Twice as fast

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic upended schooling, are teachers finding their footing again—or running faster and faster to stay in place?

They do feel better about their jobs, and more, they think the future will get better, not worse, for them and their students. The second annual EdWeek Teacher Morale Index stands at 18 on a scale of -100 to 100—suggesting teachers, overall, feel more positively than negatively about their jobs, and a significant boost from last year’s score of -13.

Yet even though teachers appear to feel more optimistic about their work, they also must work harder to keep pace with rapidly multiplying responsibilities and deepening student needs. It’s often an uphill road to tread, through student malaise, absenteeism, and disengagement; new technologies; and political disruptions.

“Every day is a crazy day. It’s fine,” said Rachel Griggs-Hopkins, a math teacher at Sweetwater Union High School in National City, Calif., south of San Diego. “Something is always happening when I’m supposed to be doing something else.”

While her students are not yet fully back to their pre-pandemic normal, Griggs-Hopkins said they are starting to stabilize, both emotionally and academically. “I don’t know if [test] scores will follow,” she said, “but … we’re starting to see kids get back toward normalcy.”

To capture the evolving nature of the job, four Education Week reporters visited and kept in touch with Griggs-Hopkins and a half-dozen other teachers across the country throughout the fall and winter. They work in New York state, small-town Minnesota, and four of them in the Sweetwater Union high school district south of San Diego throughout fall and winter. These educators serve kids across grade levels and subjects—both struggling students and high-fliers.

The picture that emerged is twofold: On the one hand, the teachers’ experiences offer insight into the resilience and adaptability that has become critical to success in their work. And the teachers are proud of the progress they see their students making so far this school year.

But the reporting also paints a picture of a profession undergoing rapid transformation as teachers are expected to handle a high volume of challenges—many of them unforeseen just five years ago.

What that ultimately means for K-12 teaching—a career that has struggled to attract new recruits—remains to be seen.

“It feels like teachers are expected to do more with kids who know less and less every year,” said Kathleen Monegan, a math teacher at San Ysidro High School in San Diego. “Kids come in with less basic skills, less skill on how to actually be a student, less work ethic—but we’re supposed to do more and more and more and catch up all the gaps and holes.

“As a teacher in this era,” she continued, “you have to do the best you can every day with what you have.”

Academic needs intensify

For Monegan, doing her daily best sometimes means slowing her Calculus classes to a crawl to review skills introduced in earlier courses or grade levels. Other days, it means letting students pull out calculators to deal with arithmetic so their focus can be on the new content she’s introducing, not computation.

In one early morning Calculus class, Monegan had all her students work a problem aloud together—reciting their reasoning for different procedures. This approach has an advantage over simply calling up a few students to work problems on the board: The entire class must cite the appropriate equation or the rule underlying a concept.

When one girl called out that Monegan’s notes on the board didn’t make sense, the teacher grinned wryly.

“I am writing exactly what you are saying,” she said as she followed along on the board. “If this isn’t making sense, you aren’t making sense. Say what you mean and mean what you say.”

She waited for the class to find their mistake. “Right, this function will never be undefined. Why? You know it’s a polynomial, and our polynomials are—? Show me hands.”

Students gamely trace swooping curves in the air, and she smiles. “Yes, smooth curves. And are smooth curves always going to be defined? Yes.”

Monegan prodded her students to talk her through the entire lesson. She liked to keep the teenagers physically active, constantly calling for students to model slopes with their arms, trace the kind of curve generated by particular functions, or give a quick show of hands to agree with another student’s answer: “Thumb up, yes; thumb down, no; thumb sideways if you have no clue.”

She made a point of calling out the students who went quiet or sounded hesitant.

“What do we get here? Come on, who’s brave?” she exhorted them to find the rate of change for one function at a point on a graph. One girl volunteered, but described the wrong function. When Monegan corrected the sentence, the girl ducked her head and muttered, “Sorry.”

Without missing a beat, Monegan told the girl she had no reason to apologize. “Does anything happen if you are wrong? Nothing, we are all going to still be here.”

At the occasional forest of sideways thumbs, Monegan stopped for quick-and-dirty reviews. Math, after all, is hierarchical, perhaps more than any of the other content disciplines, and success with new ideas hinges on strong understanding of what’s come before.

When she began teaching the course at the start of the school year, she spent a few weeks reviewing basic skills. It didn’t pay off.

“I realized there was no bang for my buck in it; even if I reviewed them, if we didn’t see it again for another month, they lost it all again,” Monegan said after the class. Now she reviews only when the class gets to problems that hinge on the previous concepts.

“Seeing it within problems gives them more of a reason to care and want to know how to do it, like, ‘I’m not going to be able to finish unless I figure this out,’” she said.

In situ reviews of this sort have been shown to help students fill holes in their understanding while continuing to learn new material. But Monegan and other teachers continue to feel pressure to help students regain lost academic ground, as the number of struggling students has grown—and their needs have deepened.

All the teachers EdWeek followed in the 2024-25 school year echoed that point.

And teachers can fall behind, not just because of the time it takes to reteach, but because of unexpected shuffling in classes, noted math teacher Cristina Hernandez at Bonita Vista High School, southeast of San Diego and less than 15 minutes from the U.S.-Mexican border.

For the past two or three years, Hernandez said, class rosters have changed significantly in the first month of school. That has meant establishing new relationships and classroom norms again and again, slowing down her carefully planned pacing schedule.

“It will be like, ‘Hey, spend the first week or so doing [social-emotional learning]. Let us figure out all the classes, and then you can start teaching content,” Hernandez said. She starts Thursdays with two-hour, back-to-back Calculus classes—one with 38 students, the next with 42.

Griggs-Hopkins tries to make sure her students don’t feel overwhelmed by learning gaps from lower grades. She decks her class walls with a tip sheet of key concepts and equations (a cheeky reference labeled SISK, for “S---- I Should Know”), as well as a silhouette of the Schuyler sisters from “Hamilton” exhorting students to “Work!”

For all of those supports, students were cheating a lot more. Griggs-Hopkins considered it a holdover from virtual school, when it was difficult to ensure students were actively learning instead of seeking shortcuts.

Griggs-Hopkins tried to get ahead of any inclination toward cheating during one class this October, in which students were finding derivatives on a scientific calculator.

“If you are doing derivatives by hand and want to check your answer, your calculator is a good way to check your work, right?” she told a class of juniors and seniors. “The bottom line is there will be parts of the test where you get a calculator and parts where you don’t, so you need to know how to do this both ways.”

A few students huffed at that, but most seemed to appreciate learning more than one approach, nodding along or pulling her into little conversations to show off their work.

“I have conversations [about cheating] all the time,” Griggs-Hopkins said after class, “around this idea of, you could cheat all you want, but eventually it’s going to catch up to you. There has to come a point where you have to want to learn this.”

Engagement falters

Convincing students to see value in their education and to apply themselves to their work has gotten harder, the teachers said. From the core subjects all the way to electives like art, teachers have faced student disengagement in learning—and had to brainstorm new ways to motivate them.

“I’ve felt in the last couple of years the thing that was most prevalent and hardest to combat was not problems with skills—I’ve done that my whole life—but the apathy, the not wanting to try,” Griggs-Hopkins said.

While teaching one algebra lesson, she said, she often had to cajole each student individually to start a problem in a new exercise.

“I’m like, there are 40 of you; I cannot go to each of you individually” to start you on the work, she recounted. “And by the time I walk around the whole class and get back to the first, they haven’t even done one more.”

At the start of a new marking period in October, Griggs-Hopkins switched up the student groups in her class and spent the first part of her class soliciting math-punny names for the new teams, like Barely Functioning and My Limit Does Not Exist.

The exercise did double duty in the first after-lunch period, giving the ever-present stragglers time to make it to class and encouraging her students to socialize in the context of math. Explaining their team names helped students commit to their new classmates, while also giving them a low-key review of definitions like functions and limits.

Lack of engagement is a phenomenon that transcends urban, high-need environments to small, rural locales.

Clayton Hubert is used to juggling a lot of different student needs. He teaches art to all K-8 students and high school elective students in the 400-student Red Rock Central school district in Minnesota, a rural district not quite halfway between Minneapolis and Sioux City, Iowa.

But he, too, said students seem less motivated now than earlier in his teaching career.

“They run into something, and their instinct is not to persevere—but then I ask if they think they’re persevering, and they say yes,” he said. “What they think is working hard is not what the groups before them thought was working hard.”

It’s led Hubert to restructure each of his art lessons to make it easier for students to see their progress.

At the start of a unit on watercolors in October, Hubert let students paint freely for a while, then ran them through his “watercolor boot camp,” demonstrating and having the students practice 16 different painting techniques.

One afternoon toward the middle of the unit, students practiced making three wide, extra-long paper bookmarks using the techniques they had learned, refining the ones they liked best and could execute cleanly. One girl painted one bookmark entirely blue, then blotted it with a sponge for texture; a boy nearby carefully striped multiple shades of green down the length of his bookmark.

Later in the week, the students would create a final bookmark showcasing their chosen techniques for a grade.

“From beginning to end, hopefully you can say, ‘Yeah, I grew. I got better,’” Hubert said after class. “It’s about seeing and recognizing growth.”

Asked to what she attributes disengagement in school, Griggs-Hopkins blames the lack of engagement in part on the saturation of technology that, this past year, led to a backlash against cellphones in schools, both in Sweetwater and nationwide.

“It’s a slightly depressing thing, but I think part of it is that they aren’t interacting with other humans,” she said. “Technology allows them to not interact in real life—to go home and hole up in your house and play video games. It’s not every kid, but I feel like it’s gotten worse since the pandemic.”

Monegan takes a blunt approach to keeping her students off phones.

“If I see your cellphone, I will pretend I’m a pitcher, I promise,” she told her students during an October class, miming a baseball wind-up.

Encouraging students to take ownership of their learning—whether naming their math team, reflecting on their art progress, or setting future goals—is key to engaging them, teachers said.

One February morning, four 3rd graders at Horizon Elementary in Volusia County, Fla., sat in a solemn semi-circle around academic interventionist Kassandra Geyer. All had struggled on mid-year reading assessments, and Geyer focused first and foremost on getting them to take ownership of their progress. She shared each student’s current grade, reading off a spreadsheet on her computer, and asked them if they wanted to maintain their grade, or strive for something higher.

“Last grading period, you got a D. What do you want to strive for?” she asked one student.

“An A.”

“An A? Awesome, write that down,” Geyer said.

She turned to another student.

“Last semester, you got a B. You’re lower than that right now, are you going for the B or an A?”

“An A.”

“Sweet,” Geyer said.

Two more students, with a C and a B, echoed the goal of an A.

“Nice, I like those goals,” Geyer said. All four students perked up in their seats.

Her students, across grade levels, come from various racial/ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. Three are English learners. Some have conflicts at home, such as divorcing parents, and others are experiencing homelessness.

But when they’re in Geyer’s classroom, they are simply students working with their teacher to make progress in English/language arts and math skills.

“They understand that they know what they need to do, and I just try to give them the respect, and then kind of want them to give it back to me, and that way they can respect each other,” she said.

A diverse population

Geyer and other teachers we followed said the culture and community of their schools both helped them stay connected and motivated as educators and helped them make instruction feel more relevant to their students’ lives.

The daughter of Cuban immigrants, Geyer tries to tie students’ academic engagement back to supporting their community. Her own background and her son, a student at her school, drive her commitment to teaching. She regularly dons a T-shirt depicting the Cuban poet and political activist José Martí, whose writings and work were key to the success of the Cuban War of Independence against Spain.

Geyer believes in Martí's philosophy of education as a tool for freedom. “Education is your way out. That’s kind of how I see it,” Geyer said.

The United States’ multiethnic, polyglot student body is the leading edge of the nation’s demographic evolution. (The number of Latino, African American, and Asian students in public K-12 classrooms surpassed the number of non-Hispanic white students in 2015.) But that diversity comes with additional challenges, like students’ cultural and linguistic needs, that can also be a stressor.

Teachers said they need more support to respond to those needs.

In New York, where roughly 1 in 10 students is learning English as a new language, Schenectady teacher Carrie White said she has trouble keeping up. The county has seen a rapid rise in immigrant families since 2018, and has one of the largest education disparities between native- and foreign-born residents in the state.

“My students are entering with less and less skill,” said White, a 2nd grade teacher at Yates Elementary School.

“As an urban district, we’ve always tended to have higher [English-learner populations] … but we have had such an influx, all schools are kind of full now,” she said.

While her school has Spanish versions of some lessons and tools, White said she often relies on Google Translate to help her communicate with students and parents who come from homes where other languages are spoken. White said she had very little preservice English-learner training, and while teachers in her school have received some professional development from the district in working with ELs, it isn’t enough to prepare them for the intensity and variety of student needs.

“We have so many immigrant families coming in; we have students arriving two days after coming to the country,” White said. “As regular ed. teachers, we’re not trained for anything like that.

“My goal used to be to make sure my students are ready for 3rd grade and have mastered all the 2nd grade standards. It’s still that, but it looks pretty different when I still have students who need skills from kindergarten. … My goal is just to see improvement and get them as close to grade level as I possibly can in the year,” White said.

Across the country in California, Griggs-Hopkins said she chose to work at Sweetwater Union, one of the oldest school districts in the state, in part because of its diversity.

“It’s definitely lower income, very Hispanic, and it’s got old-community vibes,” she said. “There are students’ grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles—family generations who’ve gone to this school. It’s very much a vibe of history and tradition.”

She also relies on online translators frequently, although the universal nature of math helps to somewhat bridge the language divide.

“I can show you 2+5=7 whether you know English or not,” Griggs-Hopkins said. “The hard part is when you have a kid that has low English and low math [skills], because you can’t figure out where they’re confused as easily.”

The political discourse about immigration and citizenship has made some of those challenges more acute. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship (since halted by several federal judges, the order is being appealed and may go to the Supreme Court his administration has promised to increase deportations of noncitizens and did away with a policy that before had designated schools as protected places from raids by federal immigration authorities.

In San Ysidro High School, less than five miles from the Mexico border, students are worried about what increased immigration enforcement could mean for their communities, teachers there say. The school has hired three counselor interns to provide additional mental health support for students this semester, and has trained staff in how to turn back immigration officers who try to come on campus without a clear warrant for a specific student or adult on school grounds.

“We’re like, ‘No, we’re a learning environment: You’re not allowed on campus,’” said Monegan, the math teacher there.

She said she worries about her largely Hispanic students, though she does not know—and doesn’t inquire about—their immigration status.

“It’s not like I’m going to walk around and say, ‘Are you legal? Are you?’ But I worry about them and their well-being; that keeps me up sometimes,” Monegan said.

Monegan and other educators worry that families’ fears about immigration enforcement could keep them from sending their children to school, worsening an already uphill fight to get students to come to school regularly.

Absenteeism persists

Chronic absenteeism continues to affect teachers from coast to coast—another factor that continues to reshape the profession, and teachers’ attitudes toward it.

In all of the districts EdWeek visited for this project—from Minnesota to Florida, California to New York—chronic absenteeism rates remained above 2018-19 levels.

And while rates nationwide have improved slightly since the pandemic, more than 1 in 4 students still miss at least 10 percent of their school days, according to the Return to Learn Tracker, a project by the American Enterprise Institute think tank that collected data on attendance during and after the pandemic. Those empty seats drain teachers’ energy and morale, forcing them to constantly reteach concepts and straining their relationships with students.

Monegan spent much of the fall struggling to find and loop in a pair of boys who consistently missed class.

“I don’t know what to do with them,” she said, exasperated, in November. “I’ve called home, gotten the counselor involved, the principal involved, but it’s kind of out of my hands.

“When they are here, I try to catch them up as much as I can—they’re also really nice kids, and they try really hard when they are here—so I hope they can get it together,” she said.

In the Sweetwater Union high school district, where Monegan, Griggs-Hopkins, and Hernandez all teach, chronic absenteeism is twice as high as it was in 2019. Report cards over the winter break helped motivate students somewhat.

“I had some heart-to-hearts like, ‘Hey, you know, last semester you would’ve earned credit if you were here, but you wouldn’t do anything,’ ” Monegan said. “A couple of those kids that were never coming have been here in January: So far, so good. We’ll see.”

In New York state, at Yates Elementary, White is part of the school’s attendance working group—“one of the most important in school,” she said, since more than half of students were chronically absent as of 2023. They regularly analyze student data and reach out to families to offer help with transportation and other services.

But in winter, families can get mixed messages.

“Unfortunately, with all the sickness, it’s really hard, you know?” White said. “We tell parents, ‘Keep your kids home when they’re sick,’ but then we send them a letter saying, ‘You need to be at school.’ I think COVID is still sometimes in people’s head like, ‘Oh, they have a cough; they have to stay home.’ And that’s not the case, because they’re missing a lot of instruction.”

White and her fellow teachers spent January brainstorming a slew of activities to keep the kids motivated to come to school—like class attendance competitions and extra recess or computer free time—to get ahead of a traditional March uptick in absenteeism in Schenectady.

“It’s always a long, difficult month. It’s right before state tests in New York; it’s cold; they’re tired of indoor recess,” White said. “We’re always trying to come up with some way we can get kids motivated to be at school and doing the right things.”

Beyond teaching

Extracurricular activities like sports and clubs are critical to many schools’ drives to boost student engagement and attendance, and they’ve long been responsibilities that have landed on teachers’ plates.

But teachers say that pattern seems to be increasing. All the new strategies districts are putting in? It’s likely teachers who are implementing them. Trying to keep a tutoring program? Teachers are probably administering it. Coaching and mentoring programs? Those usually fall to teachers, too.

These new roles, the teachers said, generally are the result of genuine, well-meaning attempts to solve the real problems students are bringing to school. But the load can be overwhelming.

A large majority of teachers take on additional—and frequently unpaid—non-teaching duties, like administrative support, advising student clubs or sports, and mentoring other teachers.

Juggling multiple roles is part and parcel of many rural teachers’ repertoires. In the Red Rock Central district in Minnesota, Hubert starts his day at 6 a.m. behind the wheel as one of the district’s part-time bus drivers. He also serves as head wrestling coach and manages the student council, along with any other clubs that fall into his lap.

One morning this winter, Hubert had just started trying to catch up on his email backlog during his prep period when a student wandered in asking where the yearbook club should meet. It was another club he’d picked up.

“I forgot about that,” Hubert winced, sending the student to the front office to send a last-minute announcement.

An hour later, Hubert put his correspondence and class prep on hold again to help re-shelve library books and then lug snacks and drinks from an old concession stand ___location to a new building before a Halloween assembly scheduled for the next day.

Hubert often runs school- and club-related errands through his prep time and routinely works through his own lunch. (He teaches elementary school art during the high school lunch period, and vice versa.)

Multiple roles are something of an occupational expectation in a far-flung, small district like Hubert’s. But non-instructional roles are now common for teachers in large schools, too.

Cristina Hernandez serves as math department chair at Bonita Vista High in California, and also spends about five hours a week as a resource teacher there. She gets dedicated time, though not extra money, to help her peers think through lessons and assessments.

The position has been difficult to define, Hernandez said.

“I feel like there’s more I could be doing than, ‘Hey Cristina, could you create a quiz for us?’ ” she said. “I’m trying to figure out how I can approach someone and ask them, ‘How can I help you be a better teacher?’ ”

In February, Monegan was offered a bonus to start coaching other math teachers during her prep period. While she agreed to do it on a trial basis later this spring, she’s wary of what it will mean for her own teaching.

“The money’s good, great, but really it’s time. My prep period is gold, you know?” she said.

Sometimes teacher roles change dramatically over the course of a single year.

Geyer started the 2024-25 school year as a an experienced 3rd grade teacher at Horizon Elementary, 10 miles south of Daytona Beach, Fla. But Volusia County opened a new primary school this year, and many Horizon families switched enrollment.

With significantly fewer 3rd graders to teach by mid-September, the school reassigned Geyer, an elementary classroom teacher, to serve as an interventionist for grades 1-5.

“I’ve been teaching for over 11 years, so I kind of had my routine of how things go, how things roll,” Geyer said. “With an intervention role, the whole set-up is different. … There’s more flexibility, which is nice, but there’s more to manage.”

Geyer, who has a master’s degree in reading instruction, started working with small groups of students, most of whom need intensive reading supports and some of whom she helps identify to receive individualized education programs. In the afternoons, she turns to math interventions.

One morning in early November, she moved from quiet discussions of story themes with a group of soft-spoken 5th graders to navigating phonics lessons with a little crew of wriggly 1st graders, eager to shout out words like “fan” and “man” that they spelled out with magnet board tiles. Depending on students’ progress after her work with them, Geyer gets new crops of students about every six weeks.

New roles were added to Geyer’s portfolio throughout the year: She started tutoring English learners after school on Tuesdays and Fridays in November. By February, that had expanded to general tutoring on Mondays and Thursdays, too.

Geyer had started to develop an intervention rhythm by December—even helping classroom teachers hone their practices for small-group instruction.

Then in mid-December, she abruptly had to switch gears to help administer state and county assessments and to run a schoolwide spelling bee. And after winter break, Geyer and other interventionists got tapped to oversee test-makeup days, disrupting her rhythm and cutting into her work with students.

By February, while Geyer’s workday had returned to teaching English/language arts intervention groups in the morning and math after lunch, she started spending her afternoons co-teaching or acting more generally as a teacher’s aide.

While she is happy to help, it leads to time-management stress.

“I wish there was enough time in the day to get everything that you need to get done,” Geyer said. “Knowing that you didn’t get all your stuff done still plays like mental baggage when you go home.”

Through the looking glass

For all these new and evolving challenges, the teachers in this project were resilient, developing solutions to the new problems they encountered. They had some bad days, but in interviews, did not complain much about the demands of the job.

White, Hernandez, and Monegan all said they got a real boost this spring, as their students met the academic goals they had set in fall. And they could see, in tangible ways, students’ improved socialization.

Compared to the start of the school year, “I feel like my kids are light years ahead, not just in their mathematical abilities, but in their abilities to know how to be students: how to have their materials, how to be ready, how to ask questions and talk to their peers,” Monegan said in January. “Their maturity level has just grown so much; it makes me very happy.”

Hernandez also took pride in her students’ emotional and academic development. She has started spending the first 10 minutes of every class period simply catching up with her students, asking about their lives and their confidence in the things they are learning. It has helped her better shape the format of her lessons.

“It’s one of my favorite parts of the day, when they open up to me,” she said. “Sometimes I can feel the energy, and … if they aren’t feeling it today, we can adjust—we can still learn math, but change to do it in a way that makes them feel more comfortable.”

“I have students tell me, ‘I can tell you love your job,’ and that’s one of the best things I can hear,” Hernandez said.

The open question—and the one that as of yet has no answer—is what that job will look like five years from now. Will it be even more demanding? Can it continue to attract young people who can adapt as rapidly?

What emerged over months of talking to these teachers is this insight: Like nursing, social work, and other public-service fields, teaching is a frenetic, high-stakes profession that asks much of its practitioners.

Perhaps unlike those jobs, though, is a lack of widespread public understanding of what it means to teach in 2025. Through the looking glass of the media, portrayals are still awash in sentimentalism; the fallacy that teachers have “short days and summers off” continues.

Hernandez and the other teachers continue to recommend teaching as a career to their students. But not without provisos.

Would-be teachers need to spend more time in classrooms, to “understand the full dynamics of what goes into it,” Geyer said. “It’s more work than I think you can ever realize until you are completely in there.”

She stays motivated to teach by the little lightbulb moments in the students she tutors, and the times she runs into her son, who attends an early child care program at her school, in the hallway. At 3, he welcomes his mother’s hugs in front of his peers.

“I’m just trying to get [my students] to read,” Geyer added. “They need to function in society. It’s just good for everybody involved, not just for them, but for the world that my son is going to be growing up in.”