instead of boosting pay,” said Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute. “And we’ve gone soft on traditional discipline in the name of equity. Both decisions were misguided.”

The head of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, agreed with the National Council on Teacher Quality report on widespread teacher unhappiness and the need to change traditional classroom arrangements.

“If we want to support every student so that they can live into their brilliance, it is imperative that we reimagine the role of teachers in schools and adapt to the realities of the interconnected and interdependent world we live in today,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in an email.

At the same time, she criticized the report for ignoring “the importance of including educators and the unions that represent them in discussions about what the future of the profession should be.”

“If we rely only on state and district policymakers, education prep leaders and other advocates, we will never be able to progress forward,” Ms. Pringle said.

Stagnant wages

Analysts chalked up the growing discontent to a widespread perception that teachers are undervalued and underpaid.

Economist Gema Zamarro, a K-12 education market researcher at the University of Arkansas, highlighted recent data showing teachers’ job satisfaction has declined since 2010 to its lowest level in nearly 50 years.

“Overall, I think increasing teacher salaries is a great first step to improve the prestige of the profession, but it might not be the only needed step,” Ms. Zamarro said. “We should also pay attention to these other important working conditions for teachers and the decline in their sense of professional autonomy.”

She cited waning prestige, declining enrollments in education programs, pandemic burnout, school shootings, inflation and decades of stagnant wages as examples.

Seven states have recently enacted laws to increase teacher pay. They include Maryland, Florida and Arkansas, which raised the state’s minimum annual salary for teachers from $36,000 to $50,000 last year.

Similar legislation is pending in 15 other states, including Ohio and Arizona.

In Arizona, Justin Wing, assistant superintendent of human resources for Mesa Public Schools, said the suburban district near Phoenix has “significantly increased” starting salaries to attract special education and math teachers. The district has about 400 to 600 teacher vacancies annually.

“The demands are much greater [to] personalize learning for each student,” said Mr. Wing, who supports redesigning classrooms. “In 1988, instruction was entirely different.”

He said not enough administrators are available to support teachers through recent challenges.

“One administrator of an elementary school with over 60 employees and 500 students is not tenable,” Mr. Wing said. “In business, managers supervise 10-12 employees, perhaps up to 15.”

The nation’s public schools received $190 billion in federal pandemic relief money but have struggled to rebound from related learning losses since the end of public health restrictions.

The Defense of Freedom Institute, a think tank founded by former Trump administration education officials, reported in July that many districts spent relief funds on hiring staff and administrators.

Boston’s public school system hired at least 16 administrators, including a staff wellness manager and an “ethnic studies instructional coach and coordinator.”

Milwaukee Public Schools created a “race-conscious teaching project” and a four-member Gender Identity & Inclusion Department.

As relief funding expired, many large school districts quietly implemented layoffs over the summer.

Meanwhile, multiple reports suggest that students learned little to nothing during virtual classes.

The Department of Education’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that two-thirds of fourth- and eighth-graders are not proficient in reading.

From 2018 to 2023, the Program for International Student Assessment found U.S. math scores dropped 13 points to their lowest levels since officials started comparing them with other countries in 2003.

The Northwest Evaluation Association, a test-making division of the textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, estimated last year that eighth-graders would need a whole year to catch up to pre-pandemic learning levels. Educators say most students are not likely to reach that goal.

School choice

School choice advocates say many parents voted with their feet by pulling their children out of struggling public schools that closed during pandemic lockdowns. They say teachers should be allowed to do the same.

Enrollments declined in most large school districts that ended in-person learning as more families sought out homeschooling, private schools and public charter schools as alternatives.

In a 2023 survey of public school teachers from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and The Harris Poll, 97% of those teaching on charter campuses reported overall job satisfaction, compared with 83% of teachers on traditional school district campuses.

Nina Rees, a longtime charter school advocate and an Education Department official in the George W. Bush administration, said charter school teachers feel freer to do their jobs than traditional district teachers with a “centralized district bureaucracy” micromanaging them.

“This is not surprising because charter schools are schools of choice, not just for the students who attend them but also for the staff that selects them,” Ms. Rees said. “I think the greatest tool to attract and keep teachers around is giving them autonomy in the classroom and giving them a sense of ownership in their schools.”