My wife Judith is a 4th grade teacher, and I teach graduate seminars. At the dinner table, conversation often turns to the problems and challenges of teaching. We talk as equals, teacher and professor, about the common challenges we face in the classroom, as if we were members of the same profession. Our experience has taught us that the fundamental acts of teaching and the central questions all teachers confront are essentially the same. But professors and precollege teachers are not seen as members of the same profession. Why should that be?
The work is essentially the same, but the conditions, status, and pay of one profession are vastly different from those of the other. The work is institutionalized in different ways. Yes, professors have more training and do more research. The fact that professors are still mostly men and schoolteachers are mostly women is also a large part of the answer.
Male patriarchs dominated both professions at the end of the 19th century before the massive expansion of the educational system in the United States took place. Both were top-down systems. College presidents hired and fired the faculty and dictated the curriculum, as did most school superintendents. The power of the presidents was absolute. My wife’s great-grandfather, Melancthon Woolsey Stryker, was the president of Hamilton College in upstate New York in the 1890s. Like most college presidents then, he personally interviewed the faculty, told them what courses they would teach, and did not hesitate to tell them what color trim they could paint their houses on College Hill. Similarly, school superintendents wrote the manuals for teachers to follow and specified the appropriate length of a teacher’s hair.
There were some important differences, however. While the college presidents wielded enormous power as institutional leaders (as long as they maintained the confidence of their boards of trustees), they were not seen as more expert than the faculty. Most of the private college presidents were ordained ministers. As the great centralization of public schools took place early in the 20th century, however, the school superintendents succeeded in establishing themselves as the true educational experts. They got doctorates in educational administration at Columbia or Wisconsin and wrapped themselves in the mantle of scientific management. They conducted expensive surveys of emerging urban school systems that convinced the public that educational effectiveness and efficiency could be achieved only through the application of their expertise and their understanding of the principles of scientific management. Teachers with low levels of formal education could be had cheaply because they could be trained on the job in schools that sorted pupils by age and aptitude. All the teacher had to do was to follow the curriculum guidelines written by the new experts. They could turn out literate students just as workers for the Ford Motor Co. could turn out Model T’s.
Although superintendents preferred normal-school graduates, certification of teacher expertise carried little weight with the public. But as major research universities began to multiply in the 1920s and 1930s, the Ph.D. degree imported from the German universities became the badge of expertise for the highest ranks of the professoriate. Professors with doctorates in chemistry or philosophy were highly sought after by universities and colleges eager to achieve research eminence. The professors were no longer willing to submit to the autocratic rule of a largely clerical college presidency.
Out of these tensions came the first academic revolution. Professors stripped college presidents of their powers to determine the curriculum and fire the faculty at will. They took charge of their teaching and research by forming the American Association of University Professors, which established the rights of tenure and academic freedom that gave the faculty essential control of the educational process at the college level. Schoolteachers, however, remained locked in a mostly hierarchical system in which they were treated as hirelings whose work was mandated by a male administrative elite. They followed detailed curriculum outlines and adjusted the teaching day to change subject matter when administrators rang the bells. Although teachers often complied only symbolically once the classroom door was closed, since the supervisors couldn’t watch everybody all the time, they were treated as functionaries, not as professionals capable of independent judgment.
In Teaching in America, Christine Murray and I use the term “slow revolution” to describe the gradual accretion of efforts by teachers to take charge of their practice in ways analogous to the professoriate’s. As a result of our classroom observations and interviews with more than 500 teachers in new roles as mentors, lead teachers, and policymakers over the last decade, we believe this slow revolution has approached its final stage. The outcome is far from certain, however. It may be that instead of a completion of the second or “slow revolution” of teachers by 2020, there will be a repeal of the first academic revolution achieved by the professoriate. There would be no downward spread to schoolteachers of the kind of empowerment professors won in that revolution. On the contrary, there would be--and to some extent already is--an upward spread of more tightly engineered and centralized higher education systems with most faculty working on contracts without tenure. Professors would look more like schoolteachers than the reverse.
The recent chairman of the Massachusetts board of higher education, James F. Carlin, a multimillionaire who previously ran insurance and real estate companies, personifies this trend. He put faculty on notice that a counterrevolution had begun and that if he had his way, colleges and universities would be run more like General Motors. Boston newspaper editorialists cheered when he ridiculed the idea that faculty should run the academic side of institutions and announced that he wouldn’t accept the faculty rights written into current contracts. Mr. Carlin viewed tenure as “an absolute scam” that had turned faculty jobs into sinecures and made tuition excessive. In a 1997 poll, 56 percent of New York voters said they were opposed to giving teachers tenure.
A more optimistic scenario foresees the hastening of the slow revolution. Some “leveling” of professions in America will occur. More of the work of the traditional high-status professions, particularly medicine, will occur in bureaucratic or large organizational settings under the watchful eye of managers, whether these be administrators of health-maintenance organizations, in the case of doctors, or bureaucrats who supervise the work of lawyers employed in government agencies. While doctors are accepting more and more regulation, the schoolteachers and nurses will slowly break out of long-established bureaucratic hierarchies and share more of the autonomy previously enjoyed by members of the high-status professions. The increasing political strength of the women’s movements will create upward pressure to elevate the status and pay of the traditionally female “helping professions” of teaching, nursing, and social work. The gender gaps in professional work will also close as more men enter traditionally female fields and more women are employed as lawyers, doctors, and architects. By the late 1990s, nearly half the students at leading law and medical schools were women; at Harvard, slightly more than half the first-year medical class was female by 1997.
The eventual triumph of the slow revolution for teachers depends on four developments, which are well advanced in some districts while lagging in others:
Will it happen? Large systems seldom change unless there is no other alternative. The public education system now in place was an incredible achievement of the late 19th century, and it came about because doing nothing was not an option as millions of poor immigrants came to America and cried out for more educational opportunity.
Two political battles that will have a large impact on the completion of the slow revolution will be settled within the next five years. One will take place in the major teachers’ unions: Will they not only accept but encourage role differentiation and take responsibility for rooting out incompetence in their own ranks? The second will be decided in governors’ offices, state legislatures, and among school boards: Will they attach major incentives to national-board certification? To date, incentives have been adopted in some form in 23 states and 61 school districts. But few have yet gone as far as North Carolina in granting an automatic 12 percent pay increase to any teacher who becomes board-certified. While only a few thousand teachers are now certified nationally, the board predicts more than 100,000 will be by 2005. If the board assessment retains its rigor, that would begin to change public perceptions about the teaching profession.
Two significant differences with the first academic revolution also bear on the outcome. The professors’ was a revolt of sons against their fathers. The triumph of the slow revolution would be the first time a predominantly female profession forced an entrenched patriarchy to share its authority, an authority more embedded in law than was the case with college presidents. Most difficult is the goal of achieving results for children.
The revolution by the professoriate was congruent with the dominant societal values of individualism and an emphasis on opportunity to learn that presumed radical inequality of outcomes based on individual effort and talent. The tracking system established then for sorting talent in higher education is still largely in place and mostly unchallenged. It sorts students by SAT scores and faculty by research prestige. The push that accompanies the second academic revolution is to do just the opposite: to untrack the schools and to educate all students to higher levels in more inclusive settings. No one argues for equality of outcomes across the board, but an enormous change in values and beliefs is required to make the distribution of test scores in America look more like that of the Japanese, who are rightly said to have the strongest “bottom quarter” in the world. It won’t be easy.
