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.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 US 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 ...