Before Lizbeth Valdez could start her first year teaching elementary school, she had to scan the covers of all 137 books in her personal classroom library. They’re all educational and age-appropriate but if every single parent didn’t approve a book, she was forced to remove it from her collection.
Valdez, who starts her day looking for ways to keep her students engaged, is part of a new generation of teachers that are stepping into the field and encountering new challenges to an already difficult profession. She teaches third grade bilingual math and science in Fort Worth, Texas and grapples every day with her love for the job and the stress it causes her.
After a pandemic disrupted the very essence of education, K-12 public school teachers are thinking about leaving the profession at higher rates. COVID-19 reduced the number of educators in the system by over 500,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Four years later, the pandemic’s effects are still felt acutely. Teachers are facing pressures from multiple fronts, leading them to a level of burnout that is, for some, undefeatable.
“I’ve always had respect for teachers, but once I became one, it was a different level,” Valdez said. “It's not just showing up and like, ‘oh, the lessons are ready, you just gotta teach the kids.’ It’s a lot of work."
Valdez graduated from the University of North Texas in May. Throughout her program, she had the opportunity to work as a student teacher at a local elementary school in Denton. She said that despite her experience, walking into her own classroom as a fully licensed teacher was terrifying.
Her students were in kindergarten and first grade during COVID-19, at an age where they were barely learning how to socialize and use tools like glue and scissors, all of which they had to learn through a camera from home.
“It really took a toll on parents as well, to take on the role of teacher. And if I'm being honest with you, a lot of them were not successful, like, at all,” Valdez said. “Our students came through with no skills, basically.”
Valdez in August 2024 in her new classroom in Forth Worth, TX. (Photo courtesy of Lizbeth Valdez)
At around this grade level, many states begin standardized testing to evaluate student performance. For Valdez’s kids, that comes in the form of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, tests, and much of her curriculum is shaped around preparing students for the demands of state expectations.
But when students start the third grade with practically no skills that’s a lot harder for Valdez.
“You're telling me that I need to teach a kid how to multiply, but they don't know how to add yet?” Valdez said. “I'm trying to teach a lesson, and I'm realizing it in real time: These kids are struggling with step number one.”
It’s not just elementary schoolers that are struggling to catch up. Bernadette Bottino, a retired teacher in New Jersey, said she sees similar patterns in the high schoolers she tutors. In the years after the pandemic, the incoming freshmen were “immature, severely lacking in skills, severely lacking in just basic knowledge.”
Bottino in December 2024 with her tutorees. (Photo courtesy of Bernadette Bottino)
“They were worried. They were seeing what was going on TV. They were seeing people dying. The last thing they wanted to do was worry about schoolwork,” Bottino said. “I can't imagine how they functioned during the pandemic. How much learning were they really doing?”
The students' academic setbacks are an added stressor for teachers.
“You have kids’ lives in your hands. Their education is in your hands,” Bottino said. “Especially during the pandemic, when everybody had to teach on Zoom and still do everything else. It just has a reputation of being a very stressful job that doesn't have many perks.”
Valdez has also noted an emotional delay in her students. Without a structured classroom setting for two years, many students have handicapped attention spans and social skills.
Before Valdez starts her day, she must plan to fill every single minute without wasting a second, or else she risks losing her students' minimal attention. She has a bin full of fidget toys to help keep her students focused, but oftentimes, they’re too antsy to sit through a day full of lessons.
Valdez said more and more of her students are getting tested for ADHD and are displaying anxious tendencies. Research has shown that the pandemic doubled the percentage of children and teenagers reporting anxiety symptoms.
Valdez on the mental impacts of the pandemic on students. (Photo courtesy of Lizbeth Valdez)
“Now that they're back at school, they want to express themselves, and it's harder for them because they were never taught how to do it appropriately,” Valdez said. “They're barely opening up.”
As students struggle to catch up even years later, teachers are forced to provide extra emotional and educational support in a profession that notoriously does not pay highly.
Brandon Martinez, an adjunct professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and former teacher and principal, said this is an intensification of a long withstanding issue in the structure of K-12 education: There simply isn’t enough time.
The 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. school day divided into different subjects taught in 50 minute slots is based on convenience, not any learning science, Martinez said.
“The structure of the day forces teachers to create lesson plans and instructions that follow a time guideline versus what the demands of the concept are,” he said. “If I'm teaching factual knowledge, that might take less time than if I'm teaching a really deep physics concept that I might have to do over two or three days.”
Even worse, a teacher’s performance is evaluated almost entirely on student performance on standardized tests, the reason why Valdez said she was stressed about the STAAR tests before the school year even started.
“Where do teachers then find the joy, if [they’ve] got all these factors that lean towards a negative experience?.”
— Brandon Martinez
“If you think of a high stakes summative test, it happens on one day and it's a snapshot, and there are so many variables that can cause errors in the results,” Martinez said.
The learning deficiencies caused by the pandemic are compounded every year as students continue to move up grade levels without internalizing any of the information. Every year they’re not as prepared for state testing, resulting in some of the lowest reading and math test scores. In California, student scores remain “far behind pre-pandemic levels.”
“[Teachers say,] ‘I want tenure. I want a perfect job where I can stay here and have my career, but if my students don't perform well, that's an added stressor,’” Martinez said. “I think at the end of the day, where do teachers then find the joy if [they’ve] got all these factors that lean towards a negative experience?”
United States Capitol Building, Washington D.C. (Photo Courtesy of Flickr/Ken Lund)
The debate in D.C. trickles down into the classroom
The events of nearly five years ago didn’t only affect students in the classroom. As schools shut down nationwide, a surge of conservative conspiracy theories began to impact how communities view their educators. Education has always been inherently political but teachers were, for the first time, the subject of distrust on a national scale.
The pandemic coincided with a wave of legislative censorship in public schools. In 2021, critical race theory became the subject of mass criticism among state lawmakers, inciting bans in states like Texas, Alabama, Florida and 15 others. The theory is a study of how race and racism have shaped, and continue to impact, American systems and institutions, primarily taught in higher education. Only a few states have not made any attempts at the state level to ban the theory’s inclusion in the classroom.
Although the conversation has cooled in recent years, these bans are still operating at a state level, and even in “safe” states, many individual school districts have instituted them too.
Sparking further national outrage, legislators have also tackled book bans. School libraries across the country have been forced to remove books about LGBTQ+ issues, people of color, race issues and sexual content. According to the American Library Association, the movement for more restrictions surged in 2022 and reached an all-time high in 2023. The state with the most bans is Texas, where Valdez is required to scan all the books in her library for parental approval.
Throughout the 2024 election cycle, the Republican party moved onto a new boogeyman in public education: the conspiracy of sex-change surgeries in schools. President-elect Donald Trump used this theory as a major talking point throughout his campaign.
President-elect Donald Trump in August 2024.
“The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child,” Trump said in August during a Moms for Liberty convention in Washington, D.C. Since then, he and many surrogate speakers have repeated the claim, along with similar anti-transgender and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.
Conservative parents and community members who subscribe to these beliefs now blame teachers for the desecration of traditional values. For some who follow this line of thought, pointing fingers isn’t enough. To really start making changes, they run for the school board.
As a third grade science and math teacher, the most Valdez has to worry about is her personal library collection. For others, even in the Democratic stronghold of California, the consequences are paramount.
Although controversial censorship legislation varies by state, teacher turnover rates increased in both red and blue states after the pandemic. Other states not graphed include: Hawaii, Mississippi and Maine.
In Temecula Valley, the teacher’s union has been waging a two-year war against its conservative-majority school board, battling controversial policies and bans that have made headlines across Southern California.
“When there is a segment of the population stating that that's occurring and that it's there, and they just have to find it and uncover it, it creates a disjointed trust with a population you're trying to serve,” Edgar Diaz, president of the Temecula Valley Educators Association, said.
For Diaz and Cyndy Lopez, the Vice President of the association, the pandemic was a catalyst for the heightened tensions.
Diaz on the political polarization of TVUSD. (Photo courtesy of TVUSD)
“We started seeing a certain group of people showing up at school board meetings during the [COVID-19] times when school closures were happening,” Lopez said. “I think that [time] allowed for some people to go down different kinds of rabbit holes of, I would say, extremist views.”
Online education, immunization requirements and masking policies incited backlash from parents, opening a door to a host of other issues.
The first major sweeping policy initiated by the new conservative school board in 2022 was a district-wide ban on critical race theory despite the fact that instructors do not often teach it at the high school level. When a collection of students, parents and teachers brought a lawsuit against the school district for unclear policies, the school board hired a non-profit Christian law firm to represent them. The firm, Advocates for Faith and Freedom, describes itself as “dedicated to protecting constitutional and religious liberty in the courts.”
A Riverside County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the district earlier this year.
“This is a win for commonsense, parents, and the safety of students,” said Robert Tyler, president of Advocates for Faith & Freedom in a press release in February. “TVUSD is committed to providing a quality education free from political agendas and free from dishonest and divisive curriculum. This ruling allows TVUSD to continue implementing these sound policies.”
For teachers trying to encourage reading in their classrooms, this policy has had a “chilling effect” where instructors are afraid to touch certain topics.
“I had middle school teachers who replaced their libraries with wooden blanks, which are the title spines, just to make it look like they have a library,” Diaz said. “There's no books there, because the idea is that we're being held responsible for whatever content is in there, and we never know what's there. It could be a phrase, it could be a paragraph, it could be a theme.”
Last year, the board also voted to implement a controversial parental notification policy that requires schools to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender or nonbinary. A month later, every flag except the U.S. and California flags were banned from school campuses, a move largely viewed as an attack on the pride flag by members of the district.
The everyday struggles of a K-12 teacher are well documented: heavy workload, student behavioral issues, low pay and other consistent grievances. When political hostilities are added on top, the pressure compounds.
Catalano on the struggle with the TVUSD school board. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Catalano)
“It's a feeling of unrest. It's a feeling of not being supported,” Jennifer Catalano, an Elementary area representative for TVEA, said. “We're feeling like we have to go to board meetings and fight for ourselves, because they're just saying things that are just so untrue.”
For Diaz, Lopez, Catalano and other Temecula Valley educators, the fight is exhausting.
“We're fighting to prove our name, like we're teachers, we're here for the kids, like, I invite you to come in my room and see what I do for a full day,” Catalano said. “There is no indoctrinating. There's no grooming. There is nothing going on. But yet, because everything is so publicized, they're making us out to be these terrible people.”
Although the controversies have cost the union some members, they’ve also encouraged some teachers to participate more in the union’s activities, energizing TVEA’s political action committee to operate year-round.
“It's taken a toll on us, just because we've kind of had to focus our energies on other stuff right now, all this other noise, and it's kind of taking us away from the stuff that really matters,” Lopez said. “This is bad what we're going through. But it did really get our association moving in a really positive direction with more involvement.”
Temecula Valley is not the only Southern California school district facing a hyper-political environment. Fifty miles away, educators in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District in Orange County are facing similar circumstances.
