More than one-third of teachers who aren’t near retirement say they will probably or definitely quit their jobs in the next three years, a survey published this week by their union found.
The teacher’s main complaint? They’re extremely burned out.
Teachers overwhelmingly said that they entered the profession because they wanted to help students and do something positive with their lives. But when a survey by the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools and the California Teachers Association gave them a variety of positive and negative terms to describe their work, 68% settled on the most popular choice: “exhausting.”
The scores of educators eyeing the door comes during a larger teacher shortage that dates back to the deep cuts made to public services during the Great Recession, according to the Learning Policy Institute.
More recently, the stress of teaching during COVID-19 led many teachers to look for new careers. Sacramento County schools had about 250 vacancies weeks into the current school year. Over the course of the pandemic, teacher retirements climbed. Increasingly, schools have relied on underprepared teachers, according to the California Department of Education.
The survey was conducted by Hart Research Associates over the summer on behalf of UCLA and CTA, the state teachers’ union. No one surveyed was older than 62, so as not to skew the results toward people closer to retirement age.
Teachers told the surveyors they struggled to find affordable housing; to save money for their long-term goals; and to pay for basic necessities. Housing emerged as the worst category, with 80% of respondents saying they found it difficult to find a place to live near their workplace.
Additionally, the surveyors interviewed 26 teachers who had recently left the profession. Many of them identified higher pay as something that could have enticed them to stay.
“The work is hell,” one former teacher said, “but there is a financial tipping point that helps deal with the organizational trauma.”
On average, California teachers made $85,856 in the 2020-21 school year, but the 1.6% rise in average wages from the previous school year did not keep pace with the 5% rise in inflation.
Most school districts in Sacramento County paid teachers between $71,000 and $84,500 on average in the 2020-21 school year, with River Delta Joint Unified School District as the outlier, paying an average of $59,963.
The survey showed teachers of color found themselves worse off than their white colleagues. White teachers had a rosier outlook on diversity and inclusion than Black teachers: Only 28% of Black teachers said they “strongly agreed” that their schools were supportive of different cultures, while 46% of white teachers strongly agreed with that statement — an 18 percentage point difference. Less than a quarter of American Indian/Alaska Native teachers strongly agreed with that statement.
Meanwhile, 60% of Black teachers said that racial dynamics made them feel uncomfortable expressing themselves at work sometimes, and 62% said they experience racial discrimination at work.
