California teachers cite discipline problems as survey shows at least 40% plan to quit in next decade
California teachers are warning about how the profession has changed over the past three decades, citing lack of support for teachers to address behavior issues and an overall decline in standards.
A survey from EdWeek's 2026 installment of its State of Teaching Report, found 40% of teachers in California plan to retire or quit in the next 10 years.
Fox News Digital spoke with six California teachers, many of whom have 30 years of teaching experience or on the cusp of retirement.
"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," Tera Fowler told Fox News Digital.
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Fowler, 63, plans to retire soon after teaching for over 30 years. Since she started her teaching career, she noticed students are being "coddled" more.
"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," she said.
In California, the share of teachers who say they plan to retire in the next 10 years is between 40% and 49% with an estimate of 45%, Holly Kurtz, director of the Education Week Research Center, previously told Fox News Digital.
Kurtz said that California teachers are on average older than teachers in many other states, according to the most recent federal data. The average age of a California teacher is 45.5, while the average teacher age in the U.S. is 42.9. Therefore, age is likely the major reason why California teachers are more likely to say they plan to retire in the next decade than teachers in other states, according to Kurtz.
"Age is probably the number one thing. You get to about my point in the career … it doesn't make sense to do anything else, so you stick with it until you're too old to do something else, and then you retire," California teacher Doug Kosak told Fox News Digital.
Kosak, 56, taught for 24 years in public school at Temecula Valley Unified School District and Mesa Unified School District. The 20-plus-year teaching veteran added that "progressive discipline" had emerged over the years, tying up his workdays.
"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," he said.
Nick Pardue, who teaches economics to seniors, also cited the lack of discipline and support for teachers to enforce standards. Responding to EdWeek’s survey results, he said the "lack of support from administrative staff and behavior issues" could be another reason driving teachers to retire.
After teaching for over 30 years, the 54-year-old echoed what others have said that the profession has changed.
"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," Pardue said.
According to the EdWeek report, 36% of teachers nationwide say they plan to retire in the next 10 years. Kurtz explained that there is evidence that indicates that teacher morale has been declining across the country and is at, by some measures, "the lowest point in recent memory."
Pardue, an Army veteran, believes teachers are encouraged to pass kids, regardless of what their skill levels are.
"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," he said.
Steve Campos, who has been teaching for over 30 years, said student behavior has gotten worse.
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"Times have changed," Campos, 54, told Fox News Digital. "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."
Jennifer Stoeber, who is getting ready to retire soon after teaching for 30 years, told Fox News Digital that the curriculum has become more "inclusive" over the years.
"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," Stoeber said. "In our social studies books, we focus more on inclusive issues on other cultures and not so much on our history itself."
Gevin Harrison, who started teaching 14 years ago after a 24-year career in the Air Force, discussed how teachers would reinforce values that were being taught at home.
"I consider myself a newbie. So I'm not really sure if I would be able to track any change," Harrison said. "If I was going to mark the change, I would probably compare the years that I've been teaching with the years that I was in high school."
"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," he added.
The California Department of Education did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.