Teachers are feeling burned out. Artificial intelligence can help.

Educators are at the ends of their ropes. So suggests a fall 2020 survey by RAND Corp., which found that a quarter of all teachers were thinking about leaving education. Remote learning and COVID-19 are partly to blame: More than half (57 percent) of teachers said they worked more hours per week during the pandemic than they did before it, according to RAND, and 80 percent reported feelings of burnout as a result. Even before COVID-19, however, former public-school teachers were struggling, and reported finding better pay, better work/life balance, more resources and a more manageable workload in jobs outside of education. "Part of the problem is that teachers spend a lot of time doing things that ... in their view are not the best and highest use of their time," says former teacher Jake Bryant, now a partner at management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., where he serves the company's education practice. "Nobody becomes a third-grade teacher because they love collecting permission slips and filling out attendance sheets.