Survey Shows Teacher Satisfaction Climbing Over Quarter Century

Teachers’ views on their profession have become markedly more positive over the past quarter-century, at least partially validating the widespread school improvement efforts of the period, concludes a retrospective-survey report released this week by MetLife Inc.

“The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Past, Present, and Future” is the company’s 25th annual survey of educators. The series was begun in 1984, a year after the catalytic A Nation at Risk report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, as a way of capturing teachers’ unique and sometimes overlooked perspectives on the conditions in schools and the impact of reform initiatives. (The MetLife Foundation also provides funding to teachermagazine.org , a sister publication of Education Week .)

The current report, based in part on telephone interviews of a nationally representative sample of 1,000 teachers conducted by Harris Interactive, offers a composite look at how those perspectives have changed over the past 2½ decades. The survey method, according to MetLife, has been consistent over that period. The sampling error is plus or...