Post-Lockdowns, There’s A Teacher Burnout Crisis In U.S. Schools

According to a recent report by Aaron Gifford in The Epoch Times, teacher burnout is posing a huge challenge for school districts across the country, resulting in shortages.

Of course, four years ago, schools were shut down, forcing millions of students to “learn” remotely. Not only did this cause severe learning loss, but it also turned many students into screen junkies barely capable of functioning in the physical world.

However, many children are overcoming these learning losses. In my experience as a high school English teacher, this is probably the first year my incoming classes have mostly returned to the pre-lockdown norm, scoring higher on diagnostics and successfully complying with my rule of keeping their phones out of sight.

Beyond lockdowns, the key factors that account for today’s dysfunction all precede Covid by several years. According to Gifford’s report, teachers complained about low salaries and student misbehavior. Consequently, they are taking on far more stress for far less pay.

Teachers’ perennial complaint about money is warranted today. Even if teachers were never paid too well, they usually could afford to own a home and support a family. But with living expenses skyrocketing all over the country, simply making enough to live somewhat near the school can be impossible without taking on another job or having a spouse who also works.

Additionally, districts continue to mismanage their budgets, cutting the core personnel who teach children while maintaining bloated bureaucratic overhead, worthless auxiliary departments, and pointless training programs. It has been especially bad here in Texas, where many school districts planned on receiving more money from the state this year, but never did because Democrats and RINOs shot down a bill increasing public school spending due to its school choice provisions. This led to staff cuts and salary freezes, which in turn has swollen class sizes and piled on extra duties for teachers.

According to staffing data collected by the nonprofit EdChoice, non-teaching staff and their salaries have grown far faster than both teacher pay and student population growth. So while teachers are buried with assignments to grade and can hardly move in their classrooms because it’s so crowded with students, their assistant superintendent receives generous bonuses and commands a small army of program directors and administrative assistants tasked with making PowerPoint presentations and attending meetings.

Earlier EdChoice research found that if non-teaching staff hiring had increased only at the same rate as student enrollment, teachers could have all gotten a $11,000 raise. School districts are increasing spending on bureaucracy that frustrates teachers and reduces their pay.

Of course, it doesn’t help that teachers’ autonomy and authority have steadily diminished for decades. No longer are teachers trusted to use their judgment in teaching and managing their classes. Instead, they are given elaborate scripts to follow and required to fill out endless paperwork when making plans, inputting grades, and aligning assignments with unreadable curriculum documents.

Then there’s the endless paperwork for the growing number of students with various learning disabilities or who can’t speak English. Much of a teacher’s “planning time” is spent filling out forms for these students and attending their committee meetings throughout the year.

This means what a teacher assigns often doesn’t fit the needs of the class, is rarely graded, and primarily intended to serve as busy work. If teachers decide to go rogue by grading more work or creating their own materials, they will face punishment in the form of even more meetings and paperwork. Understandably, most teachers do everything they can to pass their students and minimize the fuss.

As for student discipline, the general policy is to deal with the bad students no matter how disruptive or dangerous they might be. Teachers can try to send these students to the principal, but the principal often sends them right back to the class without any punishment. Worse still, many principals will grill the teachers of these students on their classroom management and may even call for a meeting with the student to “collaborate on a solution” to their misbehavior — as prescribed by the restorative justice model that has become popular on K-12 campuses.

Since punishing bad students inevitably invites more hassle from administrators and parents, teachers learn to let it slide and lower their expectations. Needless to say, this is just as demoralizing as the lousy pay, if not more so.

At the root of these policies that immiserate teachers and lower the quality of education is a deep and abiding belief in “equity” and government hierarchy. In the eyes of (mostly progressive) educational leaders, all teachers of varying quality and importance are equal, and administrators and district bureaucrats are more essential than the teachers they are supposed to support. Altogether, it’s a system immune to reform.

As such, any disparity in performance or behavior between students is seen as the fault of the system, so the system is rigged in favor of producing the same outcomes across the board. In practice, this means the slacker will end up in the same place as the hard worker, and the terror who stabs his teacher with a pencil has just as much right to be in the class as his non-homicidal classmates. True, punishing some and rewarding others is perfectly fair in a meritocracy, but it’s perfectly unfair in a system promising equal outcomes.

All this is precisely why charter schools exist and school choice must be expanded. In a competitive system where schools are free to compete for students, the teachers and students who produce are rewarded and the ones who hold back everyone else are corrected or cast off. And administrators rightly occupy a subordinate role of taking care of all the paperwork and keeping records — and are paid accordingly.

It just so happens that school choice is on the ballot this coming election, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats opposing it. If it’s not enough to do right by students and offer a better system capable of cultivating excellence, then voters should think of the poor teachers who want to work in schools where they aren’t reprimanded for doing their job and duly compensated for doing it well.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman , a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written for essays for The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X.