Too Tired to Teach? The Relationship Between Stress and Burnout and Teacher Attrition Behavior

• In Event: Compensation, Race, and Burnout: Examining Drivers of Disparate Teacher Retention

Abstract

Each year, 16% of teachers leave their current position. Compounded by the decreasing number of students earning college degrees in education (Snyder et al., 2018), schools across the country are struggling to fill their classrooms with high quality teachers. Schools spend valuable resources to recruit and train large numbers of new teachers each year, which exerts significant impacts on schools and students. Teacher attrition further harms schools through lost institutional knowledge, hiring of less qualified teachers, and increased class sizes. For instance, teacher attrition has been directly linked with poorer English and math test scores (Ronfeldt et al., 2013).

The causes of teacher attrition can be more fully understood within the context of economic labor market theory. Economic equilibrium stipulates that supply and demand fluctuate based on wage. At high wages, there will be a surplus of labor, as more individuals will be seeking to enter that field and fewer employers will be willing to pay that wage. At low wages, there will be a shortfall of labor, as fewer individuals will be seeking to enter the field and more employers will be willing to pay that wage. As teaching stress increases, teachers may become motivated to explore jobs outside of teaching with higher wages or lessened emotional demands for which they have the appropriate educational background.

Research supports the relationship between stress and attrition amongst teachers from a variety of backgrounds (Conley & You, 2009; Sass et al., 2011; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2016). Across these studies, teachers with increased stress were more likely to quit or intend to quit their current position. However, despite a large body of research exploring the predictors of teacher stress, burnout, and attrition, gaps in the literature remain. Given changes in accountability and student characteristics over time, teacher stress across several time periods has not been considered utilizing a comprehensive and consistent data set. The present study seeks to utilize three waves from the Schools and Staffing Survey, a nationally representative, cross-sectional survey of over 30,000 American teachers per wave. The large sample size and consistent indicators of teacher stress will allow us to understand how overall teacher stress and burnout and its underlying variables have changed over time.

Our preliminary results indicate that stress and burnout is highly associated with teacher intentions to stay in teaching. In particular, we find that when teachers are less stressed and burned out, they are substantially more likely to want to stay in teaching. Moreover, this relationship is particularly meaningful for STEM and novice teachers as increased levels of stress and burnout for STEM and novice teachers decrease the likelihood that they intend to stay in teaching relative to increased levels of stress and burnout in non-STEM and more experienced teachers. Our evidence suggests stress and burnout have a similar relationship between their actual behavior and their intention to stay. We consistently find a detrimental relationship between stress and burnout and all forms of teacher mobility.

Authors

• Tuan D Nguyen, Kansas State University

• Kristen P. Kremer, Kansas State University