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“quits”, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, hit a high in September, with over 4.3 million people leaving their jobs, and was followed by a modest reduction of that trend in October and November.

n Tuesday the labor department said there were 10.6m job openings at the end of November and 6.9 million unemployed people – 1.5 jobs per unemployed person. The number of quits hit a new high of 4.5m.

The top reasons cited by experts continue to be lack of adequate childcare and health concerns about Covid

(City students were excluded from the analysis because no city schools had adopted four-day weeks. Only rural, small town and suburban students were included.)

The switch seemed to hurt reading achievement more than math achievement.

Rural schools accounted for seven out of 10 schools on the four-day schedule in this study.

home-schooling is back to its prepandemic rate of 4 percent, and data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that by far the steepest drops in public school enrollment during the 2020-21 school year were among children in pre-K or kindergarten.

All of this at least raises the question of whether some of the people driving the outrage, even animus, against schools might not have much skin in the game and might not have any recent experience with teachers or curriculum.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on people who left their jobs shows that people working in transportation and manufacturing quit at a lower rate than people working in professional and business services, and below the overall private industry average. Among industries with lower wages, hospitality did see a high level of resignation and job changes, though the industry typically has very high turnover (up to 70% to 80% yearly).

Nikolaidis’s research shows that some of the strongest determinants of lower mood after covid-19 were external social circumstances, including income or economic distress, as well as the person’s mental and socioeconomic conditions prior to the pandemic. People working in low-wage and hourly jobs have long expressed significant stress associated to their work, and their burnout epidemic arguably pre-dates covid-19.

The US administration seems aware of the looming crisis, and has proposed a mental health strategy with an overall budget of about $1 billion for 2023, to provide mental health services, recruit a mental health workforce, provide support to frontline health workers, and strengthen the role of community behavioral health clinics.