Part One of the Series: Why Teachers Leave — What the System Keeps Missing
Why Teachers Rarely Leave Because of One Bad Day
It was 4:17 in the afternoon, and most of the students were gone.
The hallway had settled into that strange end-of-day quiet every teacher knows, with a custodian’s cart rattling somewhere around the corner and the copy machine humming in the workroom. A teacher was still sitting at her desk, laptop open, trying to enter intervention data she had not been able to touch during the school day.
There was an email reminding staff to complete a required technology training, a parent message waiting for a response, tomorrow’s lesson needing adjustment because today’s had not gone quite as planned, and a behavior documentation note she had promised an assistant principal before leaving.
Beside her sat papers that needed attention, a meeting already waiting on the next morning’s calendar, and three unread messages that seemed to carry their own quiet accusation.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, perhaps without even saying the words aloud, came the thought:
I don’t know when my job became all of this.
I suspect more teachers have had some version of that moment than we realize.
We talk a great deal about teacher retention. We track vacancies, study shortages, examine salary schedules, count resignations, conduct exit interviews, develop recruitment campaigns, and attend job fairs.
All of that matters.
But I wonder whether, in our search for the reason teachers leave, we sometimes ask the wrong question.
We ask, What made you leave? as though there must have been a single moment we can identify and name.
One terrible student.
One unreasonable parent.
One bad evaluation.
One principal.
One policy.
One day when a teacher finally said, That’s it.
Sometimes there is such a day. But after spending much of my life around teachers, I have come to believe that many don’t leave because of one terrible day.
They leave after a thousand small extractions.
The Work We Keep Adding
A teacher writing in a public online educator community recently described days filled with classes, extra classes, activities, meetings, parent communication, discipline procedures, and administrative work that had to go home because there was no time for it during the school day.
The teacher’s summary was painfully simple:
“I am constantly working.”
Another teacher, reflecting on whether to return for another year, wrote:
“I honestly don’t know if I can handle another year, which stinks because I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.”
That second comment stays with me because it holds two truths at once: I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, and I don’t know if I can do another year.
Perhaps that is one of the things policymakers and school leaders misunderstand about retention. Teachers can love teaching and still reach a point where the conditions surrounding teaching become unsustainable.
The problem is not always the work at the center of the profession; it is often everything that has slowly gathered around it.
The new documentation requirement, the additional data entry, the parent communication system that now makes teachers reachable almost continuously, the intervention form, the learning platform, the mandated training, the new initiative introduced before the old initiative has disappeared, the committee, the survey, the progress monitoring, the behavior log, and the compliance task that will “only take a few minutes” all begin to collect around the actual work of teaching.
Each request, viewed by itself, may seem reasonable.
That is the problem.
No single expectation appears heavy enough to explain why someone would leave teaching, but teachers do not experience expectations one at a time. They carry them all at once.
I have come to think of this as expectation creep — the slow expansion of what teachers are expected to absorb, manage, document, learn, and emotionally carry without a corresponding expansion of time, staffing, compensation, or professional support.
The research behind teacher retention repeatedly points toward workload, administrative burden, planning time, leadership support, and working conditions. Recent national turnover data from the Learning Policy Institute found that nearly one in seven public school teachers moved schools or left the profession between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years, with most of that turnover voluntary and for reasons other than retirement.
The retention research gathered for this series points toward the same pattern: manageable workloads, reductions in unnecessary administrative burdens, and adequate planning and collaboration time are repeatedly identified as conditions that may help teachers remain.
Yet I wonder how often a school system has actually sat down and asked:
How much have we added to the work of teaching in the last five years?
Not how many initiatives we discontinued on paper, and not how many forms we consolidated, but how much time the work actually requires in the lived reality of an ordinary school day.
There is a difference.
When the Demands Keep Growing
Psychologists who study workplaces sometimes use a framework called the Job Demands–Resources model, and the basic idea is remarkably human.
Every job makes demands on us. Those demands may require time, concentration, emotional energy, physical effort, or psychological endurance. People also have resources, such as time, autonomy, support, training, trust, good colleagues, adequate staffing, and the opportunity to recover.
The Job Demands–Resources model asks us to pay attention to the relationship between the two.
When demands remain high while resources are insufficient, strain grows.
A recent systematic review of teacher well-being found workload, student-related challenges, and time pressure among the most frequently reported job demands in education. Another recent study of nearly 5,000 classroom teachers found workload associated with depressive symptoms, which in turn were associated with stronger intentions to leave. That study involved Australian teachers, so we should be cautious about simply transferring every finding to American schools, but the psychological pattern deserves attention.
The question is not simply whether teachers are working hard.
Teachers have always worked hard.
The question is whether the demands of the job are consuming resources faster than those resources can be restored.
There is another psychological framework that may help us understand what happens next. It is called Conservation of Resources theory, and at its heart is the idea that human beings work to obtain, protect, and preserve the resources that matter to them: time, energy, emotional capacity, confidence, relationships, and the sense that they are still capable of meeting the day ahead.
When those resources are repeatedly threatened or depleted, we begin protecting what remains.
Think about that in the context of teaching.
The veteran teacher who once volunteered for every committee stops volunteering. The creative teacher who used to develop elaborate projects begins using simpler lessons. The colleague who was always willing to stay late begins leaving at contract time. The teacher who once answered emails throughout the evening turns notifications off.
School systems may interpret these changes as disengagement, and perhaps sometimes they are. But I wonder whether we too quickly judge what may actually be an act of preservation.
There comes a point when saying no is not evidence that a teacher has stopped caring.
It may be evidence that something inside the teacher has finally begun protecting what remains.
This is one of the tensions inside what I have called sustainable generosity. Teaching has always depended upon generosity, because teachers give time, attention, patience, creativity, forgiveness, second chances, and often more than the contract requires because a child needs something in that particular moment.
There is something beautiful about that.
But there is a danger when systems begin budgeting around the generosity of teachers. The gift slowly becomes the expectation, the extra mile becomes the starting line, and eventually what teachers once freely gave begins to feel like something quietly extracted.
The Problem With Asking Teachers to Cope Better
When teachers begin showing signs of exhaustion, our response is often aimed at the teacher.
Practice self-care. Build resilience. Use mindfulness. Set boundaries. Find work-life balance.
There is value in all of those things, and I have written about many of them myself. But we need to be careful, because a breathing exercise cannot create a planning period, mindfulness cannot complete a behavior report, resilience cannot reduce a caseload, and a gratitude practice cannot make five separate initiatives fit into the same forty-five-minute preparation period.
Sometimes the problem is not that people need better strategies for carrying the weight.
Sometimes the weight is too heavy.
There is an old story in Exodus that I keep returning to. Moses is trying to carry the needs and disputes of an entire people. From morning until evening, people come to him. He listens, decides, advises, and tries to help.
His father-in-law, Jethro, watches.
Importantly, Jethro does not praise Moses for his dedication, admire his work ethic, or recommend a better morning routine. He tells him the truth:
“The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone.”
— Exodus 18:18
There is wisdom in that moment for schools.
Sometimes the kindest thing a system can do is stop romanticizing how much teachers are carrying.
Maybe some of our teachers don’t need another message about resilience. Maybe they need someone with authority to look carefully at the work and say:
This is too much.
And then do something about it.
The Quiet Accounting Teachers Do
Teachers are always doing a kind of quiet accounting.
I don’t mean grades or budgets. I mean the private ledger teachers carry about what the work gives and what the work takes.
– The student who finally understands.
– The planning period lost to coverage.
– The note from a parent that says thank you.
– The evening spent completing paperwork.
– The colleague who makes you laugh.
– The new initiative announced in September.
– The former student who comes back to visit.
-The Sunday afternoon anxiety.
For a long time, the gifts of teaching may outweigh the costs, and for many teachers they still do. That matters.
But expectation creep changes the accounting slowly. One additional task rarely changes the balance, and neither does the next one, or the one after that, until one afternoon, perhaps at 4:17, a teacher looks at a laptop, a stack of papers, three unread messages, and tomorrow’s lesson and wonders when the work became all of this.
By the time that teacher resigns, the system may go looking for the reason and never find one, because the reason was not one thing.
It was the accumulation.
Perhaps Retention Begins With Subtraction
We often respond to teacher retention by adding something.
A wellness committee, a recognition program, a new mentoring platform, a survey, a professional development session on burnout, or a task force to study workload may all be offered with good intentions. Some may even be helpful.
But notice our instinct.
Even our solutions can become another thing teachers must do.
Perhaps the first question in a serious teacher retention strategy should be much simpler:
What can we stop asking teachers to carry?
I would like to see school districts conduct what I think of as an Expectation Audit.
Take an honest inventory of what teachers are required to do beyond the direct work of planning, teaching, assessing, and building relationships with students, and then ask four questions:
What are we asking teachers to do?
How much time does it actually take?
What problem is it solving?
And if we add something new, what are we willing to remove?
The key word is actually.
Not how long the person who designed the form thinks it should take, and not how quickly an experienced administrator can click through the platform during a demonstration. Ask teachers. Watch the work. Count the minutes. Notice the interruptions. Understand the human rhythms of a school day.
Then make a difficult policy commitment:
Every new expectation should come with a subtraction.
A new initiative?
What stops?
A new data requirement?
What disappears?
A new technology platform?
What old process is retired?
A new responsibility?
Where does the time come from?
This is not resistance to improvement. Schools must change, teachers must learn, new needs emerge, and our understanding of students continues to grow.
But human capacity does not expand simply because a new priority is important.
That may be one of the central things policy forgets.
The school day is finite. Attention is finite. Emotional energy is finite.
Teachers are finite.
And perhaps respecting those limits is not lowering our expectations for teachers, but finally creating conditions in which excellent teachers can remain long enough to keep doing the work they once dreamed of doing.
Because somewhere tonight there is a teacher who still loves teaching, still loves the students, still believes the work matters, and quietly wonders whether they can do another year.
We should not wait for the resignation letter to take that question seriously.
Perhaps teacher retention begins by noticing the thousand small extractions and having the courage to give something back.
Next in the series: When Teaching Stops Feeling Like a Profession — The Quiet Loss of Teacher Agency.
Research & Sources
This essay is part of the Why Teachers Leave: What the System Keeps Missing series.
Research, teacher voices, psychological frameworks, and supporting sources used throughout the series will be available in the Teacher Retention Series Sources & Research Guide (coming after the series is published).
