David Labaree is a historian and retired Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. This essay is taken from his website (https://davidlabaree.wordpress.com/). He introduces the essay thus:
In this piece, I explore a major problem I have with recent educational policy discourse — the way we have turned teachers from the heroes of the public school story to its villains. If students are failing, we now hear, it is the fault of teachers. This targeting of teachers employs a new form of educational firepower, value-added measures. I show how this measure misses the mark by profoundly misunderstanding the nature of teaching as a professional practice, which has the following core characteristics:
- Teaching is hard
- Teachers depend on their students for their professional success
- Students are conscripts in the classroom
- Teachers need to develop a complex teacher persona in order to manage their relationship with students
- Teachers need to carry out their practice under conditions of high uncertainty
- Teaching looks easy
- It looks like an extension of child raising
- It is widely familiar to anyone who has been a student
- The knowledge and skills that teachers teach are ones that most competent adults have
- Unlike any other professionals, teachers give away their expertise instead of renting it to the client, so success means your students no longer need you
- Teachers are an easy target
- Teachers are too visible to be inscrutable and too numerous to be elite
- They don’t have the distance, obscurity, and selectivity of the high professions — so no one is willing to bow to their authority or yield to their expertise
