Critical Reflection—Fragakis

On the second day of school, my colleagues and I—all first- and second-year teachers, which is to say, all people that our administrators perceived as easily cowed—were told to stay after dismissal for an impromptu meeting. We weren't told the meeting's start time, only that we were supposed to "hang out" until it commenced. Nor was any indication offered as to when this meeting would end. Given how chaotic our first two days of school had been, I was speculating that we'd all be vested in our pensions by its conclusion. As we sat on the curb, I asked my colleagues whether they thought we'd be paid for our time. "You know," a fellow teacher told me, "if you don't want to be here, you can just go!" I realized that he was right: I could just go. But I felt that it was important that I be there. I also felt that it was important that I be paid for being there. And I told him so. "If we were doctors and lawyers," I said, "our time would be valued. There'd be no question that we'd get paid for it. How can we ever be professionals if we don't ask to be treated like professionals?" It wasn't an argument that I wanted to have on the second day of school—I like to wait at least a week before alienating new coworkers—but it was something, as someone who's been in the workforce for twenty years, that I firmly believed. And my colleague surprised me by concurring: "You're right," he said, "We should get paid a $100,000 for doing this."

But, as we all know, most teachers don't get paid a $100,000 for doing what they do. "Historically, fields such as law, medicine, architecture, and accountancy have been considered professions, but teaching and nursing have sometimes been classified as semiprofessions," write the authors of Foundations of American Culture (Johnson et al, 2008, p. 27). "This distinction is based in part on the prestige of the different jobs as reflected in the remuneration received by members of the profession." It's a vicious circle, then: Because teaching isn't perceived as a prestigious profession, its practitioners don't get paid handsome salaries, but until its practitioners get paid handsome salaries, it won't be perceived as a prestigious profession. The Equity Project, a charter school slated to open in Washington Heights this fall, will pay its teachers (who will undergo a rigorous selection process) $125,000, with the understanding that they will work a longer day and year and take on responsibilities that usually fall to non-teaching staff (New York Times, March 7, 2008). The project's explicit goal is not to increase the perception of teachers as professionals but rather to test what effect teacher quality has on student performance. Yet, should the experiment prove successful, other educators of equally high caliber might be in a position to ask for greater remuneration, which, may in turn, lead to greater respect and prestige.

What the Equity Project acknowledges—and rewards—is that being a teacher takes an inordinate amount of skill and time. Teachers in the current climate of high-stakes testing and accountability are expected to take on more and more work but to accomplish it in the same amount of time. Ballet et all write that teachers suffer from a "chronic and persistent sense of work overload" that reduces "'areas of personal discretion, inhibits involvement in and control over long-term planning, and fosters dependency on externally produced materials and expertise.' (2006, p. 210)." Teachers, because they want to act and be regarded as professionals, accept the increase to their workload (what Ballet et all call "intensification") and do their best to contend with it. But the very tasks that they are asked to take on—increased data collection, more "teaching to the test"—further decreases their autonomy, in the process perpetuating teaching's status as a "proletarianized occupation" instead of a profession. The harder teachers work, then, the more they affirm their roles as cogs in the educational machinery. "Paradoxically," Ballet et al write, "the ideology of professionalism for teachers legitimates and reinforces features of proletarianization" (2008, p. 210).

"The hallmark of a profession is the autonomy derived from expertise that laypersons do not possess," Myers writes in "Teacher Power—Revisited" (2007). Lawyers decide how best to argue their cases, doctors decide how best to treat their patients, but the choices of teachers are being increasingly made by school boards and legislatures (Myers, 2007). As autonomy in a profession (or "semiprofession") decreases, so, too, does its attractiveness to many capable candidates. Even the course of study that schools of education teach is dictated by legislatures. Law schools, by contrast, determine their own courses of study, a self-determination that becomes possible, in part, because it is understood that virtually all law students will be tested in a rigorous manner before being allowed to practice law (Meek, 1988). Linda-Darling Hammond, of the Center for the Study of Teaching, speaks in an interview conducted twenty years ago about the importance of having a national organization that can "anoint members of the profession in some way." (Meek, 1988, p. 12) She continues, "You have to have a professional structure before you can have anything else in terms of self-governance in a profession" and identifies the establishment of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which oversees national licensing (and was still relatively new in 1988), as an important step in the direction of increased teacher professionalization.

Hammond brings up another point, one that I don't think is peripheral to the issue of the "semiprofessional" status of teaching: that, traditionally, teachers have been female. "Any occupation that has been female-dominated has had a hard time professionalizing. Nursing is a very close analog. There are aspects of role, allocations of authority, and salary considerations that go along with gender," she says (Meek, 1988, p. 14). Even the language that is used to persuade teachers to accept the "intensification" of their schedules—telling them, for instance, that if they "really cared about the kids," they'd stay, unpaid, beyond the normal work day—is derived from what I would call a rhetoric of maternalism. Teachers are asked to be self-sacrificing because that's what we expect mothers, the exemplars of good womanhood, to do. That caring about children and asking to be fairly remunerated for teaching them are regularly portrayed as mutually exclusive is tied, I believe, not just to issues of finance but also to issues of gender.

There are two statements that I made ad nauseum over the past year, my first as a teacher: "Teaching is the hardest thing I've every done" and "I don't work for free." The former I tended to repeat to friends who did not understand why I no longer returned phone calls in the season in which they were received, the latter to colleagues and administrators at my school who didn't understand why I expected to be paid for all the time I no longer had for the timely return of calls. But the statements are linked, I realize. In both instances, I was asking for respect. And though it's certainly not something you can demand of others—or of your society—it's not unreasonable to expect it.

REFERENCES

Ballet, K., Kelchtermans, G., & Loughran, J. (April 2006). Beyond intensification towards a scholarship of practice: analysing changes in teachers' work lives. Teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 12(2), 209–229.

Gootman, E. (7, March 2008). At charter schools, higher teacher pay. New York Times. Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html?scp=2&sq=125,000%20salary%20school&st=cse.

Johnson, J. A., D. Musial, G. E. Hall, D. M. Gollnick, & V. L. Dupuis. (2008). Foundations of American education: perspectives on education in a changing world. Boston: Pearson.

Meek, A. (November 1988). On teaching as a profession: a conversation with Linda Darling-Hammond. Educational Leadership, 46(3), 11-17.

Myers, D. A. (May/June 2007). Teacher power—revisited. The Clearing House. 80(5), 239-242.