Why Teachers Are Disrespected in Society (And What the Data Shows)

Short answer: Largely yes, and it has been measured rather than merely felt — in the largest international study of the question, classroom teachers ranked near the bottom of fourteen professions. But the same research complicates the story: in most countries surveyed, the public thinks teachers are paid less than they deserve. The problem is less that people hold teachers in contempt, and more that the job is widely misunderstood.

Most writing on this topic is a list of grievances. This page starts with what the evidence actually shows, because the data is more interesting than the complaint — and in places it points somewhere different.

Is it actually true?

The most comprehensive attempt to measure this is the Global Teacher Status Index, commissioned by the Varkey Foundation and conducted by Populus with researchers at the UK-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It polled 35,000 members of the public and a further 5,500 teachers across 35 countries, and asked people to rank their respect for teachers against other professions.

Its headline finding, published in 2018, is blunt: classroom teachers placed near the bottom of a list of fourteen key professions. So the perception teachers report is not imagined, and it is not confined to one country.

Two caveats worth keeping. The index measures relative ranking against other jobs, not whether people dislike teachers — placing fourteenth out of fourteen in a ranking exercise is not the same as hostility. And the study is now several years old, which matters for a question where the pandemic years are widely thought to have shifted attitudes in both directions.

The finding that complicates it

The same research contains a result that sits awkwardly with the simple disrespect narrative, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

In 28 of the 35 countries surveyed, teachers were being paid less than the amount the public considered a fair wage for the job. The general public, asked directly, thought teachers should be earning more than they were. The study also found that most people underestimate how many hours teachers work and how much they are paid.

Put those together and the picture changes shape. It is hard to describe a public that thinks teachers are underpaid and works longer than assumed as one that holds teachers in contempt. What the data looks more like is a profession people are broadly sympathetic to but do not see clearly — they do not know what the job involves, so they do not rank it alongside professions whose demands are more legible to them.

That distinction matters, because misunderstanding and contempt call for different responses. It also explains why “teachers get long holidays” and “teachers are underpaid” are so often held by the same person without apparent contradiction.

What teachers themselves report

The public-facing data above is only one half. The other half is what teachers believe about how they are seen, and it is measured too.

Education Week’s 2024 State of Teaching report, based on a nationally representative survey of 1,498 teachers, found that seven out of ten teachers believe the public holds a negative view of their profession. A middle school teacher from North Dakota quoted in the reporting put the feeling directly: “Teachers are overworked, underpaid, and disrespected. We deal with our most valuable part of our society, which is children. We are treated as if that does not matter.”

Set that against the Varkey finding and you get the actual shape of the problem. Teachers overwhelmingly believe the public thinks badly of them. The public, asked directly, says teachers should be paid more than they are and works longer than assumed. Both of those can be true at once, and the space between them is a perception gap rather than a disagreement.

That gap is worth taking seriously in both directions. A teacher’s sense of being disrespected is real and has consequences regardless of what surveys say about public opinion — feeling undervalued affects job satisfaction and retention whether or not the underlying contempt exists. But a profession that believes it is disliked, when the evidence says it is mostly misunderstood, may be misreading which problem to solve.

One distinction is worth keeping separate here. Pew Research’s 2024 study of US public K-12 teachers found that 68% said they had experienced verbal abuse from a student, such as being yelled at, and about one in five described students being disrespectful toward them as a major problem. That is real and serious, but it is classroom behaviour rather than societal status — a different question with different causes, and conflating the two makes both harder to think about.

The reasons teachers give

Ask teachers and the same explanations recur. Several are well founded; a couple are worth pushing back on.

It is treated as a fallback career

The idea that teaching is what you do when other plans fail — captured in the old jibe about those who can’t — is durable and corrosive, because it frames the job as a destination rather than a choice. It is also circular: a profession described as a fallback attracts less prestige, which makes it more likely to be described that way.

Everyone has been to school

This is probably the strongest single explanation, and the old version of this page missed it. Almost nobody has watched a surgeon work, so nobody imagines they could do it. Everybody has sat in a classroom for over a decade and watched teaching happen, which produces a widespread and mistaken sense of familiarity with the job.

What a student observes is the delivery — the visible hour in front of the class. What they never see is the planning, assessment, differentiation, safeguarding, behaviour management and administration around it. Expertise that is invisible reads as absent, and a job that looks easy to do is rarely ranked as a demanding profession.

Pay is read as a status signal

Whatever people say about respect, salary is how societies broadcast what they value, and the gap is real and measured. The Economic Policy Institute found the teacher pay penalty hit a record high in 2024, with teachers earning 26.9% less than similarly educated professionals.

The direction of causation is genuinely contested — whether low pay follows low status or produces it — but the signal works either way, and it is the one most visible to people deciding whether to enter the profession. Our separate guide covers the case for paying teachers more in detail.

Suspicion and safeguarding culture

Reported cases of misconduct are covered heavily, and the coverage attaches to the profession rather than to the individual. The practical result is a working environment built around visible, documented contact — open doors, no one-to-one meetings out of sight, communication on school systems.

Those precautions are sensible and protect staff as much as students, but they carry an implicit message that teachers notice: the default posture is caution rather than trust. That is a genuine change in how the job feels, and it is reasonable to name it.

Two things are worth stating plainly here, because this is where discussion of the topic usually goes wrong. First, these precautions apply to all staff equally — the protection is structural, about keeping contact observable, not about suspicion attaching to particular teachers. Second, the realistic consequence of a conduct allegation is an employment process: an investigation, possibly suspension, possibly dismissal. Describing routine professional caution as a road to prosecution overstates it badly and adds anxiety without adding accuracy.

A profession that is majority women

Teaching, particularly at primary and elementary level, is overwhelmingly staffed by women, and it is frequently argued that this depresses its perceived status — part of a broader and much-discussed pattern in which occupations that become majority-women have tended to lose pay and prestige rather than gain it.

It is worth being precise about what that argument is. It is a claim about how society assigns status, not a claim about the work or the people doing it, and the sexism in it belongs to the perception rather than to the profession. Framing teaching as somehow lesser because women do it is the attitude being described, not a finding to be repeated approvingly.

Responsibility without authority

Teachers are held accountable for outcomes — attainment, behaviour, attendance — while the tools available to them have narrowed considerably, and decisions about consequences sit with administrators. Being answerable for results you cannot fully control is a recognised source of low professional status in any field, and teachers feel it acutely.

The “it’s a calling” trap

Framing teaching as a vocation is meant as praise and often functions as a way of declining to pay for it. If the reward is intrinsic, the argument goes, the extrinsic one matters less — which is not applied to doctors, who are also allowed to love their work and be paid properly for it. Teachers notice that the vocation framing shows up most reliably in conversations about money.

Parents, and the childcare framing

Schools do provide supervision, and for working families that function is real and necessary. The friction comes when it becomes the primary way the institution is understood — when the teaching is treated as incidental to the fact that the child is somewhere safe between eight and three. We look at that framing directly in are teachers babysitters?

Why it matters beyond hurt feelings

It would be easy to treat this as a question about morale. It is not only that, and the practical consequences are the reason it gets studied at all.

It shapes who enters the profession. Status is one of the things people weigh when choosing a career, alongside pay and conditions. A profession widely described as a fallback, and visibly paid less than comparable graduate work, has a harder time recruiting from the same pool as law or medicine — and that is a self-reinforcing loop, because the calibre of entrants feeds back into how the profession is regarded.

It shapes who stays. Feeling undervalued is consistently among the reasons teachers give for leaving, and it compounds with workload rather than sitting separately from it. A demanding job that is also perceived as low-status is a harder proposition than a demanding job that is admired.

And it shapes how much latitude teachers get. Professions that are trusted are given discretion; professions that are not are given procedures. A good deal of what teachers experience as bureaucratic creep is downstream of a general reluctance to leave judgment in their hands.

Matthew Kraft, the researcher quoted in Education Week’s coverage, makes the point that talking about respect is not in itself a plan: “We’d like to talk about how we need to value and respect educators, but that doesn’t give us any actionable steps for what to do.” His emphasis is on structural change — pay, and redefining the work of teaching. That is a more useful frame than exhortation, and it is why the section below is about mechanisms rather than attitudes.

Where teachers are respected more

The most useful thing about an international study is that it shows this is not inevitable. The Varkey research found significant differences between countries, with teachers generally enjoying higher social status in Asia than in Europe or the Americas, and China and Brazil sitting at the top and bottom of the index respectively.

That range matters more than any single ranking. If teacher status were simply a consequence of the job’s nature, it would look similar everywhere. It does not, which means it is a product of how a particular society treats the profession — how it is paid, how selective entry is, how much autonomy teachers are given, and how the job is talked about publicly. Those are all things that can change, and in some countries have.

What actually shifts it

If the underlying problem is legibility rather than contempt, the responses that follow are fairly specific.

• Make the invisible work visible. The gap between what the public thinks the job involves and what it involves is measurable, and it is where the misunderstanding lives. Descriptions of the actual week do more than assertions of respect.
• Pay, because the signal is read. The public in most countries already agrees teachers are underpaid, which makes this less politically fraught than it is usually treated as.
• Selectivity raises status. Professions regarded as hard to enter are regarded as prestigious. Systems that made entry more demanding, and supported it properly, have generally seen status follow.
• Autonomy over the work. Being trusted to exercise judgment is what distinguishes a profession from a job, and it is the thing teachers most often report losing.

For an individual teacher none of that is immediately actionable, which is its own frustration. It is worth separating the two things this question bundles: how the profession is regarded in the abstract, and how a particular teacher is regarded by the students and families they actually work with. Those frequently diverge, and the second one is usually much better than the first.

What respect looks like day to day

National status is abstract. If you are a parent or an administrator reading this and wondering what it would actually mean in practice, teachers tend to describe the same fairly small, concrete things.

• Assume good faith first. The single most cited thing. When a teacher makes a decision a family disagrees with, opening with “help me understand why” rather than a complaint to the principal changes the entire interaction — and it usually resolves it faster.
• Back the professional judgment. Teachers notice when an administrator’s default is to reverse a decision under pressure rather than to ask about it. Being overruled without being consulted is the specific experience that reads as disrespect.
• Protect the time. Meetings scheduled into planning periods, and administrative work added without anything being removed, communicate a view about whose time is valuable more clearly than any staff-appreciation week.
• Ask before deciding. Curriculum, timetabling and behaviour policy are areas where teachers hold the relevant expertise and are frequently the last to be consulted. Consultation is the cheapest available form of respect.
• Be specific when something goes well. “Thank you for what you do” is pleasant and generic. Naming the thing — a lesson your child talked about, a way a difficulty was handled — is the version teachers actually remember.

What connects those is that none of them are gestures. They are all instances of treating a teacher’s judgment as expert judgment, which is what distinguishes respect for a profession from goodwill toward the people in it. Goodwill is what the survey data suggests the public already has; the professional regard is the part that is missing.

It is also worth saying to teachers reading this that the abstract and the particular genuinely diverge. A profession can rank fourteenth out of fourteen while an individual teacher is held in very high regard by the families they work with. The national number is not a verdict on your classroom.

Frequently asked questions

Has respect for teachers actually declined, or does it just feel that way?

Careful long-run comparisons are harder than they look, because consistent measurement of teacher status only really begins with studies like the Global Teacher Status Index. What is well evidenced is that teachers currently rank low against other professions and that the pay gap has widened. Claims about a specific golden age are usually asserted rather than measured.

Which countries respect teachers most?

In the Varkey research, status was generally higher in Asia than in Europe or the Americas, with China at the top of the index and Brazil at the bottom. The spread between countries is the important part — it shows teacher status is a policy and cultural outcome rather than a fixed feature of the job.

Do students disrespect teachers more than they used to?

This is a different question from societal status, and the honest answer is that it is contested. What has clearly changed is the range of responses available to a teacher and where the authority to use them sits, which alters how the same student behaviour plays out even if the behaviour itself is unchanged.

Does subject or grade level change how teachers are treated?

Teachers consistently report that it does, with status tending to rise alongside the age of the students and the perceived difficulty of the subject. Early-years staff describe being treated as childcare most often, and the childcare framing tracks closely with how young the children are rather than with how demanding the work is — early-years teaching being, by most accounts, among the hardest of the lot.

Is teaching considered a profession?

It has the standard markers — required qualifications, licensure, a code of ethics, a body of specialist knowledge — while lacking some of the autonomy and control over entry that the classic professions hold. That tension is the substance of a long-running debate, which we cover in is teaching a profession or an occupation?

Keep reading
Is teaching a profession or an occupation? — the status question, argued properly.
Why teachers should get paid more — the pay gap in detail.
Are teachers babysitters? — the childcare framing head-on.
Teachers being disrespectful to students — the same question pointed the other way.
10 common reasons teachers get fired — what actually ends careers.