Boosting teacher morale requires district and school administrators to give classroom educators time to observe and learn from colleagues, address student discipline concerns, and encourage educators to weigh in on where their schools are headed.
Those were some of the main themes shared by a group of California educators on a panel held here this week focused on improving teacher job satisfaction.
The panel was part of an event hosted by Education Week, in partnership with EdSource, highlighting new national and state-level findings from Education Week’s The State of Teaching project, an annual research and reporting effort that explores the working lives of teachers and how schools can support them.
For the project, the EdWeek Research Center measured job satisfaction on the Teacher Morale Index, a consistent year-over-year gauge on how teachers view the profession. In 2026, the national index stood at +13 on a scale of -100 to +100. While that’s a slight decline from last year’s score of +18, it suggests that teachers overall view their jobs more positively than negatively. In California, that index stood at +16.
Still, educators at the March 19 event spoke about how disruptive student behavior and a lack of support from administrators can lower teacher morale in the Golden State and elsewhere—and how those factors can in turn hurt student academic achievement.
They spoke of the need for administrators to validate the work teachers do as a skilled, specialized occupation, not just a calling.
“I see my job as a profession, and I want to be treated as a professional,” said Eric Lewis, a science teacher in the San Francisco Unified district, who was one of the panelists.
Creating positive working conditions in schools is a team effort
Lewis, who has been teaching for 27 years, said administrators can treat teachers as professionals by providing clarity on what their work should entail and a school’s mission.
“Yes we want to educate our kids and we want to do it well, but how we do it should be different based on [the school environment],” Lewis said, “and sometimes there’s a big mismatch for that with teachers and their administrators.”
For Alicia Simba, a transitional kindergarten teacher in the Oakland Unified school district who has taught since 2020, it means administrators taking teachers’ concerns about bad student behavior seriously. Transitional kindergarten, which became accessible to all 4-year-olds in the state this school year, is California’s version of pre-K.
“It’s very exhausting being kicked or screamed at ... and then going to families, and them being like, ‘Well, they never do that.’ Or administrators being like, ‘Well, have you tried relationship-building?’” Simba said.
She said she’s fortunate to have an administrator who takes her at her word, and she benefits from families who work with her to address disruptive behaviors.
Vito Chiala, the principal of William Overfelt High School, in the East Side Union High School District, started as a teacher at the school he’s been leading for the last 19 years.
When he was a classroom educator, Chiala recalled that he had a principal who respected the work he and his colleagues were doing. They could trust that the principal would listen to teachers and allow teachers to weigh in on the school’s direction.
That collective foundation and transparency are key for school and district leaders to build on if they want to ensure high teacher job satisfaction, said Chiala, whose school is in San Jose, south of San Francisco.
Once he became a principal, Chiala sought to help teachers manage the biggest practical challenges they face on the job. He heard them say they didn’t have time to complete grading, read Individualized Education Programs for students in special education, and prepare lessons for English learners.
In response, his school built a schedule with a prep period and an open period for teachers to get work done.
It’s about “holding teachers in high regard at the administrative level, and allowing them access to power on top of that foundation of doing meaningful work collectively,” he said.
At the district level, support can look like a superintendent meeting regularly with union leadership representing both teachers and classified staff, such as paraeducators and bus drivers, as Chris Hoffman, the former superintendent of the Elk Grove Unified school system, did during his tenure, which lasted from 2014 to his retirement last year.
“It’s our paraeducators, it’s our campus supervisors, our bus drivers, it’s our principals, it’s everybody feeling that this is a more difficult time to do the work,” Hoffman said. That makes it all the more important, he said, to ensure everyone is at the table when making decisions on how to improve morale.
A connection between high teacher morale and student performance
Being an effective teacher requires hard work, and if a teacher has low morale, they are less likely to put in the extra effort required to do their jobs well.
That leads to a cycle in which the quality of students’ education suffers, the morale across a school suffers, and problems emerge with student behavior, the panelists said.
“If you’re not a happy teacher, your students are going to pick up on it,” Lewis said.
Some of the more detailed strategies the panelists suggested on improving teacher job satisfaction included allowing for teachers, especially newer ones, to learn from their colleagues through observation.
While Simba went through a distinct pathway of teacher preparation (studying education as an undergraduate, then pursuing a master’s degree, then obtaining a teaching credential) she credits fellow classroom teachers as the source of many of the practical strategies she uses on the job.
Teacher morale also hinges on teachers receiving support to improve their classroom practices, which is likely to result in better student outcomes, Hoffman said.
That professional improvement can be accomplished by districts and schools providing practical, district-level training. For example, to better enact restorative justice practices at his schools (a less punitive approach to student discipline with the goal of getting ahead of bad behavior), Hoffman’s district took about three years to train all educators in understanding what restorative practices are.
They also gave educators time to examine their own belief systems about restorative practices and provided skillsets so when educators saw student behaviors they needed to address, they knew how to respond.
Teachers also need more opportunities to learn about how to improve in their profession while getting paid to do that work, Lewis said.
“If you’re not learning more as a teacher, you’re falling behind,” Lewis said, “because your students are new, the technology is new, the content is new, so we need to be constantly learning and building that in.”
