The little ways that work seeps into teachers’ personal lives—and the strictures that make it harder for teachers to deal with personal issues during the school day—may increase teachers’ stress and burnout.
That’s one conclusion of the 2025 State of the American Teacher survey, released today by the research think tank RAND Corp. Despite the popular perception of teaching as flexible and family-friendly, teachers face more job intrusions into their personal lives than do similarly educated workers in other professions, it finds.
School rules and schedules particularly hamstring female teachers once they became parents.
RAND researchers asked a nationally representative sample of more than 1,400 K-12 teachers and more than 500 similar working adults—those 18-65 who have at least a bachelor’s degree and work at least 35 hours a week—about their stressors, duties, and personal activities at work and at home.
For example, teachers were more than three times as likely as other working adults to say their job made them too tired for personal activities afterward, at 46% versus 13%. And they were more likely than similar workers to say they felt stressed and burned out.
Fewer than half of teachers reported that their schools make efforts to help them with work-life balance, RAND found. Teachers had much more difficulty than their peers in other professions to do things like take a personal call at work or adjust their schedule by an hour or two to deal with personal issues like doctors’ appointments or children’s activities.
How U.S. teachers compare globally
U.S. teachers may also have less flexibility than their peers around the world, according to the latest 2024 results of the Teaching and Learning International Survey—the world’s largest global teaching survey, based on 55 countries and education systems, from Singapore to in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group comprised mainly of developed countries in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Many of the OECD systems that participate in TALIS also take part in the Program for International Student Assessment.
According to TALIS data, nearly 30% of U.S. teachers report frequent on-the-job stress, compared to less than 20% for OECD countries on average. U.S. teachers were also more likely to report that teaching had taken a toll on their mental and physical health.
U.S. lower secondary teachers worked on average more than 45 hours a week in 2024, nearly five hours more than the OECD average.
“Teachers in some of the other countries spend far less, perhaps even half their time in front of a classroom, because their role is conceived of more broadly,” said Jackie Kreamer, director of policy analysis and development for the National Center on Education and the Economy.
“Part of the teacher’s job [in other countries] is to work on curriculum development, work with other teachers, be part of research and other kinds of activities,” Kreamer said. “In some ways, it’s a broader role, which may make it more attractive to people over a longer period of their lifetime.”
Parent workloads are worse for female teachers
Among U.S. teachers, those with 7-10 years of experience are most likely to be tapped for leadership, mentoring, and other roles on campus. Unfortunately, Steiner said, this is the same time when teachers who began in their early 20s are most likely to have young children—and RAND found problems with work-life balance fell heaviest on parents.
RAND found both female and male teachers typically worked the same number of hours at school, but teachers who were parents took on a “second shift” after class in the form of childcare and household chores. Teachers who were also moms spent, on average, 40 hours a week on chores and caregiving, on top of their teaching and other jobs, about 10 hours more on average than teachers who are also dads.
While women typically take on more household duties than men across different occupations, RAND found the gender gap was more likely to lead to burnout among educators.
“Over time, since 2021, we’ve seen really big, very consistent differences between the rates of job-related stress and burnout that female teachers report compared to male teachers,” said Elizabeth Steiner, lead author of the RAND survey. “That’s really important to explore because the teaching workforce is about 75% female, and the elementary school teaching workforce is closer to 90% female.”
While the National Council on Teacher Quality reported earlier this year that nearly half of large school districts it studies now offer at least some personal leave beyond sick days, RAND found teachers’ benefits are less likely than those of similar working adults to include paid parental leave, childcare assistance, or extended personal leave. Few states and districts provide teachers full paid family leave, though studies find it can improve health of both infants and mothers.
A little flexibility can go a long way
Teachers’ happiness with their jobs is much more closely linked to their relationships with their school leaders in the United States than in other OECD countries, TALIS data show—in part because U.S. schools do not have as standardized workplaces as those in other countries, and school leaders can have an outsized effect on school climate and teacher morale.
Even small flexibilities can make a big difference in teachers’ well-being and work-life balance, Steiner suggested.
“Administrators being supportive of boundaries for work—trying to minimize meetings and administrative tasks, allowing teachers to take small increments of time off, like an hour to go to the dentist as an example, rather than having to take an entire day—those sorts of flexible conditions teachers found to be extremely helpful,” Steiner said.
The RAND report also advised district leaders to consider work flexibility as an important part of teacher contracts, which typically shape the benefits teachers have. The average teacher benefit package included perks like paid sick leave, retirement or pensions contributions, and health insurance.
But teachers with benefits that included paid parental leave and more personal leave reported better work-life balance and retention. Seventy-five percent of teachers with children under age 5 who had paid parental leave reported that they used all of it.
