Many recent reports have predicted an impending crisis in the teaching profession. At the heart of the reports and the reform effort lies the notion that in order to improve school experience for children, school experiences for teachers ought to be improved. This paper deals with teacher incentives as a means of attracting, retaining, and…

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142) demanded basic changes in the practices, purposes, and institutional structures of schools to accommodate handicapped students, but did not adequately address the differences between general and special educators in expectations, training, or assumptions about the functions of schooling…

An attributional model that conceptualizes the pressures that reduce professors' personal and career vitality is presented. The model is based primarily on the locus of control literature and especially the reformulated model of learned helplessness by Lynn Abramson, Martin Seligman, and John Teasdale. The analysis deals only with the cognitive…

Retirement plans and concerns of tenured faculty 40 years old and older were evaluated in 1979. For the sample of 26 member institutions of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, 1,193 faculty members returned usable questionnaires. The evaluation focused on the following: characteristics of the faculty respondents, current circumstances…

This document comprises the recommendations of a 13-member Paperwork Reduction Task Force appointed by Georgia's State Superintendent of Schools, in response to concern by educators and the public that the Quality Basic Education Act (QBE) had created a substantial increase in paperwork, particularly for teachers. The task force of teachers,…

After the Mississippi Legislature passed the Educational Reform Act in 1982, a series of programs were implemented that brought about rapid changes with little or no input from the public school personnel who were affected by them. Accordingly, a survey was conducted of the perceptions of 150 Mississippi principals and 150 superintendents…

Designed to probe the question of the specific administrative problems within their schools that principals in Georgia schools deem to be most troublesome, this study reports on the findings of a survey of 403 randomly selected elementary and secondary principals. For each of 10 needs areas that had been determined through a 1987 study to be the…

This paper presents the findings of a study conducted to investigate negative teacher attitudes toward staff development as mandated by the Mississippi Educational Reform Act of 1982. The East Mississippi Center for Educational Development is a consortium of 16 rural school districts and the Meridian Branch of Mississippi State University. The…

The relationship between teacher morale and teachers' acceptance of principals' authority was examined. The Zones of Indifference Instrument (ZII) was used to measure the degree of acceptance of authority. The Purdue Teacher Opinionnaire (PTO) was also administered to the group of Mississippi teachers to measure their morale. Usable responses were…

Data collected on school environments for "A Study of Schooling" were analyzed to determine teachers' perceptions of their work environment. Two sets of elementary, middle, and high schools were identified from teacher responses. There were 14 schools in the set having less satisfying work environments, and ten schools were in the set having more…

This research studies task-based stress among teachers in a rural setting. A 51-item instrument was administered to teachers in 12 schools to determine (1) the extent of differential reactions to a wide range of task-based teaching events, as correlated with situational characteristics (sex, age, elementary or secondary affiliation, school size);…

Perspectives concerning the current disenchantment about undergraduate curricula and the bachelors degree are offered in this keynote address. It is suggested that rising expectations and unfulfilled hopes for higher education from the 1960s may be a factor. In the 1960s a sense of reform and rediscovery later created an expectation among students…

A growing body of research indicates that teachers have different job skills, knowledge, behavior, attitudes, and concerns at different points in their careers. Many of these changes seem to follow a regular developmental pattern from which three stages can be discerned. Stage I is the survival stage, during which beginning teachers are concerned…

Teacher morale may be deteriorating because the intrinsic rewards for teaching are lower now than they used to be. High job morale, or "vocational adaptation," comes from an optimal relationship between job adjustment and personal fulfillment. Today's low teacher morale indicates low vocational adaptation. Teachers in the past had higher…

This report is an early release of a measurement instrument used in a longitudinal project Management Implications of Team Teaching (MITT), and is taken from a larger, technical Project MITT report, "Governance and Task Interdependence in Schools: First Report of a Longitudinal Study." The report describes the development of a 24-item…