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By: Eva Carafa

What does the fight over Creationism, the ongoing skirmishes in Class Warfare, and Rush Limbaugh’s rants against Sandra Fluke and the GOP War on Women have to do with teachers, who find themselves fighting for their professional lives? Over the next few weeks, I’ll take a look at all these societal forces and draw a line between Genesis, women’s work, the abandonment of support by the wealthy for public schools, to the current political firestorm of anti-teacher sentiment.

I bet teachers hear all the time that they are doing God’s work by preparing the next generation for the future. Cultivating young minds. In their chalk-dust-covered hands, they hold the future, nay, the very existence, of America!

But do we really mean it? Or is our gushing merely a stream of platitudes, a verbal pat-on-the-head, a way of distracting the listener from the fact that we pay them low wages, constantly attack their professional fitness and secretly think they’re overpaid for the work they perform? On the face of it, teaching, which requires at least a Bachelor’s Degree, a period of student teaching, and state certification, should be considered a highly desirable, highly prestigious undertaking.

So why isn’t it?

Professionals with comparable certification requirements are lawyers, doctors, Professional Engineers (PE) or Certified Public Accountant (CPA) (although many employees work as an “accountant” or “engineer” without a license, only a CPA or PE can perform certain tasks). But most jobs don’t require a degree, at least by law. A nerdy guy with lots of computer skills can work as a computer programmer if he finds an employer willing to hire him without one. And he won’t need a license.

But are teachers widely regarded as being in the same league as their professional peers? Richard M. Ingersoll and David Perda wrote in, “The Status of Teaching as a Profession”  that professionals are those workers who have 1. a high degree of control over their work environments; 2.high prestige; and 3. relatively high compensation compared to nonprofessionals. Do teachers make the cut?

Teachers traditionally scored high when it came to having control over their work environments. They had, after all, their own classrooms, and within those four walls, they were The Law. Trouble came from the bottom up (unruly students) rather than top down (principals and school boards). How they taught was their business. Nowadays, though, curriculum is determined at the state level and a teacher who diverges from its mandates will quickly find herself out of a job. Individual teachers have lost a great deal of they control they once had.

On the issue of pay, too, the sad answer is no. Teachers have nowhere near the unlimited earning potential of doctors, lawyers, or scientists. The average salary for full-time public school teachers in 2010-11 (nationwide) was $56,069 in current dollars. That average was only 3% higher than the 1990-91 average salary, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Not exactly a fortune, is it? And now teachers are being asked to take even less compensation for the same work.

But teaching is considered a high-status position, such that teachers are accorded, if not riches, then respect? As it turns out, not so much. Despite their training they are, according to Ingersoll and Perda, accorded only mid-level status relative to the more male dominated professions such as medicine, law, scientists, and engineers. In terms of status, teachers barely squeak by closely-related, predominately female professions like librarians/social workers on the status scale. All three barely rate higher than non-professionals like funeral directors, secretaries, and workers employed in the trades.

But what about the platitudes, you ask? The head pat? We’d pay you more if only we could. Honest! We turn our pockets inside out to prove there’s no more to offer. Doesn’t that more than make up for the uncompensated time they put in and the ever decreasing amount of control they are given in the classroom?

It might, if we meant it, but more often than not, the same person who tells a teacher they are doing God’s work in one breath will also question why teachers should be paid more for what is, in many people’s minds, a “part-time” job. They get summers off, don’t they? And all those holidays? What do these women want, anyway? A teacher who explains about the number of uncompensated hours in a day, the grading and planning that gets done on their own time, the numbers of hours they are called upon to perform non-teaching tasks, like talking to kids about their problems at home, is “bitching.” Yet a lawyer bills his client when he makes a 10-minute call on its behalf.

And how does that make teachers feel? I can’t speak for them, but I can share some personal experience. When I graduated law school, people listened when I spoke. I was 25, and didn’t know much, but my job title afforded me respect beyond my experience. I didn’t get many pats on the head, but I heard “Yes, Ma’am!” every single day. I felt important, and it felt good.

Fast forward to staying home to care for my small children. When people learned I had given up my career for awhile, they would earnestly say “Caring for your children is the most important job in the world!” Did you catch it? It’s the same verbal head-pat teachers get. It felt good, for awhile, until I noticed that when I spoke as a stay-at-home mom, I was routinely ignored. I fumed, and my sense of self-worth plummeted.

In Finland and South Korea, the two highest performing school systems internationally, teachers are revered.(Read about the difference between the US ‘s attitude toward teachers, on the one hand, and those of Finland and South Korea, on the other, here .) In both the US and the UK, much hand-wringing over the state of education has led to studies that recommend, first and foremost, that teachers be accorded higher status as professionals. See here for the US and here for UK.

But before we can fix what’s wrong, we need to understand the attitudes that got us here, and why, in the current political climate, it will be hard to change our ways.

Next week, in Part 2, we’ll take a look at why teaching is considered a low-status profession, and why teachers are yet another front in the War on Women.


 


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9 Comments

  1. Education from K thru 12 was traditionally a 'women's job'. The same challenges are encountered in the medical professions. Part of the reason for the hostility is working class men see themselves being left behind while women move forward.

  2. Let me begin by saying I respect the teaching profession, immensely. I was a teacher and a applaud the job they do. Membership in the "teacher's union – NEA or AFL-Cio" is part of the problem. Unions were started to protect employees. Unions negiotiate fare wages, working conditions etc. Unions were established to fight for the blue collar worker. On the other hand, doctors, lawyers etc are members of professional organizations. Their purpose is to provide information, share ideas etc. with others in the profession. So how, as a society, are we to treat teachers? As blue coller workers that are members of a union or professionals as members of an organization. Unfortunately, they have created some of their own problems. I don't think the problem has any thing to do creationism, class warfare or a contrived war on women. It has to do with how they would like to be perceived. It seems like they want the best of both worlds and we all know…you can't have it all. Something has to give!

    1. First, let me thank you, Krista, for taking the time to read and comment on my post. I definitely plan on addressing the role of unions and the status of teachers in Part 3 of this series. And while I understand and have in the past thought unions played a bigger role in this problem, I disagree that unions have caused the status problem I think unions came to be a major player in education BECAUSE of the low-status of women and their inability to negotiate favorably for higher pay and benefits. I think if teaching wasn't looked down on to begin with, the teaching profession would have attracted more men, and they would have been more highly regarded, like lawyers and doctors.

      Think of midwives. When women gave birth, if they were lucky, they could afford a midwife's presence. Midwives made very little, and trained informally for the position, usually learning at the side of a more experienced midwife. What changed? Doctors-mostly men-came to see a financial opportunity in delivering children as part of their practice, and pretty soon midwives disappeared, by and large.

      Nothing like that happened in the world of teaching, so women have kept at it. And the status of the profession has not risen.

  3. Not all teachers are part of a union. Some teachers, like music teachers for example, are part of a professional organization. As a teacher, becoming a union member is a choice, not a requirement. Not all teachers are union members.

  4. One of the problems is that education budgets seem to be one of the first things under the axe any time a state faces a budget crunch., so that teacher pay — never high to begin with — is hard to increase with any stability or regularity.

    Another is that you tend to see broad-scale education policy set more by administrators and legislators than by teachers themselves. Most teachers in my experience don't seem terribly keen on having to "teach toward the test," whether it's college entrance exams or the barrage of local, state, and federal assessment exams that presume to measure the fitness of schools. I'm not saying we shouldn't have any sort of accountability for schools, but it is a little too convenient-for-anyone-not-directly-involved-with schools to just throw yet more standardized tests at the problem. (Tip: standardized tests never do that great a job at measuring what they claim to; just look at the SAT for a prime offender.)

    You're too right about the perception of teachers as not being "full time" workers — it's easy for someone who has no experience of anything but a regular 8-hour workday to assume that someone who works fewer paid hours is actually working fewer hours. Many people just have no idea what it's like to be a teacher — which makes it easier to make poor assumptions about them and make demands upon them out of sheer ignorance of what their jobs are actually like.

  5. Thank you for addressing exactly how I feel after 10 years in the classroom. Is there any other profession where so much work is expected at all hours of the day? Krista posted about unions. I live in the South, therefore, teacher unions are non-existent in my state . I have to belong to professional organizations which certainly are not cheap. As far as the average salary… after a 3 year salary freeze at 40 K, I finally received my step increase. I have my masters. For the past 3 years, my district froze our salaries, suspended our supply money, and oh yeah, had 5 furlough days. Yet, our class size increased and duties multiplied. We are constantly reminded that we need to be thankful we have a job! Yes, we are told it is a job, not a career. Oh, I also need to mention that merit pay is being implemented this year. My salary is contingent on test scores. Teacher morale is pitiful. It makes me ponder if I should pursue another career…. or job.
    Thanks again for your thoughts, I really needed to read it today.

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