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Diana Burroughs

Diana Burroughs, Co-founder and Executive Director of TeachersCount
Co-founder of PENCIL, a non-profit that encourages private-sector involvement in public education, Diana more recently served as the Manhattan Borough Deputy to the New York City Schools Chancellor. Diana received her Ph.D. from Princeton University.

The Need

One of TeachersCount’s main goals is to create a permanent culture of teacher appreciation in the United States. Current teachers will perform better and remain in the profession longer if they feel the importance of their work is recognized. Additionally, more young people and potential career changers will consider teaching if the profession is more highly esteemed by the general public.

Research supports the TeachersCount mission. Read below for some startling facts about problems in the teaching profession.

  • There is a growing teacher shortage. More than 2 million newly hired public school teachers will be needed over the course of this decade. 1
  • Teachers feel they are blamed for everything that’s wrong with education. According to a Public Agenda survey, 76% of teachers feel they are the scapegoats for all problems facing education. 2
  • Schools struggle to retain teachers. More than a third of teachers leave within their first three years, and half leave by their fifth year. This high rate of turnover not only contributes to the teacher shortage; it also incurs major costs for school districts and detracts from instructional quality because of the decrease in experienced teachers. 3
  • Teachers are paid significantly less than those with comparable levels of education. Salaries of workers with at least four years of college are now more than 50% higher than the average teacher salary. In the 2004-2005 year, the increase in the average teacher salary did not keep pace with inflation, causing real wages to fall. When adjusted for inflation, teacher salaries have increased by only 0.2% over the last decade. 4
  • Teachers feel demoralized. “Both teachers who left teaching and teachers who transferred at the end of 1999–2000 reported a lack of planning time, too heavy a workload, too low a salary, and problematic student behavior among their top five sources of dissatisfaction with the school they left.” 5
1 Source: https://hems.nea.org/teachershortage/03shortagefactsheet.html
 2 Public Agenda Foundation. Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think about Unions, Merit Pay, and Other Professional Matters. New York: Public Agenda, 2003.
 3 Source: https://www.nea.org/home/14809.htm
 4 Ibid.
 5 Source: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28