scales vary from district to district, but the national average places teachers lowest on all lists of presumed professionals. As a sociologist named Dan Lortie puts it, America has always chosen to secure an adequate number of teachers, not with money or status, but by making it easy to become a teacher. America has never really tried to make teaching an attractive lifetime occupation.
Like everyone else, teachers learn through experience, but they learn without much guidance. One problem, of course, is that experience, especially the kind that is both repetitious and disappointing, can easily harden into narrow pedagogical theories. Most schools have a teacher with a theory built on grudges. This teacher knows that there is just one way to conduct a lesson; she blames the children and their parents if the children don't catch on; she has a list of types and makes her students fit them; and she prides herself on her realismâmost children come to school, she knows, to give her a hard time. Current research holds that most teachers get set in their ways, both their good and bad ones, after about four years of learning by experience. Many teachers don't last that long.
Studies suggest that many of the best teachers quit soonest. If they stay in education, they tend to move on to administrative jobs, which represent the only real form of professional advancement in this profession. Not surprisingly, public education has always suffered from high turnover in faculties, rates as high as 50 percent, in some schools, in some eras. Lortie speculates that this flux led long ago to what he calls "cellular structure" in schools. A complex and collegial arrangementâteachers sharing many dutiesâwould not have accommodated a large turnover in faculties. So instead, schools have traditionally been arranged in modular fashion: each teacher to her own room and her own duties. The arrangement makes teachers conveniently interchangeable in the administrative sense, and also gives an institution a ready-made system of damage controlâwatertight bulkheads, as it were. When problems arise, they are isolated from the start in individual rooms. The doors to the rooms of incompetent and inadequately trained teachers can always be closed.
Almost two and a half million people teach in public schools. Many of them work in curiously insular circumstances. Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside their classrooms. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid. Chris had nearly absolute autonomy inside her room. In that narrow, complicated place, she was the only arbiter of her own conduct. Sometimes she felt very lonely. "The worst thing about it," she once said, "is you don't even know if you're doing something wrong."
Al sympathized with his teachers, in his own way. "I always tell people if you want to see
anything,
come here. We got it. Because a lot of schools don't have the little curly-haired white kid. You have it all here, the doctor's, the lawyer's. Then you get your middle-of-the-road kid, and then your poverty kid. You get Hispanic kids dressed to a T. The parents own a grocery. Chris has to deal with it all. Alcoholic parents, you name it." Al went on: "Kids come in at seven-thirty and ask for a Band-Aid. They just came from home and they had the cut already, but they have to get the Band-Aid here. It's tough, it really is. I say to everybody on the staff, Do the best you can. But remember, you're not the lawyer, you're not the psychologist, you're not the social worker, you're not the doctor."
But to be a teacher implies parts of most of those roles and of some others, too. Decades of research and reform have not altered the fundamental facts of
Like everyone else, teachers learn through experience, but they learn without much guidance. One problem, of course, is that experience, especially the kind that is both repetitious and disappointing, can easily harden into narrow pedagogical theories. Most schools have a teacher with a theory built on grudges. This teacher knows that there is just one way to conduct a lesson; she blames the children and their parents if the children don't catch on; she has a list of types and makes her students fit them; and she prides herself on her realismâmost children come to school, she knows, to give her a hard time. Current research holds that most teachers get set in their ways, both their good and bad ones, after about four years of learning by experience. Many teachers don't last that long.
Studies suggest that many of the best teachers quit soonest. If they stay in education, they tend to move on to administrative jobs, which represent the only real form of professional advancement in this profession. Not surprisingly, public education has always suffered from high turnover in faculties, rates as high as 50 percent, in some schools, in some eras. Lortie speculates that this flux led long ago to what he calls "cellular structure" in schools. A complex and collegial arrangementâteachers sharing many dutiesâwould not have accommodated a large turnover in faculties. So instead, schools have traditionally been arranged in modular fashion: each teacher to her own room and her own duties. The arrangement makes teachers conveniently interchangeable in the administrative sense, and also gives an institution a ready-made system of damage controlâwatertight bulkheads, as it were. When problems arise, they are isolated from the start in individual rooms. The doors to the rooms of incompetent and inadequately trained teachers can always be closed.
Almost two and a half million people teach in public schools. Many of them work in curiously insular circumstances. Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside their classrooms. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid. Chris had nearly absolute autonomy inside her room. In that narrow, complicated place, she was the only arbiter of her own conduct. Sometimes she felt very lonely. "The worst thing about it," she once said, "is you don't even know if you're doing something wrong."
Al sympathized with his teachers, in his own way. "I always tell people if you want to see
anything,
come here. We got it. Because a lot of schools don't have the little curly-haired white kid. You have it all here, the doctor's, the lawyer's. Then you get your middle-of-the-road kid, and then your poverty kid. You get Hispanic kids dressed to a T. The parents own a grocery. Chris has to deal with it all. Alcoholic parents, you name it." Al went on: "Kids come in at seven-thirty and ask for a Band-Aid. They just came from home and they had the cut already, but they have to get the Band-Aid here. It's tough, it really is. I say to everybody on the staff, Do the best you can. But remember, you're not the lawyer, you're not the psychologist, you're not the social worker, you're not the doctor."
But to be a teacher implies parts of most of those roles and of some others, too. Decades of research and reform have not altered the fundamental facts of
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