Where Are Teachers Thriving?

A recent headline in The New York Times is representative of national sentiment around the state of teachers: “Teachers, Facing Increasing Levels of Stress, Are Burned Out.”

If we want great schools in this country, we need great teachers. While obvious to anyone who has thought about it for more than 30 seconds, it bears repeating that the quality of our education system rises and falls on the talent it is able to recruit into the classroom. We need schools where teachers can thrive.

In partnership with Morning Consult, we polled a nationally representative sample of 961 teachers between April 26^th and May 6^th of 2023. We asked a long battery of questions, but I want to highlight questions related to teachers’ wellbeing. Their responses reveal to us that teacher misery is not uniform across school sectors in America. More importantly, they identify places where teachers are thriving.

Net Promoter Score

Let’s start with a simple question. We asked teachers, “On a scale from 0 to 10, where ‘0’ means ‘Not at all likely’ and ’10’ means ‘Extremely likely’. How likely is it that you would recommend teaching to a friend or family member?”

This allows us to calculate something called a Net Promoter Score, a tool used by businesses to measure satisfaction. (You may have been asked a similar question on a follow up survey after staying in a hotel, traveling with an airline, or shopping at a hardware store.) The “net” in Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the “detractors,” those who give a score of zero to six, from the “promoters,” those who give a score of nine or ten.

When we look at the topline results, teaching is underwater. While 36% of teachers can be identified as promoters, 41% were detractors. This yields a net promoter score of -5. Not good.

But, when we disaggregate by school sector, we see that negative sentiment is driven by teachers in traditional public schools. Traditional public school teachers have a net promoter score of -21, showing far more detractors than promoters. But both private and charter school teachers register positive net promoter scores, by a wide margin. Private school teachers score +34 and charter school teachers score +42, with both sectors having far more promoters than detractors. (One note of caution, we only had 90 charter school teachers in our sample, so their responses should be taken with a pinch of salt.)

Thriving vs. Suffering

We asked a related question, “How do you generally feel about your life on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means you feel like you are suffering to a high degree and 10 means you are thriving to a high degree?” This allowed us to create a net thriving index by subtracting those who gave a score of zero to two from those who gave an eight, nine, or ten.

For all teachers, 50% said that they were thriving, 48% were neutral, and 3% said that they were suffering, leading to a net rating of +47. Not bad, but it doesn’t make anyone sit up and pay attention.

Again, though, when we disaggregate, we see just how much negative sentiment is driven by teachers in traditional public schools. Only 41% of traditional public school teachers said that they were thriving, while 54% were neutral, and 4% said that they were suffering. Compare that to charter school teachers, where 66% said that they were thriving, 34% were neutral, and only 1% were suffering. Private school teachers reported even better numbers, with 69% saying that they were thriving, 31% neutral, and 2% suffering.

School Contribution to Personal Happiness

I don’t want to belabor the point, but responses to one more question put a punctuation mark at the end of the sentence. We asked, “To what degree does your school contribute to your personal happiness?”

Looking at teachers as whole, 78% of said “a lot” or “a little” while 17% said that their school “hurts a little” or “hurts a lot.” Again, not too bad. But again, we need to disaggregate.

For traditional public school teachers, 72% said that their school contributed to their happiness rather than hurt it. But for private school teachers it was 90% and for charter school teachers it was 94%. Much, much stronger.

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We must take teachers’ complaints seriously. A mass exodus from the profession would be devastating. We owe it to teachers to look into why they are unhappy and what can be done to help.

But we also need to look at places where teachers are thriving and ask what we can learn from them. On metric after metric, we see teachers in charter and private schools exhibiting higher levels of happiness and satisfaction. What are these schools doing that makes their teachers so much happier?