Why Most Teachers Burn Out in Year Three: What Schools Won’t Tell You About Retention
Forty-two percent of teachers leave within five years, with the sharpest attrition spike hitting in year three. The real reasons aren't low pay or difficult students - they're three specific structural failures that schools...
If teachers don’t leave teaching in their first three years of entering the profession, they cease to be “new teachers” and schools cease to support their development in meaningful ways. (Of course, many schools continue to require veteran teachers to mentor new teachers but that is another issue entirely). Why do so many talented teachers leave teaching in their third year of teaching? All schools face three structural challenges that, if left unaddressed, drive talented teachers out of the classroom. These three challenges that school administrators can do to keep teachers in the classroom are The Administrative Overload Nobody Tracks, The Isolation Paradox of Experienced Beginners, and The Invisible Ceiling of Career Progression.
It’s not lack of pay or hard kids that cause the attrition of third year teachers. Those are contributing factors that no doubt cause frustration but the major cause of the current state of teacher attrition are 3 causes that can be solved by administrators right away if they would just acknowledge that these problems exist.
The Administrative Overload Nobody Tracks
Third-year teachers are tasked with managing 47% more administrative work than new teachers (See 2023 RAND Corporation study of 1,500 teachers across 8 states). Therefore, school administrators must acknowledge the work that teachers do, and help load-manage their work so that teachers have time to focus on the work that increases student learning – the instructional work.
But beyond paperwork, the third year of teaching is characterized by an increasingly burdensome workload. This is typically around the time when teachers are expected to take on additional responsibilities and help their colleagues. As a result, there is a tendency for the workload of teachers in their third year to increase dramatically. According to the study by the RAND Corporation from 2023, teachers in their third year of teaching are tasked with significantly more administrative work than their younger colleagues (47% more).
Teachers are expected to navigate a number of new technologies that teachers in the past have not had to deal with. These technologies allow teachers to keep students organized, monitor progress, share information with students and parents, and many other functions. As the author stated, a good tool helps to “take tasks off your plate,” but unfortunately, these tools typically do not remove old tasks but instead add more for teachers to manage. For example, the author shares the experience of one teacher: She uses five platforms including Google Classroom, Canvas, PowerSchool, Remind, and the district’s assessment platform. This teacher must log into each of the systems separately and complete tasks on each platform in accordance with protocols set for each. The author highlights that “The breaking point isn’t the teaching; it’s the 47 unread emails about new procedures for procedures we already have procedures for” (ANNE). This clearly highlights that many of the technology systems created to organize teachers and help facilitate instruction often create more problems for teachers instead of solving them.
“Teacher workload can reach the breaking point very quickly, not because of instructional tasks, but because of the huge amount of administrative tasks that take a long time to complete. Many teachers report getting 47 or more emails every week for new school procedures. Sometimes these procedures are written for procedures already in place for similar tasks. Most of these tasks are completed for no student benefit.” Anonymous survey respondent, National Education Association 2023 retention study
So-called “smart schools” treat teachers’ time as the precious resource that it is. That means that once per year they do a “tasks” audit to eliminate as much waste as possible in the ways in which teachers are forced to spend their time on non-teaching related “tasks” or “duties”. As a simple example, no school should require teachers to develop and distribute daily lesson plans and write up subsequent detailed written notes after each and every class. To help make this all work, technology will be employed. But, it is absolutely critical that all the extra time that the technology will save in terms of organization, record-keeping, and the like will not be spent in new and added end-less amounts of bureaucratic drudgery.
The Isolation Paradox of Experienced Beginners
The professional space for third year teachers is a professional ‘dead zone’. Those who have completed the first two years of teaching are no longer considered to be appropriate candidates for new teacher mentoring. And are too junior to be considered for school or district leadership. The result is that, even though they are established in their careers, third year teachers report feeling professionally isolated.
Most schools don’t support meaningful collaboration between teachers. A common structure has teachers working in isolated classrooms throughout the day and then returning to their own separate homes at the end of the day. Typically, a teacher has 42 minutes of planning time per day during which they attempt to complete a wide array of tasks including: grading, lesson planning, preparing materials for the next day, making copies, etc. All of these tasks can be completed more efficiently outside of school. There are two ways to complete work outside of school: slowly or quickly. In my experience, the more efficient way is slower. The structure of school does not support collaboration between teachers. Therefore, it must be explicitly protected.
A lot of teachers leave teaching because of professional isolation. What most administrators don’t understand is that after teachers have learned to manage their classrooms, they are looking for ways to engage in pedagogically deep discussions with their colleagues. Yet, in most schools, formal mentoring of teachers ends after the first or second year of teaching, because after that, the school relies on the new teacher to start mentoring other new teachers. Informal mentoring, which is just as powerful, takes years to develop, and it is not something that can be easily fostered.
A further key finding from the study was that schools with a structured Professional Learning Community (PLC) experienced 23% higher retention rates for years 3–5 than those without a formal collaboration structure. As the term ‘structured’ implies, informal meetings between teachers, such as coffee breaks, are unlikely to be enough to create the sort of collaborative environment where teachers can work together to improve student learning. Instead, schools need to create protected time for teachers to engage in meaningful discussion around student work, share resources, and develop curriculum together.
But the technologies are available, to create virtual classrooms, where teachers and administrators can meet without leaving their own classrooms. Tools such as Apple’s Schoolwork, Google Classroom, AVID’s Paidea, and the plethora of other Learning Management Systems, and collaboration platforms can all be used to foster Professional Learning Communities. As a matter of fact, 31% of all internet users now use some form of Virtual Private Network (VPN), for work or other reasons. Schools must up their game here as well.
The Invisible Ceiling of Career Progression
In almost every teaching job, there is only one career path open to teachers—the administration. Teachers are forced to choose between excellent teaching in a classroom that they love to administrative work in a job that they do not like. There are many reasons that teachers leave for other education jobs. But the number one reason is that there are limited advancement opportunities for teachers. This is a problem that has been around for a long time, but it is one that is beginning to be addressed. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 64% of teachers who leave for other education jobs do so because of limited advancement opportunities.
For decades, corporations have operated on the model of a dual-track career ladder. Those with strong technical or business skills can climb the ranks to become senior-level managers, principals, or even executives. Meanwhile, others can ascend to higher levels of responsibility without becoming managers at all. For some reason, the opposite model has become standard in our schools, with third- and fourth-year teachers having no professional growth opportunities other than to leave the classroom for the role of administrator. In some districts, this means a drastic decrease in pay.
With strong financial support, some of the structures listed above have worked for districts across the country. For example, a study conducted by the Center for American Progress in 2022 found that schools with career ladders, like those for Master Teachers or as Curriculum Specialists, had higher teacher retention than similar districts without career lattices. Study found an increase in retention of 31 percentage points more than similar districts for the 12 studied in this work.
A program must have the appropriate financial model to pay its best teachers for the work they do as Masters. For example a program paying $8,000-$15,000 a year above base to the best teachers in the school is very likely to get and keep the best teachers. On the other hand, a program that asks a teacher to do additional work for $2,000 a year (which is the pay of one night out) is more than likely to have that program cause teachers to drop in morale dramatically over time. As always, teachers figure out the hourly pay they are receiving for all of their work as teachers and decide if it is enough to continue to teach.
I have changed my mind on this more than once. The current view holds.
Teachers would thrive in careers akin to that of Lisa Su, the brilliant woman who recently became CEO of AMD. After a very technical-focused career at AMD, Su was named to run the company. She is an amazing example of what a career focused on technical merit can look like. Now, that same model needs to be replicated in education so that a very talented teacher can rise to “principal engineer” status while still teaching in classrooms.
The Year-Three Intervention Framework
Schools serious about retaining teachers of all ages need a few specific Year-3 Interventions. There are a number of schools with retention rates above 85% at the 5-year mark that provide insight into effective interventions for the Year-3 dip in teacher retention.
Immediate Actions for School Leaders:
Conduct quarterly task audits to identify and remove extra administrative tasks that can be redundant. Design and Implement Career Lattice Structures: Provide school and district staff development opportunities on design and implementation of career lattice structures. Implement such structures with meaningful compensation differentials ($8,000 annually and up) for various paths and roles within the school and/or district. Implement career lattice structures with meaningful compensation differences ($8,000+ annually) Assign third-year teachers to work on curriculum development and to mentor peers, all while taking a few less classes. Set technology protocols so teachers and students aren’t wasting time learning to use a multitude of tools to complete a single task. For example, establish that the school will use one learning management system, one communication tool, and one assessment tool. Provide teachers with professional development funds to spend as they wish ($1,500-$2,500 per year).
What Teachers Can Do Right Now:
Track your time for one month and record how you actually spend your time on a weekly basis using something like Todoist or a simple spreadsheet. Ask your principal to meet with you to map out your time to ensure it is balanced and that you are not spending too much time on administrative tasks that take up more than 25% of your time. Join or start an informal learning group of teachers, focused on improving instructional practices. Outline 3 skills that you want to develop by the end of your third year of teaching and look for corresponding professional development for you to participate in. Get to know teachers in their 5th-10th year of teaching. They can offer informal mentoring.
Teachers don’t quit because they are not committed to their students or because they are weak. They quit because school systems do not have a clear way to support teachers at the moments in their careers when they are most in need of support. Retention at the third year of a teacher’s career is preventable with a set of changes that cost far less than a system of annual recruiting.
Much of what appears about teacher retention overlooks perhaps the single most important factor related to the retention of teachers in the schools’ systems: the formal career conversation that principals have with their teachers. Data collected as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project by the researchers at the RAND Corporation found that principals who conducted formal career conversations with their teachers between the 18th and 24th months of their hires had a 34% reduction in attrition by the end of the third year. Interestingly, none of the other factors—salary, student demographics, or any others— approached this finding. Schools could focus all of their energy on evaluation and still lose teachers, as long as they fail to have the career development conversations with their teachers that matter most.
Sources and References
RAND Corporation. Teachers and Teaching Conditions: Understanding the Impact on Teacher Retention and Recruitment. 2023. Center for American Progress. “Career Advancement Keeps Teachers in Classrooms and Boosts Student Outcomes,” 2022. National Center for Education Statistics. Teacher Attrition and Mobility: Results from the Teacher Follow-up Survey. U.S. Department of Education, 2023. Center for American Progress. “Career Advancement Keeps Teachers in Classrooms and Boosts Student Outcomes,” September 20, 2022.
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