COVID-19 devastated teacher morale − and it hasn’t recovered

Teachers often work well in excess of 40 hours per week. 10’000 Hours/DigitalVision via Getty Images by Lesley Lavery, Macalester College and Steve Friess, University of Michigan Kansas faces the worst teacher shortfall in its history. The 4,000 teaching vacancies Florida faces as the new school year approaches “is more than the population of teachers in 19 of Florida’s smallest counties combined,” the state’s teachers union says. In Vermont, there are days when whole grades of students are sent home because there’s no teacher or sub available. The teaching profession faces a morale – and staffing – crisis. A National Education Association survey of members found that, as of late 2022, a staggering 55% of educators were thinking of calling it quits. This is a legacy of COVID-19. Teachers were already unhappy before the pandemic, but the public’s reaction to the education their kids got during that crisis continues to haunt the profession. A Brown University study found teachers’ job satisfaction in 2022 hovered near its lowest level since the 1970s. As a researcher focused on education policy, along with my colleague Sara Dahill-Brown, we spent the pandemic researching how teachers felt as events unfolded. Between 2020 and 2022, we...