Numerous accounts suggest that public school superintendents are burned out and frustrated by the accumulated stress of steering schools through the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and political polarization, and that they are increasingly at risk of mass attrition. However, despite high stress levels and similarly dire predictions…

Principal and teacher well-being is a matter of immediate concern for principals and teachers themselves and for the students they teach. Stress on the job can negatively affect educators' physical health, and poor teacher wellness and mental health are linked with lower-quality student learning environments and with poorer academic and…

Media accounts have described kindergarten through 12th grade teaching staff shortages in 2021-2022 that were severe enough to temporarily close schools for in-person instruction in some areas. Although much has been written about the negative impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on teachers, less is known about the extent…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has added more stress to an already high-stress profession: American public school teacher. The authors of this report share the results of a new survey of nearly 1,000 former public school teachers and reveal how important stress has been--even more so than pay--to teachers' decisions to leave the…

This technical report provides information about the sample, content, and administration of the 2022 State of the American Teacher (SoT) and State of the American Principal (SoP) surveys. The SoT survey was completed by 2,360 American Teacher Panel members, and the SoP survey was completed by 1,540 American School Leader Panel members. The…

The Wallace Foundation's Partnerships for Social and Emotional Learning Initiative (PSELI) is a six-year initiative that The Wallace Foundation launched in 2017 to explore whether and how children benefit when schools and their out-of-school-time programs partner to improve social and emotional learning (SEL), as well as what it takes to do this…

This report presents school district leaders' views about staff turnover, hiring, and districts' financial outlooks at the end of the 2020-2021 school year. Based on the survey responses of 292 district leaders from the American School District Panel (ASDP), the authors found that teacher and principal turnover had not increased substantially…

U.S. school districts have taken widely varied approaches to reopening public schools for the 2020-2021 school year. The divergence stems from the highly localized approach to both schooling and addressing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and differences in COVID-19 transmission rates among communities. To develop a national…