More than half the teachers in the United States report feeling burned out, resulting in a rising teacher and principal turnover, according to a survey from the research organization RAND Corporation. It found that the turnover is highest in urban and high-poverty school districts, and districts with a majority of students of color.
“For Black educators, it’s so tough to witness discipline disparities among Black children because we feel that it’s very difficult to stay self-regulated. Black teachers are called on to be disciplinarians.”
Houston educator lavondia menephee
Moreover, educators of color, who are often underrepresented in schools, may leave at greater rates. The solution for teacher retention lies in well-being strategies that can also contribute to the diversity of the education workforce and student success.
Some organizations are taking steps to confront these concerns with systemic solutions.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), established by co-founders and co-CEOs Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, aims to mitigate challenges like diseases, improve education and address the needs of local communities.
Its grantees include organizations that focus on students and teachers of color, including Equal Opportunity Schools, The Hunt Institute, Center for Black Education Development, Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity (BranchED), The Teaching Well, and Village of Wisdom.
Chan is a pediatrician and teacher, whose work with patients and students across the Bay Area fueled her passion to make learning more personalized and explore new paths for the cures and management of diseases. She also founded The Primary School, a nonprofit organization providing K-12 education and parental care for children and families in East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven neighborhood in Menlo Park, California.
According to a new report that examines CZI’s contribution toward helping teachers through technology building and grantmaking, the organization and its partners published several scholarly working papers and research translation briefs to bring awareness to how school environments can affect students. It also developed technology like Reach Every Reader that created apps to promote pre-literacy skills, created educational models with insights from educators, students, researchers, and communities – a model now being used across Washington, D.C. and other states, and invested in educators’ well-being and professional development through efforts like the The Hunt Institute’s One Million Teachers of Color Campaign.
Chan says the resources developed by CZI’s partners have reached more than five million students, while their technology tools have helped teachers connect with over 250,000 students.
“As this report has shown, progress toward a whole child approach to education is possible,” said Sandra Liu Huang, head of education and vice president of product. “We will continue to stand in support of an education system that unlocks the full potential of every student, no matter who they are or where they live.”
The organization, in its report, says that its 1,000+ grants have funded more than 420 organizations and supported more than 6,500 educators and 200 researchers of color.
Additionally, its tool building comprised more than 1.3 million mentor sessions, 34 million learning goals, more than 500,000 hours of training for teachers, and reached 43 states over the years, with 54% of Summit Learning’s partner schools located in urban areas, 29% in suburban areas and 17% schools in rural areas; and 73% of schools are public, 22% are charter, and 5% are private.
Impact on Houston’s educators and students
FuelEd, a Houston-based education partner of CZI, partners with schools, districts, and organizations and aims to develop interpersonal skills and the emotional well-being of their staff to help educators create an optimal learning environment, in turn.
FuelEd received a $1 million grant from CZI to implement its initiatives. Its other funders are local to Houston, including community-based funding. According to its website, the organization has reached more than 150 schools in the U.S., with over 14,000 participants, with a goal of reaching 132,000 educators and administrators.
Megan Marcus, partner and founder of the organization, says understanding trauma, attachment, and child development through social neuroscience or interpersonal neurobiology is important for educators as their training focuses on their knowledge and instructional skills but does not prepare them for working with human beings and building relationships.
“Our early relationships shape who we are, who students are, how they’re showing up for the better or for, the worse; it changes their frame of how they see and interpret student behavior,” Marcus told the Defender. “Instead of seeing a student’s behavior from this lens of ‘What’s wrong with you?’, they see it through the lens of ‘What happened to you?’”
FuelEd operates at the district and school levels in its capacity-building efforts. It builds relationships with district leadership, who are responsible for social-emotional learning, student behavior, and educator wellness. In collaboration, they decide the ideal situation for rolling out their program. As a first step, the organization gets the district leadership to engage in a flagship training session and then steer a committee set up, followed by more training such as a video series, she explained.
Over the years, Marcus has seen a mindset shift in educators, as a result of being exposed to the science of relationships. It increases their capacity and skills to be able to build relationships with students and staff in terms of their ability to listen, express their own needs, learn about a student, and become self-aware.
“We believe you cannot impact students if you have not really unpacked your own stuff,” Marcus said. “[It is] Helping teachers understand not only students through the lens of trauma but themselves and their own stories through the lens of their own trauma so that when they are triggered in the classroom, they are frustrated or demoralized, they’re understanding self-protection mechanisms in play.”
An educator’s feelings
LaVondia Menephee, a veteran educator and an alumnus of FuelEd who has been a field trainer since 2018, was one of the counselors who helped open the Secondary DAEP (Disciplinary Alternative Education Program) in the Houston Independent School District. FuelEd’s Twitter [now X] posts, validating teachers’ feelings, made her feel seen. She had earlier served as a growth team captain, a role that encompassed leading empathy groups with faculty and staff.
“At that time, unlike now, it was taboo to talk about teachers’ feelings,” Menephee told the Defender. “It was refreshing to hear that educators had a right to feel however we were feeling. You don’t need a magic wand. All you have to do is just fully show up for another human being.”
The journey had its challenges. Most of FuelEd’s impact has been on the individual educator level and not much, as it would have wanted, on the school ecosystem.
When the changes in an educator do not pair with a school’s transformation, an incongruence is created between an educator’s awareness, skills, and motivation and the environment they are operating in, Marcus explained.
She has observed teachers leaving their school for another when their needs are not met, one which they are more aligned with. “We need to actually change the schools that need these teachers most desperately, which has led the organization to reorient our program towards whole school culture that the principals, leadership, even the district leadership know how to make adults feel seen, soothed, cared for and supported,” she added.
Menephee says FuelEd’s training is rooted in DEI, where participants from different backgrounds engage in sessions like “Empathy School,” discussing “mirror neurons” that ignite a community’s empathy based on their shared experiences, albeit having nothing in common with each other.
Being a Black teacher
“For Black educators, it’s so tough to witness discipline disparities among Black children because we feel that it’s very difficult to stay self-regulated,” Menephee said as she elaborated on the experience of being an educator of color. “Black teachers are called on to be disciplinarians.”
As a school counselor at an elementary school with a largely Black and Latino population, she was “over-disciplined,” she recalled. “That weighs on teachers because Black teachers are called on to also deal with parents and be the subject matter experts whenever we have crises like rash brutality and police brutality and murders. Black educators weigh that, we carry that.”
Her suggestion for school districts is simple: clear communication and creating a space for discussions. Based on her observations, some school districts opt for benefits policies that do not pay for mental health, which puts mental health out of reach for educators. “We have lots of teachers everywhere who have to find the money to pay for a therapist,” she said.
