Teacher Burnout

I chose my topic because I, like my classmates, am entering the education profession. On many social media applications, teachers and ex-teachers are bringing light to the conditions in which they work and why they are no longer staying in the teaching profession. I have second-hand experience with teachers' conditions, working in a school, and having family members in the profession. My mother is a teacher, and I have been surrounded by my mother’s friends my whole life. I now work at a high school, assisting secondary English teachers in the classrooms. You would not believe the number of times a teacher has tried to stop me from being a teacher because they have been taken advantage of and disregarded by everyone and do not wish me to take the same path and feel miserable later on in life.

I am driven here by my own observations. I see the teachers on social media platforms documenting the daily abuse they face from students, parents, and their districts. I know the lack of support from their admin. I see it in my own life when I see the teachers I work with struggling to get any backup from admin for their classrooms or persisting problems in the school. A teacher shortage does not seem to improve despite all the teachers entering the field. Teacher burnout chews them up and spits them out. I only know my experiences and what I have seen. I want to research the reasons behind these hardships and how we can solve them so that my peers and I will be successful in our endeavors heading into the credential program.

I set out by ignoring all the advice (not all) on how to do research and just used the databases I knew how to use to research because I knew there were plenty of resources and research on what I wanted to know about. Alternatively, at least, I had to assume there was because every teacher I talk to has an opinion on how the public education system is going and what should be done about it. No one on the state level is paying attention, but I thought someone must have. Politicians love to ignore research anyway. I first researched teacher burnout, but the word “attrition” kept popping up as a keyword or as parts of the title while researching, so I changed my search words to “teacher” and “attrition,” and more studies popped up.

I started to document when my colleagues in teaching would comment on teacher burnout or similar topics on our lunch breaks. We gather in one teacher’s classroom and discuss what goes on in the school. Recently, one of the teachers took a day off. I automatically assumed she was sick, especially in our post-Covid world. When she came back the next day, I asked why she was out, and the response I was given was, “because I am exhausted, the kids will not do tier work, and there is too much time between now and Thanksgiving break.” She was correct; I am a tutor in her class every time I come to work, and her kids just refuse to do their work. She has been a teacher for over twenty years, but at the end of the day, she is an average person who is tired of bending backward to find something her students will engage with.

I once witnessed a student argue with one of my male teacher colleagues about why my colleague would not grade on his days off. The teacher explained that while the student had his homework, my colleague had over one hundred essays to grade and that e would take no longer pride himself on risking his physical and mental health to grade faster. My colleague used to grade on the weekends and into the early mornings because he wanted to be the best teacher he could be, but all this made him lose sleep and have less time to prepare his lesson plans. In front of the class, he explained that teachers are expected to do all of this extra work for a low salary because it is a female-dominated field. Of course, he did not reference research at that moment, but I felt he had a point.

The hot topics among my colleagues right now are the lack of support from the administration, the lack of pay, the lack of discipline of students, and the lack of support from parents. As I wrap this paper up, the letters to parents about class failures are going out, and I am watching half the students rapidly turn in their missing assignments. The other half accept that they will fail the class because they do not want to put the effort in. It is particularly irritating to see how apathetic and uncaring students are about their grades.

Back to the other research part, I focused on being in the last ten to twenty years to keep the research updated and accurate. However, I was frustrated to see that in my search and the chosen research articles, references are made to existing literature that has been around for decades. Why is teacher burnout or attrition still an issue if the research has been done multiple times and solutions put forth? While most of my sources are about teacher attrition, some of the references were focused on Secondary English teachers, which is the field I intend to enter.

Teacher attrition, burnout, and shortage are all terms used for the same overall problem. There is an issue with the overall public education system; the outcome is that teachers are exhausted, miserable, and leaving the profession. There is even a shortage of incoming teachers because fewer and fewer people want to do the job anymore. In a paper published in 2019, Sutcher, L., Darling-Hammond, L., & Carver-Thomas, D, explained that a teacher shortage is “used to refer to an insufficient production of new teachers, given the size of student enrollments and teacher retirements” (4) in their article “Understanding Teacher Shortages: An Analysis of Teacher Supply and Demand in the United States.” They go on to elaborate that this definition is not a good one and more factors than the above definition cause that teacher staffing problems.

Across the board, “More than 40 states report shortages in several subject matter areas, such as mathematics, science, and special education, and more than 30 report shortages in several other fields, ranging from career technical education to bilingual education” (Sutcher et al. 5). Regardless of the research, any teacher you talk to can tell you that these are the most needed subjects and is supported by the increasing teacher recruitment programs at colleges. My second job out of high school was to be an ambassador for the Teacher Preparation Institute at Mount San Antonio College. I would go into classrooms that requested me and present on the need for teachers and where we needed them. The presentation was meant to entice students into pursuing teaching for their love of kids and decent benefits. Many scholarships and grants for teachers are also required in the specific hard-to-staff fields.

What is not advertised is the teacher burnout that educators in the yield would warn you about. In the article “Teacher Attrition: Differences in Stakeholder Perceptions of Teacher Work Conditions,” the authors posit that raising salaries is insufficient to stop teacher attrition. In their review of the literature, the authors explain that some reasons for attrition are “Increased expectations of teachers, as well as decreased support and respect for the teaching profession, are other concerns that have been noted in the research literature” (Harris et al. 2). The decreased support comes from outside the teaching profession and within educational settings like schools.

Not only is the public against teachers, and the pandemic hero status not lasting too long, but the administrations with school districts do not care to hear from the teachers either. I am lucky to work in a school district where the teachers voice their opinions, but the administration does not always listen.

Molly Fischer corroborates the point with the conclusion of her study “Factors Influencing Stress, Burnout, and Retention of Secondary Teachers,” in which she sent out a survey to 412 Advanced Placement (AP) teachers. She concludes, “When even more pressure is added from administrators, stress levels increase, and burnout worsens. Unfortunately, this causes many teachers to never see beyond their fifth year in the profession” (30). In addition to the lack of support, “ the five most common causes of unhappiness were a lack of planning time (60%), too heavy a workload (51%), class sizes (50%), too low a salary (48%), and student behavior (44%)” (Hancock and Scherff 329). These issues could be solved within individual schools and school districts. Employing more teachers to take on more students on fairer pay would stave off attrition, save schools money in the long run, provide better educational experiences for the students, and maybe raise student success rates.

I found some disheartening statistics for a future educator like myself within the article “Learning from those who no longer teach: Viewing teacher attrition through a resistance lens,” in which the author, Jeremy Glazer, cites research from 2010 by Day and Gu, as well as Huberman in 1989. Glazer explains, “The highest rates of teacher attrition come within the first two years on the job, during what's termed the ‘survival period’” (Glazer 62). While attrition slows down, it does not dissipate after the first two years, and teachers continue to leave before retirement. I knew the first year was rough for most teachers, but according to this article and another, it could be anywhere from a two to five-year struggle period.

In fact, according to “Who Will Stay and Who Will Leave? Predicting Secondary English Teacher Attrition Risk” by Carl B. Hancock and Lisa Scherff, “For every 5 years of teaching experience an English teacher garnered, the likelihood of being classified a high attrition risk decreased 23%” (334). While the high attrition risk for all teachers is within the first two years, as referenced above, secondary English teachers have still considered a high attrition risk within the first five years of their careers. The article explains that teachers take a large amount of blame from the parents and the public for academic failure among their students because they are seen as a direct cause of students’ grades. If teachers could receive more support, students would benefit, and teachers would maybe be praised again.

In actuality, “ These results suggest that in addition to efforts to improve teacher pay, any comprehensive plan intended to reduce teacher attrition must primarily be concerned with improving work conditions in schools” (Harris et al. 9). Working conditions mean more than physical working conditions like safety and OSHA violations. Working conditions like class size, preparation time, and student behavior contribute to the overall classroom environment, which may affect teachers’ ability to do their jobs effectively. Support and policies from the state or administration can mitigate some of these issues. Jeremy Glazer concludes in his article, “Their dissatisfaction was not a result of market forces or a new relationship to careers, but rather was a result of policies and their implementation” (69). Politicians and local governments should take note to save some money caused by teacher attrition.

While teachers can take this research and work not to be a product of teacher burnout, “Freudenberger claims those most at risk are ‘the dedicated and the committed’ who are ‘seeking to respond to the recognized needs of people” (Fisher 30). The teachers who want so desperately to beat the odds and do their best for their students are the ones who will eventually harm their mental health or leave the profession entirely. Keeping teachers happy and safe keeps students in a safe and helpful learning environment where they can thrive without their teachers leaving halfway through a school year.

Conclusions

The cause of teacher burnout is a complicated mess of reasons, policies, and culture. There is no one solution for teacher burnout and attrition, but multiple ways to teach attrition and support our teachers and ourselves. Simply putting in the effort to reduce attrition would show teachers that the system cares for the teachers they have educating their children.

While reading the statistics on when teachers tend to leave the profession, I kept telling myself that I would make it past the first five years and the next five years after that, only to be confronted with the fact that I need to do my best for my students will eventually lead to my overexertion and burnout was something I did not want to hear. I have had multiple conversations with my colleagues about when to set boundaries between the job and my mental health. Like the colleague's conversation with a student about grading, my colleague told me after the period finished that he hoped I learned from that. Working in a school is entirely different from reading the statistics and studies that can discourage someone from going into teaching. You can experience feelings of doubt and push them away because they are just feelings. Research is a whole new ballgame.

The cause of teacher burnout and attrition is a combination of numerous environmental factors within an educational setting that cannot sustain teachers long-term. The system is made to take children and pump them full of enough knowledge to pass them to another teacher in the next grade. Forging relationships with the students through extra-curricular and in the classroom will make the classroom a much more supportive place for the students and benefit the teachers.

This research was honestly discouraging. I am still trying to figure out what I thought I would find in the research. I thought I would find ways to protect myself from the burnout and attrition factors and last longer than other teachers or that I would be able to make it better on my own. Armed with this knowledge, I can be aware and try not to fall into the same holes as other teachers, but the factors are inherently systemic. I could be an advocate or a union leader, but who knows if that will make me feel worse faster? I have this great habit of wanting to help so many people and taking on too many tasks to help the world that I forget to help myself.

I think this paper taught me that as a teacher, I have to look out for myself and do my best to do what I can for my students with my resources so that my students still have a quality education in which they know their teacher cares about them and their future without wondering about the system or who is going to help them. I wanted to be a teacher because I needed someone to believe in me, and a teacher did. That will keep me from leaving.

Works Cited

Darling-Hammond, Linda and Desiree Carver-Thomas. “Understanding Teacher Shortages: An

Analysis of Teacher Supply and Demand in the United States” Education Policy Analysis Archives, Vol. 27, no. 35, 2019. Accessed 2022.

Fisher, Molly H. “Factors Influencing Stress, Burnout, and Retention of Secondary Teachers.”

Current Issues in Education, vol. 14, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–36.

Glazer, Jeremy. Learning from Those Who No Longer Teach: Viewing Teacher Attrition through

a Resistance Lens, vol. 74, 2018, pp.62–71. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate. 2018.04 .011.

Hancock, Carl B, and Lisa Scherff. “Who Will Stay and Who Will Leave? Predicting Secondary

English Teacher Attrition Risk.” Journal of Teacher Education, vol. 61, no. 4, 2010, pp. 328–338. SagePub, Accessed 2022.

Harris, Scott P, et al. “Teacher Attrition: Differences in Stakeholder Perceptions of Teacher Work

Conditions.” Education Sciences, vol. 9, no. 4, 2019, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9040300.