Conditions in Schools Aren't Working

If we want to sustain public education as we know it, we have to do more than address teacher pay. Working conditions in schools need to change, too.

Unless you’re scheming to privatize public education or deprofessionalize teaching, here’s some unsettling news: teacher job satisfaction in the US plummeted to an all-time low in 2022:

The Merrimack College Teacher Survey, which picks up where MetLife’s Survey of the American Teacher left off, found that only 12% of teachers in 2022 report they are “very satisfied” with their jobs, while 43% report they are “somewhat” or “very dissatisfied.” Anecdotally, my own teaching career has spanned the steepest dive-drop segment of the roller coaster featured in the chart above. I entered the profession in 2010—the last year in which a majority of teachers reported being very satisfied with their work—and saw a steady disillusionment set in among my colleagues (and myself) as successive waves of budget cuts and policy reforms pushed us to labor more intensively without accompanying increases in compensation.

The survey also dug into several potential causes of the precipitous decline in teacher job satisfaction. Only 25% of respondents believe their salaries are fair for the work they do, and 46% report they feel respected as professionals by the general public (down from 77% in 2011). The intensification of perennial teacher woes of low pay and lack of respect now threatens the future of the profession, with 55% of current teachers planning to leave sooner than they had originally planned, and teacher preparation programs reporting unprecedented drops in enrollment.

Policymakers have been quick to focus on increasing salaries to recruit and retain teachers, and several states have already acted to do just that. While pay raises for teachers are welcome (and long overdue — are you listening, Texas?), they are unlikely to, by themselves, restore teachers’ job satisfaction or maintain a stable workforce.

That’s because over the last decade or so, teachers’ working conditions—how they are expected to perform their jobs, when (and for how long), and in what kinds of environments and work cultures—have deteriorated. The Merrimack survey confirms this decline: when asked which issues in education deserved more media attention, teachers selected working conditions and climate in schools (85%) more frequently than any other issue, including school funding, student mental health, and student academic success:

If we want to restore dignity to the teaching profession and keep our schools staffed, we need to improve teachers’ working conditions—the time and space constraints that organize their labor.

First, teachers need time to be able to do their jobs effectively, which means they need more control over their schedules and fewer non-teaching duties. The Merrimack survey found that teachers are reporting increases in working hours, driven primarily by more time spent performing peripheral work that includes administrative and documentation work, non-instructional monitoring and supervision of students, and (often irrelevant or unhelpful) professional development.

According to the survey, 25 of teachers’ 54 weekly working hours are typically spent actually teaching students—which means the rest of their working time is spent performing duties other than instruction. (Looking at my own work schedule, I typically instruct students in my classroom for 28 hours each week, and spend about 15-25 hours doing everything else.)

This figure is especially concerning given that K-12 teachers in the U.S. already spend significantly more time engaged in classroom instruction than their international counterparts do:

In other words, U.S. teachers who already spend more time in the classroom than the majority of teachers in the OECD nations are now also spending more time performing administrative tasks, without a proportional reduction in instructional time. Meanwhile, teachers’ time to prepare for instruction is being squeezed. More than any other activity, teachers in the Merrimack survey wish they had more time to plan lessons, perhaps because their planning time increasingly being reduced to review of student assessment data, a practice researchers say has virtually no effect on student performance.

Second, teachers need to work in a space that dignifies their labor and promotes their health and wellness. More than half of the nation’s public school facilities currently report the need to replace or update essential building infrastructure (like HVAC, plumbing, and insulation), and school capital spending has been drastically reduced in most parts of the country even as student enrollment has increased:

This decade-long disinvestment in educational infrastructure has produced physical conditions that are actively harmful to teachers and students: the EPA currently estimates that 46% of US public schools have poor indoor environmental quality. Perhaps most shamefully, a staggering number of the nation’s schools are still contaminated with toxic mold and asbestos in the walls and lead in the pipes. Even more shameful is the disporortionate prevalence of infrastructural deficiencies and environmental pollutants in schools that serve the most marginalized students:

So, yes, please pay teachers more! But also, give them the time they need to teach and plan lessons, and reduce the growing demands for them to perform “other duties as assigned.” Pass a Green New Deal for Public Schools that would retrofit school buildings and remove toxic environmental pollutants so we have the space to perform our jobs with dignity. And while we’re at it, can we stop dangling “Jeans Days” as the solution to all our teacher morale problems?