(TNND) — Teachers have more stress and less pay than their peers with other jobs, according to a RAND report published this week.

The annual State of the American Teacher survey focuses on teacher well-being.

And while there have been improvements over the last few years, teachers still suffer from lower well-being than other college-educated adults working full-time.

“If teachers are not well themselves, it's hard for them to do their jobs well,” said Elizabeth Steiner, one of the authors of the report and a policy researcher at RAND. “And their jobs are educating and helping the social and emotional development of students. And when teachers are feeling stressed about their jobs, when they're experiencing symptoms of depression, they are often less engaged in their work. They perhaps are absent more often. ... There is some research suggesting that teachers who are experiencing symptoms of depression, for example, are providing students with less detailed feedback. Their lessons are less rigorous.”

Steiner said RAND began these annual teacher surveys in 2021 amid concerns about pandemic-induced school closures.

The mission of the report hasn’t changed, though Steiner said they’ve moved away from issues such as remote learning and now focus more broadly on teacher working conditions.

This year’s survey of kindergarten through grade 12 public school teachers was conducted from January to March.

Teachers report higher levels of job stress, depression and burnout than similar working adults.

Teachers report an average base salary that’s about $30,000 less than their non-teaching peers.

And fewer teachers see themselves as better off financially than their parents.

On the positive side, this year’s survey showed fewer teachers are thinking about quitting their jobs.

The share of teachers who intended to leave their jobs fell to 16% from 22% last year.

Steiner said that’s encouraging but could also reflect broader uncertainties in the job market.

Teachers are less stressed than they were when RAND began its annual teacher surveys.

Sixty-two percent of teachers said this year that they experienced frequent job-related stress, down from 73% in 2022.

Meanwhile, just a third of other working adults said they experienced frequent job-related stress, down from 41% in 2022.

Sixty-eight percent of female teachers reported frequent job-related stress, compared to 46% of male teachers.

Steiner said that’s “quite a large margin” and cause for concern, because about three-quarters of the teacher workforce is female.

Steiner said local support matters, though they’re limited in their ability with this survey to dig deeply into variation by state, district or school.

“One thing we have found in our State of the Teacher research is that administrators’ support, specifically for student behavior, seems to have an important relationship to teachers’ well-being, to their job satisfaction, and to their intentions to leave their job,” she said.

Steiner said teachers want to work fewer hours and get more pay.

That desire, of course, is not unique to the teaching profession.

But she said school leaders can improve teacher well-being by helping teachers focus on the core aspects of their job: teaching.

Teachers want more support in the classroom and help with the administrative tasks, she said.

And Steiner said schools can potentially improve teacher morale with flexible staffing models and by giving them fewer classes for which to prepare.