ience burnout and contemplate an exit from
the profession than older teachers with more
classroom experience or time on the job.
The Methodology section of this proposal will describe the research that will be undertaken to test these hypotheses.
Byrne (1998) has commented that as much as 50 percent of America's teachers leave the classroom within the first seven years of experience and never return, with over two-third of that percentage leaving within four years of entry into the profession. Job burnout among teachers seems to occur within the first seven years of practice, with peaks observed in the second and the fifth years of classroom employment. Byrne (1998) states that in the first year of teaching, burnout occurs because teachers realize that pre-teaching ideals are often unattainable in practice settings; the teacher then learns to cope with this dissonance, but at about the fifth year of teaching realizes that coping is not the same thing as teaching. The result is the exodus of potentially valuable teachers from the public school system, as well as increased indifference and frustration on the part of teachers who elect to remain (Austin, 1998). Thus, the problem of teacher burnout can be regarded as having a significant and negative impact upon the education system, teachers' themselves, and their students (Byrne, 1998).
The literature on teacher burnout is extensive. Evans (1996) contends that a balanced mixture of career teachers in various stages of their career has disappeared from the schools. He believes that the average age of teachers is nearly 45 and that only about 5 percent of teachers are under 25 years old. Because teachers are much less mobile than other professionals and far less likely than college educated workers in general to change occupations or employers, this aging of the faculty presents very real challenges to administrators and others. Further, these differentials indicate th...