“You Can’t Teach ‘Em ‘til You Love ‘Em”: Emotional Labor, Bureaucracy, And Teacher Burnout In The American Education System

Drawing on a series of interviews and a survey of North Carolina teachers, I examine teacher burnout in the American K-12 education system. I show how, because of the structure of education, teachers feel conflicted between the emotion norms of diverse professional expectations – including objectivity and affection – during interactions with students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. Ideologies shape teachers’ perspectives towards their roles: self-responsible teachers invested pride in student outcomes and struggled against the affective neutrality of standardized testing, while communal teachers’ dilution of educational responsibilities served as a beneficial negative case. Both ideologies expressed disillusionment over accountability measures that prescribed emotional labor in professional interaction. Self-responsible teachers were pre-disposed to occupational burnout due to their investment of pride into their role and student success. My findings suggest how low-level administrators have a fundamental role in shaping local organizational culture and teachers’ experiences with burnout, specifically by recoupling professional expectations of emotional labor with teachers’ day-to-day actions. This study exhibits the value of sociologically approaching interaction and burnout from the intersection of emotions and organizations.