Before my son was born, my wife and I made a decision that sounds strange to most people. We decided that our relationship with each other was more important than our relationship with him.
We weren’t being cold. We were being structural. If the marriage breaks down (if the foundation cracks), everything built on top of it cracks too. A child can feel when his parents’ partnership is eroding. He absorbs that instability like water. So we decided that protecting the marriage meant protecting the family. That tending to the spousal relationship was the best gift we could give our son. It wasn’t either/or. It was prerequisite.
Schools operate exactly the same way, and most have forgotten it.
For the last decade, schools have bent themselves into configurations that prioritize student happiness, student outcomes, student voice at almost every decision point. The mission statements are written in student outcomes. The initiatives are designed for student engagement. The time, money, and energy all flow toward the students. And somewhere in that focusing down, schools stopped asking whether the adults holding it all together were okay.
They’re not. In December 2025, only 15% of teachers reported their wellbeing as positive.
Burned-out teachers produce lower student achievement. This is what the research (which schools claim to follow) shows. Not because teachers stop caring. Because when a teacher is emotionally exhausted, the classroom changes. The feedback becomes more critical, the encouragement dries up, the creativity retreats. Students in classrooms with burned-out teachers have measurably higher cortisol levels (the stress hormone spiking in response to the emotional climate, not the curriculum).
A recent systematic review found that when teachers are cynical and exhausted, they provide less favorable social behavior toward students, plan less engaging lessons, and create environments where students feel less competent. The students absorb it; their motivation drops, and their achievement follows.
The parallel to my marriage is exact: **You cannot build student wellbeing on the wreckage of teacher wellbeing.** The students notice when the lesson is phoned in. They notice when the teacher is absent (physically or emotionally). They notice when the classroom has become a place where an adult is surviving rather than teaching. And they respond with lower engagement, lower achievement, higher anxiety, lower life satisfaction.
But schools have structured themselves backwards. The priorities are inverted. Student outcomes sit at the top. Everything else serves them. Teacher satisfaction is treated as a nice-to-have, not a prerequisite.
It’s not.
Research on school climate consistently finds that teacher morale is not separate from student performance (it’s foundational). Schools with positive climates, where teachers report higher job satisfaction and feel supported, produce higher student achievement. Teachers’ perceptions of the school as a place to work predict eighth graders’ reading and math scores. It’s not correlation without causation. The mechanism is clear: teachers who feel respected, resourced, and stable create classrooms where students thrive.
The inverse is also clear. Strip away a teacher’s planning time. Add layers of compliance documentation. Remove job security. Demand more rigor without providing more support. Reduce a teacher to a facilitator of standards rather than a thinker about learning. Watch what happens: the teacher becomes depleted, the classroom becomes flat, and the students (whom schools said they were optimizing for) suffer.
This isn’t an argument against caring about students. It’s an argument for understanding systems. A school that wants to improve student outcomes should look first at the health of its teachers, not as an investment in recruitment or retention (though it is that), but as the direct prerequisite for student learning.
The students are not separate from the adults in the room. They’re not unaffected by teacher stress, teacher burnout, teacher demoralization. They’re immersed in it. They breathe it in. When you improve teacher wellbeing, you improve the entire environment in which students learn. When you erode it in pursuit of higher test scores or student happiness, you’re sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.
My wife and I protected our marriage because we understood that a child’s sense of security comes from the stability of his parents’ partnership, not from how much we spend on his activities or how perfectly we manage his happiness. The same is true in schools. Student wellbeing grows from the stability and health of the adults creating the learning environment, not from initiatives designed to optimize student happiness in isolation.
This isn’t a call to abandon student needs. It’s a call to understand the hierarchy. You can’t build on a broken foundation. You can’t create a healthy school climate for students by draining the adults who create it. You can’t pursue student outcomes by sacrificing the people who produce them.
If a school wants to improve student outcomes, it should start by asking: Are our teachers okay? Do they have time to think? Do they feel secure? Are they burning out? And then, not as a nice gesture but as a core strategy, it should do what’s necessary to answer yes to those questions.
Because when teachers are supported, resourced, respected, and healthy, students absorb that too. They feel safe. They engage. They achieve. They show up, not because they’re being motivated by adults who are running on empty, but because they’re in an environment where learning is happening the way it’s supposed to: with presence, creativity, judgment, and care.
The students come first by putting the teachers first. It’s not a paradox. It’s how systems work.
Takeaway for Leaders: Before you implement the next student-centered initiative, ask: What does this cost the teachers who’ll execute it? If the answer erodes their wellbeing, you’re not helping students. You’re borrowing from the future to pay for today.
If you’re thinking through questions like this one — how to prioritize teacher wellbeing as the foundation for student success — my book goes deeper. The AI Doesn’t Know Your Students is available on Amazon and at shouldiuse.ai/book.
David Jacobson is a high school history teacher. He writes about AI, education, and the messy intersection of the two at shouldiuse.ai.
