Metlife Survey Shows Teachers Are at Least as Happy With Their Jobs as Other People

Peyri Herrera / Flickr

You might not know it from much of the coverage of MetLife’s annual survey of teachers and principals, but teachers are about as satisfied with their jobs as workers in other fields — and perhaps even more satisfied.

About 82 percent of teachers surveyed reported being very or somewhat satisfied with their jobs, according to the 2012 Metlife survey.

How satisfied are workers in other fields? Depends whom you ask. Three surveys give different answers:

• About 35 percent were somewhat satisfied or satisfied. (2011 survey of about 400 North Americans by staffing firm Right Management)
• About 47 percent were satisfied with their jobs. (2011 survey of U.S. workers by the Conference Board)
• About 81 percent are somewhat or very satisfied with their jobs. (2012 survey of 600 randomly selected U.S. workers by the Society for Human Resource Management, h/t to Andrew Rotherham)

But the Metlife survey does suggest that the number of teachers who are thrilled about going to work every day is falling to “normal” levels.

About 39 percent of  teachers responding to the most recent Metlife survey were very satisfied with their jobs. About 38 percent of workers responding to the Society for Human Resource Management survey said the same thing.

Just nine years ago, nearly 60 percent of teachers were very satisfied with their jobs.

That means that, as our colleagues at StateImpact Indiana write, there are more teachers today writing things like this:

“I am beginning to hate getting out of bed each morning to teach.”

The fine print: For both the 2012 and 2003 reports, Metlife surveyed nationally representative groups of about 1,000 public school, K-12 teachers. Both the Metlife surveys and the Society for Human Resource Management survey report margins of errors or sampling errors. Margins of error for the Right Management and Conference Board surveys are not publicly available.