Many teachers worried about their own health, particularly as restrictions began to ease and students returned to classrooms.
Between the 1999-2000 and the 2017-2018 school years, the number of full- and part-time public school teachers rose 18% to 3.5 million teachers
But by the 2019-2020 school year, the number of teachers fell to 3.2 million and by 2020-2021 to just over 3 million.
The number of students completing teacher education programs fell by more than one-third between 2008 and 2019, according to a 2022 report by the AACTE.
A Gallup poll released in June 2022 found that workers in K-12 schools reported the highest rates of burnout of any field in the country.