An uptick in verbal and physical aggression has large numbers of educators expressing intentions to transfer schools or resign from the profession altogether.
Threats and violence against P-12 teachers and other school staff have rebounded to pre-COVID-19 lockdown levels in the United States, according to research published in May by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Researchers found that while pandemic restrictions resulted in a lull in incidents of aggression (most likely because of remote learning), incidents have returned to levels “equal to or exceeding” those prior to shutdowns.
Lead author Susan Dvorak McMahon, a professor and the associate dean for research and graduate programs at DePaul University’s College of Science and Health and the chair of the APA Task Force on Violence Against Educators and School Personnel, said this is the latest development in over a decade of ongoing research by the team.
APA’s research reports significant rates of violence and aggression, which McMahon said is “not a new problem.” McMahon has been researching this topic with the task force since 2008, and she attributes increased awareness of the issue to social media’s capability to widely share incidents. The verbal and physical threats school personnel face, however, have been a trend since she started working with the APA in 2008, if not earlier.
Edyte Parsons, a 4th grade teacher at Fairwood Elementary School in the Kent school district in Kent, Wash., has experienced these national trends firsthand.
Parsons said student behavior was “starting to slide” before the pandemic, but the first year back in schools in person was “really bad.” She said that post-pandemic, teaching has gotten more difficult, students are less engaged, and stress levels among teachers, staff, and parents have risen.
After an incident with one of her students this year—as well as what she recalls as many instances of being cursed out, threatened, screamed at, and even physically harmed—she is reconsidering her career in education.
80 percent of teachers report threats, 56 percent report physical violence post-pandemic
Most recent surveys conducted by the APA concluded that 65 percent of teachers reported at least one incident of verbal harassment or threatening behavior from a student prior to the pandemic, which decreased to 33 percent during the pandemic but increased to 80 percent after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted.
Forty-two percent of teachers reported instances of physical violence from students prior to the pandemic, which decreased to 14 percent during the pandemic but again increased to 56 percent after the height of the pandemic. Physical violence rates tend to be lower than verbal threat rates in general, according to McMahon.
Based on experiences with violence and aggression and concerns about school climate, 57 percent of teachers expressed their desires or plans to resign on a post-pandemic survey, as compared with the 49 percent that indicated this sentiment on a survey during the pandemic.
Survey participants also reported increases in anxiety and stress during the pandemic. According to APA’s research, these levels still have not fallen to pre-pandemic levels.
The published study compares data from two recent surveys that capture the experiences of three eras for teachers—2019-20, prior to the pandemic; the height of the pandemic in 2020-21; and 2021-22 after many schools had lifted COVID-19 restrictions.
Starting with the 2019 survey, McMahon said the researchers sought responses from those she identifies as “underrepresented groups” in this field of study. The study was expanded from just teachers to other adult stakeholders, like administrators, school staff, school psychologists, social workers, and counselors.
According to the research, these other groups of stakeholders are also reporting incidents of aggression and violence, though they are not experiencing rates of physical violence as high as those teachers are facing.
When surveying participants, APA explicitly defined what various behaviors constituted an act of physical or verbal violence and aggression. Surveys asked respondents whether they had been subjected to specific incidents perpetrated by students, parents and guardians, colleagues, and administrators, and how frequently.
McMahon said when looking at the frequency of these acts, on average, most people in the sample reported that they had only experienced violence or aggression once, and they often did not report repeated offenses.
“It’s still really important to pay attention to because some of these incidents are pretty horrendous, and once really can be quite traumatic,” McMahon said.
One teacher who faced violence says support is lacking
Parsons said teaching is her “calling.”
She worked in several jobs—both in and out of education—but she couldn’t shake the thought of going back to teaching before landing in the Kent school district almost a decade ago. She was the 2023-2024 educator of the year at her elementary school.
Parsons, who said she was not part of the APA survey, has witnessed and experienced acts of violence and aggression, but one in particular stands out. In late April, one of Parsons’ students slammed her into chairs, desks, and cabinets, she said.
In the months leading up to the incident, Parsons said she did what she could to prevent ongoing threats from that particular student from escalating by reporting concerning interactions to administrators and contacting a school counselor.
Parsons said she walked away from the scene with bruises on the right side of her body and a concussion and described the physical and emotional toll of the incident as immense. Parsons said she could have reported the alleged incident to law enforcement, but chose not to because of the student’s age and because she believed it would not have helped the situation or the student and their family.
“I’m an emotional mess,” she said, reflecting on the incident and the school year.
In response to Education Week’s requests for comment, Fairwood Elementary School Principal Patricia Hoyle deferred to the district’s communications department. The Kent district communications department said in an email to Education Week that “the District cannot comment about personnel matters and can neither confirm nor deny the allegations.”
Though Parsons took time off, she was told the student involved in the incident was placed back in her classroom by noon the following day.
Parsons said she had to suggest using sick leave to take off the remainder of the school year to prompt the school’s principal to permanently remove the student from her classroom. Specific policies surrounding student violence toward teachers in the district, including reporting protocol, are unclear.
“I’m not going to be teaching somebody who feels like it’s OK to do that to me,” she said. Following the incident, Parsons no longer attends after-school events in an effort to avoid the student.
She views handling violence as part of her job description now.
“I know for a fact for the rest of my career—and I have 17 years left—the office and administration [are] not an option. ... I’ve got to handle it in-house, in my classroom, because [the] administration will not be assisting me,” she said.
Researchers call for annual assessment to address violence against educators and improve support systems
McMahon views the results of the information and experiences gathered in the surveys like those of Parsons as “snapshots in time” and a way to measure the well-being of teachers and school personnel. However, she recognizes the study’s limitations, saying people who have experienced violence may be more likely to have responded to the surveys.
Researchers say there’s no cohesive reporting protocol for threats and violence against teachers and other school personnel—be it requirements for reporting to the school, the district, or law enforcement—which means comprehensive national data may not truly exist. McMahon said some kind of annual assessment gathering reports from educators would allow researchers to look at trends across time.
Linda Reddy, a professor and the associate dean of research at Rutgers University, is another researcher on the APA task force with McMahon and helped spearhead this work.
Reddy agrees that implementing a national registry for educators to report instances of violence and aggression is important to get a more comprehensive understanding of the issue’s scope. Her ideal national registry would maintain some anonymity for educators when needed.
“I think a national registry is really important, but we need to do more than just register,” she said. “It has to activate a system of support.”
The APA surveys also advised researchers that educators would like more support and training, both before going into the profession and during their tenures, to address some of these issues.
“[Educators are] sometimes in situations that are quite unreasonable, and they feel unprepared to handle them,” McMahon said. Researchers identified behavior and classroom management, de-escalation strategies, socioeconomic learning approaches, trauma-informed practices, and working with diverse groups as training topics.
Among other strategies to address violence and aggression in schools, McMahon points to policy and parent engagement as two that may help alleviate some of these trends.
In terms of policy, McMahon spoke on the need for mental health support and resource improvements, raising educator salaries, and required annual data gathering as steps to improving school climates. Most school violence-prevention programs, she said, are focused on students, not education professionals.
“We’re a little behind, really, in terms of developing programs that are effective for teachers and other adult stakeholders,” she said.
Researchers advocate for comprehensive school safety reforms and improved teacher support systems
Reddy offered a few other potential solutions. She believes a comprehensive and integrative approach to school safety is key—meaning strategies that aren’t just “spot work,” as she said.
They include changing the training for educators. Reddy said the traditional method of training school personnel through workshops and lectures is not as effective as continually learning workplace-applicable skills and gaining access to mentorships and direct support in the specific environments they are working in.
School leaders should steer clear of training their teachers in zero-tolerance, or punitive, strategies, she said, because research shows that these exclusionary strategies are ineffective in promoting school safety and can be harmful to students of color.
What’s more, Reddy said, policy at the local, state, and federal levels could also help improve school climate across the country. This includes phasing out zero-tolerance policies.
She believes that shifting the mindsets and work experience of educators starts at the school level. School leaders are crucial to creating cultures of open communication, she said, and should foster empathy and be approachable. Being in the classroom alone can be isolating for teachers, she said, and teachers need to feel heard and supported in their concerns by their supervisors.
“It’s not all doom and gloom. … But the reality here is teaching as a profession has changed the last couple decades, and we can’t continue to do what we’ve normally done to retain high-quality teachers in schools,” Reddy said.
She also suggested schools set up advisory boards representative of school personnel, students, and parents to facilitate ongoing feedback from all school stakeholders. Feedback and data could be collected through surveys and focus groups, but the information should also be reciprocal, and participants should be assured that their concerns are being addressed.
Advisory boards model a preventive approach to violence in schools and avoid “[waiting] until the shoe drops,” Reddy said. She emphasized the need for critical feedback from students and school personnel who are not teachers, such as bus drivers, custodians, and paraprofessionals, who often have a pulse on school climate and wellbeing.
Furthermore, she said, there’s a lot to learn from schools that are excelling—not just those that are having difficulty with classroom climate. Researching and collecting data to determine why certain schools have fewer violence concerns can be helpful.
Consistent with McMahon and Reddy’s research, Parsons said she has given more thought to leaving teaching. Before the pandemic, she thought she would likely be an educator until she retired. Now, she has determined that if she experiences one more bad school year, she will leave the profession.
“It will break my heart, but I’m not going to be [hurt by a student] every year. This was not worth it.”
