The share of teachers who say the stress and disappointment of the job are “worth it” has fallen to 42%, which is 21 points lower than other college-educated workers, according to a poll by Rand, a nonprofit think tank. As recently as 2018, over 70% of teachers said the stress was worth it.
Teacher exit rates reached new highs in the past two years, according to data from several states. In Texas, thousands more teachers left the classroom in 2022 and 2023 compared with the years before the pandemic.
In a recent Education Week poll, only 18% of public school teachers said they were very satisfied with their jobs, with an additional 46% saying they were somewhat satisfied. The share of teachers who were very satisfied was lower than at any point between 1984 and 2012, the last prepandemic period in which the question was asked.
Pay is another source of teacher stress. Average teaching salaries fell by 6% between 2019 and 2021, adjusted for inflation, and continue to lag behind most other professions.
Relevant discussion from a related topic (featuring OP). As someone working in the early childhood level, I would wager this isn't going to get better any time soon. Last year, my students were...
As someone working in the early childhood level, I would wager this isn't going to get better any time soon. Last year, my students were pandemic babies (born 2019-2021) and the majority were way behind on their language and social development. There doesn't seem to be any political will to address this anytime soon.
Damnit, kfwyre. I still have one more week of summer, don't get me down.
Hello fellow ECE teacher. I noticed the same last year - physical and academic milestones met but socioemotionally stunted. It was a hard year. I'm already noticing a difference with my new class....
Hello fellow ECE teacher. I noticed the same last year - physical and academic milestones met but socioemotionally stunted. It was a hard year. I'm already noticing a difference with my new class.
I'm working on getting my license right now (two weeks to go!) and all this news, while disheartening, is not discouraging me from completing what I know I want to do: to be the teacher I always wanted.
YMMV, but my sister is a teacher at a district that increased her pay substantially multiple times with inflation in the recent era, and aside from the initial happiness, the burnout I hear her...
YMMV, but my sister is a teacher at a district that increased her pay substantially multiple times with inflation in the recent era, and aside from the initial happiness, the burnout I hear her expressing is the same. She's just as tired after work, just as lethargic on weekends, just as frustrated with students that socially fell behind during the pandemic, just as annoyed with unreasonable parents. More money absolutely feels good, and can be part of the solution, but you don't remember more money when you're stressed out. My feeling is that we need to return more autonomy to teachers and let them give out more consequences in addition to all the other benefits that need to be revisited.
Pay is certainly only one part of the equation. Plenty of software engineers burn out hard by their 30s, especially if they got lucky enough to get into a FAANG company because those environments...
Pay is certainly only one part of the equation. Plenty of software engineers burn out hard by their 30s, especially if they got lucky enough to get into a FAANG company because those environments are designed around 60-100 hour work weeks. Medicine saw huge burnout rate increases during the early stages of the pandemic and they've only somewhat started to slow down because it's been a huge push in nearly all medical institutions to figure out how to handle it.
Stress and work-life balance are probably the two most important factors, followed closely by whether you feel your voice even matters or can make a difference in how a place is ran. Work environments are getting standardized across the board over the last 20 years in a way we haven't seen in a long time where workers are increasingly being treated as disposable, and that certainly doesn't help any of these factors.
Good points all around, but I feel like your last one is particularly important. Sometimes when I post teacher-specific stuff like this I feel a little vain doing it, because I think a lot of the...
Good points all around, but I feel like your last one is particularly important. Sometimes when I post teacher-specific stuff like this I feel a little vain doing it, because I think a lot of the issues we're seeing in education aren't even specific to education. It's not just teachers -- it's seemingly everybody.
Of the people I know in other fields, nearly all of them are also feeling burnt out, are seeing their jobs getting harder, are asked to take on temporary additional responsibilities that then become permanent expectations, and generally feel like they're employed underneath an immovable weight that's pressing down more and more over time.
I post the teacher-specific stuff because it's important for me to highlight it, but I honestly think there's a bigger picture here that we're merely a subset of.
I agree with all your points, but I might even put making a difference/having your voice heard above stress and work-life balance. I have a teacher friend that works at a non-profit on weekends...
I agree with all your points, but I might even put making a difference/having your voice heard above stress and work-life balance. I have a teacher friend that works at a non-profit on weekends and summers in addition to his regular school because he feels he's making a difference in kids' lives. He loves that part. He loves teaching in his regular job too. He's only ever griped at me about decisions that admin has made where it made him feel like they didn't value his input.
It definitely depends a lot on the person and their specific job. To be clear, I was casting generalizations and the specifics are probably going to differ from person to person. I'm an extremely...
It definitely depends a lot on the person and their specific job. To be clear, I was casting generalizations and the specifics are probably going to differ from person to person. I'm an extremely low stress and low anxiety person, so even in very high-stress situations (I used to be an EMT, for example), I didn't burn out from that alone, but I had met many people who have struggled with this.
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I feel like devs/engineers making $200-300k TC, doctors making $200k, even nurses at $80-90k are in a vastly different place from an early-career...
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I feel like devs/engineers making $200-300k TC, doctors making $200k, even nurses at $80-90k are in a vastly different place from an early-career teacher getting paid $42,000. I'd definitely rather work in a place with good support, but it seems to me that saying "it's not about the money" isn't acknowledging the fact that the money-to-work/stress/pressure/inconvenience ratio used to work for people in teaching, and now it doesn't. And unfortunately nobody seems to want to fix either half of that equation.
Apologies, I never said "it's not about the money" and did not mean to imply it. I just wished to highlight other parts of the equation, because the context was situations where folks were burning...
Apologies, I never said "it's not about the money" and did not mean to imply it. I just wished to highlight other parts of the equation, because the context was situations where folks were burning out even with good increases in pay. Money is an extremely strong motivator, and it's strength is only multiplied when you have less of it. But, as I stated, it is only one part of the equation, and efforts targeting employee burnout need to move multiple levers simultaneously to be most effective.
Don't apologize! I think I am fortunate in that I got out of teaching before I was a burnt out stub of a human lol, so the money one is what I end up focusing on. But you're right. But also if...
Don't apologize! I think I am fortunate in that I got out of teaching before I was a burnt out stub of a human lol, so the money one is what I end up focusing on. But you're right. But also if they had paid me 150k to be a teacher I would still be doing it haha
While work-life balance is sometimes an issue for software engineers, hours vary a lot both between tech companies and within companies. Software engineers often have flexible hours and there’s...
While work-life balance is sometimes an issue for software engineers, hours vary a lot both between tech companies and within companies. Software engineers often have flexible hours and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate hours worked. There is also the “rest and vest” stereotype at Google and perhaps other places. That’s an exaggeration from a TV show, but it’s not entirely made up.
All in all, I would guess many software engineers don’t work as hard as teachers, but there are notorious exceptions. The gaming industry has a reputation for working people hard. I recently read an article about working at NVidia being very stressful. There are stories about people working long hours at startups, but this wasn’t true for the ones I worked at. (It was quite a long time ago.)
It seems like something to be wary of when looking for a new job rather than a reason to avoid the whole industry.
I think the point is less that software engineers work harder than teachers (we absolutely do not) and more that burnout cannot be solved simply by increasing pay, because software engineers make...
I think the point is less that software engineers work harder than teachers (we absolutely do not) and more that burnout cannot be solved simply by increasing pay, because software engineers make far more than teachers and many still frequently suffer from burnout.
Pay isn't the solution, it's addressing something else that's been wrong for a long time. It's great that pay is raised, but today's just getting teachers to a baseline they should have been at...
Pay isn't the solution, it's addressing something else that's been wrong for a long time. It's great that pay is raised, but today's just getting teachers to a baseline they should have been at long ago.
Is work life balance notably worse for teachers than in any other field? My understanding based on my location is that it is better. They have more holidays, the summer off, etc. I understand that...
Is work life balance notably worse for teachers than in any other field? My understanding based on my location is that it is better. They have more holidays, the summer off, etc. I understand that there is some out of school planning that goes on, grading homework, filling out paperwork, I've even had an elementary school teacher for my daughter he was gracious enough to respond to messages on a weekend when our daughter told us she was being bullied, but this was in no way a requirement of the job or an expectation on our part. We were extremely grateful for it and we made sure to shower her with thanks for it. The teachers I have known in my personal life have specifically told me that after the first few years, their lesson plans are pretty well set and they don't have much work during their downtime.
Could your sister have un-diagnosed depression, anxiety, or ADHD (speaking from personal experience here)?
I think you are underestimating the amount of time that goes into teaching outside the classroom, even though you acknowledge the existence of it. Keep in mind that they need to do all that in...
I think you are underestimating the amount of time that goes into teaching outside the classroom, even though you acknowledge the existence of it. Keep in mind that they need to do all that in addition to what amounts to at least 40 hours a week in school -- and it can be pretty exhausting work, at that! Doing all the out-of-school preparation essentially on top of a full-time job makes it a pretty huge time sink if nothing else, even if they can get some of it done during school hours, which isn't the case for everyone. That on top of having to manage parents' and administrators' expectations can lead to a very stressful job. Poor pay, of course, exacerbates this issue, since many teachers need to find other part-time work during their vacation.
When I did it I worked a 40-hour week and left it all there when I went home; the difference from most jobs is that teaching attracts (maybe completely depends on?) people who are willing to...
When I did it I worked a 40-hour week and left it all there when I went home; the difference from most jobs is that teaching attracts (maybe completely depends on?) people who are willing to sacrifice to "make a difference", and they are unofficially compensated in like manner, so they don't feel like they have to push for more money. It's a "service," a "calling," etc—I don't think I was a worse teacher for being there less, in fact I was way less stressed so I enjoyed it more.
That makes a lot of sense! I'd wager you're right that at current pay rates and work expectations, American schools rely on those people willing to sacrifice themselves for the work.
That makes a lot of sense! I'd wager you're right that at current pay rates and work expectations, American schools rely on those people willing to sacrifice themselves for the work.
There's a tendency to both over-exaggerate and under-exaggerate how hard teachers work. I know/knew some at both sides of the spectrum. Responding to a different comment of yours from this post,...
There's a tendency to both over-exaggerate and under-exaggerate how hard teachers work. I know/knew some at both sides of the spectrum. Responding to a different comment of yours from this post, but as a software engineer, if you asked me at my last job if I worked as hard as the average teacher at my last job, I would have said no. But if you asked me now..
Yeah, I'm sure there's plenty of variation in both career paths. I just think it's worth pushing back on the idea that teachers have better world-life balance than other fields, just because they...
Yeah, I'm sure there's plenty of variation in both career paths. I just think it's worth pushing back on the idea that teachers have better world-life balance than other fields, just because they have summers off, because that seems like a common misconception. I've never worked as a teacher (I've considered it, but the money and work-life balance put me off) so I don't have any firsthand experience on that side of things.
For sure, people should not think that teachers get a "free" vacation. They paid for that vacation with sweat in ways that most are not. But aggregated across a year, others are also putting in a...
For sure, people should not think that teachers get a "free" vacation. They paid for that vacation with sweat in ways that most are not. But aggregated across a year, others are also putting in a lot of sweat and I think it just irks them when they hear that their work is easier than a teacher's. Sometimes it is! But when it's not, it sure sucks to hear it.
I also started pushing back on the notion that software engineering is easy, similar to the push back against teaching being easy.. Those "Day in the life of a software engineer" videos were fun when they first started, but it really warped kids' conception of what we do and now our job market is in a really bad place in 2024. Yeah, the perks are great, the flexibility is almost unparalleled, and the compensation is bonkers for the relative ease of getting into the field. But what people are not aware of is that you could be spending an entire day chasing a bug, with no guarantee that you'll ever find it. And then wake up and do it again because you have a deliverable and you have to find it. Or pinged at 6am on a Sunday because you're on-call. Or you ship a feature that breaks and millions of people are mad and your boss is breathing down your neck because their boss is breathing down theirs. And at any point, you could be fired because this is not a unionized career (teachers are notoriously hard to fire where I am, at a certain point). Once you're out there looking for a job, you could experience interview processes that range in length from 30 minutes to 8 hours and still get ghosted. Oh, after studying algorithms for a month.
Would I say teaching is harder than software engineering? Maybe, but not definitively. Software engineering has high highs and low lows, but teaching has a kind of reliability as a career that people like and that's a tradeoff.
Definitely! Speaking as a teacher, I don't think job difficulty should ever be looked at hierarchically -- it just encourages needless competition. Teaching and software development are both...
For sure, people should not think that teachers get a "free" vacation. They paid for that vacation with sweat in ways that most are not. But aggregated across a year, others are also putting in a lot of sweat and I think it just irks them when they hear that their work is easier than a teacher's. Sometimes it is! But when it's not, it sure sucks to hear it.
Definitely! Speaking as a teacher, I don't think job difficulty should ever be looked at hierarchically -- it just encourages needless competition. Teaching and software development are both difficult jobs in very different ways. Plus, even within just one field there's immense variation between positions and placements. Anyone in an "easy" job is just one bad boss or team member away from a difficult one, after all.
Many (most?) jobs are difficult, and I think it's worth meeting that with compassion rather than comparison.
Also worth mentioning: We are NOT PAID during the summer! I literally do not collect a paycheck; I have to work a part-time, second job, and I have a master's degree. It is not in any sense of the...
For sure, people should not think that teachers get a "free" vacation.
Also worth mentioning: We are NOT PAID during the summer! I literally do not collect a paycheck; I have to work a part-time, second job, and I have a master's degree. It is not in any sense of the word a vacation for me.
Yeah, I work in software development so I'm partially just more familiar with the highs and lows of it I think. Plus, I live in a country with better employment protections than the US which helps...
Yeah, I work in software development so I'm partially just more familiar with the highs and lows of it I think. Plus, I live in a country with better employment protections than the US which helps some.
I can tell you that post-teaching, it is a huge relief to be able to pick when I want time off, instead of being assigned 6-8 weeks that I don't get paid for lol. Part of the reason paying...
I can tell you that post-teaching, it is a huge relief to be able to pick when I want time off, instead of being assigned 6-8 weeks that I don't get paid for lol. Part of the reason paying teachers less has always been justified is "Well you're working 190 days instead of 230-250," which is true, but teachers also don't have the option to work those six weeks if they want, no overtime/differentials, etc. Those summers were great, literally the only reason people keep doing it lol, and I did summer school/night classes any chance I got, but now I'm like wow, I could have just worked all year and made normal money like everybody else.
Thank you for being kind! That is, unfortunately, quite rare for us teachers. The ratio of kind to hostile emails we get is... not favorable. I also brought it up here, but it's quite common for...
I've even had an elementary school teacher for my daughter he was gracious enough to respond to messages on a weekend when our daughter told us she was being bullied, but this was in no way a requirement of the job or an expectation on our part. We were extremely grateful for it and we made sure to shower her with thanks for it.
Thank you for being kind!
That is, unfortunately, quite rare for us teachers. The ratio of kind to hostile emails we get is... not favorable. I also brought it up here, but it's quite common for parents to enter a retaliatory mode when we communicate with them. For example, your contact with the teacher was very positive, but it's quite possible that your daughter's teacher attempted to contact the bullies' parents about their behavior only to be met with hostility.
If that were the case, what was a positive experience for you very likely could have been a net negative experience for the teacher.
This also goes into an often overlooked issue of teaching: the emotional labor of navigating all of those things. Seeing a kid you care about get bullied carries a personal weight. That's possibly why the teacher took time out of his weekend to communicate with you in the first place: he genuinely cared.
Whenever someone genuinely cares though, the full spectrum of "life" stuff that happens to the kids in front of you hits pretty hard. A student loses a parent. Another is being abused by a family member. Another is homeless. Another is getting cyberbullied. These are intangible weights that a lot of other domains don't have to deal with on a regular basis. Witnessing others' suffering is tough -- witnessing childrens' suffering is especially difficult.
I've been in education long enough that I've got a pretty thick skin for it, but that just means I'm better able to handle my own response -- not that it really hits me any less.
I mention this not to guilt trip you or anything -- instead I think it's something that a lot of people don't factor in to their perception of what teachers do. People tend to start and stop at a sort of "chalk and talk" perception of teachers based mostly on the instruction that we do, rather than as professionals that interface with hundreds of children, and, by proxy, all of the concomitant stresses and traumas within those populations.
Now, as for specifically how our work-life balance compares to other fields, it's hard to say. I think a lot of people, across various disciplines, are having a difficult time with work right now. It's important for me to spotlight teachers because that's what I know and I want people to be aware of alarming trends in what I consider to be a vital national institution, but I don't like that focusing on just us often carries an implication that everybody else is doing better. I don't think that's true, and I think other fields would benefit from the same spotlight that is often given to teachers.
The article does bring up an interesting data point though:
The share of teachers who say the stress and disappointment of the job are “worth it” has fallen to 42%, which is 21 points lower than other college-educated workers
It's not a perfect measure of work-life balance, but it's a decent one. The fact that it's so discrepant is probably a valuable indicator, but I don't want to put too much weight or read too far into a single data point.
Yeah, good question. I think it is notable worse, but a lot of that is gut feeling since I haven't worked as a formal teacher professionally. I think the ratio of teachers that I've heard advise...
Yeah, good question. I think it is notable worse, but a lot of that is gut feeling since I haven't worked as a formal teacher professionally. I think the ratio of teachers that I've heard advise kids not to become teachers gives me reason to think that the reward:stress ratio is off more so than most other fields. However, when I say I didn't work as a formal teacher professionally, I did teach a class for a year part-time (Saturdays) at a non-profit and it was incredibly tiring. This was during Covid lockdowns, so it happened online, but by the end of the day I was just exhausted from having to talk non-stop and repeating the same words over and over. It's draining in a way I'm not used to.
As for the depression/anxiety/ADHD part, maybe? I think I have anxiety and ADHD to some extent, so I wouldn't be surprised if she had it too. We didn't grow up in a household that built good habits, so we transitioned into routines later in life than I think is healthy for a young adult. It's possible that moving from a lifestyle like that to one as scheduled as a teacher's day was a big transition for her. Just my theory, but nothing I've confirmed with her. It played out like that in my career.
I am not a teacher, but did consider it briefly because my high school was so amazing. And I quickly came to realize it's because my school was so exceptional and amazing that it makes the...
I am not a teacher, but did consider it briefly because my high school was so amazing. And I quickly came to realize it's because my school was so exceptional and amazing that it makes the prospect of teaching at other schools... Less than pleasant, to put it lightly. It did, however, give me a strong passion for education and make me pay a lot of attention to schools.
I think part of the burnout is politics. There's the standard workplace politics going on, with an extra layer in the form of dealing with parents who can have a lot of sway due to being wealthy or influential. Then there are literal politics seeping into the classroom, in the form of new regulations and policies, funding and budget cuts, and other restrictions. Vital support programs are getting cut, classes are growing while the school buildings don't, there's pressure to pass kids no matter what so they can meet quotas, etc.
This stuff has been building for a long time, but I feel it's gotten worse in the past few years. There's just a growing sense of entitlement in America. People are just far more comfortable being openly nasty, whether that boils down to bigotry or yelling at any person who works any sort of job for not catering to their whims exactly as they want. Retail workers get to deal with that plenty, but teachers are the other group most heavily subjected to it.
Schools, especially public schools, are one of the few places where you can't really control who's there. Theoretically people can quit jobs if they have hostile coworkers or get transferred to another team, or managers can fire bad workers, but teachers just don't have that option. You can't really fire a student, and there are less and less options for dealing with students who are causing trouble. I was going to qualify that statement with "without actually breaking rules or harming people," but even that isn't enough to get students removed from classes sometimes. Just look at that teacher in Virginia who got shot by a 6-year-old, after she and others complained to the school multiple times.
Speaking as an outsider, it's just increasingly bad. School administrations seem to be offering less and less support to the teachers in dealing with issues, and catering more to parents or otherwise trying to avoid any public image issues. I've heard of many veteran teachers resigning in the past few years because the satisfaction of doing good just no longer outweighs the stress of dealing with increasingly unreasonable people (both parents and students) and no support.
It just saddens me because everyone suffers for it. Teachers, students, and the rest of society that's stuck dealing with those students are going to suffer in the long run.
This is why I'm not sure I'm going back. I left this summer and haven't found something new yet, but the longer I'm out of the classroom, the less I miss it. It was just non-stop policing of...
“When I got into teaching my one thing was about learning and love of learning,” Jarrell said. “In the end, it was less about the learning and more about babysitting.”
This is why I'm not sure I'm going back. I left this summer and haven't found something new yet, but the longer I'm out of the classroom, the less I miss it. It was just non-stop policing of behavior in my middle school classes. I want to teach, to dig in and learn with my students, but that's just not what you do as a teacher, at least with middle schoolers. In fairness, I never wanted to teach middle school in the first place but my particular field (band) and region don't offer a lot of options that don't involve middle school. And high school band is its own can of worms and stress. I miss working with the students who were there to learn but it felt like that was maybe 15% of them at most. I know I could be a really good teacher, but I just have to question whether it's right for me at this point.
It's pay. Teaching has gotten much harder but they could easily make that up to me by paying me more. Benefits are great, I absolutely love my job, but it's exhausting beyond belief and I think I...
It's pay. Teaching has gotten much harder but they could easily make that up to me by paying me more.
Benefits are great, I absolutely love my job, but it's exhausting beyond belief and I think I deserve to be comfortably middle class considering I have a master's degree and work very hard doing (what I think is) an important job.
It’s more than just pay. No one wants to work some hellishly micromanaged job where constant politics prevent you from actually doing what you’re supposed to do. The amount of bullshit ive seen...
It’s more than just pay.
No one wants to work some hellishly micromanaged job where constant politics prevent you from actually doing what you’re supposed to do.
The amount of bullshit ive seen from parents, admin, and students that wouldn’t have flown even 15 years ago is insane.
We’ve made teaching about almost everything but teaching and in trying to keep everyone happy or chase perfection we’re failing the teachers and the students
It sounds like you've been teaching a bit longer than I have. Perhaps I never knew any different so have nothing much worse to compare it to. It's worse than pre-pandemic but not significantly in...
It sounds like you've been teaching a bit longer than I have. Perhaps I never knew any different so have nothing much worse to compare it to. It's worse than pre-pandemic but not significantly in my opinion.
I’m combining my time in school with years of subbing and friends who still teach, but the amount of objectively atrocious or even violent behavior that goes unhandled is absurd
I’m combining my time in school with years of subbing and friends who still teach, but the amount of objectively atrocious or even violent behavior that goes unhandled is absurd
I don't think anyone is trying to collectively shoot teachers in the foot, and Eji isn't wrong that it's worse now, but I believe you are not wrong about pay—sure they could fix all the other...
I don't think anyone is trying to collectively shoot teachers in the foot, and Eji isn't wrong that it's worse now, but I believe you are not wrong about pay—sure they could fix all the other problems if pushed, but I have said a ton of times that if you paid teachers an amount of money that some people would laugh at/spit their coffee out when they heard it, all the other problems would go away. If a Backend Dev IV doesn't like the work environment at NVIDIA/Cisco/etc, they can just go somewhere else, and probably get a bump, and never once feel like they are failing a generation of children or letting anyone down, etc. It's just not fair dude.
Definitely feeling the micromanagement here. This year, admin decreed that everyone should match late work and grading policies across their departments, but the career skills department is...
Definitely feeling the micromanagement here. This year, admin decreed that everyone should match late work and grading policies across their departments, but the career skills department is grouped by how varied we are, not how similar we are. School started today and I had to tell my students to expect a syllabus some time next week as the arguing continues.
Worse than that, there's no time to prepare. There were four work days, two eaten by training (I did not need valuable workday time swallowed up by a group read of "PLC+: The Plus Is You"), one by a freshman event, and one by the arguing above. Smeared across those four days were maybe 3 hours to prepare for my classes, one of which is new to me with very little existing content to steal. With the only info available being mismatched and conflicting, I was only barely able to figure out what this class is supposed to look like on the semester-scale before today. I still have nothing as far as lessons. I hope I can hammer something out in the next couple of hours before I turn in for the night.
Has something with funding changed? I would expect schools could generally tell the crazier parents to fuck off and just take their property taxes regardless of whether their children are enrolled.
Has something with funding changed? I would expect schools could generally tell the crazier parents to fuck off and just take their property taxes regardless of whether their children are enrolled.
So first off, location wise I can only speak for the US, and specifically Clark County Nevada, which is one of the worst out there for all sorts of reasons. That said there are the following...
Exemplary
So first off, location wise I can only speak for the US, and specifically Clark County Nevada, which is one of the worst out there for all sorts of reasons.
That said there are the following issues at play:
It is EXTREMELY hard to get a student expelled. While I think this should be the case, I have watched multiple students cross major lines and just get shuffled around. Hell the worst case was a student threatened to kill a teacher, then a month later brought bullets to school. The teacher had to complain to admin to get them removed from their class, so they moved them down the hall. It's fucking insane.
Sorta 1a, but I believe some of this is due to the laws relating to education, and a total lack of remedial schools for difficult students. For every extreme like I just mentioned, there's lots of children who, unfortunately, are emboldened by their parents to just be hellishly disruptive. They will gladly say and do anything, and refuse to do anything. I have watched a student just flat out refuse to go to the dean after vandalizing a room, and the school refused to actually make him go in any way shape or form.
I think some of this is related to the simple fact that there's a lot of "perfect environment" studies out there for education. Things that say "oh well the best way to handle a disruptive student is to....." which I think are very likely correct. They are however usually handled in environments that are much more controlled and with many more resources. I routinely taught classes in middle and high school ranging from 30-60 students. It's nearly impossible to help ANYONE with that size, let alone kids who are willingly obstructive, but "the literature says...."
There's also the business politics of teaching. Several of our schools threw out their books as part of a deal to do some springboard teaching or other nonsense program that cost millions of dollars. You were only supposed to teach from their one book, and could not deviate. So now all the very interesting and clever lesson plans that good teachers have come up with over the years are thrown out so we can enjoy the irony of teaching The Giver in a way that's probably the first step on making that dystopia a reality. Low and behold, it didn't deliver, but oops you threw out all your books as part of the deal, so now they hunt for some other plan, and on and on and on.
Metrics are hell. This doesn't just affect teaching, but it does affect teaching A TON. It is extremely fucked the way that they've badly applied stats, with little control, to schooling and using that to evaluate success. They'll redo the lines on what school gets what students and suddenly they have a much rougher student body, and oops that must mean all your teachers suck, because your students used to get A's and now they get C's, while ignoring that the new student body has a literal F average.
Oh related to that, you can't fail anyone. Turning in a blank piece of paper with your name on it got you an automatic 50-60% depending on the year/school. Failing students is the only metric anyone seems to care about, and so they will bend over backwards to make sure it doesn't happen. I've met high schoolers who can barely read, and it's not for any developmental reason. Just literally no one has bothered to make them and passed them on despite clearly failing grades. Hell half the reason those kinds of students can read at all is because of texting being important to them.
Finally, in attempting to make sure no one ever has a bad teacher, we've basically bullied out all the good ones. I taught at the highschool I went to when I was first subbing. Within 4-5 years after I had graduated every single teacher who I would consider a major influence on who I am today, was gone. All of them because of stupid rules or regulations that got in the way of them teaching, or decided that they must be a bad teacher. Several stopped teaching AP first because the rules to teach AP kept changing and they got tired of proving they could. I can remember maybe a handful of bad teachers in my life, but I remember a ton of good ones, and yet more and more the political goal of teaching policy from admin has been "better standardize the shit out of everything so that no one can ever complain", and I believe it's hellishly detrimental to the entire organization. The sort of people who are sticking around are either EXTREMELY passionate, have no better option, or are some of the worst people imaginable (thinking specifically of one disgustingly vile vice principal who absolutely ruined years of teaching at one school)
I can co-sign on pretty much all of these. I'll also extend point 7. Teacher quality often gets treated as if its something innate rather than influenced by its environment. I think there is an...
I can co-sign on pretty much all of these.
I'll also extend point 7. Teacher quality often gets treated as if its something innate rather than influenced by its environment. I think there is an innate component, but I think its importance is often overstated.
If a teacher's environment is awful, they will be a worse teacher than they would be in a functional one. If it continues to suck for a really long time (say, over the course of their career), the attrition can be especially damaging.
In the first school I worked at, my administration was proud one year of poaching a local Teacher of the Year. They convinced her to move schools and come work with us, where she would certainly have an amazing impact. She was the superstar that was going to make our dysfunctional school so much better and brighter!
Did that happen? No. Our dysfunctional school crushed her. She was a Teacher of the Year in her previous setting, but she used to come cry in my classroom on our prep periods in her new setting. She became a broken, beaten down shell of her professional self within a single year (not coincidentally, that was also the year I left that school).
I personally feel like I was a better teacher years ago than I am now. Despite having been in mostly the same environment for the last stretch of my career (though arguably COVID was a pretty big environment change in and of itself), the attrition is admittedly getting to me. I'm older and getting much more worn down. When you're newer and younger you have increased energy and tolerance for bullshit, but it wanes the longer you go on.
Now, there are some teachers who are genuinely awful and shouldn't be in the profession at all. This is not a defense of them in the slightest. I actually consider them just another environmental issue that wears down good teachers.
If we ignore them as outliers for the moment and instead look at the bulk of the teaching population, I'd wager the situation is less "all the good teachers are gone" and more "all the good teachers are having the good wrung out of them."
Educational politics has gotten worse. Students struggle, poor grades reflects badly on the school, admins try to placate legislatures/school boards/parents by “encouraging” higher pass rates,...
Educational politics has gotten worse. Students struggle, poor grades reflects badly on the school, admins try to placate legislatures/school boards/parents by “encouraging” higher pass rates, teachers lose authority to control/teach students, repeat.
And for a while, NCLB did tie funding to standardized test performance.
Relevant discussion from a related topic (featuring OP).
As someone working in the early childhood level, I would wager this isn't going to get better any time soon. Last year, my students were pandemic babies (born 2019-2021) and the majority were way behind on their language and social development. There doesn't seem to be any political will to address this anytime soon.
Damnit, kfwyre. I still have one more week of summer, don't get me down.
I’m genuinely sorry! I thought pretty much all of us were already back in the classroom.
Enjoy your remaining time off.
Hello fellow ECE teacher. I noticed the same last year - physical and academic milestones met but socioemotionally stunted. It was a hard year. I'm already noticing a difference with my new class.
I'm working on getting my license right now (two weeks to go!) and all this news, while disheartening, is not discouraging me from completing what I know I want to do: to be the teacher I always wanted.
YMMV, but my sister is a teacher at a district that increased her pay substantially multiple times with inflation in the recent era, and aside from the initial happiness, the burnout I hear her expressing is the same. She's just as tired after work, just as lethargic on weekends, just as frustrated with students that socially fell behind during the pandemic, just as annoyed with unreasonable parents. More money absolutely feels good, and can be part of the solution, but you don't remember more money when you're stressed out. My feeling is that we need to return more autonomy to teachers and let them give out more consequences in addition to all the other benefits that need to be revisited.
Pay is certainly only one part of the equation. Plenty of software engineers burn out hard by their 30s, especially if they got lucky enough to get into a FAANG company because those environments are designed around 60-100 hour work weeks. Medicine saw huge burnout rate increases during the early stages of the pandemic and they've only somewhat started to slow down because it's been a huge push in nearly all medical institutions to figure out how to handle it.
Stress and work-life balance are probably the two most important factors, followed closely by whether you feel your voice even matters or can make a difference in how a place is ran. Work environments are getting standardized across the board over the last 20 years in a way we haven't seen in a long time where workers are increasingly being treated as disposable, and that certainly doesn't help any of these factors.
Good points all around, but I feel like your last one is particularly important. Sometimes when I post teacher-specific stuff like this I feel a little vain doing it, because I think a lot of the issues we're seeing in education aren't even specific to education. It's not just teachers -- it's seemingly everybody.
Of the people I know in other fields, nearly all of them are also feeling burnt out, are seeing their jobs getting harder, are asked to take on temporary additional responsibilities that then become permanent expectations, and generally feel like they're employed underneath an immovable weight that's pressing down more and more over time.
I post the teacher-specific stuff because it's important for me to highlight it, but I honestly think there's a bigger picture here that we're merely a subset of.
I agree with all your points, but I might even put making a difference/having your voice heard above stress and work-life balance. I have a teacher friend that works at a non-profit on weekends and summers in addition to his regular school because he feels he's making a difference in kids' lives. He loves that part. He loves teaching in his regular job too. He's only ever griped at me about decisions that admin has made where it made him feel like they didn't value his input.
It definitely depends a lot on the person and their specific job. To be clear, I was casting generalizations and the specifics are probably going to differ from person to person. I'm an extremely low stress and low anxiety person, so even in very high-stress situations (I used to be an EMT, for example), I didn't burn out from that alone, but I had met many people who have struggled with this.
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I feel like devs/engineers making $200-300k TC, doctors making $200k, even nurses at $80-90k are in a vastly different place from an early-career teacher getting paid $42,000. I'd definitely rather work in a place with good support, but it seems to me that saying "it's not about the money" isn't acknowledging the fact that the money-to-work/stress/pressure/inconvenience ratio used to work for people in teaching, and now it doesn't. And unfortunately nobody seems to want to fix either half of that equation.
Apologies, I never said "it's not about the money" and did not mean to imply it. I just wished to highlight other parts of the equation, because the context was situations where folks were burning out even with good increases in pay. Money is an extremely strong motivator, and it's strength is only multiplied when you have less of it. But, as I stated, it is only one part of the equation, and efforts targeting employee burnout need to move multiple levers simultaneously to be most effective.
Don't apologize! I think I am fortunate in that I got out of teaching before I was a burnt out stub of a human lol, so the money one is what I end up focusing on. But you're right. But also if they had paid me 150k to be a teacher I would still be doing it haha
While work-life balance is sometimes an issue for software engineers, hours vary a lot both between tech companies and within companies. Software engineers often have flexible hours and there’s also a tendency to exaggerate hours worked. There is also the “rest and vest” stereotype at Google and perhaps other places. That’s an exaggeration from a TV show, but it’s not entirely made up.
All in all, I would guess many software engineers don’t work as hard as teachers, but there are notorious exceptions. The gaming industry has a reputation for working people hard. I recently read an article about working at NVidia being very stressful. There are stories about people working long hours at startups, but this wasn’t true for the ones I worked at. (It was quite a long time ago.)
It seems like something to be wary of when looking for a new job rather than a reason to avoid the whole industry.
I think the point is less that software engineers work harder than teachers (we absolutely do not) and more that burnout cannot be solved simply by increasing pay, because software engineers make far more than teachers and many still frequently suffer from burnout.
Pay isn't the solution, it's addressing something else that's been wrong for a long time. It's great that pay is raised, but today's just getting teachers to a baseline they should have been at long ago.
Is work life balance notably worse for teachers than in any other field? My understanding based on my location is that it is better. They have more holidays, the summer off, etc. I understand that there is some out of school planning that goes on, grading homework, filling out paperwork, I've even had an elementary school teacher for my daughter he was gracious enough to respond to messages on a weekend when our daughter told us she was being bullied, but this was in no way a requirement of the job or an expectation on our part. We were extremely grateful for it and we made sure to shower her with thanks for it. The teachers I have known in my personal life have specifically told me that after the first few years, their lesson plans are pretty well set and they don't have much work during their downtime.
Could your sister have un-diagnosed depression, anxiety, or ADHD (speaking from personal experience here)?
I think you are underestimating the amount of time that goes into teaching outside the classroom, even though you acknowledge the existence of it. Keep in mind that they need to do all that in addition to what amounts to at least 40 hours a week in school -- and it can be pretty exhausting work, at that! Doing all the out-of-school preparation essentially on top of a full-time job makes it a pretty huge time sink if nothing else, even if they can get some of it done during school hours, which isn't the case for everyone. That on top of having to manage parents' and administrators' expectations can lead to a very stressful job. Poor pay, of course, exacerbates this issue, since many teachers need to find other part-time work during their vacation.
When I did it I worked a 40-hour week and left it all there when I went home; the difference from most jobs is that teaching attracts (maybe completely depends on?) people who are willing to sacrifice to "make a difference", and they are unofficially compensated in like manner, so they don't feel like they have to push for more money. It's a "service," a "calling," etc—I don't think I was a worse teacher for being there less, in fact I was way less stressed so I enjoyed it more.
That makes a lot of sense! I'd wager you're right that at current pay rates and work expectations, American schools rely on those people willing to sacrifice themselves for the work.
There's a tendency to both over-exaggerate and under-exaggerate how hard teachers work. I know/knew some at both sides of the spectrum. Responding to a different comment of yours from this post, but as a software engineer, if you asked me at my last job if I worked as hard as the average teacher at my last job, I would have said no. But if you asked me now..
Yeah, I'm sure there's plenty of variation in both career paths. I just think it's worth pushing back on the idea that teachers have better world-life balance than other fields, just because they have summers off, because that seems like a common misconception. I've never worked as a teacher (I've considered it, but the money and work-life balance put me off) so I don't have any firsthand experience on that side of things.
For sure, people should not think that teachers get a "free" vacation. They paid for that vacation with sweat in ways that most are not. But aggregated across a year, others are also putting in a lot of sweat and I think it just irks them when they hear that their work is easier than a teacher's. Sometimes it is! But when it's not, it sure sucks to hear it.
I also started pushing back on the notion that software engineering is easy, similar to the push back against teaching being easy.. Those "Day in the life of a software engineer" videos were fun when they first started, but it really warped kids' conception of what we do and now our job market is in a really bad place in 2024. Yeah, the perks are great, the flexibility is almost unparalleled, and the compensation is bonkers for the relative ease of getting into the field. But what people are not aware of is that you could be spending an entire day chasing a bug, with no guarantee that you'll ever find it. And then wake up and do it again because you have a deliverable and you have to find it. Or pinged at 6am on a Sunday because you're on-call. Or you ship a feature that breaks and millions of people are mad and your boss is breathing down your neck because their boss is breathing down theirs. And at any point, you could be fired because this is not a unionized career (teachers are notoriously hard to fire where I am, at a certain point). Once you're out there looking for a job, you could experience interview processes that range in length from 30 minutes to 8 hours and still get ghosted. Oh, after studying algorithms for a month.
Would I say teaching is harder than software engineering? Maybe, but not definitively. Software engineering has high highs and low lows, but teaching has a kind of reliability as a career that people like and that's a tradeoff.
Definitely! Speaking as a teacher, I don't think job difficulty should ever be looked at hierarchically -- it just encourages needless competition. Teaching and software development are both difficult jobs in very different ways. Plus, even within just one field there's immense variation between positions and placements. Anyone in an "easy" job is just one bad boss or team member away from a difficult one, after all.
Many (most?) jobs are difficult, and I think it's worth meeting that with compassion rather than comparison.
Also worth mentioning: We are NOT PAID during the summer! I literally do not collect a paycheck; I have to work a part-time, second job, and I have a master's degree. It is not in any sense of the word a vacation for me.
Yeah, I work in software development so I'm partially just more familiar with the highs and lows of it I think. Plus, I live in a country with better employment protections than the US which helps some.
I can tell you that post-teaching, it is a huge relief to be able to pick when I want time off, instead of being assigned 6-8 weeks that I don't get paid for lol. Part of the reason paying teachers less has always been justified is "Well you're working 190 days instead of 230-250," which is true, but teachers also don't have the option to work those six weeks if they want, no overtime/differentials, etc. Those summers were great, literally the only reason people keep doing it lol, and I did summer school/night classes any chance I got, but now I'm like wow, I could have just worked all year and made normal money like everybody else.
Thank you for being kind!
That is, unfortunately, quite rare for us teachers. The ratio of kind to hostile emails we get is... not favorable. I also brought it up here, but it's quite common for parents to enter a retaliatory mode when we communicate with them. For example, your contact with the teacher was very positive, but it's quite possible that your daughter's teacher attempted to contact the bullies' parents about their behavior only to be met with hostility.
If that were the case, what was a positive experience for you very likely could have been a net negative experience for the teacher.
This also goes into an often overlooked issue of teaching: the emotional labor of navigating all of those things. Seeing a kid you care about get bullied carries a personal weight. That's possibly why the teacher took time out of his weekend to communicate with you in the first place: he genuinely cared.
Whenever someone genuinely cares though, the full spectrum of "life" stuff that happens to the kids in front of you hits pretty hard. A student loses a parent. Another is being abused by a family member. Another is homeless. Another is getting cyberbullied. These are intangible weights that a lot of other domains don't have to deal with on a regular basis. Witnessing others' suffering is tough -- witnessing childrens' suffering is especially difficult.
I've been in education long enough that I've got a pretty thick skin for it, but that just means I'm better able to handle my own response -- not that it really hits me any less.
I mention this not to guilt trip you or anything -- instead I think it's something that a lot of people don't factor in to their perception of what teachers do. People tend to start and stop at a sort of "chalk and talk" perception of teachers based mostly on the instruction that we do, rather than as professionals that interface with hundreds of children, and, by proxy, all of the concomitant stresses and traumas within those populations.
Now, as for specifically how our work-life balance compares to other fields, it's hard to say. I think a lot of people, across various disciplines, are having a difficult time with work right now. It's important for me to spotlight teachers because that's what I know and I want people to be aware of alarming trends in what I consider to be a vital national institution, but I don't like that focusing on just us often carries an implication that everybody else is doing better. I don't think that's true, and I think other fields would benefit from the same spotlight that is often given to teachers.
The article does bring up an interesting data point though:
It's not a perfect measure of work-life balance, but it's a decent one. The fact that it's so discrepant is probably a valuable indicator, but I don't want to put too much weight or read too far into a single data point.
Yeah, good question. I think it is notable worse, but a lot of that is gut feeling since I haven't worked as a formal teacher professionally. I think the ratio of teachers that I've heard advise kids not to become teachers gives me reason to think that the reward:stress ratio is off more so than most other fields. However, when I say I didn't work as a formal teacher professionally, I did teach a class for a year part-time (Saturdays) at a non-profit and it was incredibly tiring. This was during Covid lockdowns, so it happened online, but by the end of the day I was just exhausted from having to talk non-stop and repeating the same words over and over. It's draining in a way I'm not used to.
As for the depression/anxiety/ADHD part, maybe? I think I have anxiety and ADHD to some extent, so I wouldn't be surprised if she had it too. We didn't grow up in a household that built good habits, so we transitioned into routines later in life than I think is healthy for a young adult. It's possible that moving from a lifestyle like that to one as scheduled as a teacher's day was a big transition for her. Just my theory, but nothing I've confirmed with her. It played out like that in my career.
I am not a teacher, but did consider it briefly because my high school was so amazing. And I quickly came to realize it's because my school was so exceptional and amazing that it makes the prospect of teaching at other schools... Less than pleasant, to put it lightly. It did, however, give me a strong passion for education and make me pay a lot of attention to schools.
I think part of the burnout is politics. There's the standard workplace politics going on, with an extra layer in the form of dealing with parents who can have a lot of sway due to being wealthy or influential. Then there are literal politics seeping into the classroom, in the form of new regulations and policies, funding and budget cuts, and other restrictions. Vital support programs are getting cut, classes are growing while the school buildings don't, there's pressure to pass kids no matter what so they can meet quotas, etc.
This stuff has been building for a long time, but I feel it's gotten worse in the past few years. There's just a growing sense of entitlement in America. People are just far more comfortable being openly nasty, whether that boils down to bigotry or yelling at any person who works any sort of job for not catering to their whims exactly as they want. Retail workers get to deal with that plenty, but teachers are the other group most heavily subjected to it.
Schools, especially public schools, are one of the few places where you can't really control who's there. Theoretically people can quit jobs if they have hostile coworkers or get transferred to another team, or managers can fire bad workers, but teachers just don't have that option. You can't really fire a student, and there are less and less options for dealing with students who are causing trouble. I was going to qualify that statement with "without actually breaking rules or harming people," but even that isn't enough to get students removed from classes sometimes. Just look at that teacher in Virginia who got shot by a 6-year-old, after she and others complained to the school multiple times.
Speaking as an outsider, it's just increasingly bad. School administrations seem to be offering less and less support to the teachers in dealing with issues, and catering more to parents or otherwise trying to avoid any public image issues. I've heard of many veteran teachers resigning in the past few years because the satisfaction of doing good just no longer outweighs the stress of dealing with increasingly unreasonable people (both parents and students) and no support.
It just saddens me because everyone suffers for it. Teachers, students, and the rest of society that's stuck dealing with those students are going to suffer in the long run.
This is why I'm not sure I'm going back. I left this summer and haven't found something new yet, but the longer I'm out of the classroom, the less I miss it. It was just non-stop policing of behavior in my middle school classes. I want to teach, to dig in and learn with my students, but that's just not what you do as a teacher, at least with middle schoolers. In fairness, I never wanted to teach middle school in the first place but my particular field (band) and region don't offer a lot of options that don't involve middle school. And high school band is its own can of worms and stress. I miss working with the students who were there to learn but it felt like that was maybe 15% of them at most. I know I could be a really good teacher, but I just have to question whether it's right for me at this point.
It's pay. Teaching has gotten much harder but they could easily make that up to me by paying me more.
Benefits are great, I absolutely love my job, but it's exhausting beyond belief and I think I deserve to be comfortably middle class considering I have a master's degree and work very hard doing (what I think is) an important job.
It’s more than just pay.
No one wants to work some hellishly micromanaged job where constant politics prevent you from actually doing what you’re supposed to do.
The amount of bullshit ive seen from parents, admin, and students that wouldn’t have flown even 15 years ago is insane.
We’ve made teaching about almost everything but teaching and in trying to keep everyone happy or chase perfection we’re failing the teachers and the students
It sounds like you've been teaching a bit longer than I have. Perhaps I never knew any different so have nothing much worse to compare it to. It's worse than pre-pandemic but not significantly in my opinion.
I’m combining my time in school with years of subbing and friends who still teach, but the amount of objectively atrocious or even violent behavior that goes unhandled is absurd
I don't think anyone is trying to collectively shoot teachers in the foot, and Eji isn't wrong that it's worse now, but I believe you are not wrong about pay—sure they could fix all the other problems if pushed, but I have said a ton of times that if you paid teachers an amount of money that some people would laugh at/spit their coffee out when they heard it, all the other problems would go away. If a Backend Dev IV doesn't like the work environment at NVIDIA/Cisco/etc, they can just go somewhere else, and probably get a bump, and never once feel like they are failing a generation of children or letting anyone down, etc. It's just not fair dude.
Definitely feeling the micromanagement here. This year, admin decreed that everyone should match late work and grading policies across their departments, but the career skills department is grouped by how varied we are, not how similar we are. School started today and I had to tell my students to expect a syllabus some time next week as the arguing continues.
Worse than that, there's no time to prepare. There were four work days, two eaten by training (I did not need valuable workday time swallowed up by a group read of "PLC+: The Plus Is You"), one by a freshman event, and one by the arguing above. Smeared across those four days were maybe 3 hours to prepare for my classes, one of which is new to me with very little existing content to steal. With the only info available being mismatched and conflicting, I was only barely able to figure out what this class is supposed to look like on the semester-scale before today. I still have nothing as far as lessons. I hope I can hammer something out in the next couple of hours before I turn in for the night.
Has something with funding changed? I would expect schools could generally tell the crazier parents to fuck off and just take their property taxes regardless of whether their children are enrolled.
So first off, location wise I can only speak for the US, and specifically Clark County Nevada, which is one of the worst out there for all sorts of reasons.
That said there are the following issues at play:
It is EXTREMELY hard to get a student expelled. While I think this should be the case, I have watched multiple students cross major lines and just get shuffled around. Hell the worst case was a student threatened to kill a teacher, then a month later brought bullets to school. The teacher had to complain to admin to get them removed from their class, so they moved them down the hall. It's fucking insane.
Sorta 1a, but I believe some of this is due to the laws relating to education, and a total lack of remedial schools for difficult students. For every extreme like I just mentioned, there's lots of children who, unfortunately, are emboldened by their parents to just be hellishly disruptive. They will gladly say and do anything, and refuse to do anything. I have watched a student just flat out refuse to go to the dean after vandalizing a room, and the school refused to actually make him go in any way shape or form.
I think some of this is related to the simple fact that there's a lot of "perfect environment" studies out there for education. Things that say "oh well the best way to handle a disruptive student is to....." which I think are very likely correct. They are however usually handled in environments that are much more controlled and with many more resources. I routinely taught classes in middle and high school ranging from 30-60 students. It's nearly impossible to help ANYONE with that size, let alone kids who are willingly obstructive, but "the literature says...."
There's also the business politics of teaching. Several of our schools threw out their books as part of a deal to do some springboard teaching or other nonsense program that cost millions of dollars. You were only supposed to teach from their one book, and could not deviate. So now all the very interesting and clever lesson plans that good teachers have come up with over the years are thrown out so we can enjoy the irony of teaching The Giver in a way that's probably the first step on making that dystopia a reality. Low and behold, it didn't deliver, but oops you threw out all your books as part of the deal, so now they hunt for some other plan, and on and on and on.
Metrics are hell. This doesn't just affect teaching, but it does affect teaching A TON. It is extremely fucked the way that they've badly applied stats, with little control, to schooling and using that to evaluate success. They'll redo the lines on what school gets what students and suddenly they have a much rougher student body, and oops that must mean all your teachers suck, because your students used to get A's and now they get C's, while ignoring that the new student body has a literal F average.
Oh related to that, you can't fail anyone. Turning in a blank piece of paper with your name on it got you an automatic 50-60% depending on the year/school. Failing students is the only metric anyone seems to care about, and so they will bend over backwards to make sure it doesn't happen. I've met high schoolers who can barely read, and it's not for any developmental reason. Just literally no one has bothered to make them and passed them on despite clearly failing grades. Hell half the reason those kinds of students can read at all is because of texting being important to them.
Finally, in attempting to make sure no one ever has a bad teacher, we've basically bullied out all the good ones. I taught at the highschool I went to when I was first subbing. Within 4-5 years after I had graduated every single teacher who I would consider a major influence on who I am today, was gone. All of them because of stupid rules or regulations that got in the way of them teaching, or decided that they must be a bad teacher. Several stopped teaching AP first because the rules to teach AP kept changing and they got tired of proving they could. I can remember maybe a handful of bad teachers in my life, but I remember a ton of good ones, and yet more and more the political goal of teaching policy from admin has been "better standardize the shit out of everything so that no one can ever complain", and I believe it's hellishly detrimental to the entire organization. The sort of people who are sticking around are either EXTREMELY passionate, have no better option, or are some of the worst people imaginable (thinking specifically of one disgustingly vile vice principal who absolutely ruined years of teaching at one school)
I can co-sign on pretty much all of these.
I'll also extend point 7. Teacher quality often gets treated as if its something innate rather than influenced by its environment. I think there is an innate component, but I think its importance is often overstated.
If a teacher's environment is awful, they will be a worse teacher than they would be in a functional one. If it continues to suck for a really long time (say, over the course of their career), the attrition can be especially damaging.
In the first school I worked at, my administration was proud one year of poaching a local Teacher of the Year. They convinced her to move schools and come work with us, where she would certainly have an amazing impact. She was the superstar that was going to make our dysfunctional school so much better and brighter!
Did that happen? No. Our dysfunctional school crushed her. She was a Teacher of the Year in her previous setting, but she used to come cry in my classroom on our prep periods in her new setting. She became a broken, beaten down shell of her professional self within a single year (not coincidentally, that was also the year I left that school).
I personally feel like I was a better teacher years ago than I am now. Despite having been in mostly the same environment for the last stretch of my career (though arguably COVID was a pretty big environment change in and of itself), the attrition is admittedly getting to me. I'm older and getting much more worn down. When you're newer and younger you have increased energy and tolerance for bullshit, but it wanes the longer you go on.
Now, there are some teachers who are genuinely awful and shouldn't be in the profession at all. This is not a defense of them in the slightest. I actually consider them just another environmental issue that wears down good teachers.
If we ignore them as outliers for the moment and instead look at the bulk of the teaching population, I'd wager the situation is less "all the good teachers are gone" and more "all the good teachers are having the good wrung out of them."
Educational politics has gotten worse. Students struggle, poor grades reflects badly on the school, admins try to placate legislatures/school boards/parents by “encouraging” higher pass rates, teachers lose authority to control/teach students, repeat.
And for a while, NCLB did tie funding to standardized test performance.