WORKING WELL BRIEF - Organizational Initiatives and Policies to Support Educator Well-Being

Oct 15, 2026

Educator well-being is framed as essential to child and student wellness, healthier school climates, reduced absenteeism, and greater workplace satisfaction. The brief links rising stress and burnout to workload, student behavior challenges, limited autonomy and recognition, inadequate resources, administrative burdens, and gaps between training and real in-service demands. It uses national data to highlight burnout, depression, anxiety, and disproportionate impacts on educators of color, then outlines how school-based systems and partnerships can support both organizational and individual well-being.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time28 min

AccessFree to download

Setting the Stage

Stress and burnout drivers

Impacts on educators and students

Operationalizing Educator Well-Being

Core areas of well-being

WORKING WELL BRIEF Organizational Initiativesand Policies to Support Educator Well-Being With the K–12 teacher pipeline stalling, we are at a consequential juncture to attend to educators’a stress and well-being. 1 Teachers leave the profession for a variety of reasons, including workload, student behavior, unpreparedness for new job responsibilities, and personal stress, all factors impacting educator well-being.2 Educator well-being is associated with child and student wellness and contributes to healthy school climates, lower rates of absenteeism for students and staff, and greater workplace satisfaction.3, 4 Recent calls by the U.S. Department of Education encourage assessment of staff well-being with attention to individual and organizational elements that inform wellness. 5 Drawing upon an ecological systems framework, along with the 5Essentials Framework that informs student and teachers’ perceptions of schools’ organizational conditions, this brief highlights how staff stress and well-being is situated within school-based systems and how current national, state, and local partnerships and tools can support educator and organizational well-being.6, 7 Setting the Stage Despite an increased concern for educator well-being after the pandemic, stress and burden has long been associated with the teaching profession.8 Lever and colleagues highlight a multitude of factors contributing to the high rates of stress and burnout in the education field, including, but not limited to, high-stakes testing, large class sizes, student behavioral challenges, increased responsibility for others, limited autonomy, perceived devaluing of and lack of recognition for work, inadequate resources, competing demands in workload, poor physical space, heightened administrative tasks, and a gap between preservice training expectations and in-service work experiences.9 a We use the term “educators” in this brief to be more inclusive of the adults who work with students; however, most research on well-being focuses on classroom teachers. Although these stressors also affected our schools before the pandemic, the U.S. educational system continues to face unprecedented challenges in recovery from the pandemic, resulting in extensions to teachers’ workload, responsibilities and tasks for which they are often unprepared, and a highly novice workforce. Related stressors, such as testing pressures, poor compensation, declining enrollment, unfilled job openings, increased student behavioral issues, and instructional tensions regarding beliefs about appropriate course content, also continue to challenge our educational systems. 10, 11 Given these working conditions, it is not surprising that Gallup found that 44% of K–12 teachers report feeling burned out “very often” or “always”—one of the highest rates across United States workforces. 12 The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights that 27% of educators report symptoms of clinical depression and 37% report symptoms of anxiety. 13 Twice as many educators, in comparison to other working professions, report job-related stress, burnout, and perceived inadequacy to cope with job-related stress. 14 Along with teachers, principals also are more likely than other adult workers to report burnout and symptoms of depression, and are also less likely to say that they feel resilient (that they can “bounce back” when bad things happen) . 15 These negative impacts on well-being are even more profound for educators of color, who report higher levels of depression than their White educator colleagues, and specifically for Hispanic or Latine teachers, who are more likely to report poor well-being overall. 16, 17 Reasons for this added burden and stress for our teachers of color potentially align with unique asks of the job, such as being asked to translate, functioning as a disciplinarian, or partaking in additional roles when racial incidents occur. Among teachers of color, 41% indicate

FAQs

How does educator well-being affect students and schools?

Educator well-being is associated with child and student wellness, healthier school climates, lower absenteeism, and higher workplace satisfaction.

What factors contribute to teacher stress and burnout?

The brief cites workload and responsibilities, student behavior challenges, high-stakes testing, limited autonomy and recognition, inadequate resources, increased administrative tasks, and a mismatch between preservice expectations and in-service work.

How are the impacts different for educators of color?

The brief reports higher depression levels for educators of color and higher reported negative well-being overall for Hispanic or Latine teachers, with higher likelihood of leaving their job compared with White teachers.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by Jordan Avery