Almost everyone has had that one teacher who has impacted them in one way or another. When asked who has had the greatest impact on me, without hesitation I can list off teachers throughout my education who have encouraged and inspired me to become a more thoughtful, well-rounded individual. However, as time progresses, future students may not be able to do the same.

K-12 teachers throughout the nation have been leaving the profession at higher rates than ever before, with 51,000 teachers resigning in August of 2023 alone. With more and more teachers migrating to other career paths, replacements have been unusually slow to trickle in. In an attempt to buffer this devastating impact, 876 school districts have switched to the four-day school week, simply because there aren’t enough teachers. Why is this happening? The problem behind the teacher crisis stems from a slew of reasons. It’s an endless cycle of a lack of assistance from administration, low pay, hours of overtime without so much as a cent in compensation, education gaps left by COVID-19, and many more, all of which have led to an epidemic of teacher burnout all over the nation.

Teachers are struggling immensely, and instead of dismissing their issues, we need to listen to their grievances before the education crisis completely collapses the future of the United States and fails future generations more than it already has.

Many tend to point their fingers at low pay when discussing why teachers are leaving and not looking back. They aren’t necessarily wrong, but they aren’t entirely correct either. Teachers must be well-educated before even thinking about entering the field. Aside from obtaining a high school diploma, most teachers are also required to earn a bachelor’s degree in education, which isn’t cheap. The average cost for one year of college in 2023, including books, supplies, and daily living expenses, is $36,436. Following university, future educators are then expected to spend at least one year in a full-time, often unpaid internship, after which they have to obtain a teaching license before they can officially start working in a school. On top of all the debt that accumulates from preparing for the job, teachers in the U.S. make an average of $68,469, making it difficult to pay back student loans while simultaneously trying to make ends meet in the current state of the economy, with inflation at 3.7%. As a result, in an attempt to increase their earnings, an estimated 57% of public school teachers return to college to earn some form of a postbaccalaureate degree. Many fall into a cycle of accumulating more debt in an attempt to earn a living wage to pay off said debt. So yes, teachers want an increase in salaries, but mainly because they need it to pay off their immense education debts, regular bills and groceries, and additional degrees in hopes of being more qualified.

Besides low pay, many teachers have taken to social media to discuss another main issue: the students. Teachers seem to be emphasizing that current students’ behavior has significantly gotten worse, with many refusing to pay attention during instruction time and (particularly elementary and middle schoolers) lacking essential foundations in their education due to the 2020 pandemic. 

One teacher recently posted a video that went viral and amassed over 5.5 million views, in which she states, “The kids are different. The kids are 100% different.” She goes on to explain that one of the three subjects she teaches is a recorder class and elaborates that the children are difficult to connect to and don’t pay attention in class, due to their extremely shortened attention spans (a result of access to overly-stimulating content on social media). Although this may seem like normal behavior for young children, a study by the Education Advisory Board (EAB) found that “educators nationwide agree that student behavioral concerns have gotten even more worrisome since the 2018-2019 school year,” and that “eighty-four percent of all respondents agree that students’ behavioral skills are developmentally behind students of the same age from two years ago,” further validating that the sudden change in children’s behavior is a result of COVID-19.

In regards to the educational gap that remains due to the pandemic, a seventh-grade teacher in Atlanta, Georgia also took to social media, ultimately starting the discussion on the teacher crisis, explaining his concerns about his students’ level of performance. He states in his video, “I’mma just say this. I teach seventh grade. They are still performing on the fourth-grade level.” He further explains that these students should not have passed their previous grades as they severely lack foundational knowledge, but are continuously passed on to the next grade with the excuse that COVID-19 “slowed down education for everyone.” This issue is much more detrimental than people think. Teachers are now forced to reteach essential lessons from previous grades that were lost during lockdown and virtual schooling, while also being expected to teach current-level lessons mandated by unaware county boards of education. Without any acknowledgment from people in power, we are simultaneously setting up teachers to fail and stripping our students, our future, of a proper education.

Encouraged by these teachers’ stories, I decided to take matters into my own hands and interview teachers to receive a broader perspective on the matter. After all, to fix the issues at hand, we have to ask and listen to teachers to identify the problem rather than passively wonder why they want to leave. 

The first teacher I interviewed, when asked whether teaching is a stressful job, answered, “Yes. I live an hour and ten minutes away from here. So I drive an hour and ten minutes in good traffic in order to get to one of the best school systems in the state. I don’t want to work closer to home, because the school system in which I live is probably pretty terrible. So, I drive that far in order to teach better kids, AP, and it does pay better. The caveat to that is that I can’t afford to live in a house anywhere near the area in which I teach. Because it is so beyond my means. So how is it that we are expecting teachers to live in a house near where they teach, but we can’t even afford it because we don’t get paid enough?” She later explained that the job is also stressful because of the absurd amount of workload teachers are expected to complete on a day-to-day or weekly basis. “And, you know, we have an hour and a half for planning, sure, but we have meetings, we have professional development, PLCs [Professional Learning Communities]…we have IEP [Individualized Education Program] meetings, we have 504 meetings, we have watching other classes because we have a sub shortage, we have to plan, we have other kids coming in asking for our help that we have to prioritize,” explains Chanel. She further elaborates on the emotional hardships teachers also endure, saying, “And also you put on everything your students put out. Like, if my kid is having a bad day, if my students are having a bad day, I take on all their stress onto my shoulders. So when my kids are freaking out about an exam, or freaking about over their AP classes, or they’re freaking out about a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, or a friend fight, or their parents got mad at them, I take all that and internalize that and in return worry about those kids.”

The second teacher I interviewed is currently in her twentieth year of teaching middle school and also elaborated on the emotional needs of students on top of already existing large workloads. She explains, “The teaching role is different from what it used to be, especially post-Covid, because, I’m just going to be honest with you, the amount of social/emotional needs that children have these days are much more serious than when I first started years and years ago. We have mental illness. We have much more mental illness than we did when I first started teaching, and teachers not only have to be the teacher, but we also have to be the counselor to make sure our students are okay.” When asked to expand on how the pandemic has impacted the education system, this teacher articulates, “I think one of the major challenges we are faced with right now is trying to close the gap that Covid caused. We have some students right now that were in a very important foundational part of their educational career when we went home for Covid, and that presented some very large learning gaps…It’s a challenge to grow them from year to year as it is, and then them being that much behind presents a larger challenge.”

Hearing about these issues face-to-face with teachers made the situation at hand appear much more real to me. The 51,000 teachers who resigned in August of this year aren’t just a number, but real people who have been overworked to the point of resigning from a job they have invested so much time and love into. That fact alone is very disheartening.

In short, teachers are burnt out, and we can’t blame them. Educators have been stretched extremely thin for years, and the long-standing effects of COVID-19 on the education system have served as fuel to the fire. After the pandemic, teachers have had to teach students fundamental knowledge they lost during virtual school while also teaching current grade level lessons, making sure their students’ mental health isn’t suffering, subbing in for other classes due to substitute and teacher shortages, and creating lessons to engage students due to shortened attention spans, while already attending multiple long meetings weekly, going back to school to receive higher levels of education in hopes of earning higher wages, paying off student loans, and responding to hundreds of emails a day — all while trying to make ends meet in a staggering economy. If you had to juggle all of these issues every single day, would you stay at your job?

This article was edited by Grace Hur.