School Crisis Recovery and Renewal

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Is it burnout or is it a moral injury?

By Jen Leland
September 12, 2024

Categories: School Crisis Recovery, School Crisis Renewal, Workplace

“Good morning, can u put some $$ into my GFM for my classroom supplies,” texts my 55-year-old friend turned first-year teacher following her possible mid-life, possible COVID identity crisis. 

“Also can I pick up your power washer to clean the floors this Saturday? It’s gross and the district cut janitorial.” 

My internal alarm bells sound. She’s teaching industrial arts at a local Oakland Unified public high school. She’s eager, vibrant, and already working on Saturdays before the academic year begins. I hope her vitality for teaching persists, but the data does not bode well for her.

Educator burnout indicators are going from bad to worse

  • In the 2022 Gallup Poll on occupational burnout, 44% of K-12 teachers in the United States reported feeling burned out “often” or “always”
  • According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 300,000 public school teachers and other related staff left the field of education from February 2020 to May 2022. This large exodus was approximately 3% of the workforce
  • In a 2022 poll by the National Education Association, 55% of teachers responded that they plan to quit their current education roles earlier than they originally intended. Just one year earlier in August 2021, only 37% of teachers reported this same feeling
  • At the beginning of 2022, data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 44% of public schools posted full or part-time teaching vacancies due to unforeseen resignations and forceful reliability on non-teaching staff. That means nearly half of all American public schools were actively seeking new teachers, and meanwhile, were short-staffed

I texted back to my friend: “Just dropped some funds in the GFM account and yeah come over anytime on Friday night to grab the power washer.” 

I know her friends will be her critical support and I also know that an educator’s closest relationships often bear the burdens of educator burnout – the sudden withdrawal, never any time or energy to do the trips, adventures, and crafter-noon hangs we once enjoyed.

The National Education Association defines burnout as “a condition in which an educator has exhausted the personal and professional resources necessary to do the job.”

The headlines decry teacher shortages highlighting low compensation, increasing workloads (taking on work of those who left the field), and educator burn-out as driving forces. Tell-tale signs of burn-out include changes in appetite, sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression, fatigue, hair loss, and anhedonia or inability to enjoy activities formerly enjoyable or inability to even enjoy downtime. But, this language anesthetizes my embodied experience of burnout. 

My experience in a white body has been protected and buffered from the allostatic loads of racism and white supremacy that BIPOC educators carry. Compensation lower than the already low salaries educators receive,  expectations to take on more than their white-bodied educator colleagues (fixing discipline issues, taking on the most challenging classrooms, serving on equity committees), all while receiving less support than their white colleagues, and being often over-disciplined. 

Burnout slowly colonized my body like an undetected virus and then grew vigorously after a decade in special education classrooms. Though typical for educators and school counselors, I chalked my experiences up to the inevitable side effects, the blood and sweat equity of doing frontline work. My burn-out showed up like this:

It showed up as night terrors, surviving on chips and nicotine gum, stomach pains, and ulcers, a thinning friend group, romantic relationships with only those in the field who “got it” because they also were experiencing burn out too, binge-watching my favorite shows (the Wire, Six Feet Under) though not being able to enjoy, much less follow the plot, too busy rewinding the tape of the day, all my missteps, mistakes, and tallying up the things I didn’t do well or enough. 

“If we only talk about burnout, we hold the individual responsible for the problem. If we center moral injury, we hold the system responsible for the harm.”

– – Jen, in her SCRR Collective Renewal Strategy offering, “Trauma-Informed School Systems for Crisis Recovery and Renewal” during our 2024 Summer Institute for Educator Healing – “Embracing Renewal: Praxis and Practice towards Healing”

A toxic brew: De-contextualized definitions and trauma-informed responses to burn-out


My story with burnout started ten years before COVID pandemic, right as the trauma-informed care field was just beginning to move from whispers on the margins to widespread cheers of adoption, ubiquitous stress balls, and prescriptions for more square breathing and nature walks. The medicine for burnout aggressively focused on self-care and self-soothing–encouraging educators to muscle up and implement these strategies in contexts that lacked any time for slow breaths, much less time to urinate, and adding stress balls to our crowdfunded supply lists. 

Burnout implies that educators need more coping skills because they just can’t handle the distressing conditions. 

This de-contextualization of burnout shows up in other ways too. News headlines spotlight growing national trends of “teacher shortages”, rendering invisible the structural forces behind this decline. A more accurate headline might read:

“Schools experience a growing decline of quality educator jobs that offer humane and sustainable working conditions, livable compensation, and basic resources.” 

The trauma-informed field has since expanded to amplify traumatizing conditions, policies, and systems as part of the conversation about what it means to recover and heal. And yet it’s rare for a school district that includes teachers in this expansion of systemic inquiry and transformation.

Moral Distress and Injury in Education

For all its limitations, the trauma field continues to offer more resonant language than occupational health. Recently, this comes in the form of “moral injury,” a term coined by VA psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay that makes more visible the wounds of working in a system that constrains us from acting from our highest values and morals.   

This term, moral injury, comes from the military psychology field and refers to the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one’s core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty. It has since been applied to the fields of medicine, child welfare, and education where professionals witness and experience structural and moral harms that go against their personal values or the ethical codes of conduct for the profession.

For educators, it can look like:

  • Witnessing moral injuries and distress: witnessing students being harmed by school policies or practices; students or teachers who are impacted by policies and practices that are inequitable (especially in minoritized bodies, BIPOC, trans/queer, etc.) 
  • Witnessing transgression by educators: experiencing distress over acting in ways that violate your own moral or values; not having the freedom to provide differential teaching strategies for students who cannot learn or perform without these supports; suspending students because the policy dictates rather than engaging in inquiry and customizing behavior strategies
  • Betrayal: school, state, or national policies that prioritize compliance over care; banning books, over-disciplining students instead of accommodations and more simply, witnessing those in power uphold policies they know will create harm
  • Persistent ethical tensions: “If I do what is effective in my classroom, I might lose my job; if I prioritize by job, I fail my students whom I deeply committed”

Annie Phan, an educator in San Francisco, tweeted about “moral injury” at her previous school. 

“What I’ve learned from my recent stint of burnout in my new job is that what I was experiencing working as a public school classroom teacher was definitely not just burnout, but moral injury. Becoming a teacher to help students, only to be forced to participate in a system that fails them at every turn, creates moral injury.”

Dr. Erin Sugrue, an assistant professor of social work at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, studied moral injury with educators using an adapted version of the moral injury and distress scale and found that 80 percent of participants were impacted by moral transgressions committed by others, 68 percent experienced some sort of betrayal of their own morals, and 45 percent committed actions that transgressed their values. Additionally, she found that professionals working in high-poverty, racially segregated schools were significantly more likely to endorse experiences of moral injury.

“How does moral injury change someone?” asks Jonathan Shay in a 2015 Psychology Today article. “It deteriorates their character; their ideals, ambitions and attachments begin to change and shrink. Both flavors of moral injury impair and sometimes destroy the capacity for trust. When social trust is destroyed, it is replaced by the settled expectancy of harm, exploitation and humiliation from others.”

This settled expectancy of betrayal and harm leads to elevated feelings of despair, guilt, shame, and increased social isolation.

I text my friend again, “And let’s celebrate your first week on Friday evening with the crew.” I search for any small way to inoculate her before the process of calcification and settling consumes her. Plus, I know my time with her will disappear until June.

A blooming and complicated field of study: repairing and recovering from moral injury in education

When educator burnout is de-contextualized from injurious cultures and systems, it can exacerbate feelings of guilt, isolation, and betrayal. And yet, our theories and responses to burnout remain divorced from these systemic fires. 
I wish I was as excited about the strategies offered to recover from moral injury, as I am about the language it offers to us that goes beyond the burnout paradigm. As I dig into resources for recovery, the guidance feels disturbingly familiar to those given in the trauma-informed care field. Educators are encouraged to increase self-compassion and compassion with others in school systems, to maintain connections with students and to their wellsprings of vitality and purpose. However well-intentioned, enacting these strategies while enduring demoralizing conditions can only go so far. Wounds of the soul require soul repair. Persistent harmful systems only change with tenacious collective organizing. We need self-care and collective care, and both require time, capacity, and connection–resources scant in education.

“When systems fail us, we turn towards each other.”

 – Jen, in her SCRR Collective Renewal Strategy offering, “Trauma-Informed School Systems for Crisis Recovery and Renewal” during our 2024 Summer Institute for Educator Healing – “Embracing Renewal: Praxis and Practice towards Healing”

A powerful component of trauma recovery is speaking to what has been and remains unsayable. Having more precise language to describe our often perplexing experiences can make us feel more witnessed and seen. In this way, understanding moral distress and injury is in itself a powerful strategy for recovery. As studies proliferate and more educators are screened for the effects of moral injury, I hope that our focus on decreasing the morally injurious practices in education also propagates. In the meantime, I’ll keep texting and showing up in friendships and collective organizing with educators as they bear these burdens of demoralizing systems. 

A note from the author:  Though this writing focuses on understanding moral distress and injury for educators, it is the students who carry the heaviest burdens and deepest scars.

About the Author

Jen Leland, LMFT has extensive background in community mental health and education programs, including leading trauma-informed special education and residential treatment and youth justice programs and directing multiple non-profit and county public health programs. 

In 2015, Jen had great honor to become founding Director of Trauma Transformed Center. Having her own lived experiences in systems and more than 15 years in the public health field, she is humbled and driven by the vision that school communities can recover from crisis, structural and collective trauma in ways that lead to even more healing, loving, and just school communities for all students.

References

Burnout

Moral Distress and Injury:

Healing from Educator Moral Injury