New Study: Teacher Working Conditions Worsened After COVID — and Still Are
Teacher working conditions not only worsened when the pandemic began, but have continued to decline, a new study finds.
The University of Missouri research discovered ongoing issues including increased classroom disruptions and declining trust between teachers and parents, principal and colleagues. The researchers analyzed data from the 5Essentials Survey which collected responses about school wellness from roughly 123,000 to 130,000 teachers in more than 3,300 Illinois schools annually from 2019 to 2023.
'I would have thought the 2020-21 school year was the big disrupted year,' said Cory Koedel, a University of Missouri professor who worked on the study. 'It's quite reasonable to think that was the worst. But this data is telling us that's clearly not true. And our findings give no indication that working conditions will rebound naturally now that the pandemic is behind us.'
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
The 5Essentials survey identifies five main indicators of school success: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environments and ambitious instruction. Each year, teachers and students are asked to rate their experiences.
The most dramatic change after the pandemic began was in classroom disruptions. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 70% of educators said students in their schools misbehaved more than before the pandemic. In 2024, the percentage increased to 72%.
Koedel's research found the quality of student discussions and professional development also declined from 2019 to 2023. The trust teachers felt toward parents, principals and other educators didn't worsen from 2019 to 2021 but deteriorated from 2021 to 2023. Teacher safety significantly improved in 2021, when most schools shifted to online learning, only to drop again in 2022 and 2023, once students returned to classrooms.
A few working conditions initially declined but improved from 2021 to 2023, including collaborative practices and student engagement in learning
The study also analyzed Illinois survey data by school demographics. Teachers from schools in wealthier communities had better working conditions, but experienced the same decline as educators in lower-income schools.
Schools where instruction was delivered online during the 2020-21 school year also had larger declines in working conditions compared with schools where learning was in-person.
Koedel said that while the study focuses on Illinois, educators nationwide have experienced similar working conditions.
Related
'There's really no reason to think Illinois is some weird place that's so different from every other [state]' Koedel said. 'In my opinion, we should expect Illinois to be like other places, because a lot of what's happening in schools there is happening everywhere.'
For example, other national studies have highlighted the link between teacher job satisfaction and educators' well-being and retention.
A 2022 study from the RAND Corp. found that teachers who had administrator support and felt they belonged in their schools were less likely to report burnout and job-related stress. Those who had strong positive relationships with their colleagues and felt their students were engaged in learning were also much less likely to report poor well-being.
'There's a deeper question of, like, 'What exactly is it that's driving this?' ' Koedel said of the University of Missouri results. 'I believe this is telling us we have made some sort of bad decisions about how we're running schools, but this doesn't tell us what decisions we made that were bad, right? So I'm trying to understand that better.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Yahoo
Opinion: Reading Reform Will Fail Without Families
Across the country, a wave of new reading legislation aims to fix literacy crises, yet there's little direct support for families to help carry the reforms forward. At a recent meeting in my community, one fact hit hard: Our reading pipeline is broken. Instead of the expected 80% of students succeeding with general instruction, only 11% of Milwaukee students are on track. A staggering 65% need frequent, in-depth, individualized support — far more than the system was ever built to provide. When a speaker cited these numbers, the crowd nodded at the urgency and applauded calls to retrain more than 1,000 teachers in evidence-based reading instruction practices. I applauded, too — schools have the greatest opportunity and obligation to provide high-quality reading instruction at scale. But I couldn't shake the feeling that teacher training alone clearly wouldn't be enough. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter In classrooms crowded with kids who have extraordinary needs, even the best teachers can only do so much. Better prepared teachers would be able to gradually increase the share of kids who are on track with reading and prevent more students from falling behind. But many kids would still need targeted small-group support, one-on-one tutoring, and, crucially, support from home. Teachers, no matter how well prepared, build on the foundations kids have. The odds of reading success are largely shaped beyond the classroom. Longitudinal studies consistently confirm the essential role that families play in kids' reading achievement. The early language experiences and alphabet knowledge students bring to school profoundly shape their literacy trajectories. Once kids enter school, parents' influence remains powerful but increasingly overlooked. Too often, schools unintentionally sideline parents, treating them more as homework helpers than true partners. Related Parents facing economic hardship or lingering distrust from their own schooling may not immediately see the value in engaging. Even motivated families struggle to prioritize vague school requests amid a myriad of real-life demands. Rather than grow cynical, school staff must actively earn families' engagement. They need to clearly, specifically, and respectfully show families how their involvement benefits their children's development. This is Marketing 101: speak to what matters. Frame requests in ways that align with parents' hopes and addresses their real concerns. If parents don't understand how a request helps their child, schools have to connect those dots. Research from the Harvard Family Research Project shows that families make a measurable difference when they actively attend conferences, visit the classroom, and volunteer. Other studies document the value of parents engaging in literacy-specific activities like teaching letters, sharing books, and fostering reading at home. Schools can motivate parents by showing them that their efforts directly affect their kids' reading gains. Nearly 40 states have passed legislation to spur reading improvements and sprinkled amid the new curriculum and professional development requirements they've mandated are some directives for parents, too. Wisconsin's Act 20, for example, rightly emphasizes parents' critical roles: sharing family learning histories, monitoring learning disabilities, implementing literacy strategies, tracking reading plans, and even filing complaints when necessary. Yet, the law provides little tangible guidance or support. Ask a Milwaukee parent how to help their child meet reading expectations and you may get a shrug — not from indifference, but from genuine confusion. Schools must translate mandates into meaningful guidance. When staff get strategic about what they ask families to do, they create space for real partnership. Generic advice like 'read aloud every night' can evolve into more specific grade-level guidance like 'Read this book to practice the 'oo' sound your child is learning in class.' Related I recently observed a work session between school staff and local nonprofit tutoring groups. The educators invested months designing targeted, straightforward home literacy activities that were aligned closely with common student needs in the district. Next, they planned to test the tools with real families, revise the instructions based on feedback, and then film demonstration videos, so parents could clearly see what success looks like. Tips are helpful — but seeing another parent do it builds belief. Once complete, these tools will provide teachers with a library of targeted activities to share with families based on specific student needs. The anticipated result? Fewer, clearer asks for families and greater impact. Across the country, different family engagement models are emerging. In New York, the NYC Reads Family Ambassador program held 10-week online sessions to teach families the science of reading. The sessions aimed to strengthen home literacy routines, as well as inform participants who could then share effective strategies with other families. The Indiana Learning Lab hosts virtual workshops that are accessible to parents anytime, enabling them to tune in at their convenience. Both these programs acknowledge that families want to help, but need accessible, credible resources and consistent encouragement. Raising our nation's reading achievement is an all-hands-on-deck effort — inside and outside of school. Teachers, instructional coaches, literacy specialists, staff, administrators and community volunteers can all support families. But for these partnerships to flourish, we've got to get honest about who teaches kids: all of us. Ultimately, the strongest readers aren't shaped in classrooms alone. They're nurtured at home: word by word, story by story, conversation by conversation. To help reading reforms succeed, we need to do more than retrain teachers and revise curricula. We must support the first, most constant teachers all children have: their families.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Yahoo
L.A. Unified Sees ‘Major Gains' in Fight Against Chronic Absenteeism
Chronic absenteeism remains a problem for LAUSD, but the school district is making gains, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said on his last house visit of the year aimed at driving student attendance. The district made progress this year with the tricky challenge, Carvalho said during the home visit last month, but officials could not say how much progress was made exactly in reducing chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than ten percent of the school year. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter 'Our approach is we support, we're not about penalizing,' said Carvalho of the strategy being employed in getting chronically absent kids to class. 'Two years ago, we were in a different position … [but] conditions have improved dramatically.' Carvalho said the number of chronically absent students is slowly dropping closer to pre-pandemic levels, in part because of the district's push to personalize its efforts to bring individual students to class, with well-known tactics like his house visits. Los Angeles isn't the only place struggling with persistent attendance issues. A study from the American Enterprise Institute found that chronic absenteeism nationwide rose over 10% from 2019 to 2024, peaking in 2022 at 28% of students. The same report said the national percentage of students with good attendance fell sharply between 2019 and 2023, compounding the problem. More and more research, in fact, is suggesting that higher levels of chronically absent students could become the new normal. In L.A., chronic absenteeism remains a problem. At the beginning of the school year, nearly one-third of all students in the nation's second-largest district were missing class enough to be deemed chronically absent. That's an improvement from the years following the COVID-19 shutdowns in the district, when nearly half of all students were chronically absent, the worst the problem ever got in LA Unified's history. Carvalho said it's gotten better because he and the district's attendance team got personal in their approach, tailoring efforts to individual families, and knocking on the doors where kids had repeatedly missed school. Attendance counselors, school principals, and sometimes Carvalho himself have visited with thousands of families personally each school year since then, and talked to parents about why their kids are missing class. They offer solutions, like free busing or new school uniforms, or whatever could help. The tactic is a standard tool for LAUSD, one that Carvalho and district attendance workers and officials trumpet as a reason for their success. But chronic absenteeism has been a serious problem for years in L.A. More than 32% of L.A. Unified students were considered chronically absent for the 2023-2024 school year, the latest year for which the data exists. That's well above the historic norms, but still an improvement from the abysmal previous years. Los Angeles Unified had 36% of students consistently missing class in 2022-2023, and just over 45% of students in 2021-22. Fallout from COVID-19 remains the main thing parents and educators blame for the historically high numbers. During Carvalho's last at-home visit of the year, the mother of a chronically absent student said that since the pandemic she's been confused over when to keep her sick home from class. At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, Carvalho said annual incremental gains will be how the district digs itself out. That plan appears to be working, he said in May, with last year seeing a dip and district officials expecting 2024 to have even lower numbers. LAUSD officials told the LA School Report that chronic absenteeism data for the 2024-2025 school year has not been finalized, so they could not quantify the gains. Still, Rudy Gomez, the director of iAttend, LAUSD's district-wide attendance program, said in an interview that the district has made progress fighting chronic absenteeism. 'We have had some significant gains in chronic absenteeism, although we still have a lot of work to do,' said Gomez. 'But we've seen some major gains, all across the board.'
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Yahoo
Beloved by K-12 Leaders, The Four-Day School Week Fails to Deliver, Study Finds
In recent years, hundreds of school districts across the United States have responded to labor issues and straitened budgets by switching to a four-day weekly schedule. But new research from Missouri suggests that cutting out a day of instruction doesn't yield the benefits proponents hope to achieve. Circulated as a working paper on Monday, the study offers a statistical analysis of the effects of shifting to a shorter week alongside extensive reflections from educators themselves. Most of those teachers, principals, and superintendents spoke favorably about the change, saying they believed it had helped their schools attract and retain teachers in the midst of a tight job market. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter The numbers tell a different story, however: On average, the 178 Missouri districts that adopted a four-day week since 2010 did not improve at either recruiting new teachers or retaining their veterans. Andrew Camp, a scholar at Brown University's Annenberg Institute and one of the paper's authors, said district leaders' enthusiasm for four-day weeks was likely grounded in the sincere belief that they could be the answer to persistent staffing challenges. 'These things spread through word of mouth, they grab hold of people's imaginations, and we end up with this rapid adoption of four-day school weeks,' Camp said. 'But the fact that it was such a small effect — for a lot of these districts, it's one teacher being retained every three years — was really striking.' Related The almost negligible results, and officials' apparent misapprehension about their true magnitude, are particularly salient given both the scale of the four-day phenomenon and the speed with which it has been embraced. Mirroring national trends, the number of districts throughout Missouri operating on a shortened schedule has skyrocketed over the last decade and a half, accounting for one-third of the statewide total last year. Twelve percent of all students, and 13 percent of all teachers, now experience a four-day week (smaller figures proportionally, because they live almost exclusively in rural areas with smaller headcounts). The initial wave of transitions, beginning in the early 2010s, is usually attributed to states' need to contain education costs in the aftermath of the Great Recession. But in the study's 36 interviews with leaders of Missouri schools and districts, along with several teachers, respondents generally agreed the main effect of the scheduling change was to slow turnover and make schools more attractive places to work. This is something that's a potentially risky gamble, and there don't seem to be any benefits as far as teacher retention or recruitment. Andrew Camp, Brown University At least one superintendent credited the four-day week — which requires teachers to work longer days when school is in session, effectively holding instructional hours constant — with a surge in job applications and a sizable drop in workforce churn. Several others claimed that a longer weekend was a vital feature in drawing teachers to far-flung communities that cannot afford to offer top salaries. But after examining state administrative data between the 2008–09 and 2023–24 school years, including figures on teachers' school and district assignments, education levels, and experience, Camp and his co-authors found that four-day districts won only meager advantages. Switching to a truncated schedule resulted in just 0.6 job exits per 100 teachers, an effect that falls below the bar for statistical significance. Camp said the findings were broadly in line with those of prior work on the four-day schedule. While the transition might prove appealing, especially to new teachers, it likely would not address most employees' complaints about salary and working conditions. 'We don't rule out the possibility that there is a short-term, very small bump in teacher retention and recruitment,' he said. 'But what our results from Missouri show is that, over this lengthy period, there's no lasting effect.' It remains to be seen what effect, if any, the new paper will have on the ongoing debate around the often controversial policy. On one hand, it can only be said to be representative of one state's approach. Around the country, different legislatures and districts have permitted distinct versions of the four-day week. Unlike in Missouri, some states do not specify that overall instructional hours stay the same even in a shortened schedule, resulting in less instruction being delivered to students over the course of the school year. In Oregon, where more than 150 districts adopted a four-day week in the years leading up to the pandemic, one long-running study found that students missed out on 3–4 hours of teaching each week, even with the remaining days of instruction lengthened. Math and English scores fell in those classrooms (particularly among middle schoolers, whose sleep schedules could be disrupted by the earlier start times on days when classes were in session). Related A study published last summer echoed those results, revealing significant declines in standardized test scores in six states where large numbers of districts adopted a four-day week. Another paper, focusing on Oklahoma, found no detectable impact on student achievement — though it observed that school expenditures did fall slightly in four-day districts. It doesn't save a lot of money, it doesn't seem to do good things for students, and we don't have evidence showing that it improves student attendance. Emily Morton, NWEA Notably, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released state data indicating that implementation of four-day weeks was associated with only minor drops in test performance during the 2019–20 school year, though they disappeared in later years. Negative findings do not appear to have dimmed the public's enthusiasm for the idea. In 2023, a poll from the education advocacy group EdChoice showed that 60 percent of parents supported the possibility of their children's school moving to a four-day schedule; just 27 percent of respondents were opposed. Emily Morton, a researcher at the assessment group NWEA who has conducted several studies of the effects of the four-day week, said the Missouri paper was yet more evidence that the policy, whatever its attractiveness to parents and schools, did not offer much measurable upside. 'Whether or not the four-day week is a good thing, it doesn't seem to meet this particular need,' Morton said. 'It doesn't save a lot of money, it doesn't seem to do good things for students, and we don't have evidence showing that it improves student attendance. My sense, after studying this for a few years, is that communities just really like it.' Still, with the continuing spread of shortened weeks, more and more states and districts will have to at least give careful thought to their possible impact. Jon Turner is a former district superintendent in Missouri and a professor at Missouri State University. While not an avowed advocate of the four-day schedule, he has traveled to multiple states to advise school districts considering making a switch. Lately his peregrinations have brought him to Indiana and Pennsylvania, where — as in most states east of the Mississippi River — the practice is still comparatively rare. No school district makes this decision lightly, and no one sees the four-day week as a solution. Jon Turner, Missouri State University Turner said that local K–12 leaders he had met with took the question seriously, often weighing the evidence of achievement losses against their falling student enrollments and challenges in hiring new staff. Many feel the lifestyle flexibility offered by the change is one of the few perks they can offer to teachers who can easily move across district or state lines for better pay. Particularly in regions where neighboring communities have already shifted from five- to four-day weeks, he added, holdout districts may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. 'No school district makes this decision lightly, and no one sees the four-day week as a solution,' Turner said. 'It's a symptom of challenges that schools are facing.' Related The rapid spread of the trend has nevertheless met some resistance — including in Missouri, where the state legislature recently passed a law requiring larger communities to gain the consent of voters before implementing a shorter school week. In neighboring Arkansas, lawmakers are considering legislation that would establish a minimum school year of 178 days of in-person instruction. Camp said the results of his study offer forewarning to the education community. In light of the existing evidence around diminished instruction, he concluded, state and local authorities shouldn't make cavalier decisions with their instructional time. 'This is something that's a potentially risky gamble, and there don't seem to be any benefits as far as teacher retention or recruitment. So I do think this should make everyone very cautious about adopting the four-day school week.'
