Managing student behavior and supporting their well-being, low pay and other factors are among the most stressful for prekindergarten teachers across the country, according to the latest American Pre-K Teacher Survey.
A report released May 6 by Rand Corporation details the survey findings, which examine the well-being, pay and working conditions of public school-based pre-K teachers.
Among the key findings, researchers found that in spring 2024, almost twice as many public school-based pre-K teachers reported experiencing frequent job-related stress as similar working adults. Like their K-12 counterparts, the top-ranked sources of job-related stress among pre-K teachers were managing student behavior, low pay, supporting student mental health and well-being, and administrative work outside teaching.
“These findings are consistent with K-12 teachers’ reports of their top three sources of job-related stress when they selected from a similar set of possible sources in January and February 2024,” the report states. “K-12 teachers’ top-ranked source of job-related stress was managing student behavior, followed by low pay and administrative work outside of teaching. However, a larger share of pre-K teachers ranked managing student behavior in their top three sources of job-related stress (67 percent) than K-12 teachers (45 percent).”
The rate at which educators reported experiencing frequent job-related stress differed based on various factors including the race/ethnicity of the teacher and the type of classrooms they taught in. For example, 64 percent of pre-K teachers who taught in part-day classrooms reported experiencing frequent job-related stress, compared with 55 percent of pre-K teachers who taught in full-day classrooms. Special education pre-K teachers and those who worked in early childhood education-only buildings were also significantly more likely to report frequent job-related stress than their counterparts.
Additionally, 46 percent of Black pre-K teachers reported frequent job-related stress, which researchers noted is a significantly smaller share than the 60 percent of pre-K teachers of other races and ethnicities who reported the same.
The report also found that 18 percent of public school-based pre-K teachers intended to leave their jobs by the end of the 2023–24 school year, compared with 22 percent of public K–12 teachers.
“Although intentions to leave do not perfectly predict whether teachers resign, teachers who state an intention to leave are more likely to resign than those who do not state such an intention,” the report states. “In one recent analysis, roughly 30 percent of K-12 teachers who stated an intention to leave did so within one year. If we apply this estimate to our data, we estimate that approximately 5.4 percent of public school-based pre-K teachers would have left their jobs by the end of the 2023–24 school year.”
However, researchers noted, “Recent national estimates of turnover among public school–based pre-K teachers varied from about 7.7 percent in 2019 to about 8.5 percent in 2022, roughly half the rate for K-12 teachers (16 percent). The discrepancy between the shares of teachers who express intent to leave within a year and those who resign could be explained by a delay in leaving, or it might signal job dissatisfaction rather than a plan to resign.”
Other key findings:
- Public school-based pre-K teachers reported earning nearly $7,000 less in base pay, on average, than public K-12 teachers, and about $24,000 less than similar working adults.
- Thirty-eight percent of public school-based pre-K teachers said their base pay was adequate, compared with 36 percent of public K-12 teachers and 51 percent of similar working adults.
- On average, public school-based pre-K teachers reported working 47 hours in a typical week, eight hours more than the 39 hours per week that they were contracted to work.
