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Last year, an EPI report revealed the so-called “teacher pay penalty” is higher than at any time in the past quarter-century, when economists first began tracking this data.
Jillyan McKinney didn’t leave teaching on a whim; it was more of a last resort. The pioneering ethnic studies elective she helped create at her Sacramento-area high school in 2020 came under assault from right-wing culture warriors, who were waging a pitched battle against poorly understood concepts like critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Within a year, white supremacist groups had started showing up to school board meetings to complain. Strangers and non-parents roamed the halls at back-to-school night. And most frighteningly, a YouTube video taking aim at the district’s curriculum and featuring her face began circulating among local parent groups. While McKinney had always addressed racial and gender equity in her courses, she encouraged her students to form their own opinions and voice their disagreements civilly. That did not hold for her antagonists.
After the shock wore off, McKinney fell into a deep depression and began having panic attacks. “At that point, it didn’t really feel like a choice to stay—it felt like I had to leave,” she tells the Prospect. “It wasn’t the kids at all.”
There was at least one other big problem: After 18 years in the classroom, McKinney wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next, or even how she’d find a job outside teaching.
Today, for every dollar that someone in the private sector makes, “teachers are earning about 73.6 cents on that dollar.”
Welcome to the world of post-pandemic public education, where stories like McKinney’s have become increasingly common. Today, more than three-quarters of U.S. states now report teacher shortages, as educators flee school systems mired in a toxic stew of poor working conditions, culture-war attacks, worsening mental health issues, mass demoralization, and a lack of affordable housing.
But after leaving stable careers that were supposed to last for decades, many former teachers end up walking into uncertain futures, reckoning for the first time with the kind of existential uncertainties around career progression that many private-sector employees take for granted.
“Teachers really struggle with the concept that the next job doesn’t have to be their forever job,” says Daphne Gomez, the founder of Teacher Career Coach, which provides courses and job-hunting resources to teachers looking to leave the classroom. “They’re coming from a place of trauma where they chose a career, put all their eggs in that one basket, and it ended up breaking their heart.”
Recent federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals a workforce at its breaking point. Since the pandemic, the number of public-education employees leaving their jobs has continued to climb, even as the gulf widens between vacancies (of which there are many) and new hires (numbering considerably fewer).
It’s not hard to guess why. Thanks in part to Bidenomics, the American economy continues to add jobs, dropping unemployment levels to historic lows in parts of the country. Fewer college graduates feel compelled to head into public education, a profession whose workers experience stress and burnout at twice the rate of the general workforce. “It is essentially like there is a potential pool of teachers that are not willing to accept jobs given the compensation and working conditions,” says Hilary Wething, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Last year, an EPI report revealed the so-called “teacher pay penalty” is higher than at any time in the past quarter-century, when economists first began tracking this data. Today, for every dollar that someone in the private sector makes, “teachers are earning about 73.6 cents on that dollar,” Wething says. In the mid-1990s, it was about 94 cents.
That disparity particularly hurts teachers like Alicia Sewell, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher in Alabama whose two-hour daily commute requires her to gas up her car three times a week. She didn’t want to take a job so far from home, but took what she could get. “My bills have to be paid some way,” she says.
Burned out from low pay and a punishing workload, Sewell has applied to hundreds of jobs over the past three years, with the goal of working for an education company, designing curriculum, or working with schools. But even getting interviews has been a challenge, given that her résumé is stacked with classroom experience. In the long run, she worries it’s hurting her. She muses that hiring managers think, “We don’t want to take a teacher from a classroom, so we’re not gonna hire you.”
The good news is that when teachers are able to leave, they tend to have a lot of transferable skills, making them a good fit not only for education-adjacent roles like curriculum designers, but as project managers, sales reps, customer support agents, or corporate trainers, says Darin Enferadi, the vice president of talent at Kiddom, a digital curriculum platform that frequently hires former teachers. Teachers have a reputation for being fast learners driven by a strong personal value system, he says. “It’s no surprise, given how hard teachers work, that when they go on to do something else, they’re going to apply that same kind of grit.”
While McKinney didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do when she left teaching, she did want to continue making a difference, even if it wasn’t in front of kids. Like Sewell, she found few takers, getting only two callbacks after submitting more than 40 applications.
When she finally secured a position at a local nonprofit focused on the intersection of racial equity and homelessness, causes that she feels deeply passionate about, she had to give two months’ notice as she bargained with her district over breaking her contract midyear. “I ended up taking a pay cut and left a pension,” she recalls. “It was very dire for me.”
Nine months later, a colleague started a new DEI consultancy, the Equity and Wellness Institute, and brought her on as a project director, at a higher salary than she’d ever made teaching. Now, when beleaguered teachers reach out for advice, she mentors them on finding new jobs, offering hope to those looking for a way forward.
A year ago, Florida special education teacher Alanna Bianco would have counted herself among those struggling, prepared to throw in the towel for many of the same reasons that have left the state with the highest teacher vacancy rate in the country: the continual attacks on public education by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a lack of support from parents and administrators, and the pressures of having to catch kids up academically with no extra time.
Even after résumé coaching, LinkedIn networking, and applying for nearly 50 jobs, Bianco hadn’t much to show for her efforts beyond a part-time gig consulting for a textbook publisher. After a fresh-start move to New Hampshire with her kids, she began dreading the possibility of returning to teaching this fall. But then the textbook company finally hired her full-time after months of promises.
“I could not get people to respond to me for anything outside a classroom position,” she recalls. “That was the most disheartening part, because I knew my skills were transferable. But no one would see past that, no matter how many times I altered my résumé with business language.”
Still, her new job was worth the wait. As a Florida teacher, she earned only about $50,000 a year, barely enough to scrape by with coupons and child support. Today, she makes nearly $40,000 more, which has transformed her life. “I’m not going to be living paycheck to paycheck anymore,” she says confidently. As if to prove it, a few weeks ago, in preparation for their first New England winter, she bought her kids skis just because she could, without worrying about her grocery bill first.
And while she occasionally misses her students, she knows she made the right decision. Recently, she told her former colleagues, “When you feel done, you are done, and as scary as it might feel to leave the classroom, as heartbreaking as it might feel, you are choosing you for the very first time, and you are the most important.”
