Education, Policy and Politics

The professional standing of educators in U.S. society is particularly conflicted, and this situation weakens their voice in shaping educational policy at the national, state, and even local levels. As a result, decisions made often reflect political considerations rather that professional, academic insights.

Public school teachers, who are the most visible and largest segment of the profession, offer a prime [Page 286]example of how the defining characteristics of professional status are insufficiently established and, as a consequence, how the status of educator as a professional is absent or compromised. Historians and social commentators since de Tocqueville have noted a number of reasons why teaching has not fully attained the standing of fields such as medicine, law, nursing, pharmacy, and others. These include the sheer number of persons in public school instruction, the local genesis and control of the schools, the popular conceit that no specialized knowledge is necessary for the teaching role, and the convention of allowing untrained persons to teach under “emergency” conditions. Also blurred are the lines between certified teachers practicing in their specialization and those who are either uncertified or teaching out of their field. Many thus casually use the term teacher to refer to anyone who offers instruction of any kind, as opposed to protected titles such as physician, attorney, and nurse. Teachers have strength in numbers, but they suffer from an unclear societal identity, which gives them a tenuous grip on professional status.

To a large extent, these conditions spill over onto professors of education, particularly onto those in teacher education. The education professoriate is numerous, like teachers, which lends some influence. Their knowledge base—to employ the field's own term—undergoes much internal debate, however, and receives outside challenges over its very existence. Even the question of the need for the field of teacher education is continually at issue. One need not be a scholar in the field to verify the phenomena that challenge the field. For example, no universal, mandatory accreditation for teacher preparation exists. Competing accrediting bodies take radically different approaches to their mission. Furthermore, numerous states accept alternative pathways to certification. Such alternatives may require, for example, no more than acquisition of a bachelor's degree and passing a standardized test of general knowledge. Part-time instructors without terminal degrees or scholarly credentials often conduct teacher education in transported “storefront” programs. A new movement matriculates elementary teachers at community colleges, reverting to a pre-World War II standard of preparation. These challenges to teacher education are unique: No other major field faces such threats of de-professionalization and de-skilling.

Phenomena such as these have a profound influence on education policy and politics and contribute to a destructive cycle affecting the profession. Assigned low status and struggling with an uncertain identity, educators are often bypassed by elected officials in the formation of policy that affects their practice. Such action prevents educators from overcoming challenges of identity and autonomy, allowing further incursions to take place. Perceived as low status and quasi-professional, educators seem to need only minimal preparation, so the cycle replicates itself at the levels of teacher education and policy development.

...