Picture this: you’ve spent 30 years molding young minds, pouring your soul into lesson plans, grading papers until midnight, and surviving every educational fad Sacramento could cook up. And now? You’re counting down the days until you can escape.
That’s not a Hollywood teacher burnout movie. That’s real life for nearly half the teaching force in the Golden State.
The Great California Teacher Exodus
EdWeek’s 2026 State of Teaching Report dropped a stat that should make every parent in California sit up straight: somewhere between 40% and 49% of the state’s teachers — with an estimate around 45% — plan to retire or quit within the next decade. Nationally, that number sits at 36%. California isn’t just leading the pack. It’s sprinting toward the exit.
Holly Kurtz, director of the Education Week Research Center, pointed out that California’s teachers skew older than the national average — 45.5 years old compared to the U.S. average of 42.9. So sure, age plays a role. But talk to the teachers themselves and you’ll hear a very different story about what’s really pushing them out the door.
Spoiler: it ain’t their knees.
Discipline Died and Nobody Sent Flowers
Fox News Digital talked to six veteran California educators, and the chorus was unanimous. The profession they signed up for doesn’t exist anymore.
Tera Fowler, 63, has been teaching for over three decades. She’s watched the slow rot firsthand.
“I would like to see a shift in attitude toward teachers as an authority. Teachers have, since we are the professionals, the right to make decisions, education decisions, curriculum decisions, rules and consequences.”
Fowler said students are being “coddled” more than ever, and parents have gone from partners to adversaries.
“The biggest change is the lack of discipline and consequences for the children and the increasing expectation of entitlement of the parents — that they are expecting more and more.”
Let that sink in. The people trained to educate your kids can’t actually enforce basic rules because the system — and increasingly the parents — won’t let them.
“Progressive Discipline” — a Fancy Name for Chaos
Doug Kosak, 56, taught for 24 years in public schools across Temecula Valley and Mesa Unified. He watched something called “progressive discipline” creep in like mold in a bathroom — slowly, then everywhere.
“I can attribute this to the attitudes, the lack of discipline in the schools, inability to hold kids accountable. There are so many other factors that prevent me from doing my job effectively.”
Economics teacher Nick Pardue, a 30-year veteran and former Army man, laid it out even cleaner. Schools adopted “positive behavior support” — bureaucrat-speak for “don’t punish bad behavior, just hope it goes away.”
“This positive behavior support where they really didn’t want any negative punishments for students who were acting out or misbehaving. So they were looking for positive interventions with the idea that students — every once in a while — they lose themselves.”
They lose themselves. That’s one way to describe a kid throwing a chair across the room while the teacher fills out a form in triplicate.
Dashboards, Politics, and Passing Kids Who Can’t Pass
Pardue didn’t stop there. He pulled back the curtain on something even uglier — the politicization of the classroom itself.
“They also like having a dashboard for certain kids and ethnicities. That became a huge priority. So there’s a lot of politics that got infused into teaching that I think created a lot of problems.”
Teachers are being pressured to pass students regardless of skill level. Read that again. The entire point of education — measuring whether a kid actually learned something — got sacrificed on the altar of equity dashboards and administrator optics. It’s not teaching anymore. It’s data manipulation with a lanyard.
Steve Campos, another 30-year veteran, put it bluntly.
“The lack of discipline sometimes — just student behavior. It’s not like it used to be. There’s been a big change and a big difference in what we’re asked to do — what we are dealing with. Yeah, it’s just kind of spiraling quickly.”
Spiraling. The word teachers keep using when they describe what Sacramento’s progressive education policies have done to their classrooms.
History? What History?
Jennifer Stoeber, preparing to retire after 30 years, flagged another quiet revolution — the curriculum itself.
“Our curriculum has changed and become more inclusive, in some ways good — putting more emphasis on areas instead of teaching the curriculum as it used to be. In our social studies books, we focus more on inclusive issues on other cultures and not so much on our history itself.”
So kids can’t behave, can’t be held accountable, get passed whether they’ve earned it or not, and now they’re not even learning American history. Fantastic. What a system.
The Old Way Worked — Ask Anyone Who Lived It
Gevin Harrison came to teaching after 24 years in the Air Force. Even as a self-described “newbie” with 14 years in the classroom, he sees the gap between what schools were and what they’ve become.
“Teachers used to reinforce the values that you would learn at home and chances are, if you got in trouble at school, your parents were going to be ticked because they were all on the same sheet of music.”
Same sheet of music. That phrase hits like a freight train because it describes exactly what’s missing. Parents and teachers used to be allies. Now teachers are outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and out of patience.
Trump has been hammering the education establishment for years — the unions, the bureaucracy, the ideology — and stories like this are exactly why. You don’t fix a system this broken with another committee or another sensitivity training. You fix it by giving teachers their authority back and telling the progressive discipline crowd to sit down.
The California Department of Education, by the way, didn’t respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. Shocking. The building’s burning and the fire department won’t pick up the phone.
Half the teachers in California are heading for the exits, and the state’s response is silence. That tells you everything you need to know about who’s really running the asylum — and it sure isn’t the people who actually know how to teach.