Over the past few years, teachers opting out of Florida classrooms have been chalked up to pay, politics, and an overall lack of support.
But new exit interviews from over the summer across more than a half dozen Florida school districts suggest there may be a shift in what’s now driving teachers away.
- “I feel value as a person, but not as an educator,” stated a former teacher in Hillsborough County,
- “I can’t teach to the test anymore,” an ex-teacher in Palm Beach County documented.
- “Parents delegate everything,” wrote a Pasco County teacher.
These firsthand sentiments, which we obtained through a public record request months after we started sharing teacher exit interviews, provide the most detailed understanding of why some teachers choose to leave.
During the 2022/23 school year, we found more than 18,000 Florida teachers left their districts . Those exits represented nearly 10% of the state’s publicly employed teachers at the time. More recent data has yet to be released.