There was no single reason why Ryan Higgins decided to leave teaching.
It was a job he loved: invigorating, unpredictable, a chance to make the world a bit better. But several years into his career, Higgins, who taught high school social studies in the Fort Worth, Texas area, was increasingly frustrated.
For one, his salary — decent when he was fresh out of college in 2016 — felt stagnant and mediocre. He coached basketball and football, so his days often stretched from early morning to late evening. And “teacher appreciation week” began to feel borderline demeaning: You can wear jeans all week! There’s free pizza in the teachers’ lounge!
Then there was the time a parent complained after he chewed out and benched a member of the basketball team who was slacking off. The school’s assistant principal didn’t back Higgins up. Yes, maybe he had been a bit too tough, but he was also giving up his Saturdays, doing students’ laundry, and even driving the bus.
Ryan Higgins, during his teaching days, with a colleague. (Courtesy of Ryan Higgins)
“You're running around like crazy trying to solve problems, and yet people who aren’t with you are always telling you what you need to do better,” Higgins says.
What finally pushed him out was the aftermath of the pandemic. Trying to effectively teach students over Zoom was all but impossible. Then when students returned to classrooms, they were breathtakingly behind academically and socially. Behavior was out of control. Parents, it seemed, were less trusting of teachers, too. “It felt like the walls were closing in,” he says.
Higgins left teaching in the summer of 2022. A member of the Army Reserve, he soon took an assignment overseas. Today, he’s going into his third year of law school. He sees himself as part of a “lost generation” of teachers.
The year Higgins left, more teachers departed public school classrooms in Texas than at any point since at least 2007, the earliest year with state data. This was not just a blip: From 2020 to 2025, the state lost 35,000 teachers who would have stayed in the classroom if the state had maintained its pre-pandemic turnover figures. That’s equivalent to nearly 10% of the current teacher workforce.
The pattern in Texas has repeated to varying degrees in states across the country, according to an extensive Chalkbeat analysis of data since 2019 spanning 21 states. Most of those states have experienced four to five straight years of elevated teacher turnover, compounding the losses year after year. High-poverty schools in particular were already having a hard time keeping teachers.
Even though turnover finally appears to be trending down, the consequences persist. Research has linked teacher churn to declines in test scores. At a moment when policymakers are seeking to understand America’s sluggish learning recovery, the loss of teachers and instability in schools deserves to be on the list of plausible contributors.
[See our entire analysis of teacher turnover across 21 states including detailed data from each state. You can also watch our online event about teacher turnover.]
A teacher turnover dip, then a sustained rise
There is no comprehensive national data on teacher exit rates. To fill this gap, I conducted an extensive state-by-state review, using a variety of sources.
Across most states, a pattern emerged: Compared with 2019, fewer teachers left the profession in the summer of 2020 when the economy was at a standstill due to the pandemic. But then teacher attrition began to rise sharply. Rates peaked in 2022 but typically remained elevated for the next couple years.
Only a couple of states in this analysis, Connecticut and Maryland, avoided any meaningful rise in turnover.
A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said the state has “experienced many of the workforce challenges seen nationwide, which is why teacher recruitment and retention remain a priority.” Texas, for instance, has expanded a merit pay program, which has helped retain effective teachers, according to a recent study.
High-poverty schools, which struggled with teacher churn before the pandemic, likely suffered the most from the turnover spike. In South Carolina, for instance, exit rates rose especially sharply at those schools. A number of states have reported increases in uncertified, emergency-certified, and inexperienced educators. Those teachers are typically concentrated in high-poverty schools.
It hasn’t just been teachers departing. In Alaska, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Texas, and Washington state principal attrition rose too. Turnover often has a cascading effect in schools. When a principal leaves, an assistant principal may take over, a teacher may become an assistant principal — and another classroom vacancy opens up.
Justin Wax became principal of a junior high school in southeast Louisiana in 2021. He was the third leader in three years. That made keeping staff harder since many were looking for stability at that moment. Most of the teachers who were at the school when he started are now gone. “You're scraping the cream off of the top of all of the most veteran people,” Wax says. “There ends up being a vacuum.”
Turnover appears to be finally coming back down. In the 12 states with figures through last summer, rates were below post-pandemic highs, although some places have not fully returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Wax says he’s had his best year of retention recently and is well staffed going into this coming school year. He’s prioritized making his school a supportive community where teachers are given professional autonomy and backed up on student discipline issues. Today, surveys show that teacher stress has subsided from pandemic-era spikes. Most teachers are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs.
More comprehensive recent data on turnover is not available because many states report figures with a significant lag. Other states don’t report numbers at all. And no state appears to have data yet for the share of teachers who have left this summer.
Teachers face worse behavior, stagnant pay, fewer perks
What drove the sharp increase in teacher exits?
Meghann Seril has been teaching elementary school in Los Angeles for 18 years. These days, she finds students’ behavior more challenging and their attention spans more limited. She’s seen many colleagues who struggled with classroom management leave in recent years.
“It has such a ripple effect because the administrator is focused on supporting those new teachers,” she says. “You're working on putting out little fires all of the time.” In surveys, teachers often say that student behavior is their top source of stress, and many reported that behavioral issues spiked after school buildings reopened.
Meanwhile, many other professionals have received a valuable new perk since the pandemic: the ability to work from home. “Being a teacher is arguably the least flexible job around,” says Alex Baron, principal of a charter middle school in Washington, D.C. He suspects that’s made it difficult to recruit and retain teachers in his school.
At the same time, teacher salaries, never particularly high, have fallen in real dollars, as inflation soared and school officials used new funds to hire more staff rather than give teachers a raise. The salary gap between teachers and other college-educated professionals has grown in recent years.
Tyra Damm’s decision to leave teaching came down to money. Some of her colleagues with higher-earning spouses saw teaching as a nice-to-have second income. One called it “fun money.” Damm, who lives in the Dallas suburbs, did not have that luxury. She took up teaching in 2013, soon after her husband died of brain cancer. She figured it would provide a stable income with a parent-friendly schedule as she raised two young children.
She loved the job. Damm most recently taught middle school reading and writing to gifted and talented students and was named secondary teacher of the year in her district in 2019. But with only anemic raises and the price of everything rising, “I just couldn’t pay the bills anymore,” she says.
When the American Heart Association, which she had done freelance writing for, offered her a full-time job with remote work and higher pay, Damm felt like she had no choice but to take it. She left teaching in 2024.
“I miss it every day,” she says.
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