Summer means school’s out. And this year, teachers are likely just as thrilled as students—if not more so, judging by the results of the 2024 State of the American Teacher Survey, released on June 18, which finds that educators are among the most stressed, burned out, and unfairly compensated workers in society.
The survey, from the nonpartisan nonprofit Rand, found that teachers feel all three pain points at about twice the rate of comparable working adults, defined as aged 18 to 64 with a bachelor’s degree and at least a 35-hour work week. And roughly three times as many teachers reported difficulty coping with the work-related stress.
They attribute a majority of their stress to managing student behavior, administrative work outside of teaching, and low salaries—base pay is roughly $70,000 compared with $88,000 for their similar working counterparts, prompting only 36% of teachers to consider their base pay adequate, as compared with 51% of those other working adults.
That’s especially frustrating considering the many hours required, with teachers reporting working nine hours a week more than similar working adults, for an average of 53 hours of work per week.
The fourth annual Rand State of the Teacher survey is a nationally representative, annual survey of 1,479 K-12 public school teachers across the U.S., supported by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) and presented using findings from a separate 2024 American Life Panel companion survey of 500 working adults.
'Conditions, compensation, and culture wars'
Among Rand’s other findings:
- Women reported significantly higher rates of frequent job-related stress and burnout than teachers who are men, which is a consistent pattern since 2021.
- Black teachers were less likely to report experiencing job-related stress than white teachers—but were significantly more likely to say that they intend to leave their job at their schools.
- Teachers were as likely to say that they intend to leave their jobs as similar working adults.
“Teachers go into the profession because of their deep commitment to helping children learn and thrive. They, supported by their unions, have thrown themselves into the mission of helping students recover academically, socially and emotionally. They should be lionized, cherished and supported,” Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, tells Fortune.
“But this report shows, once again, that conditions, compensation and culture wars have made their lives more stressful than their peers,” she adds. “Teachers make all other professions possible. It’s well past time to stop the inadequate funding, political attacks, poor pay and substandard conditions and give them a real say. Where that happens, we’re starting to see our efforts bear fruit—as schools become places where parents want to send their kids, educators want to work and kids thrive.”
Notes Sy Doan, lead author of the report, in a press release on the survey, “Although teacher well-being seems to have stabilized at pre-pandemic levels, our data raise questions about the sustainability of the profession for Black teachers and female teachers in particular.”
The findings are similar to those of a recent Pew Teachers Survey, which also found that teachers are less satisfied with their jobs than other workers—with 33% of teachers and 51% of all U.S. workers expressing “extreme satisfaction.” It also found: 77% of teachers say their job is frequently stressful, 68% say it’s overwhelming, 70% say their school is understaffed, and 52% say they would not advise a young person starting out today to become a teacher.
This latest survey's results—particularly that student behavior, administrative work outside of teaching, and low salaries are main contributors to educator stress—certainly ring true for therapist Molly Lane. A former school social worker, she founded Teacher Talk to provide virtual therapy session specifically for teachers after often finding herself pulled into “impromptu therapy sessions for teachers in the hallways” and realizing “they didn’t have access to support, and deserved more than what I could give them in 5 minutes in between classes.”
But also topping the list of stressors for educators, Lane says, is “feeling pressure from families, from the administration, from so many different people in many different ways,” she says, “and sometimes feeling they can’t do a good job in any capacity.”
In her experience, teachers love their career and want to do a great job and be there for their students, but there are endless barriers to that. “Internally, they put a lot of pressure on themselves. And then there’s a structure and an environment that makes it challenging for them to do the work to the best of their ability.” But that lack of control, she adds, can cause a lot of anxiety and stress.
That resonates for Kate, a New York City high school teacher who feels dedicated to her mostly low-income, largely recent-immigrant students who often struggle with learning and behavioral issues. She's being referred to by her first name for privacy. "Just this year we lost two students," one to gang-related violence, she tells Fortune. Others are living in foster care or temporary housing or on parole.
"I have such anxiety about them over the weekend," she says. "And their behavior is off-the-charts bad," much of it still fallout from COVID, when many kids lost their social skills. Add all to that the baseline responsibilities—teaching, doing hall duty twice a week, grading work, and now preparing for a new bilingual program for the fall when she only speaks English, and, she says, "It's very stressful." And that's only her work life.
“One piece we forget sometimes," notes Lane, "is that teachers are also people, with their own personal lives.” And normal home-life anxieties can be compounded by the stress of the job—especially when teachers are still working, in many ways, in the long shadow of the pandemic.
“Those challenges helped us recognize the importance of teaching, and many thought that once things got back to normal, it would feel better,” says Lane. Instead, what it revealed about teaching was that “at its baseline, it’s very stressful.”
