Teachers on TikTok: ‘I Quit’
Disillusioned American teachers use the social media platform TikTok to portray the profession as fundamentally unsustainable, according to a new case study by Melanie Muskin, a graduate student at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy.
During the 2021-2022 school year, the U.S. experienced a historic teacher shortage. Online, videos of teachers resigning went viral, with some videos viewed nearly 14 million times. To better understand the potential impact of teachers’ resignation stories going viral on TikTok, Muskin analyzed these videos for messages about the teaching profession.
Muskin found posts on #teacherquitok showed educators emptying classrooms, crying, and bidding farewell to students. #teacherquittok provided a space for teachers to voice concerns and resembled political speech by linking resignations to complaints about the workplace, according to the study Quitting with a Crowd: An exploration of teachers’ resignation stories on TikTok, published in the September 2024 issue of the journal Teaching and Teacher Education.
But few QuitToks demanded policy changes or encouraged offline activism. Muskin found that “#teacherquittok is not a space for overt political action, but a new online social movement where teachers mobilize around grievances related to poor working conditions instead of reform efforts that challenge existing policies and catalyze system change.”
Instead of direct political action, #teacherquittok serves “as a barometer for the mood and morale within the teaching profession," Muskin wrote.
For policy makers, these findings illuminate how viral expressions of dissatisfaction from educators pushed to the brink could affect recruiting next generation of teachers. “The popularity of #teacherquittok—nearly 400 million views—underscores its potential to affect public opinion, especially among younger generations,” Muskin wrote. “QuitToks may not only reflect how teacher perceive their workplaces but also how young people view teaching.”
QuitToks depicted exhausted and fed-up teachers, grieving the loss of a profession they loved. They also showed resilient and energized teachers, escaping intense workloads, stress, and poor compensation to engage more deeply in their personal lives. In one video, a teacher filmed himself crying. In another, the camera pans across empty desks until a hand turns off the light.
“No one ever talks about the extreme amount of guilt teachers have after leaving their student mid-year” another teacher posted. “There will always be a part of me that feels like I left them in their most vulnerable time.”
Nearly half of the QuitToks positioned resignation as the only option to the challenges and saw no hope of change. “Interestingly, zero QuitToks included concrete policy solutions or recommendations for efforts that could have improved teachers’ circumstances,” Muskin noted.
The lack of any efforts to mobilize could either be a feature of #teacherquittok’s novelty or it could be “emblematic of teachers’ entrenched disillusionment with institutionalized reform,” Muskin said. “Only time will tell if messages on #teacherquittok continue to center narrative construction that ties teachers’ resignations to a broken system, or if they evolve to promote specific calls to action in efforts to ignite change.”
Muskin, an adjunct professor at her alma mater, Vassar College, is finishing her doctorate in human development and social policy at the School of Education and Social Policy. At Northwestern, she is part of the Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences, a three-year graduate fellowship program funded by U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.
She has long explored issues of dignity and sustainability for public school teachers. Before coming to Northwestern, she worked in New York City schools as a teacher, elementary school assistant principal, director of a citywide research-based professional development initiative, and head of a center-based preschool.
Some of her recent research looks at University-run early care and education; she also has a book chapter under review titled “How would you know? You don’t have kids.” The taboo of being child free in early childhood education.”
In 2022, Muskin and SESP graduate student Andrew Stein received honorable mention in the Society for Psychological Study of Social Issues essay contest, which challenged writers to address the legacy of white supremacy and Western dominance in psychology. Muskin and Stein called for “epistemic pluralism,” which means staying open to many ways of perceiving, understanding, and learning.
In addition to a master’s in human development and social policy from Northwestern, she has a master’s in organization and leadership from Columbia University, where she also earned her initial school building leader certificate; and a bachelor’s in cognitive science from Vassar, where she also earned her initial teaching certificate.