When the coronavirus pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020, schools in the United States made a rapid, unprecedented shift to remote instruction amidst a global atmosphere of fear, hardship, uncertainty, and tension. In the years since, journalists, researchers, and policymakers have often dissected the lasting impacts of this time period on students. But far less attention has been paid to the scars the pandemic era left on our nation’s teachers.
UC Santa Cruz Education Professor Lora Bartlett is a scholar who focuses specifically on the teaching profession, and as her own high-school aged daughters switched to online learning during the pandemic, she immediately recognized the need to study the impacts of this event on an already stressed K-12 teaching profession.
Bartlett joined forces with researchers from UC Berkeley, University of Puget Sound, and Lewis & Clark College to collect two and a half years of detailed data on the pandemic and post-pandemic experiences of 75 teachers from varied communities across the country. The team’s findings are shared in their new book, Going the Distance: The Teaching Profession in a Post-COVID World. The UC Santa Cruz news team interviewed Bartlett to discuss themes from the book, including a downward spiral in career satisfaction and longevity for teachers, implications for the future of education, and potential policy solutions.
Let’s start with some context. Why are these findings from the height of the pandemic important to look back on now?
Well, it’s important to understand that, before the pandemic even began, the teaching profession was at a well-documented 50-year low, in terms of the level of respect from the general public, the number of people who are drawn to go into teaching, the salary that teachers received, and teachers’ reported levels of satisfaction. So as the pandemic arrived, we had a teaching profession that felt underpaid, under-respected, under-supported, and that had a diminished appeal to individuals who might consider going into teaching.
What the pandemic did was reveal those conditions to teachers in a very dramatic way. It raised the temperature and revealed the cracks in the profession. And those issues persist today. But this research also revealed that there are things that school leaders, state policymakers, teacher educators, and teachers themselves can do to improve working conditions for teachers, even in times of extreme crisis, and certainly in times of calm.
What were some of the major discoveries from your research?
The pandemic was undoubtedly a health crisis, but it didn’t need to be an education crisis, nor did it end up being one evenly all across the country. In some places, it was a much bigger educational crisis than in others. And that’s because, as crisis theory tells us, a crisis is not merely an event: it's the context in which an event takes place and the response to that event.
So, in those local and regional contexts where teachers felt better paid, more respected, and better supported, we found that teachers were in a better position to navigate the pandemic. A big part of that was teachers feeling like they had a voice, and in places where there were strong teacher unions, there tended to be more voice. Also, teachers who had strong networks of professional collaborators inside and outside of their school were able to draw on those resources to problem-solve and sustain themselves.
Another aspect was that, in places where the response to the pandemic was one that teachers found to be proactive and supportive of their needs and well-being, that enabled them to minimize the effects of the pandemic on teaching and learning in schools. In other places, teachers felt really abandoned and exploited by the response, and that made the educational implications of the pandemic much bigger.
What did teachers have to say about the issue of “learning loss” and how to address it?
The teachers in our study all agreed that students did not learn as much as they would have during this time, had there not been a pandemic. But they did not agree with the typical response to this issue, which was to double down on academics, push out extracurricular activities, and make state test scores a very public worry. Teachers agreed with the need to increase students’ academic learning, but in order to do that, they said we need to ensure student well-being and reconnect them to school and one another. Expectations about academic progress need to take account of social and emotional needs.
The intense focus on learning loss was basically ignoring the hierarchy of student needs and putting immense pressure on students at a time when they were already incredibly stressed, leading to worsened problems with student mental health and absenteeism. It also structured the conversation in a way that made it sound like teachers had failed to do their jobs. But the fact of the matter is, students spent a year and a half not going to school, not being among people, and perhaps also facing tremendous loss in their own personal life, through death and illness. When they came back into the school building, they brought a trauma response with them, and that never got addressed.
Why do you think learning loss got so much attention, while the effects of the pandemic on teachers are rarely discussed?
It's honestly difficult for me to talk about, because many teachers pointed to a sense that they were considered expendable. When teachers were categorized as essential workers in August of 2020, there was this expectation that teachers should put their lives on the line, like nurses and doctors. And that pressure, in some places, got articulated very directly.
There’s one example from an online school board meeting, where a parent says very clearly that children's education is more important than teachers’ lives, and if some teachers are going to die because they go back to school in person, so be it, that’s a sacrifice worth making. And although it was rare for someone to say it as bluntly as this man did in the school board meeting, many teachers told us that man was giving voice to what they were all sensing. And this had big implications for teachers’ ability to stay engaged and committed to their work. It really eroded their sense of worth and capacity to respond.
What did your research show about the overall state of teacher career satisfaction?
Of the 75 teachers we followed through our study, only 25 came through the pandemic with what we call a “satisfied stayer” orientation. Of our remaining 50 teachers, 15 left teaching, and there were others who moved schools in an effort to try and find a context where they actually could stay, with variable success. And then the rest of them were still in teaching, but were very unhappy to be in teaching. At the start of the pandemic, they had been highly committed, engaged teachers, but now they talked about feeling demoralized and sad.
These shifts were not exclusively about the pandemic. During this same time period, there was also an increased political movement to curtail teacher freedom and decision-making around curriculum materials and instruction that came up in our research. A teacher in our study who was from Iowa ended up leaving after his tenth year of teaching because of new state laws that told him he could not problematize the issue of slavery when he taught U.S. history. He had to be “neutral” on it. This was a huge ethical dilemma for him, and he didn’t want to abandon the critical lenses he brought to his teaching. But because of his resistance, he was called out by local politicians as being “un-American” and faced threats to his personal safety. He was quite honestly hounded out of teaching.
So there were these other issues happening during this same time period, and it may have seemed like they were happening in parallel to the pandemic, but I would argue that they were actually happening, in part, because of the pandemic. Online instruction opened windows into classrooms that brought an increased attention to the content and an increased attention to trying to further control teacher practice.
What will it take to address these issues and strengthen the teaching profession?
Well, first, I would say that there's a lot of concern out there right now about teacher shortages and teacher recruitment, but one of the things I want the book to remind people of is that we also have big problems with teacher retention: keeping the teachers we have and bolstering their commitment. Even among the teachers who do stay, we have deficits in engagement, satisfaction, confidence, and sense of respect. And until those issues are addressed, we may very well have many teachers in our schools who don't want to be there anymore. And that is its own very serious problem.
During the pandemic, we saw that teachers who were able to respond best to this emergency situation were those who had the latitude to make decisions about student learning and how to implement instruction and practice based on their expertise and in response to the moment and the student needs they were observing. And those conditions of professional freedom need to predate the actual moment of crisis.
However, as a society, we have, for two decades, embraced this notion that the way to improve teacher practice is through strict standards: including scripted curriculum, standardized testing, and mandates about how teachers should teach. The pandemic demonstrated why that approach is ultimately not beneficial, for either teachers or students.
So one of the biggest things we need to do is take steps to return professional autonomy to the teaching profession. And by professional autonomy, I mean a shared professional responsibility for student learning that is supported by a collaborative culture and effective school leadership. Schools need to be structured to benefit from, rather than suppress, teacher expertise.
For more information about Bartlett’s work and national efforts to improve teacher retention, register for her upcoming talk on Jan 30th with Harvard University’s School of Graduate Education or tune in to her podcast episode with the National Education Policy Center. Bartlett also recently won a Trailblazer Award from The Educator's Room.