How should we square this with soft data coming out of teacher surveys? Those results are messier, but they could fit the same basic trajectory. One high-quality study out of Illinois found that teacher working conditions worsened substantially from 2021 to 2023. And research looking at a range of survey and pipeline indicators suggested that the state of the profession was at 50-year lows as of data ending a couple years ago. More recently, Education Week’s Teacher Morale Index showed a significant rebound in 2024-25 over the prior year.