What COVID Burnout Is Doing to New York City’s Schools

M. told me that her school’s rate of staff absences is markedly higher than in years past. “We have people who’ve had deaths in the family, and the effect is compounded by the multiple deaths they experienced during COVID. We have people with small children who have to quarantine, so they need to stay home. We have people who are exhausted, overworked, not feeling well.” She went on, “COVID has created crises in people’s lives that extend far beyond anything we can comprehend right now.”

Given concerns about COVID transmission, students’ heightened need for individual attention, and growing teacher burnout, New York’s extremely large class sizes have become a triple liability. The U.F.T. has backed a bill, endorsed by a majority of the current city council, that would significantly lower class sizes through a mix of new construction and the hiring of eleven thousand additional teachers. But the bill did not come up for a vote before the end of the legislative session. (“It’s New York City politics,” Michael Mulgrew, the U.F.T. president, said in an e-mailed statement. “But if they don’t do it now, we’re not stopping.”)

I spoke with a teacher at a Brooklyn high school, whom I’ll call B., who lost members of her immediate family to COVID. She had assumed that a return to in-person learning would necessitate smaller class sizes, and she was startled to learn that thirty-two children had been assigned to one of her classes, just below the city’s legal limit of thirty-four. “Pretending like it’s O.K. to be around that many people in a room—it heightened my anxiety,” B. said. She went on, “It’s hard to be here, mentally and emotionally. But I have to put my emotions aside in order to take care of my students.” She plans to leave the D.O.E. once she is fully vested in the retirement system.

Another teacher, whom I’ll call S., taught, until recently, at a public elementary school in Brooklyn. She has suffered from depression since she was a teen-ager. “I’m very good at managing it,” she said. “Even at the height of the pandemic, during remote learning, it was difficult being away from the kids, my mom got COVID—even then, I didn’t feel the way that I do now.” At the start of the school year, S. saw students acting out to a more extreme degree than in previous years. They would “punch or yell or curse” when they got angry, she said, “because they haven’t learned how to express their emotions in a healthy way.” Many of them had not seen the inside of a classroom in a year and a half. Some were two grade levels behind in reading, but S. felt largely powerless to accommodate them, because, she said, “teachers get reprimanded if we deviate from the grade curriculum to fit our students’ needs.” She also felt overwhelmed by a slew of new standardized tests that she was required to administer to students to assess pandemic-era learning loss.

Her physical health began deteriorating. “I was sick the entire month of October,” she told me. “I had a fever every single day.” She used a week of sick days. Her depression worsened. “I couldn’t get myself to do work. I would sit in bed and cry until the last minute.” She worried that she could no longer camouflage her anguish in front of a classroom. “My lessons could have been a lot better,” she said. She asked for permission to transfer to a different school, and, when her principal turned her down, S. resigned. “If I stayed, it would have affected the kids,” she told me.

S. said something that emerged as a refrain in my conversations with teachers: that D.O.E. officials, and the school leaders who report to them, are suffering from a kind of willful amnesia about the scars left by the pandemic. “They are trying to act as if nothing happened,” S. said. B. told me, “There’s an elephant in the room—it’s understood that we are not going to speak about the last twenty-one months.”

On its face, this claim may seem odd. Much is being spoken of, and much has obviously changed. The children are still wearing masks, and some are still eating lunch outside, even in cold weather. Schools have hosted pop-up vaccination sites and conduct random COVID testing on students, although multiple teachers told me that the testing programs at their schools draw from a small pool of students, minimizing their value. (A D.O.E. spokesperson told me that more than ninety-one per cent of schools are meeting their ten-per-cent-testing threshold, and schools are administering more than fifty thousand tests per week. “Our testing policies are aligned with CDC guidance and the advice of our public health experts,” the spokesperson wrote in an e-mail.)

Over the summer, Mayor de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Meisha Porter, announced a six-hundred-and-thirty-five-million-dollar “academic recovery plan” for mitigating post-pandemic learning loss, including two hundred and fifty-one million for special-education recovery services—after-school and Saturday programs for students with special needs, led by teachers who elect to work overtime hours. The catch is that schools are expected to staff the programs with their existing faculty. “I can’t magically make more teachers materialize in my school to do the after-school time,” M., the Brooklyn principal, said.

This fall, another, more immediately visible component of the recovery plan was the heap of additional standardized tests in math and literacy, sourced from the nonprofit N.W.E.A. and the ed-tech companies Acadience and Curriculum Associates, at a total cost of thirty-six million dollars. The tests “give you discrete information that a teacher wouldn’t otherwise pick up on,” Lisette Caesar, the principal of an elementary school in East Harlem, said. The city has also put eighteen million dollars into the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment, or DESSA, a forty-three-part questionnaire developed by yet another ed-tech company, Aperture Education. DESSA is intended to measure students’ “social and emotional competence” by asking teachers how often they observed a child “describe how he/she was feeling,” “say good things about herself/himself,” or “compliment or congratulate somebody,” among other behaviors.

Martina Meijer, a fourth-grade teacher in Brooklyn, expressed doubts about the utility of the tests and questionnaires. “What we actually need is academic and emotional support,” Meijer said, “and what is being done instead are huge contracts with ed-tech companies—millions of dollars that could be used to hire more teachers, counsellors, and social workers.” Teachers don’t know how the city will use the testing data, Meijer said, or if they will have opportunities to integrate the data into their teaching plans. “None of this stuff is going to stick around,” Driver said. “We have a new mayor coming in soon. It’s just, ‘We can tell people we’re doing stuff.’ ” (At an event on December 9th, Mayor-elect Eric Adams, introducing his pick for New York City schools chancellor, David Banks, called the school system “dysfunctional,” and said that students in the pandemic “were living in a state of despair and no one seemed to care.”)

Along with all the new tests, the customary statewide exams, which are administered to students in grades three through twelve, are going ahead as usual in 2022, after having been cancelled in 2020 and made optional in 2021. At M.’s middle school, about eighty per cent of incoming students did not meet proficiency scores on state exams in literacy, math, and science. “I do believe in formal assessment,” she said. But “the students I serve are historically traumatized by testing and the stakes involved in it. It’s going to do a great deal of damage to their sense of self when they get the results of these exams, which are really the result of a system that could not adjust itself to them.”

In the meantime, Wagner said, teachers are expected to do the work that a grade level calls for, as if the students had been attending regular school the whole time—as if nothing had happened. “If I am obligated to teach second-grade math, but I have kids after the pandemic who are at a pre-K or kindergarten level for math—there’s no curriculum for that,” Wagner said. “If someone from the administration ever walked in on my classroom, they’d like to find me teaching second-grade math by the book, which those kids would fail. I would be setting them up to fail, and it would be my job to do that.”

As the fall progressed, my son’s pre-K class pursued the standard business of early-childhood learning: blocks, crafts, alphabet songs. My second grader seemed to come home every afternoon with the news that she had taken a test that day, or that her class had prepared for one they were taking tomorrow. One day, she uttered the tragic sentence “It wasn’t an assessment, Mommy, it was a diagnostic.” On two of her math tests, I saw that she had put down a correct answer and showed her work, but it was marked wrong because the answer key solved the problem differently. On a writing assessment, she was marked down because her story, about a hailstorm in Prospect Park, did not use the words “when,” “then,” and “after” frequently enough, a breach of the Teachers College reading-and-writing curriculum used in many New York City public schools.

The pandemic isn’t responsible for the standardization and bureaucratization of American public schools—that process has been accelerating since the No Child Left Behind Act became law, in 2002. The legislation required public schools to administer tests in math and literacy to children in grades three through eight, and once in high school, as a condition of receiving federal funding. If test scores did not reach certain benchmarks within prescribed time frames, teachers risked losing their jobs and schools could be shut down. With stakes that high, schools devoted more and more time to heavily scripted test prep. (The Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015, allowed states more discretion for determining metrics for student and teacher performance.) In the twenty-tens, an opt-out movement gathered steam among public-school parents in the U.S., notably in New York State, where, in the spring of 2018, about eighteen per cent of students declined to take the state tests.

At the time that No Child Left Behind was passed—and before its punitive, assembly-line exigencies had become entirely clear—the law might have been generously understood as an attempt to measure student progress, however reductively, in key academic areas. But, twenty years later, in the immediate aftermath of a global health catastrophe, the doubling down on standardized testing and standardized teaching feels bewildering. My daughter and her friends weren’t being marked down because the teacher they loved so much was capricious or doubted their understanding of the concepts she was ably teaching, but because she was being forced to act less as an educator than as a clerk who is expected to process paperwork generated by a centralized authority. The kids were learning how to do subtraction word problems, but they were also absorbing a lesson in the rigid yet arbitrary nature of a sclerotic government bureaucracy.

“People who have a lot of money, who send their kids to private schools—those kids don’t get all the tests,” Wagner told me. “It’s a proletarian thing.”

“Burnout” has become a catchall term for a state of exhaustion and stress, but another risk factor for professional burnout is a lack of autonomy: not having enough of a say in how you do your job, what gives it meaning, and what you wish to achieve. “Teachers are seen as an instrument or a cog,” Selena Carrión, who recently resigned from the D.O.E. after a decade of teaching in elementary and middle schools, said. If a teacher’s intellectual, subjective role in educating her students is belittled, this has a transitive effect. “I don’t think we value children as much as we like to think we do,” Carrión said.

Caolan Madden, who works as a substitute teacher, and whose child attends a public elementary school in Brooklyn, is candid about how stressful subbing can be in the COVID era, especially given the necessary safety protocols: “You’re teaching in a KN95 mask over the deafening air purifier, you’re shrieking, the kids are also wearing masks, you can’t tell them apart, you think, ‘This is just a bunch of eyebrows.’ ” Still, she doesn’t envy the scrutiny and strictures under which permanent teachers must work amid unprecedented upheaval and grief. “One thing I love about being a sub is that no one is paying attention to what I’m doing,” she said. “So my job is just to show these kids that someone cares about them. I’m not going to be able to teach them their curriculum today. But I can try to create some positive feelings. I can ask: What are they worried about? What are they interested in?”

She added, “If you’re outside of that assessments-and-evaluation culture, if you’re not beholden to it, then you have the freedom to give them that space. Teachers are being incredibly incentivized to give them computer assessments instead.”

At the start of the school year, my daughter’s class had a new daily period dedicated to social-emotional learning. “It was a fun thing for them to do at the end of the day,” Ms. T. said. “That was their time to do art and relax and talk to each other about how they were feeling.” In one session, the second graders drew pictures of different emotions, then used the drawings as clues for charades. In another, Ms. T. showed them how to make origami-style fortune-tellers, which they used to discuss how to identify and manage big feelings. My daughter loved the fortune-tellers.

After about a month, the school abruptly replaced the social-emotional class with a half-period for additional math instruction and another half-period for a reading-and-spelling program called Fundations. Teachers were instructed to fold social-emotional learning into the bustling twenty-minute period at the beginning of the day when kids are putting away their coats and eating breakfast and wandering in late and gabbing. A few weeks later, Ms. T. announced that she was leaving. (She later told me that “burnout definitely contributed” to her decision.) My kid kept making fortune-tellers. They were based on various themes: jokes, classroom crushes, rainy-day activities. She taped them to birthday cards for friends. She left one on my pillow one morning.

The kids who had to quarantine after the coronavirus exposure in mid-November returned to school the day before Thanksgiving. (That weekend, the World Health Organization designated Omicron as “a variant of concern.”) It was also the last day at school for Ms. T., although her students had already been absorbed into their new, bigger classes. My daughter was doing a math lesson when her new teacher, noticing a fortune-teller sitting on her desk, told her to throw it away. Fortune-tellers, the new teacher said, are not allowed in class. Later that day, yet another teacher made her a new one.