Paul Goyette (CC BY 4.0)
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates speaks at a press conference in Chicago support of the city's public schools, August 2025.
When Southern California elementary school teacher Arielle Fodor got her first teaching job in 2018, she was thrilled. “I’d wake up and want to go to school,” she tells The Progressive. “It was my dream job.”
But Fodor is no longer teaching.
Although she initially left on maternity leave in 2022, she ultimately decided not to return to the classroom. And while she still maintains a connection to education—she cohosts the Teacher Quit Talk podcast—her focus has shifted, and she is now using her platform to zero in on the many reasons individual public school teachers throughout the country are opting out.
Fodor is matter-of-fact about her own reason for leaving the classroom. “I loved teaching, but I became increasingly nervous about school shootings,” she says. “I began to fear leaving the house. Having to do regular safety drills with kindergarteners, just as I was becoming a mom, got to me, and I became afraid of dying.”
Fodor’s fears are not unfounded. According to the global data platform Statista, between 1966 and mid-July 2025, there were 277 school shootings in the Golden State. Nationwide, there have been 1,173 mass shooting fatalities since 1982.
Teachers everywhere worry about this, and while some cite fear of violence as contributing to their decision to leave the profession, school shootings are far from the only thing prompting the exodus. In fact, 51,000 teachers quit in 2023—some to retire, but most because of low job satisfaction, poor working conditions, and inadequate pay.
As the 2025-2026 academic year unfolds, this is a crisis writ large, with one in eight teaching positions remaining unfilled or being taught by an instructor who lacks certification in the subject area they’ve been assigned to teach. This amounts to 411,549 positions nationwide.
The shortages, however, are unevenly distributed across subject areas, with states most commonly reporting gaps in special education, science, and math. Rural schools, and those with a majority Black, brown, or immigrant student body, are also harder hit than majority white schools, whether urban or suburban. As a July 2026 report from the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) notes, “Schools with the highest concentration of students of color are four times as likely to employ an uncertified teacher compared to schools with the lowest concentration.”
Geographic disparities also exist: The situation is worse in the South and the Midwest, with the highest numbers of teacher vacancies in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Wisconsin, and Illinois. LPI estimates that six million public school students per year are impacted by these shortages nationwide.
But despite these disparities, teacher dissatisfaction across all regions and subject areas should be seen as a matter of national concern. Indeed, teachers have made the reasons for their professional discontent abundantly clear: High stress; lack of administrative and community support; disrespect for the profession; over-reliance on educators to mediate student medical and emotional trauma; chronic student absenteeism; insufficient supports to assist students experiencing hunger, homelessness, and poverty; too few opportunities to collaborate with colleagues; and excessive paperwork.
Then there’s salary. While the national starting salary for teachers averages $46,526, it is far lower in some states.
These factors have had a discernible impact on college students, as well—with fewer and fewer choosing to teach after they graduate. Fifty-five years ago, in 1970, education was the most popular college major with 176, 307 degrees granted. Today, the numbers are down by nearly half: In 2022, the last year for which statistics are available, 89,410 students majored in education.
However, not everyone has been deterred. Elias, a twenty-three-year-old newly minted teacher who asked that his surname be withheld, says that while he is aware of these factors, nothing he’s heard has dissuaded him from entering the profession, and he is excited about starting his first job in a Washington State middle school this fall. “I have always enjoyed explaining things to others,” he tells The Progressive. “I have an interest in history and social studies, and believe that I can leverage this into something good. Teaching has a tangible, real-world impact. It’s something I want to do and feel prepared to do. I also love kids and think they’re funny and interesting.”
But many teachers express far less enthusiasm about returning to the classroom. Susanna, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, high school English teacher in her fifteenth year who also asked that her surname not be used for fear of administrative retribution—describes herself as demoralized. “I never feel appreciated by the students, their parents, or the administration,” she says. “Most of the kids want to do well, even if they are not super motivated. I try to create a positive atmosphere in the classroom so the kids will follow my lead, but most of them are jittery and always seem to be thinking about something other than school. I try to teach them things that I think are important and that give me joy. But as teachers, it’s on us to create our own social and emotional support networks.”
And therein, education activists say, lies the problem: Individual solutions can’t mitigate burnout or make teaching a more fulfilling profession.
Cierra Kaler-Jones, executive director of Rethinking Schools, a nonprofit publisher that advocates for social justice education, sees collective action among teachers as imperative in combating disaffection.
“The Chicago Teachers Union has provided a blueprint to follow. It’s social justice unionism,” Kaler-Jones tells The Progressive. “[Chicago teachers] won contract provisions that protect their right to teach the truth about race, gender, sexuality, and history, as well as increased expenditures for mental health resources for students. They won school-based composting and the installation of solar panels in schools. They won lower class sizes, more built-in prep time for elementary school teachers, and got an agreement that the Chicago school system will hire more bilingual support staff, librarians, and counselors. They also got pay raises. The negotiations gave teachers a way to lean into their power and significantly boosted teacher morale.”
Kaler-Jones also credits Rethinking Schools’ many study groups—virtual meetings that give teachers throughout the country a chance to read a common text and talk about strategies for teaching it, as well as injecting racial and gender equality into the curriculum, and bringing restorative justice practices into their teaching—with helping educators connect, commiserate, and strategize. This, she says, has been fruitful despite the Trump Administration’s ongoing attacks on public education and several instances in which teachers deemed “woke” because of their support of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have been penalized.
Becky Pringle, president of the 2.8 million-member National Education Association (NEA), agrees that organizing is a necessary antidote to job frustrations and says that activism gives teachers a concrete way to contest the administration’s anti-public-education rhetoric and actions. Like Kaler-Jones, she also sees organizing and social justice unionism as an effective means to counter despair.
“Teachers want safe working conditions, respect, and autonomy,” she tells The Progressive. “They want to be able to make teaching and learning decisions based on their lived experience and training. They want to be trusted to do their jobs.”
Pringle says that Bargaining for the Common Good—a labor negotiating strategy in which unions push for structural changes both within and beyond their workplace—has given teachers a way to demand improved conditions in their schools and communities. These are changes that increase job satisfaction and improve their students’ ability to learn. Even in states without collective bargaining, she adds, the NEA has been able to organize lobbying visits to statehouses where teachers have shared their experiences with lawmakers and pushed for salary hikes and other improvements.
But despite some successes, Pringle knows that this is not enough, which is why the union has pledged to educate, activate, and organize its members. “Across the board, early, mid-level, and teachers at or near retirement age are deciding to quit or pursue other professions,” she says. “This was exacerbated by COVID-19, and our schools and families have not fully recovered. In addition, the terrible, awful, no good budget bill will add to the crisis because we can’t do our jobs if students are hungry.”
Still, Pringle stresses that as important as it is to fight back against Trump’s heinous policies, anti-education rhetoric, and anti-DEI Executive Orders, teacher retention and job satisfaction require the union to fight forward. “We have to work toward systems that increase teacher power because even in the midst of a Trump Administration, we care about kids, families, and communities.”
Keeping teachers in the classroom, she says, requires a multitiered strategy. “We have to educate, communicate, organize, mobilize, litigate, and then elect people who support public education,” Pringle says. “The next election could be the be-all and end-all of our democracy. As an education union, we are responsible for training educators so they have what they need to stay in the classroom and give students the education they deserve.”