Stress Was the Leading Reason Teachers Quit Before Pandemic, and COVID-19 Has Made Matters Worse
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Stress Topped the Reasons Why Public School Teachers Quit, Even Before COVID-19 | Web version
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Congressional alert
February 22, 2021
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Brian Snyder/Reuters
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It is no surprise that teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic has added pressure to what was already a high-stress profession. A new RAND survey of nearly 1,000 former public school teachers reveals how important stress has been—even more so than pay—to teachers’ decisions to leave the profession.
In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, about 8 percent of public school teachers were leaving the profession annually, either via retirement or attrition. Extremely high rates of teacher burnout and low levels of morale during the 2020–2021 school year portend elevated teacher attrition by the end of it. As of October 2020, about one-quarter of respondents in a nationally representative sample of teachers said they were likely to leave the teaching profession before the end of 2020–2021 school year, a majority of whom said that they were not likely to leave the profession before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a new report, RAND researchers explore what is and is not normal about teacher attrition during this highly abnormal pandemic era.
Key findings include:
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- Almost half of the public school teachers who voluntarily stopped teaching in public schools after March 2020 and before their scheduled retirement left because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- At least for some teachers, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have exacerbated what were high stress levels pre-pandemic by forcing teachers to, among other things, work more hours and navigate an unfamiliar remote environment, often with frequent technical problems.
- Many early leavers could be lured back to public school teaching. Over half of the teachers who voluntarily left the profession early primarily because of the pandemic indicated that they would be somewhat or definitely willing to return to public school teaching once most staff and students are vaccinated. Slightly fewer of those would return if there was only regular testing of staff and students for COVID-19.
- Three out of four former teachers said that work was “often” or “always” stressful in the most recent year in which they taught in a public school—regardless of when they left the profession. This was true among both teachers who left the profession before the pandemic began and among those who left after March 2020.
- Stress was the most common reason for leaving public school teaching early—almost twice as common as insufficient pay. This is corroborated by the fact that a majority of early leavers went on to take jobs with either less or around equal pay, and three in ten went on to work at a job with no health insurance or retirement benefits.
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- While waiting for COVID-19 vaccines to roll out, schools should partner with a third party to start regularly testing students and staff as a means to help keep schools open. The federal government should fund COVID-19 testing systems in schools (via qualified third parties) and also mandate that insurers cover the costs of both symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 testing. Schools that have been testing students this school year consistently say the chief benefits are reducing anxiety, establishing whether rates of positivity in the school population are low, and helping to contain spread via asymptomatic cases.
- Involve teachers in developing districts’ responses to reducing teacher stress. COVID-19 could open a policy window through which to reconsider the job responsibilities of the typical public school teacher.
- Districts and state departments of education should consider ways to increase flexibility in teachers’ schedules during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the long term. Although only a minority of public school teachers might prefer remote schooling, it could still be attractive to a subset of teachers who wish for more flexibility in their schedule.
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RAND Congressional Resources Staff
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