WW #5: Lack of a Profession

Reading: "Affirmative Action: When campus Republicans play the diversity card" (Harper's Magazine, September 2005)
Pages: 63-71

Harper's Magazine brought together 3 college professors (I'm talking about Harvard Law School, Yale, Florida International, big time schools) and 1 former University President (University of Colorado) in a forum, along with a Harper's senior editor as a moderator, to discuss some hypothetical tenure situations (at colleges, tenure is given based upon a board of peer review and things such as publishing history play as large a role, if not larger, as one's teaching ability). The situations presented are ones in which a liberal bias could easily be perceived and the members of the forum seemed to represent both liberal and concervative biases, so the opinions were a good representation of the political spectrum. Reading this article, however, made me come back to an issue I have with secondary education teachers: we are not professionals. Professionals have standards of conduct that are expected and enforced through peer review, something missing in public education teaching. I read this article and realized how great it would be to be held up for such scrutany by respected peers, how much that would improve my teaching and all teaching, in general.

Since teachers do not have standards and since there is no peer board of review, teachers are faily autonomous and do whatever they want in the classroom, sometimes NOT within reason. I work with other teachers who I do not respect because of a system that does not have expectations of its workers (at least, no expectations that are enforced). And I work with other teachers who do not respect me for the same reason; surely, I do not live up to everyone's expectations of a public school teacher. And so we are left with a system that takes surprisingly little to get into (it's not rocket science to get a teaching credential, folks), has few expectations once into the system, and is darn near impossible to be fired from (this is where tenure comes into the game).

And we wonder why scores are low, though we don't question whether or not the test is valid.

And we wonder why high school graduates are poorly prepared to enter four-year universities, though we never question the tacit expectations such universities have and whether or not those match up with state standards.

And we wonder why or if the public education system is broken, though we never suggest any substantial changes backed by research in order to improve, reorganize, restructure, or rebuild the system, instead looking to politicians to implement cosmetic changes that just make us feel as if something is being done to fix the problem.