American teachers have had enough. Since March, schools in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina have either been shut down or turned into sites of resistance.
Poor pay, increased health care costs and diminished pension plans are certainly core issues — teachers in Oklahoma, for example, haven’t received a pay boost in a decade. But these problems alone aren’t driving the protests. In every state where teachers have recently gone on strike, demands for increased school funding have been made.
Teachers are seeing their own experience being devalued by policymakers and other officials with little experience in the education field, and it’s not improving the education of their students. In other words, teachers are balking at the erosion of their status as professionals. In fact, it’s precisely because of their sense of professionalism that teachers are driven to an agonizing decision to withhold their labor. Teachers see themselves and their students being treated as fungible costs of production, cogs in a bureaucratic machine. To them, nothing less than the education profession is at risk.
WHAT IS PROFESSIONALISM EXACTLY?
While there are varying definitions and disagreements among sociologists, a set of criteria put forth by Mirko Noordegraaf, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is helpful. The starting point, he says, is “typically an emphasis on ‘good work’ and the social mechanisms for accomplishing this.” He further stresses that a “professional does not merely work; he/she has to be educated and trained, (socialized) as [a] member of an occupational domain, supervised by his/her peers and held accountable.” Noordegraaf then acknowledges an element of professionalism that serves as the locus of historical and contemporary struggle for teachers: “Professionals succeed in realizing so-called professional control: They control themselves.”
Teaching, like pastoring, is often a “calling.” So it stands to reason that teachers themselves would be the appropriate people to define the best “educational practices, entrance routes, credentialing requirements, continuing training options, codes of conduct and methods of enforcement.”
Except today, they’re not. A form of the classical structural-functionalist theory of professionalism prevails. This sociological view, first formulated by Talcott Parsons, holds that a profession is a static thing with attributes that apply without exception. Here, professionalism is a skill that can be practiced and learned over time, by anyone, with success and failure measured based on an agreed-upon objective standard. The recent history of the teaching profession helps explain why this version has come to dominate.
WHEN TEACHING BECAME “AUTOMATED”
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education published “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” a much debated and often mischaracterized call to arms. The authors sent a clear distress signal: “We report to the American people that … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”
It was then that a belief in external controls began influencing the industry. In this view, an independent and external body best regulates teachers, in which teachers are part of an accountable and efficient production system. Schools needed to function more like businesses and successfully compete for students. To this end, teachers’ work has subsequently been the subject of major restructuring over the past three decades. Teachers are increasingly directed to follow a mandated curriculum, abide by grade-level or school-district units of study and follow predetermined lesson plans.
Teaching now looks more like automation then imagination. Creativity is squeezed out and autonomy suppressed. This all occurs in an environment where teachers need higher skills — many are required to have advanced degrees and numerous certifications — and are asked to do more with less. In addition to being under pressure to meet or exceed standardized performance indicators, teachers suffer from an intensification of work. They work over 60 hours a week, are in near-constant communication with parents and must collect copious amounts of student data, among many other administrative and technological tasks. Stagnant job growth in the industry has also led to increased class sizes. In other words, teachers are asked to work harder and longer with a growing number of students, while also being told to adhere to an education plan that they have little control over.
ANOTHER THEORY OF PROFESSIONALISM
Yes, teachers need to be paid more and have better health benefits. But U.S. policymakers need to understand the kind of professionalism that teachers are demanding, too.
The professionalism practiced by teachers recognizes and prioritizes contextuality. Professionalism is not merely a collection of traits or individual competencies that can be mastered — it can’t be, because these traits and skills are constantly changing depending on the context. In other words, teachers recognize that the school environment and children’s needs dictate what professionalism requires at a given moment in time.
This means that a teacher’s classroom experiences are what ultimately create the boundaries for what it means to be a professional. This professionalism does not rely on consultant-developed tests to measure student competency, but instead uses teacher-constructed assessments oriented to the subjects being taught. Instead of standardized curricula and lesson plans, teachers have the freedom to determine the best course to help each child acquire the necessary learning abilities. The time needed to cover subject content corresponds to each learner’s capacity and not an arbitrary schedule demanding that every child masters everything at the same moment. A contextualized professionalism would have teachers teach children, not a curriculum.
WHAT’S AT STAKE
With today’s protests, public school teachers are pushing back harder than ever against rigid definitions of professionalism. They are offering their own student-centered approach, combining training, context, flexibility and a lifelong commitment to children and society. But the failure of elected officials and school boards to recognize a teacher-constructed professionalism is an invitation to endless conflict. This battle has implications for who sets educational policy and who gets to decide the future of public education. The outcome of that struggle will assuredly determine the quality of America’s schools and, subsequently, the strength of the country’s democracy.
In the meantime, if the education profession continues to degrade, teachers will do what they know best and what their professional responsibility demands. Whether they’re in the classroom or picketing, they will protect their children. So while teachers have been forced to listen to the corporate version of professionalism for decades, they’re making their voices heard on the streets. Why? Because the non-educators outside of the school have stopped listening to the version cherished by teachers.
