The Professionalization of Teaching

What NEA Surveys Tell Us About a Common Knowledge Base

By Darrel Drury

Since the mid-1980s, when influential reports by the Holmes Group and the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession set teaching on its current course toward professionalization, the field of education has looked to medicine as the preferred standard for professional work. Today, the allure of medicine’s successful transformation remains as strong as ever.

Yet, after a quarter of a century, teaching has made little progress toward achieving full professional status. While in some respects teaching and medicine share certain attributes—having been shaped by many of the same social, economic, and cultural forces—the education field has not developed a coherent, agreed-upon knowledge base comparable to that of medicine. Relying on a combination of “expert judgment,” “best practices,” and “conventional wisdom”—which, in turn, are informed by an ambiguous and inconclusive body of evidence—educators struggle to develop meaningful training, induction, mentoring, and professional-development programs, and engage in endless debates about the appropriateness of current licensure, certification, and evaluation procedures.

The inconsistencies and ambiguities that characterize the knowledge base in education are well illustrated in the pages of The American Public School Teacher, Past, Present, and Future , a book I co-authored that is being released today at the National Education Association Convention by the Harvard Education Press. The book draws on 50 years of data from the National Education Association’s “Status of the American Public School Teacher” surveys. In one instance after another, the limits of current research are laid bare, and one is reasonably led to conclude that the education community has failed to achieve consensus concerning even...