What Happens When the Canary Stays in the Coal Mine?

If the canary stays in the coal mine, what happens physically, psychologically, and emotionally to the canary? When might policymakers begin to realize we have a real problem on our hands?

Over our past few posts on our blog, we have been using the analogy of the canary in the coal mine as a way to help understand what is happening to the workforce of educators we ask to educate our students daily in the 21st century. With ongoing shortages and turnover of educators worsening year by year, our last post explored the theory of job demands and resources and its ability to give us a more comprehensive lens in understanding the growing issue of educator attrition and turnover.

Before we unpack the nature of demands and resources in our schools today, we need to examine the ever-increasing phenomenon of stress and burnout and its ongoing costs in our schools.

So consider, what causes stress? Can stress ever be helpful? And when do we really need to worry about stress?

Stress and Burnout

Stress and burnout have become a badge of honor for most workers, including educators in the 21st century. Workers who sustain long periods of stress are considered heroes, and claiming burnout has become the calling card of success.

As we previously discussed in explaining the job demands and resources, all work, including educating our children, is an energy-driven process. Teaching children, planning for lessons, working with colleagues, grading assignments, and talking to parents all require energy.

With their internal battery, an educator may start their day fully charged, but the energy required for living and all of the tasks associated with teaching slowly but surely drains the battery throughout the day. In addition to the normal tasks of living and educating, humans are also stuck with a mind that can open the floodgate and create an energy drain.

Stress is what is known as a biopsychosocial process in that the social world in which educators work influences how they think about things, which in turn influences their biology. Poor conditions in the workplace, negative interpersonal interactions, and low student engagement as social influences all create reactions as thoughts and emotions in the educator. These thoughts and emotions take energy to deal with, especially when they are negative.

A critical distinction exists, however, between seeing stress as a challenge or a threat or how we appraise stress. When educators face some difficulty during the day, they go through an unconscious appraisal loop. If they see the difficulty as a threat, a threat response is activated, or the traditional fight or flight response as a way to protect themself, and more energy is shifted to the heart and large muscles just in case. In contrast, if an educator sees the difficulty as a challenge, their response is more like an exercise in which more energy is released, and response and performance are often enhanced as the difficulty does not seem like a threat (McGonigal, 2015). In essence, by seeing stress as a challenge, educators can actually build more resilience.

However, after too many threat responses, an educator’s battery begins to run low, and feelings of stress abound; stress begets more stress in an unending loop. Like a battery left in frigid conditions too long, stress on educators can eventually accumulate into negative long-term outcomes such as decreased work performance and a higher chance of burnout.

Short-term solutions or solutions that do not deal with the biopsychosocial dynamics are like trying to jumpstart a battery left in zero degrees for a year. No matter how powerful you think the jumpstart is, people may just need to install a new battery.

The Costs of Stress and Burnout

The ongoing costs of the stress cycle in schools today create an extreme cost on the individual, the school and district, and society as a whole.

First, many educators who have spent years in training and have learned how to best educate our students face the psychic costs of abandoning what they love and the students they want to help. Even educators who are highly stressed and who do not leave begin to minimize engagement and reduce their performance.

Second, the insurance costs for schools and districts continue to rise, which can be attributed in some part to stress-related illnesses. For instance, the American Institute of Stress estimates that job stress costs employers, schools, and districts more than $300 billion annually (Pfeffer, 2018). This includes the costs for such things as anti-anxiety medications, which increased after Covid, increased depression, inflammatory shifts requiring treatment, and increases in diabetes and psychotherapy.

Last, the need for well-educated and trained students to enter college and the workplace has never been greater. This pressure has continually grown over the past few decades. However, without well-trained and experienced teachers who are given some degree of autonomy, the impact on society may be huge. For instance, estimates show that expert teachers can add extra months of learning to students, but if these experts continue to leave, less learning is likely to occur.

Conclusion

In a recent New York Times editorial, Eric Reinhart, a physician, wrote that burnout is also becoming synonymous with the medical profession. He states:

“But the burnout rhetoric misses the larger issue in this case: What’s burning out health care workers is less the grueling conditions we practice under, ‌and more our dwindling faith in the systems for which we work. What has been identified as occupational burnout is a symptom of a deeper ‌collapse. We are witnessing the slow death of American medical ideology.”

Like the medical profession, disillusionment is also growing among public educators. Addressing the attrition and turnover of educators will require our understanding of how job demands and resources link to stress and burnout and a grand effort to reimagine an ideology of the power and need for public education that works for students and adults alike. If we can’t, the canary may continue to refuse to enter the coal mine.