Framing Systemic Teacher Crisis and its Impact on Teachers’ Lives

• In Event: Teachers in Crisis, Teaching in Crisis: Unpacking Individual and Systemic Teacher Deprofessionalization and Dehumanization

Abstract

Objectives
Globally, teaching, as a profession, is in crisis. In the US (Sutcher et al., 2019), France (Farges & Szerdahely, 2024), UK (Perryman & Calvert, 2020), and over 30 other countries (Poppelton & Williamson, 2004; Van de Borre et al., 2021), teachers report unsustainable working conditions that push them out of teaching, despite a deep desire to serve children, families and communities, and a love for teaching and content itself. This paper provides a theoretical and empirical overview of tensions between systemic and individual views of crisis; then it draws from research surrounding teaching crises on both levels in the US and France to unpack teaching crises based on (eco)systems that reproduce educational inequities and harm individual teachers.

Perspective(s)
In 2002, Ingersoll noted that previous approaches to teacher staffing crisis ignored key factors impacting teacher attrition, failing to consider specifically vulnerable populations or time periods for attrition. He noted that both migration and attrition indicated teacher dissatisfaction and that teachers in their first five years of practice were particularly vulnerable to leaving the profession. Ingersoll et al. (2016) and others (Perryman & Calvert, 2020) also highlight high stakes accountability policies as playing a key role in pushing teachers out of the profession, emphasizing teacher and student performance on standardized assessments that fail to account for contextual factors, non-standardized forms of teacher impact, and teacher and student well-being. Discourse on holding teachers and schools “accountable,” particularly in a (post-)pandemic context of “learning loss,” reinforces teacher deprofessionalization (Aballéa, 2013; Author, 2021; in press). While teacher staffing and deprofessionalization are systemic crises, they are often met with individual remedies to repair harm done to individual teachers. Teachers are told by researchers and administrators to be more positive and develop coping strategies (De Stercke et al., 2015; Théorêt & Leroux, 2014) instead of leveraging research to make reparative systemic change.

Methods & Data
This paper draws from initial comparative analyses of quantitative and qualitative survey data from K-12 educators and former educators across the United States and France, using descriptive statistics and thematic coding. The US survey data (N=918) was collected through translation and adaptation of the French survey (N=676) on teachers’ professional lives. Data were analyzed individually in each national context then compared to elucidate key factors impacting teacher well-being and professional sustainability across both countries.

Results & Significance
US quantitative data indicated that while market factors like better job prospects were important to teachers, a lack of respect for their professionalism and unsustainable working conditions (including an unreasonable number of expectations) were more important in pushing teachers to leave or consider leaving the profession. In both the US and France, 84% of teachers also indicated an impact on their well-being (physical or mental health) from teaching. Qualitative themes from US data on pushout factors included workload, administration, isolation, policy reform, and inadequate flexibility, safety, and salary. These data, as examples, demonstrate the importance of research centering educator experiences, remedies based on systemic transformation, and repair necessary to rehumanize education.

Authors

• Alejandra Priede, California State University - Long Beach

• Julien Tourneville, University of Washington

• Betina Hsieh, University of Washington

• Gaelle Mounioloux, University of Washington