There is a certain amount of righteous indignation that comes with working in education. Teachers and other youth workers in schools frequently feel maligned and are very sensitive to the public perception that they don’t do that much and they are far whinier than they are worth. So naturally when I was asked recently whether teaching is a legitimate profession my knee-jerk reaction was to sputter “Well of course it is!” But reflecting upon this question has led to some uncertainty about my answer and even the substance of the initial query.
I ended up doing way more reading than I intended to do and landed on this, an excerpt from the book “Thinking About Teaching: An Introduction”. Robert Runté examines the two sociological theories underpinning the idea of a “profession”: trait theory and structural-functionalism. I’ll spare you the gory SOC101 details — neither theory does a very good job of describing what teachers do or defining professions at all for that matter, and it’s because the world is changing. Runté makes the case that the all occupations are becoming deprofessionalized for a variety of reasons. The knowledge base of the general population is rising, thus undermining the information monopoly previously enjoyed by professionals. Occurring along with this is the process of “deskilling”. The rise of automatization and the drive to decrease costs and increase efficiency are a part of deskilling. People who were formerly autonomous professionals are now more likely to be specialized workers within a larger bureaucratic organism.
So maybe the whole question of whether teaching is a profession is a non-question because professions don’t exist. Ironically all of the things that we do to make teaching seem more “professional” seem doomed to accelerate deskilling. Standardized testing increases the likelihood of curriculum-centered rather than child-centered teaching. Policy initiatives like NCLB which measure teacher performance by output decreases reflective and responsive classroom methods tailored to individuals. Top-down central control of schools discourages innovation at the classroom level and diminishes the intrinsic rewards of teaching. chools are assembly lines, students are empty vessels and teachers are detached workers hoping to increase test scores. Pretty bleak, huh?
Well, maybe not that bad just yet. But we’re getting there. Teachers need to be paid more, but I think we’re having a bit of miscommunication about why that should be so. Professional cache shouldn’t define the pay scale, whether or not a teacher is effective should.
We need more discussion about how we train, select, support and evaluate teachers. Teacher training should include a greater proportion of hours spent student-teaching – research on high school teachers has found that those who spent 60 hours or more student-teaching were 45% less likely to leave the profession than those who went through alternative certification routes requiring 30 hours or less. We can’t pay teachers based solely on outcome. Do doctors get paid less when someone dies on the table? There must be multiple measures of performance: credentials, accrued coursework, years of experience, advancing student learning as measured by test scores and added value, supporting students via reflective teaching methods, mentoring new recruits. Teachers should be encouraged to build on their classroom practice and differentiate their curriculum materials to meet the needs of their students. All of this is useless without leadership so there needs to be an increased onus on educational administrators to be instructional leaders. Principals must have the skill and the time to evaluate teachers fairly and accurately; for too long the apparent addition to the expression “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” has been “those who can’t teach, administrate”.
Before we concern ourselves with abstractions such as whether we are seen as professionals maybe we need to attend to the concrete matters of improving the the quality of the work that we do.
