Story at a glance
- Teachers are facing stressors that range from disrupted student learning, to managing student behavior to dealing with staff shortages to addressing students’ mental health.
- A myriad of solutions, including shortened work weeks, increased pay, access to mental health resources and administrative support have been proposed to combat growing teacher burnout.
- What will it take to keep teachers in their roles amid historic levels of stress?
A myriad of solutions, including shortened work weeks, increased pay, access to mental health resources and administrative support have been proposed to combat growing teacher burnout. But there are limitations to how effective each of these solutions are on their own, as polling shows burnout among educators outpaces that among the remainder of the American workforce.
Teachers are facing stressors that range from disrupted student learning, to managing student behavior to dealing with staff shortages to addressing students’ mental health. What will it take to keep teachers in their roles amid historic levels of stress?
Salary increases are an often-cited solution to the heightened level of teacher burnout. A February survey from the National Education Association (NEA) showed more than half of America’s teachers plan to leave their profession earlier than planned. Nearly all of the educators polled supported raising their pay to address burnout.
This idea was furthered earlier this week when Georgia Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams proposed raising state public school teachers’ salaries to a starting rate of $50,000 per year, part of a larger plan to increase teacher salaries by an average of $11,000.
The average starting salary for teachers nationwide in the 2020-21 school year was $41,770. That same year in Georgia, salaries began on average at $38,692.
“When our pipeline is thinning and our exodus is increasing, we are losing the fight for our children’s future,” Abrams said.
Michael Hansen, chair of governance studies at Brookings Institution, told Changing America in an email that pay raises could in fact work to mitigate some factors causing people to leave the industry.
“More money is a consistent predictor of lower attrition, so it’s likely to help avoid some of the most negative consequences of burnout—that is, compelling people to feel like they have to leave the teaching profession,” Hansen said.
Yet the pay hike would likely benefit early career teachers as they both typically sit the lowest on the pay scale and “experience the highest quit rates,” Hansen added.
“It’s less clear how these proposed increases might change other dynamics of the profession, as I don’t see many details beyond the stated goal to increase average salaries to $75K,” Hansen continued, referring to Abrams’s proposal. “So, it’s hard to say whether it, for example, helps keep older teachers in the classroom for a few more years before retiring.”
Fighting burnout might also include shortening a teacher’s work week, and several districts across the U.S. are planning to shift to four days of in-person instruction. One school superintendent in Texas recently told Changing America offering the transition to four days alongside retention bonuses led “to a dramatic increase in applications.”
Yet there are drawbacks to a shortened week, Hansen previously told Changing America, although modified scheduling offers a fair amount of flexibility for teachers
“That does attract the teacher so it’s not unreasonable to think that the four-day school week is something that could attract some teachers.”
But some educators might also experience negative impacts, especially in their home life, Hansen added. It could potentially prolong their workday as more time would be needed for adequate instruction, which could end up costing them family time.
Additional adult support in American classrooms could also alleviate stressors leading to widespread teacher burnout, Elizabeth D. Steiner, lead author of the RAND Corporation’s new State of the American Teacher survey, told Changing America.
Steiner said RAND’s nationally representative survey, which found America’s teachers experience stress at twice the rate of workers in other industries, revealed that teachers said they could benefit from more adults in the classroom.
Surveyed teachers said they could use help from behavioral interventionists, nurses, and counselors, among others, who might help kids struggling with emotional issues. They also asked for realistic expectations.
“Teachers basically were telling us if there was a way that they could have some more support, so that there could be more adults supporting students, particularly supporting students’ social emotional needs, and teachers could focus on supporting students and academic needs and focus on their instruction, that even though those aren’t strictly mental health supports, those would go a long way to alleviating some of the stress that they were experiencing,” Steiner said.
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Educators’ mental health has also been a focal point when discussing burnout, and RAND’s survey emphasized that not all teachers, or principals, knew of or how to access resources at their schools. Even when there were readily available options, barriers persisted. Some teachers and principals surveyed said they struggled to access enough counseling sessions while others said time slots cut into their family time.
Instead, some teachers sought out more informal support networks.
“Support from colleagues was particularly helpful and teachers who were in schools where there was a strong positive environment and there were strong adult relationships, spoke about how those relationships sustained them and help them cope with the stress that they were experiencing,” Steiner said.
Despite high burnout rates and worries over a potential exodus, Steiner said there’s reason to be hopeful that educators will figure out how to manage their stressful environments and stay in the profession they love.
“Even though teachers are very stressed, about two thirds of the teachers who reported experiencing frequent job-related stress said that they were coping pretty well with that job-related stress,” Steiner continued. “And so, I think it’s also important to remember that teachers, many teachers, want to be there, and many teachers that are willing to deal with the stress of their jobs to have the joy of teaching students.
“And to me, I think that is both a sign of hope and another compelling reason that educator mental health is an important topic to attend to and for districts to address in their communities,” Steiner said.
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