Abstract
Numerous portraits of public school teachers in the United States reveal that between one third and one half of teachers surveyed are alienated from their jobs, their colleagues, and students, feel burned out, want to quit, and wish that they had not chosen careers in teaching (Duke, 1984; Dworkin, 1985, 1987; Elam, Rose, & Gallup, 1993; LeCompte & Dworkin, 1991). In addition, cross-national work indicates that low morale among public school teachers is often in epidemic proportion in the developed nations of the world (Menlo & Poppleton, 1990; Poppleton, 1990). In many instances, diminished morale has been blamed on a variety of stressful factors associated with public school teaching, including the perceived absence of support by campus principals and other school administrators, other teachers, students, and parents. Additional Stressors include low salaries, diminished public confidence in public education, student discipline problems and school violence, declining student performance that has prompted more stringent school and teacher accountability measures, cultural and social class differences between teachers and their students that lead to a sense of ‘culture shock,’ and efforts to ‘teacher proof’ curricula and deprive teachers of a sense of professional autonomy (see Duke, 1984; Dworkin, 1987; LeCompte & Dworkin, 1991).
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Dworkin, A.G. (1997). Coping with Reform: The Intermix of Teacher Morale, Teacher Burnout, and Teacher Accountability. In: Biddle, B.J., Good, T.L., Goodson, I.F. (eds) International Handbook of Teachers and Teaching. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4942-6_13
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