Teachers' levels of commitment to their schools and to the teaching profession, particularly among early career teachers, is a concern facing educational institutions across the United States; this concern is apparent in both public and private schools. Research on teacher working conditions and teacher retention suggests that districts and dioceses have the potential to alleviate some of the struggles of early career teachers, thereby easing new teachers' entry into school communities and the teaching profession. However, schools are complex social organizations, and much of the research on this topic misses important features of life in schools. As well, education researchers have generally focused more on the experiences of beginning teachers after they have been hired in schools and less on the expectations that those beginning teachers bring to their new positions. The author drew on theories of realistic job previews and met expectations, as well as social capital and social networks, to study the effects of teachers' expectations and social networks on their levels of commitment to their schools and the profession. The data came from survey responses from 119 early-career teachers and 248 of their mentors and colleagues across 44 public and Catholic high schools. To study the effects of the predictors on the commitment-to-school and commitment-to-profession outcomes, the author constructed hierarchical linear and hierarchical logistic regression models, respectively. Analyses indicated that the extent to which early-career teachers' expectations for their work lives match their experiences in schools affects their spring levels of commitment to their schools. Specifically, increasing the extent of met expectations increases the level of school commitment even after controlling for the prior level of commitment. Analyses indicated that having a mentor, the frequency with which mentors and mentees communicated, and whether the mentor and mentee taught the same content area were all statistically significantly related to early-career teachers' levels of commitment to their schools in the spring even after controlling for their prior levels of commitment. In particular, having a mentor and having a mentor who teaches the same content area as the mentee each associate with a lower level of commitment to the school in the spring. At the same time, communicating more frequently with mentors is associated with higher levels of commitment to their schools in the spring for early-career teachers. The null hypotheses that the effects of the met-expectations predictor, as well as the set of social network predictors, on the commitment-to-profession was equal to zero could not be rejected based on the analyses in this study. Limitations of the study include not being able to rule out the possibility that the participants underwent natural development during the year of the study and it was that natural development that drove the study findings, as opposed to the predictors of interest. As well, the sample was not selected at random and so the possibility that the findings were an artifact of an interaction between the selection of the sample and the various predictors cannot be ruled out.
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