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Job satisfaction is something we all care about. It also happens to be something we care more about when we have less and less of it. It's a hard balance to maintain because we have satisfaction when we are with our students but we lose that same satisfaction when we read negative press or hear politicians use bad education statistics in sound bites. We certainly cannot control what they say about us but we can control how we react.

Teacher satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since MetLife last measured it two years ago and is now reaching the lowest level of job satisfaction seen in the survey  series  in more than two decades. One simply need think of Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, New Jersey and other states and cities like NY and Washington where public schools, public school teachers, and their unions have been under serious attack to begin to grasp the "why" of that drop in teacher satisfaction. But is is more complicated than that.  

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.

As demonstrated by recent survey data, job satisfaction within the profession is at its lowest since the Reagan years. What's at stake is the future of an entire generation, one that's growing up to face a new economic reality that requires a new set of skills. But because of circumstances the students don't control, they might have disaffected teachers carrying them there. According to MetLife, which interviewed 1,000 K-12 teachers by phone, the number of teachers who reported they were "very satisfied" dropped by 15 points between 2009 and 2011, from 59 to 44 percent. Two surveys that gauged teacher sentiment were commissioned by MetLife and Scholastic/The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, respectively.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That's according to the annual ­ MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. While this 15-point plummet is no doubt caused in part by the bad economy and budget cutting, it's also hard to overlook things like Waiting for Superman , the media deification of Michelle Rhee, and the publishing of flawed "scores" that purport to evaluate teachers based on students' test results - an offense first committed by the Los Angeles Times and now taken up by the New York Times and other New York papers. Teachers knew these evaluations were unreliable and invalid even before researchers documented those problems.

Over at The Nation I have a new piece looking at surveys of public school teachers, one of which found job satisfaction at its lowest point since 1989. The most important thing to note is that polling shows teachers are not unhappy because they resent new accountability policies like the more stringent teacher evaluations instituted in response to President Obama's Race to the Top program. In fact, most teachers support using multiple measures of student learning to assess educators, and most believe it should take longer to earn tenure (an average of 5.4 years according to the Gates/Scholastic poll) than it currently does (an average of 3.1 years across all states). 

The findings are also a reminder not to make assumptions about who are the unhappiest educators. It's not necessarily the burned-out veteran, or those working with the most challenging student populations. In reality, when comparing teachers with higher and lower job satisfaction, the survey shows no real difference in their years of experience, the grades they taught or the proportions of their students from low-income households.  However, there were real differences in the day-to-day experiences of the less satisified and the more satisified teachers. The unhappier teachers were more likely to have had increase in average class sizes, and to have experienced layoffs in their district. They also had more students coming to class hungry, and had more families needing help with basic social services. There was also a marked gap among the teachers when it came to how much they believed they were viewed as professionals by their peers. Among the unsatisfied teachers that rate was 68 percent, compared with nearly 90 percent of the satisfied teachers.  The survey also found a connection between the satisfied teachers and their relationships with their students' families. Happier teachers work at schools where they say there's a better plan in place for engaging parents in their children's learning. 

All over the nation, teachers are under attack. Politicians of both parties, in every state, have blamed teachers and their unions for the nation's low standing on international tests and our nation's inability to create the educated labor force our economy needs. Mass firings of teachers in so-called failing schools have taken place in municipalities throughout the nation and some states have made a public ritual of humiliating teachers. In Los Angeles and New York, teacher ratings based on student standardized test scores - said by many to be inaccurate - have been published by the press. As a result, great teachers have been labeled as incompetent and some are leaving the profession. A new study showed that teachers' job satisfaction has plummeted in recent years.

By now, you have seen the latest Metlife Survey of the American Teacher. It shows that teachers' satisfaction with their job has plummeted since 2009, from 59 percent to 44 percent. It is the lowest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of teachers who are likely to leave the profession has grown from 17 percent to 29 percent since 2009. The reasons are obvious: The most satisfied teachers feel their jobs are secure, and they are treated as professionals by the community. Compared with dissatisfied teachers, they are more likely to have opportunities for professional development, time to collaborate with other teachers, and greater parental involvement in their schools. These are teachers working in an atmosphere of professionalism and collaboration.

Schools have become the default scapegoat for our seeming inability to get a handle on the larger social and cultural issues that bedevil us. We act as if we believe that if the schools were better, our society would, by definition, be better, too. This makes sense on its face. But at the risk of playing chicken-and-egg, maybe we have it backward. Sure, it would be great if we could create a first-rate school system - whatever that might be. Families, the city, the state and nation would all benefit in countless ways. But our seeming lack of ability to reform schools to anyone's lasting satisfaction might also be a reflection of a larger, deeper social malaise, a symptom, instead of the cause we keep insisting it is.

The large-scale expansion of charter schools in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has generated few differences in educational practice between traditional and charter schools. One difference that did emerge in a RAND study was this: Parents of kids in charter schools perceived a greater sense of choice and greater satisfaction with those schools, on average, than did their counterparts in traditional schools.

"Our earnest Secretary of Education, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized NCLB by the administration's deadline and to the President's satisfaction, was back at it on Friday. Exhibiting the administration's patented disinterest in the niceties of the U.S. Constitution, he announced that he's getting ready to waive NCLB requirements for states if they agree, as the New York Times put it, "to embrace President Obama's education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition.""

Everyone loves a bump in pay, extra time off, or other form of reward or recognition.  The problem is when managers start to rely on these types of extrinsic motivators too much and stop looking for the deeper intrinsic motivators that lead to long-term satisfaction and well-being at work.

The recent reorganization of New Orleans schools offers a unique opportunity to examine differences in the policies and practices of charter and traditional schools. RAND researchers surveyed principals, teachers, and parents in both types of schools. They found higher levels of satisfaction and a perception of more choices among charter school parents. This raises the question of whether citywide school choice is equally accessible and navigable by all.

When the La Cima Elementary Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, gave out its family survey in February, administrators were thrilled that about 95 percent of families who responded were satisfied or highly satisfied with the three-year-old school. But that survey was not counted by the Department of Education in its annual progress report. The city uses a standardized environment survey that it distributes to parents and teachers every March, and La Cima refused to use it.

What has happened in the past two years? Let's see: Race to the Top promoted the idea that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students; "Waiting for 'Superman'" portrayed teachers as the singular cause of low student test scores; many states, including Wisconsin, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio have passed anti-teacher legislation, reducing or eliminating teachers' rights to due process and their right to bargain collectively; the Obama administration insists that schools can be "turned around" by firing some or all of the staff. These events have combined to produce a rising tide of public hostility to educators, as well as the unfounded beliefs that schools alone can end poverty and can produce 100 percent proficiency and 100 percent graduation rates if only "failing schools" are closed, "bad" educators are dismissed, and "effective" teachers get bonuses. Is it any wonder that teachers and principals are demoralized?

But a review of the best evidence on teachers' sentiments shows that educators are not unhappy because they resent the new emphasis on teacher evaluations, a key element of President Obama's Race to the Top program; in fact, according to a separate survey of 10,000 public school teachers from Scholastic and the Gates Foundation, the majority support using measures of student learning to assess teachers, and the mean number of years teachers believe they should devote to the classroom before being assessed for tenure is 5.4, a significant increase from the current national average of 3.1 years. But polling shows teachers are depressed by the increasing reliance on standardized tests to measure student learning-the "high stakes" testing regime that the standards and accountability movement has put in place across the country and that Race to the Top has reinforced in some states and districts. Teachers are also concerned that growing numbers of parents are not able to play an active role in their children's education, and they are angry about the climate of austerity that has invaded the nation's schools, with state and local budget cuts threatening key programs that help students learn and overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

...mounting evidence suggests that the seeming relationship between student demographics and teacher turnover is driven, not by teachers' responses to their students, but by the conditions in which they must teach and their students are obliged to learn.