The COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education. The health threats posed by the coronavirus, sudden shift to remote teaching, and added caretaking responsibilities at home have created a uniquely stressful and demanding context for teachers’ work. Kraft and Simon developed the Teaching From Home Survey for Upbeat to support districts in better understanding and responding to teachers’ experience working remotely. Between April and May, a diverse sample of over 7,000 teachers working across nine southern, midwestern and eastern states answered the survey. The large and diverse sample of respondents allow us to explore how teachers’ experiences working remotely differ across both individual and school characteristics.

Their findings suggest that the sudden move to remote teaching has created substantial challenges for teachers’ work and limited the degree to which students can engage in learning. Mid-career teachers -- those most likely to have children at home -- have particularly struggled to balance their work responsibilities with their home lives during the pandemic. And veteran teachers are over three times more likely than early-career teachers to report being uncomfortable using the technological tools required for teaching at home. Importantly, schools with more supportive working conditions have been far more successful at helping their teachers maintain a sense of success during the pandemic.

Teachers estimate that, on average, only 60% of students are engaged in remote learning on a regular basis, with wide gaps in perceived engagement along racial and socio-economic lines. Teachers working in high-poverty schools and in schools that serve a majority of Black students report that their students are facing dramatically more challenging experiences engaging in school. Their students are less likely to have the technology they need to access online resources and, consequently, are less likely to engage in remote learning activities regularly. 

In order to succeed this fall, schools will need to support teachers in balancing the many demands they are facing and provide those students most negatively affected during the crisis with more intensive, individualized support.

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