As a teacher both during and immediately after the pandemic, I was constantly on the receiving end of some version of: “You must be so relieved that the pandemic is over.” My response was always: “Actually, it has only gotten worse.” And it’s not just me. Since the onset of the pandemic, many teachers have taken to social media to discuss the challenging working conditions that they face in American schools. The common assumption is that these conditions directly resulted from pandemic-related disruptions and chaos and therefore have now ended. However, a new working paper by two University of Missouri researchers confirms what many teachers have been saying: that working conditions have actually declined even further in school post-Covid.
The study used self-reported teacher working condition data from Illinois’s 5Essentials Survey spanning the 2016–17 to 2022–23 school years. The survey identifies five main indicators of school success—effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environments, and ambitious instruction—and asks respondents to rate their experiences on several specific measures falling under each category.
The survey covered schools that comprise 90–93 percent of the state’s total student enrollment and received responses from 75–82 percent of teachers between 2019 and 2023. (The response rate was lower in 2017 and 2018, before the survey was added to the state’s ESSA plan.) Survey data were merged with data on school and district characteristics—including student demographics, school and neighborhood socioeconomic information, and primary modes of instruction during the pandemic—to allow researchers to explore some of the nuances in teacher working conditions across different school contexts.
Findings indicate that, while overall teacher working condition ratings did decline over the full duration of the study, there were notable differences between pre-, during-, and post-pandemic trends. Prior to the pandemic (2017–2019), overall working conditions actually trended positive. However, this turned into a negative trend during the pandemic (2019–2021), and conditions declined even more sharply in the years following (2021–2023).
These trends are important, but the researchers’ subsequent analyses of the specific measures that drove declines in working conditions and the differences in these trends by district characteristics produce even more valuable findings. As may be expected, scores on measures of collaborative practices and reflective dialogue decreased during the pandemic but rebounded afterwards. However, other measures that might have been expected to rebound instead continued to decline, including the quality of student discussion, the quality of professional development, and the trust teachers feel towards principals, parents, and other teachers. Classroom disruptions also became substantially worse after the pandemic.
These trends differed by primary mode of instruction during the pandemic, with the largest declines in working conditions occurring in districts that were primarily online. However, the patterns did not differ by socioeconomic status. Though high-SES schools may have more favorable working conditions overall, the trends in teacher working conditions are the same across high- and low-SES schools: They’re getting worse.
These findings should be read with caution. Though the racial makeup and school poverty measures of the Illinois student population are close to national averages, they are not exact matches—and there are many other contextual differences that make it difficult to apply these findings at the national level. In addition, the data in this study were self-reported. It is worth noting that self-reported data can be biased or influenced by any number of factors, including the setting in which the survey is completed; however, self-reports are also the only way to get a good sense of how teachers view working conditions in schools.
Still, there are some important insights to be gleaned from this study. First, we need to let go of the assumption that teacher working conditions hit “rock bottom” during the pandemic. Teachers continue to struggle with poor working conditions in American schools even after the supposed return to business as usual. In addition, understanding the measures on which teachers indicated the largest declines in conditions (especially those that are unexpected) may provide some guidance to policymakers on how to allocate resources—or at the very least, suggest what future research should focus on.
Pandemic recovery efforts thus far have been focused largely on student-level measures of academic achievement. While that’s essential, this study highlights the need for stronger recovery efforts at the teacher level, as well. As the saying goes, you can’t pour from an empty cup. American teachers are working hard to help students rebound, but they cannot be expected to perform miracles under abysmal conditions. If we want schools to truly recover from the pandemic disruption, we must address the harm it did and continues to do at every level.
SOURCE: Sofia Baker and Cory Koedel, “The Decline in Teacher Working Conditions During and After the COVID Pandemic,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (July 2024).
