Dive Brief:
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Teachers surveyed in early 2024 said they worked nine more hours per week — for a total of 53 hours — and averaged $18,000 less in base pay compared to other professionals, according to a Rand Corp. survey released Tuesday.
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About twice as many teachers reported frequent job-related stress or burnout compared to other professionals, and about three times as many teachers reported difficulties in coping with that stress. Only 36% of teachers, compared to 51% of other professionals, said their base pay was adequate.
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Black teachers were more likely to report lower base pay than other teachers and significantly less likely to say that their base pay was adequate. Women teachers reported significantly higher rates of frequent job-related stress and burnout, but significantly lower base pay, than their men counterparts.
Dive Insight:
Teachers have consistently reported lower well-being than similar working professionals since 2021, according to the Rand report.
While teacher burnout, pay and turnover have been longstanding major concerns in K-12, their impact was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic when long and challenging working hours became the norm.
"State and district education leaders quickly moved to enact policies designed to recruit and retain teachers," said the Rand report. "Many of these policies raised pay but did not address working conditions, despite evidence that both are necessary to improve teacher retention."
Teacher bonuses, pay raises, limiting class sizes and other recruitment and retention initiatives became part of many school systems' game plans for spending COVID relief funding. According to a 2022 report from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, school systems nationwide were spending up to $20 billion in American Rescue Plan funds to address some of these concerns.
But district leaders continue to grapple with issues like teacher pay and turnover, especially as pandemic relief funding winds down.
In the Rand report, teachers cited managing student behavior, low salaries and administrative work outside of teaching such as paperwork and teacher evaluations as their top sources of job-related stress. Teachers who considered their current base salaries inadequate wanted about a $16,000 increase in base pay on average.
Black and Hispanic teachers were both more likely than White teachers to say they intended to leave their jobs or the profession by the end of the 2023-24 school year.
“This is RAND’s fourth consecutive year collecting data that raise concerns about high stress and low pay in the teacher workforce,” said Sy Doan, lead author of the report and a policy researcher at Rand Corp. “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 report is based on findings from nationally representative surveys of 1,479 teachers and 501 working adults between January and February 2024.
While Rand’s State of the American Teacher survey was not administered prior to the pandemic, researchers said the percentages of teachers reporting job-related stress in 2023 and 2024 are similar to results from a 2017 survey from the American Federation of Teachers.
That survey found nearly two-thirds, or 61%, of educators said work was "always" or "often stressful," which was twice the rate reported by other workers.
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