It’s Pay, Yes, But Other Things Also Matter

Tyler Hester, Ed.L.D.’20, says he’ll never forget how a Boston Teachers Union (BTU) leader reacted to seeing dozens of teachers arrive on a wintry night in 2018 for another of Hester’s sessions about improving well-being: These shouldn’t be so popular. 

The BTU veteran had seen professional development programs fizzle out over the years, but demand for Hester’s sessions showed no signs of abating — and that revealed a problem. Teachers were struggling. It’s a problem that Hester, as co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit Educators Thriving, has spent the past several years studying, with the aim of offering solutions school systems can implement to boost teacher resilience, morale, and retention. 

“Mister Rogers said, ‘Whatever is mentionable is manageable.’ And I think too often, because we can’t measure some of the things around people’s experience, we don’t even mention it. And when we don’t mention it, we don’t even attempt to manage it,” Hester says. 

Last fall, Educators Thriving released its latest measure of how teachers are faring. The second annual Educator Well-Being Report Card is a comprehensive look at how teachers feel about their work and workplaces. The report is based on a survey that nearly 9,000 educators took during the 2024–25 school year, and it focuses on seven factors that Educators Thriving, in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers, have found to be predictive of job, satisfaction and mental and physical health. These factors include school- and system-wide concerns such as having responsive leadership, a supportive culture, and foundational necessities such as adequate compensation and sufficient staff. But the factors also include personal capacities such as the degree to which an educator is flexible, oriented toward growth, accepts difficult emotions, and practices well-being outside of work. 

Lessons Learned 

A few themes stood out in the survey’s results. One is that the most predictive factor of educator well-being is the degree to which they feel backed by leadership. This support may take the form of principals seeking teachers’ input, taking their concerns seriously, and including them in decision-making. It’s also expressed as a willingness to be responsive to faculty needs and to keep lines of communication open. 

For example, the report found that a little more than half of educators feel administrators back them in dealing with student behavior, mental health, and discipline. (Such student problems are the second-leading reason, behind compensation, that teachers leave schools, the report says.) Many teachers say they’d like principals to clearly communicate shared values and apply a consistent discipline process. 

A second major theme that emerged from the survey is how more time spent collaborating with one another affects well-being and teacher retention.

“Teaching can be so isolating,” says Hallie Fox, Hester’s fellow cofounder of Educators Thriving. “You are with a group of young people all day but don’t have a lot of time with other adults to problem- solve and collaborate. And when that time is structured and given to teachers, and they’re authentically sharing problems and working through strategies together, everyone benefits.” 

Collaboration with peers is only part of the picture. Well-being flourishes when collaboration happens up and down the educational organization, again underscoring the importance of supportive leadership. The data from the report bears this out: About half of the variance in well-being from one educator to the next is predicted by how they answer questions about their administrators. 

This finding points to a bright spot in the report, and perhaps its biggest takeaway — teacher well-being can be improved. “The idea that you actually can create conditions for … flourishing is so encouraging,” Hester says. 

Another positive finding is that teachers report a high sense of purpose and making a difference. 

“This is work where it’s not all that common for people to wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether their work matters. We see on a regular basis, a daily basis, that it does,” Hester says. 

Despite that sense of purpose, the challenges are real. Hester experienced them as a middle and high school teacher for four years, then spent five more leading a teacher training program where he saw the prevalence of burnout. 

His career has been driven by a commitment to creating school systems that honor every child’s potential, and along the way, he had a realization: You can’t build excellent outcomes for kids without attending to the adults who teach them. “It’s actually at the level of the adults [teachers] that I think I want to work, and that we must work,” he says. The report card gives school leaders data to create conditions where teachers can thrive and, in turn, serve students better. 

“I can’t think of more important work,” Hester says. 

Kimberly Ashton is a freelance writer and editor whose work focuses on storytelling for educational institutions