In Part 1, we talked about the three ways teaching is viewed culturally — as profession, job, or calling — and we looked in depth at arguments for considering teaching a profession. In Part 2, we discussed whether teaching is or should be a calling. In Part 3 we’ll look at teaching as a job and some of the reasons why some people want to classify it in this way.
In Part 1, I presented this statement from the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard Ingersoll:
“We do not refer to teaching as a profession. It doesn’t have the characteristics of those traditional professions like medicine, academia, dentistry, law, architecture, engineering, et cetera. It doesn’t have the pay, the status, the respect, the length of training, so from a scientific viewpoint teaching is not a profession.”
I mentioned that this assertion had all my Spidey-senses on high alert because the evidence he cites seems both reductive and easily challenged as half the criteria rest on someone’s perception — a notoriously slippery and completely subjective metric. I think it’s worth looking at some factors that affect that perception and may make it easier for academics like Ingersoll to relegate teaching to a mere job rather than acknowledge it as a profession.
Clientele
Teachers work with small, unformed humans who have many needs, both long and short term. Their job is to help them master the content at their grade level, but also to help them human better. We don’t just teach them how to multiply, we teach them how to line up, how to sit during a speaker, how to resolve conflicts on the playground, how to name what they are feeling so it doesn’t overwhelm them or result in a meltdown. There is so much ancillary learning (especially in the elementary grades) that it can obscure the academic learning — the actual work teachers have trained to do — from the casual observer. All that ancillary learning — which is critically important because without it schools would be like cage matches — goes largely unacknowledged and (I think) gives detractors an excuse to devalue the academic work because that work is intercut with wiping noses and taking people to the bathroom and reminding them to use inside voices.
High Turnover
This factor stems from the period when teaching transitioned from an all-male profession to one that was (and still is) female dominated (see below for more on this). Historically, women had to be single to teach. If they married, they had to quit. Eventually, women were allowed to continue teaching if they were married, but they had to quit if they became pregnant. This was policy everywhere until 1974, when the Supreme Court said districts were no longer allowed to ban women from working because of pregnancy. But, for more than a century, teachers tended to be young women who couldn’t necessarily stay in their positions very long. Those that did tended to be single women with no other jobs open to them (and at the time women began teaching it was almost the only job they were allowed to do) and no other means of financial support, making them more vulnerable to the exploitation of low pay (see Woman-Dominated, below). Now, teacher turnover is higher because of burnout, lack of support, and low pay.
Lowered Requirements
The tendency for states desperate to fill teaching positions to lower requirements to get adults into classrooms has greatly undermined the respect with which teaching is regarded. One state’s plan allows military veterans to step into classrooms. Equating a military veteran with a trained teacher, never mind that the veteran was a munitions expert or a tank mechanic, is — and I mean no disrespect to veterans — bonkers. Being a veteran simply doesn’t qualify a person to teach, any more than a BA in English qualifies me to fix tanks. Even accepting untrained people with college degrees doesn’t work very well if a person’s degree is in agriscience or accounting, or political science because it presupposes that they can extrapolate from their academic background all they need to teach 5th grade math, ELA, science, and social studies and manage a classroom, and change teaching strategies as needed to help everyone understand the content. A few may be able to do this, but most will not because expertise in the same content area doesn’t automatically give a person the ability to teach in that area effectively, let alone those whose content expertise isn’t even slightly parallel. The results of this practice are going to be wildly inconsistent. It could be ok, or glorified babysitting, or worse.* Instead of softening requirements, the U.S. Department of Education actually recommends raising the bar by ensuring districts hire “outstanding, well-prepared educators” and then offering better pay, higher quality, affordable teacher education programs, and improved support for new teachers.
Treating Learning as a Simple Input/Output System
This is less prevalent than it was in the early aughts, when there was a big push to run schools like businesses. Success was achieved by delivering inputs (content) and reaping the outputs (learning). Unfortunately for proponents of this idea, children are highly complex beings with widely divergent experiences and many don’t thrive in such a reductive environment. The theory, however, undermined teaching as a profession because it asserted that the entire process could be streamlined and optimized as though it were a factory production line — a view that made teaching seem no more difficult than assembling widgets.
Anti-Intellectualism
The distrust of intellectuals and experts — and by extension education — really exploded during the pandemic. A distrust of science and rise of misinformation during the first months of Covid-19 spilled over onto education. Anti-intellectualism particularly devalues higher education and anyone that has higher education, which has led to an overall devaluing of education as a whole. In recent years there has been extensive pushback against the idea that a college degree holds long- term economic benefit for people unless that degree is a means to a specific end. Anti-intellectualism also seeks to ban courses that are outside the particular beliefs that a group espouses because teaching those courses — exposing students to ideas outside that group’s orthodoxy — is deemed dangerous. Teachers, as agents of education and free thought, must of necessity be devalued as well, if not actively demeaned. This has in large part been encouraged by….
Media Bias
Almost a year ago, I posted some interesting research about who was actually dissatisfied with education. Turns out, the vast majority (80%) of parents are very satisfied with their kids’ education but the American public as a whole was not — only 42% said they were satisfied. That group includes a lot — a LOT — of people without kids actually in school. The survey then, is measuring satisfaction among people who are not directly experiencing teachers and teaching. Pew Research, normally a fairly neutral source, just released survey results measuring whether people felt education was “going in the right direction” and found that about half of the respondents did not think it was** but again, many didn’t actually have kids in school. It’s this general dissatisfaction from people not experiencing teachers or teaching that gets reported and rereported in certain media outlets. Minimal googling will lead you to articles and interviews with topics such as: “woke” teachers, critical race theory in schools, why we can’t trust higher education, the decline of American education, the widespread weakening of educational requirements, and things with ominous but amorphous titles like The MisEducation of America (sic)***. There are also a lot of school choice proponents (including some think tanks) using those outlets to undermine perceptions of public education in order to advance their school-choice agenda; many of these people also don’t have kids in school. All this is to say that impressions and opinions of education are informed by a lot of things that are NOT actual experience with teachers and teaching. Education has become a scapegoat for a host of unconnected issues and unsubstantiated fears, largely because of media spin designed to attract clicks and viewership.
Finally, the one that might just be the most pertinent:
Woman-dominated
Teaching, like most professions, used to be exclusively male. It wasn’t until the Civil War that empty teaching positions had to be filled by female candidates because the men were off fighting. Once school boards saw that women could teach as competently as men, they realized they could get the same work for less pay — a lot less. Sometimes the pay for a female teacher was half that of a male candidate. The stated reason for this disparity was that men were breadwinners supporting families while the entire pool of female teachers was unmarried (see High Turnover, above). This is not unique to education; women have a long history of being paid less for the same work. Even today in 2024, women only make about $.82 for every dollar earned by a man. Teaching as a whole is mostly female — 80% of teachers are women across all of education.**** Educational leadership, however, is less so. The higher the position, the fewer women hold it. As of 2023, women made up 56% of principals, but only 30% of superintendents. As of 2022, even school board members are more likely to be male. In fact, all — literally all — the other professions Ingersoll cites in his assertion are still dominated by men: medicine (38% female), engineering (15% female), architecture (numbers are fuzzy but the government says 25% female), academia (only 35% of full professors are female; non-tenure track and adjunct professors are overwhelmingly female), dentists (38% female), and law (40% female). It’s not hard to see that one of these things (teaching) is not like the others in a specific, glaring way.++
So which is it?
Before you assume which side I’m going to come down on, know that I really did consider both sides and looked into other definitions of “job,” “occupation,” and “profession.” On balance, I think Ingersoll’s ‘scientific viewpoint’ is flawed; teaching is a profession rather than a just a job or even an occupation.+++ Like other professions, teachers are expected to have specialized knowledge and skills and undergo formal, higher education in order to become content and pedagogy specialists. Teaching requires at least as much training as engineering and that training includes both the theories underpinning education and their practical application, which must be further honed over multiple years. Teaching also provides more social and long-term economic benefit than building fish radar systems or exploring the mysteries of medieval French literature. In virtually every other country, teaching is considered a highly respected profession with pay rates that are commensurate with that status. Only in the U.S. is its status as a profession even questioned. Asserting that teaching doesn’t meet the “criteria” to be considered a profession may have more to do with the misplaced assumption that anyone can walk into a classroom and do as good a job as any given teacher, or may just be a symptom of thinly-disguised sexism directed toward a profession dominated by women.
*Something that no one ever mentions is how dangerous this practice of inviting unqualified and untrained people into schools may be. Such practices make child abuse more possible in a variety of ways that aren’t always preventable via background checks.
** This was the jankiest presentation of a survey ever, offered up as though it were definitive, but with multiple caveats and qualifiers. I am going to cover this in a future post because responses were widely different by political leaning and by what, specifically, the respondents felt the “wrong direction” was — and those things were even more widely different. The whole thing is making me give Pew Research a lot of side-eye.
***Let me be the first to remind you that spelling and/or grammatical mistakes in online “news” sources should make you immediately suspicious of their accuracy and trustworthiness.
****This varies by level. Far more elementary teachers are women while men and women are almost evenly represented in secondary education.
++This is where I think the idea of teaching as a calling gets dangerous; defining teaching in quasi-religious terms makes it even easier to guilt the workforce into accepting less pay.
+++’Occupation’ can be either a very broad umbrella that includes both ‘job’ and ‘profession’, or a specific task or activity like selling cars or cutting hair. ‘Job’ nearly always implies an hourly wage.