45% Of Teachers Agree That The 2024-25 School Year Has Been The Most Stressful Of Their Careers — Even Worse Than 2020
Is the crisis in American education reaching a breaking point?
Prostock-studio | Shutterstock We've all heard about the full-on crises affecting America's education system. And it seems like the problems are only getting worse. In fact, according to a recent survey, teachers say this school year has been the most trying yet.
45% of teachers agree that the 2024-25 school year has been the most stressful of their careers.
These findings come via Prodigy Education, a platform that provides math-teaching resources for both educators and students. They surveyed 841 kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers about their current stress levels, what's causing them, and what they'd like to see schools do to help.
Krakenimages.com | Shutterstock
What their data revealed is pretty startling: 45%, nearly half, said the current school year is the most stressful they've ever had, with 95% saying they are at least somewhat stressed and 68% reporting they are extremely stressed. But it's how this year compares to others that reveals the truly staggering scope of the problem.
Nearly half of the teachers surveyed said this school year is even worse than 2020, when the COVID pandemic was at its height.
The first year of the pandemic wreaked havoc on schools as everything was turned upside down for teachers and students alike. Most schools went to an online-only model, which proved next to impossible for many students, especially the youngest kids.
For many, the school year was basically a write-off as students struggled to learn under the circumstances and teachers struggled to understand how to even grade and evaluate progress. Oh, and this was all going on while everyone was dealing with family deaths and trying to keep themselves safe from a deadly condition.
The legacy of these struggles is still very much with us in the crisis-level declines in academic achievement, including literacy, in the 2020s (though the pandemic is certainly not the only reason for this). But as terrible as it was, three times as many teachers told Prodigy that 2020 had nothing on 2025.
Prodigy found that nearly 1 in 10 teachers plan to quit their jobs at the end of this school year, and nearly 1 in 4 told Prodigy they are at least considering doing so. This is surely in part due to another pretty staggering statistic: 78% of teachers said they have had to skip basic self-care tasks because of work demands, and 33% said they spend an hour or less each week on self-care. It's hard to find the time, of course, when your supposedly off-work hours are spent lesson planning and grading, as is the case for most teachers.
Teachers said student behavior problems, pay, workload, and parent interactions are the biggest stressors.
When it comes to what exactly is making 2025 the worst year ever, it's the usual suspects. Student behavior and discipline challenges were the most-cited issue, with 58% of teachers saying it was the biggest problem. That's certainly in line with what teachers seem to be constantly saying on social media.
Low salary was the second-most cited problem, followed by high workloads and overwhelming administrative demands like meetings, paperwork, and oversight. But next in line, at 25%, were problems with parents' expectations and combative communications, another thing about which teachers are constantly sounding alarms. A similar proportion, 22%, said better relations with parents would solve their stress problems.
The other things you might expect made the list, too, from too much pressure to perform on standardized tests to inadequate teaching supplies to overwhelming class sizes — problems that are sure to only be exacerbated by the new administration's drastic approach to cutting education funding.
It's hard not to see a correlation between that and perhaps the most telling of Prodigy's statistics of all: 1 in 2 teachers said they have considered quitting their job far more often this year than they did last year. There is, after all, little reason to believe any of these multifaceted issues will get better any time soon, and every reason to believe teachers will continue being blamed and scapegoated for all of it.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
