"One of the best teachers I know has decided to quit. She said she’s not quitting because teaching got harder. She’s quitting because it’s become the wrong kind of hard" (Reneau, 2025).
In just a few words, education researcher Julie Schmidt Hasson perfectly captured what so many teachers are feeling right now. They aren’t leaving the profession because they lost their passion or stopped caring about students or feel too fatigued to collaborate—it’s the opposite, in fact. The work they love has become buried under layers of bureaucracy, micromanagement, lack of support, and tasks that pull them away from their purpose.
The top reasons teachers stay in the job are “meaningful work” and “colleagues,” according to a McKinsey survey (Bryant et al., 2023). Besides low pay, what drives them out is the feeling of being “overworked and undervalued.”
With teacher shortages a seemingly intractable challenge, it can be easy to focus only on the crisis. But this issue of Educational Leadership highlights something different—schools, districts, states, and even countries that are successfully enticing their best teachers to stay.
What are they doing right? From the articles you’ll read, five strategies stand out.
1. Build trust through autonomy. According to UNESCO research, in schools with participatory leadership—where teachers are consulted in important decisions—both climate and student outcomes improve. Leaders must proactively involve teachers in curriculum and assessment design, professional learning, and school policies, not just ask for feedback after decisions have been made.
2. Create sustainable support systems. Positioning teaching as a “calling” shortchanges the real technical work required of the job. However, pairing purpose with structural protections like reasonable workloads, value-aligned tasks, and systematic professional collaboration such as peer coaching enables teachers to thrive. Principal pipelines that focus on sustainability also ensure leadership support doesn’t vanish alongside personnel changes.
3. Make belonging real, not performative. Move beyond surface-level appreciation to truly valuing your teachers. For educators of color, especially, provide meaningful pathways to leadership and support—rather than question—outside networking and culturally affirming learning.
4. Focus on what really matters. Increase teachers’ autonomy around instruction and drop time-consuming tasks that have little impact on students. Teachers don’t mind teaching—they mind excessive paperwork and micromanagement. What can you eliminate today?
5. Measure success differently. Use “stay conversations” and exit interviews conducted by third parties to gather data from teachers who leave. Develop systems for monitoring teachers’ well-being: “If schools can track hallway noise and tardies,” they can assess whether teachers feel psychologically safe.
There are countless reasons teachers leave the job, especially within the first five years. But there are also proven reasons teachers stay—when they are trusted as professionals, supported holistically, and empowered to shape the systems they work within. By implementing practices such as those shared in this issue, leaders can begin to transform the “wrong kind of hard” back into the right kind of hard—the challenge of reaching every student.
