Last month, I met a newly certified kindergarten teacher. Twenty-two years old, she was thrilled to be starting her first full-time teaching job. Passionate about her budding career, she shared detailed, insightful responses to my questions about teaching young children. She was also happily enrolled in a part-time master’s degree program in education policy.
“Why the master’s right now?” I asked her. “For the salary increase?”
“Partly,” she answered. “But also, I’d like to have kids someday, and teaching doesn’t seem compatible with a family lifestyle. So I’ll teach while I don’t have other responsibilities, and then I’ll move on to something more flexible.”
A brand-new teacher who couldn’t have been any more enthusiastic—yet she already had one foot out the door. That’s the door of a profession that claims to attract and retain employees with “perks” like pension plans that take a quarter-century to kick in.
She’s not alone. Thirty-eight percent of teachers ages twenty-five to thirty-four already plan to leave the classroom, in contrast to 30 percent of their older colleagues. And among teachers who planned to leave as of 2022, 26 percent cited a desire for greater workplace flexibility as a top reason motivating their career change. Among those who actually did leave, that number remains high, at 21 percent.
As a teacher who left the classroom in 2022, I get it.
That teaching feels inflexible—and that it’s not a family-friendly career—may surprise some. Many Americans picture the typical classroom teacher as a motherly figure, alternating between nurturing her flock of students at school and enjoying long summers off with her own children. And no doubt, the summers and other holiday breaks are fantastic (for those who don’t have to work additional jobs, that is).
But those scheduling benefits come at a cost: Teachers have non-negotiable hours and a system of disincentives to take days off. As my mentor teacher warned me: “Teaching is more work when you’re absent.” There’s making sure the lesson plans and materials are ready (and hopefully manageable) for a substitute, there’s the scramble to find a substitute (particularly burdensome these days), and then there’s the clean-up in the aftermath (because no matter how diligent the sub, there’s always confusion and missing work when the regular teacher is away). There can also be “teacher guilt”: An absence at a critical time could affect students’ test scores, and some students may struggle emotionally.
What’s more, many administrators outright discourage the use of leave time. I once had a colleague who used most of her annual leave days during her first year of teaching. At her year-end review, our principal told her, “You’re a great teacher, but your absences are a red flag. You shouldn’t actually use so many of your leave days.”
Having to plan vacations around school holidays is one thing, but consider, for example, teachers with caretaking responsibilities. Another former colleague of mine had to take her dying father to chemo treatment every week. Our department worked to cover her classes, and she was lucky she had saved up enough leave time to keep getting paid. Nearly half of teachers have school-age children living at home, a responsibility that comes with hauling them to medical appointments, picking up feverish kids, and more. Many of these appointments can’t be saved for the weekends, whether because those slots get booked early or because the offices simply aren’t open.
Teaching certainly isn’t the only job where scheduling is inflexible. Firefighters and nurses can’t exactly call in the at the drop of a hat, and many retail workers have to deal with automated, “just-in-time” scheduling that prevents them from planning around work hours.
By and large, though, teachers aren’t leaving the classroom for those jobs. They’re going into fields like ed tech, instructional design, IT services, consulting, and software development—jobs more likely to allow some scheduling flexibility. And keep in mind, too, that teaching requires white-collar credentials, which means that their college friends and broader social circles are likely to include many white-collar office workers. They’re seeing remote and hybrid work options expand around them, so why wouldn’t they want at least some of the same for themselves?
We’ve learned that remote instruction doesn’t work for most students, but that doesn’t mean policymakers can’t create a few more options for teachers. For middle and high schools with block scheduling, for instance, schools could design schedules to give teachers days (or at least half-days) to work remotely. Alternatively, campuses with sufficient staffing could take advantage of co-teaching or floater teachers to create opportunities for remote work. Other schools could consider scheduling four days for concentrated core academic instruction, with one day for activities like tutoring, the arts, physical education, internships, or community service. One D. C. middle school, for example, has dedicated Mondays to field trips, town halls, sports, and extracurricular programming. (Some schools have even moved to four-day weeks, although the research there suggests a potentially negative effect on student achievement.)
These days or hours wouldn’t be days off, but rather protected time to plan, grade, call families, or meet remotely with colleagues—all work that teachers are doing anyway, work they need more time to complete, and work that can be completed more efficiently with fewer interruptions from students and colleagues in the school building. (The only thing I loathed more than a fire drill interrupting my lesson was a fire drill interrupting my precious prep period.)
No doubt, scheduling reforms would face logistical and budgetary challenges, and different grade levels would require different structures. Districts with a strong union presence wouldn’t be the place to start, either, as their schools typically have strong emphases on fixed, contracted hours.
But, where feasible, schools and districts ought to give more flexible teacher schedules a try. Doing so could attract new teachers and combat burnout and attrition among those already in the profession. Given that teachers feel particularly disrespected in the post-pandemic era, this shift could also send the message that leadership does respect them as professionals and trusts them to get their work done. Teacher turnover continues to escalate while enrollment in teacher-prep programs declines. School as we have known it clearly isn’t working very well any more. Scheduling may not be teachers’ top reason for leaving the classroom—that honor, as ever, goes to compensation—but it’s an important factor that could be addressed at a relatively lower cost. At the very least, it’s worth rethinking our decades-old structures to meet schools’ and educators’ contemporary needs.
