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Stress in Boom Times: Understanding Teachers’ Economic Anxiety in a High Cost Urban District

Despite growing concern over teachers’ ability to live comfortably where they work, we know little about the systematic impacts of affordability on teachers’ well-being, particularly in high-cost urban areas. We use novel survey data from San Francisco Unified School District to identify the patterns and prevalence of economic anxiety among teachers and assess how this anxiety relates to teachers’ attitudes, behaviors, and turnover. We find that San Francisco teachers have far higher levels of economic anxiety on average than a national sample of employed adults, and that younger teachers are particularly financially anxious. Furthermore, such anxiety relates to job performance and teacher retention— economically anxious teachers tend to have more negative attitudes about their jobs, have worse attendance, and are 50 percent more likely to depart the district within two years after the survey.

Keywords
teacher turnover, economic anxiety, teacher labor markets
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/98de-qj60

This EdWorkingPaper is published in:

Dizon-Ross, E., Loeb, S., Penner, E., & Rochmes, J. (2019). Stress in Boom Times: Understanding Teachers’ Economic Anxiety in a High Cost Urban District. AERA Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419879439

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Dizon-Ross, Elise, Susanna Loeb, Emily Penner, and Jane Rochmes. (). Stress in Boom Times: Understanding Teachers’ Economic Anxiety in a High Cost Urban District. (EdWorkingPaper: 19-71). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/98de-qj60

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