Teacher burnout in the public schools : structural causes and consequences for children

This unique study is the first large-scale sociological analysis of teacher burnout, linking it with alienation, commitment, and turnover in the educational profession. In the process of doing so, Anthony Gary Dworkin uncovers some startling trends that challenge previous assumptions held by public school administrators.

Urban public school districts spend up to several million dollars annually on programs intended to rekindle enthusiasm among their teachers, hoping thereby to reduce the turnover rates. They also assume that enthusiastic teachers will heighten student achievement. Yet data presented in Teacher Burnout in the Public Schools challenge these suppositions.

Dworkin's research shows teacher entrapment, rather than teacher turnover, as the greater problem in education today. Teachers are now more likely to spend their entire working lifetime disliking their careers (and sometimes their students), rather than quitting their jobs, and Dworkin proposes that principals, more than any other school personnel, can do much to break the functional linkage between school-related stress and teacher burnout. The author's findings also indicate that burned-out teachers pose a minimal threat to the achievement of most children, but that they do have an adverse impact on brighter students.

Teacher Burnout in the Public Schools includes an inventory of supported propositions and three levels of policy recommendations. These important policy recommendations suggest substantial organizational changes in the nature of the training of public school teachers in the college educational curriculum, in the teacher employment and deployment practices of school districts, as well as in the administrative style of school principals.

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Dworkin's text is far less than satisfying in exploring the topic of teacher burnout. The body of the study focuses on a large urban, southern public school and was originally done to discern the effect of integration on teacher burnout and student learning outcomes. While offering some insight into this particular question, the work lends little understanding or substantial analysis of the complex question of teachers and work alienation. Dworkin's focus is narrow and basically uncritical of the larger economic and political forces that serve to structure work in large institutional settings. Therefore his conclusions seem redundant and finally offer no real insights into how we can come to understand alienation and work or how to deal with it. A reader might find more grist on this subject from the growing body of literature broadly called ``the new sociology of education.'' This literature is more soundly grounded in the radical critique of the relationship of schools and education to culture, ideology, and the larger social and economic forces that serve to structure schoolwork, practice, and meaning. Works by Michael Apple and Henry Giroux are far more useful and infinitely more satisfying in helping one to truly understand the structural causes of teacher burnout. Dworkin's text is heavy on empirical analysis and full of statistical tables; it contains a fairly complex appendix. The study is substantially documented and findings are well summarized at the end of chapters and in a conclusion to the entire text. All in all, the book is interesting for its descriptive qualities but adds very little to our understanding of work alienation in the modern age.-M.J. Carbone, Muhlenberg College

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