Teacher and Staff Impacts

For more than 6 million teachers and staff across the U.S., a school building is a workplace — the environment where they spend 40 or more hours a week teaching, planning, and supporting students. The conditions of that workplace cut both ways. Deteriorated buildings with poor air quality, uncomfortable temperatures, and no space to recharge add physical strain and stress to an already demanding job. Healthy, well-designed buildings do the opposite: they support teachers’ health and wellness and make daily work easier.

Educator and staff working conditions and students’ learning conditions are largely the same, which is why this page is a companion to the page on Student Impacts. But the impacts of school facility conditions on adults are not as well studied as impacts on students. This page curates what the evidence does show, and where districts are already acting on it.

Districts spend heavily on recruiting and retaining teachers, but often overlook a retention lever they can directly control: the buildings where teachers work. The landmark study on this question, Fix It and They Might Stay, surveyed Washington, D.C. teachers and found that the quality of school facilities predicted teachers’ decisions to leave their positions — independent of other factors commonly blamed for attrition. 

Related research on urban districts from the same project reached the same conclusion, and a study of high-poverty rural schools connected facility conditions to teacher satisfaction in the districts that can least afford turnover.

This facility-specific evidence is smaller and older than the student-outcomes literature — a genuine research gap. But it sits within a larger, well-documented finding: working conditions drive teacher retention, and the physical environment is a working condition. More recent industry research reinforces the point from the recruitment side: in Corgan’s national surveys, teachers report weighing school design when deciding where to work, and post-pandemic findings identify teacher wellbeing and flexible, functional space as factors in recruitment and retention.

Teaching is demanding work even under the best conditions — and many educators don’t work under them. In the 2017 Educator Quality of Work Life Survey, 61 percent of educators described their work as always or often stressful, roughly twice the rate of the general workforce, with substandard building conditions among the workplace stressors educators reported.

The building itself directly affects staff health. Poor indoor air quality affects adults in the room as well as students, and statewide research, such as Healthy School Environments, Healthy Hoosiers, documents how environmental conditions in schools shape occupant health. Explore Health and Indoor Environmental Quality resources to learn more.

Classroom design shapes what teachers can actually do with their students. In Corgan’s national survey of 1,000 K-12 teachers, one in four cited poor classroom design as a main source of workplace stress — comparable to pressure from administration. The follow-up study found a flexibility gap: most teachers want to be able to adapt learning environments to different activities, but far fewer say their current classrooms accommodate this. A broader systematic review of school design research connects design attributes to how building users — teachers included — respond and perform. Explore more Classroom Design resources.