Everyone wants to know how to solve teacher retention and burnout.

Everywhere I go, this is one of the major issues I hear administrators discussing

It's the question on every superintendent's desk, every school board agenda, every staff meeting where someone finally says the thing everyone's been thinking:

We are losing people, and we are losing them fast.

Research shows that roughly 70% of teachers nationwide abandon or consider leaving the classroom within their first five years of teaching, according to 2025 survey data collected and analyzed by the Center for American Progress.

That is unthinkable and unsustainable

I've spent the last few newsletters circling this question from different angles — naming the mental health crisis hiding underneath the burnout statistics, arguing that we've been misdiagnosing the problem as retention when it's really a crisis of flourishing, and making the case that you cannot squeeze excellence out of exhausted people no matter how hard you press.

I work with school leaders around the world trying to help them solve this very problem in their schools

I see there are even social media accounts dedicated to helping teachers transition from education to anything else

And believe me, I get it.

Education and teaching are extremely difficult, but that barely scratches the surface of the issue

Doris Santoro's term for what's happening isn't even "burnout" — it's demoralization, because "burnout" implies a deficit in the individual rather than a systemic failure.

We see teachers, school leaders, and staff exhausted, burnt out, weary, overwhelmed, overworked, and extremely anxious, and we think “Appreciation Days” with coffeeshop gift cards one week a year somehow triages the issue.

Instead of placing more on the teacher or school leader, I believe the focus needs to be on the ecosystem itself, on what I’ve described as the invisible root system that feeds the entire organizational structure

Here is what I have come to believe, after years of building a school and walking alongside hundreds of educators and leaders:

It takes more than gift cards to make people feel seen, heard, valued, and valuable

You cannot inspire your way out of an unsafe classroom.

A 2024 RAND survey found that student behavior is the top source of job-related stress for 44 percent of teachers, and a Connecticut Education Association member survey found that student behavior topped the list of burnout causes, followed by insufficient pay, lack of respect, decisions made by politicians and non-educators, and the sheer volume of district initiatives stacked on top of teachers' existing workload.

Notice what's not on that list as the primary driver: a lack of pizza parties.

Teachers are telling us, plainly, what is breaking them:

This is the structural floor.

If it isn't solid, nothing built on top of it will hold.

No amount of language about purpose and calling will compensate for a teacher who is managing forty students with no support, buried under compliance paperwork, and second-guessed on every instructional decision she makes.

Leaders who care about flourishing still have to do this unglamorous work: protect planning time, fight for reasonable class sizes, remove old requirements when you add new tools instead of stacking them, give teachers real authority over their own classrooms, and treat behavioral support as a resourcing problem, not a character problem for the teacher to absorb.

But here's what the structural account, on its own, can't explain.

It can't explain why 58 percent of educators say the primary reason they stay is meaningful work — not salary, not summers off.

It can't explain why some schools with mediocre conditions retain devoted staff for decades, while other schools with competitive pay and reasonable class sizes still bleed people every June.

It can't explain the teacher who tells me, in nearly every coaching conversation I have, some version of the same sentence: I didn't get into this to feel invisible.

Because underneath the workload and the behavior data and the policy failures sits a quieter, deeper wound:

Disconnection from why they became educators in the first place.

Teachers can absorb extraordinary amounts of hard work. What breaks them is hard work that has stopped meaning anything.

And when schools respond to that disconnection with appreciation weeks and sticky notes in the faculty lounge instead of with genuine belonging, purpose, and trust, they aren't solving the problem.

They're merely decorating it and hoping that gets them by

This is the part of the equation that policy alone will never fix, because you cannot legislate meaning into a building.

You cultivate it.

It is cultivated through an ecosystem of care that runs in multiple directions, not just top-down evaluation.

It is cultivated through a culture where teachers are not just thanked, but known — not just valued in the abstract, but treated as irreplaceable in the particular.

It is cultivated when staff believe you genuinely see them as human beings, not as cogs in the machine

It is cultivated by the small ways you as a school leader insure everyone in your care knows in their bones they are valued and valuable

Not with a program. Not with one more initiative layered onto an already-overflowing plate — which, ironically, is itself one of the very things driving people out the door.

You solve it by holding both halves of the truth at once.

Fix the conditions. Smaller class sizes where you can manage them. Real, resourced behavioral support so teachers aren't left to manage crises alone. Genuine trust in teachers' instructional judgment instead of compliance theater. A hard rule that nothing new gets added without something old being removed. Pay that reflects the weight of the work.

And cultivate the meaning. Lead in a way that helps people reconnect to why they chose this work. Build a culture where purpose is a lived conviction, not a poster on the wall. Practice care that is specific and particular, not generic and performative. Give your people room to grow instead of merely survive. Ask, honestly and often: are the people in this building flourishing — or are they just enduring?

A school that only fixes conditions will retain compliant staff who show up and check out.

A school that only cultivates meaning, while ignoring crushing workloads and unsafe classrooms, will burn out its most devoted people fastest — because the ones who care the most are the ones who will sacrifice themselves longest for a vision that isn't backed by real support.

You need the floor and the ceiling. The structure and the soul.

Here's the uncomfortable truth for those of us in leadership: this is hard, sustained work, and it starts with us.

Transformative leadership doesn't begin with a new initiative.

It begins with an honest question, asked of yourself before you ask it of anyone else:

Am I flourishing as the leader? Or have I been running on reserve capacity so long I've forgotten what full feels like?

The schools that will solve their retention crisis in the next decade won't be the ones with the cleverest staff appreciation calendar or the ones that simply raised salaries the most, although both of those things matter.

They will be the ones whose leaders did the harder, slower work of building both a just structure and a meaningful culture — and who understood that those two things were never actually in competition.

They were always one conversation.

Until next time, Scott

Dr. Scott Martin is the founder of Odyssey Leadership Academy and the Recentered Education network. He works with school leaders across the country to help reimagine schools as places of flourishing — for students and educators alike.

If this resonates, you can explore the Flourishing School Leaders Cohort, whole-school consulting, or one-on-one leadership coaching at drscottamartin.com.