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The Science of Teacher Burnout: Why "Those Who Can't, Teach" Has It Backwards

3 the researchers behind it — The line that teaching is what you do when you can't do anything else traces to a 1903 play about revolutionaries, not classrooms — and it has outlive

University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

Richard M. Ingersoll

Known for:National data analyses reframing the 'teacher shortage' as primarily a turnover and retention crisis

Key findings

  1. 2001

    Using national Schools and Staffing Survey data, found that school staffing problems are driven far more by organizational turnover than by an insufficient supply of newly trained teachers. ↗

  2. 2010

    With Perda, traced the widely reported math and science teacher shortage to a 'revolving door' of attrition rather than insufficient production of new teachers, calling recruitment-only policy responses a wrong prescription for the wrong diagnosis. ↗

University of California, Berkeley

Christina Maslach

Known for:Creator of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the most widely used measure of occupational burnout, and pioneer of the three-dimensional model of burnout (exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced efficacy)

Key findings

  1. 1981

    With Susan Jackson, Maslach developed and validated the MBI, establishing burnout as a measurable three-dimensional construct — emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment — and demonstrating that burnout was more common in human-services occupations with chronic interpersonal demands. ↗

  2. 2016

    With Michael Leiter, Maslach reviewed three decades of burnout research and argued that effective interventions require addressing both individual coping strategies and organizational conditions — workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values — with purely individual interventions showing limited long-term effects. ↗

University of Missouri

Keith C. Herman

Known for:Linking teacher stress and coping profiles directly to classroom practice and student outcomes

Key findings

  1. 2018

    With Hickmon-Rosa and Reinke, identified four empirically derived teacher stress-and-coping profiles; teachers in the high-stress/low-coping group showed more observed reprimands and lower self-efficacy, and their students reported higher depression. ↗

  2. 2020

    With Prewett, Eddy, Savala and Reinke, found 94% of middle school teachers across a multi-district sample reported high stress, split almost evenly between high-coping and low-coping subgroups, with only 6% reporting low stress overall. ↗

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