Ideas on how to move the teaching profession out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first

Right now I’m reading The Same Thing Over and Over: How school reformers get stuck in yesterday’s ideas by Frederick M. Hess, and I will be reviewing it soon, but I thought you might be interested in Dr. Hess’s view of teaching as being a profession built in and for the nineteenth century (p. 132 and pp. 159-161). 

• Today’s teaching profession is the product of a mid-twentieth-century labor model that relied on a captive pool of female labor, presumed educators to be largely interchangeable, and counted on male principals and superintendents to micromanage a female teaching workforce. Teaching has clung to these industrial rhythms while recruitment, professional norms, and the larger labor market have shifted underfoot….
• Schooling, however, is an exception. The old rules and norms have kept the traditional framework locked firmly in place, and the teaching job itself has remained remarkably undifferentiated over the last century. Across the land, from Syracuse to Seattle, a visitor can stroll into a school and be confident that all fourth-grade teachers in that district will be expected to cover the same subjects, instruct about the same number of students, and take on roughly the same number of ancillary duties. This may have made sense when little data was available with which to track teacher strengths or student needs, but under modern conditions it represents a careless waste of skill and expertise.
• Is it possible to rethink the traditional boundaries of the teaching role, to alter responsibilities, or to tap educators who spend much of their time outside of K-12 schooling? Is it possible to rethink the teaching role and to use new tools to attract talent and allow educators to do more of what they do best? Let’s take up three illustrative examples of what these ideas might look like once we have emancipated ourselves from our current system.
• For one thing, rather than continuing to accept the notion that one either is a ‘teacher’ or is not, schools might embrace hybrid positions to allow talented educators to grow by leveraging their skills in new ways, even as they continue teaching. A district might ask talented veterans to take on half-time teaching loads and spend the other half of their time on professional development, curriculum development, or parent outreach. In addition, schools could employ community members as instructors to augment the capacities of school staff. Boston-based Citizen Schools, for example, provides highly regarded after-school instruction and career-based learning by arranging for local volunteers to work with students on a regular basis. Rather than simply mentoring or tutoring students, participants teach weekly modules that tackle complex projects with interested students. When an engineer steps off the fast track to start a family, she might consult, freelance, or find some other part-time role with her old employer or a savvy nonprofit. Yet, of those schools that might desire to scoop up such professionals by the bushel, they have no mechanism for recruiting, incorporating, or compensating them.
• Second, we need to think very differently about the opportunities offered by specialization, in which elementary reaching instruction might be recognized as a role distinct from other tasks, for example, and be buttressed with specialized training programs that help teachers diagnose, instruct, and support early readers. Other professions use precisely this model to ensure that they are squeezing maximum value out of their most talented and most highly trained professionals. In medicine, for example, the American Medical Association now recognizes 199 specialties. While there are 7 million medical professions in the United States, only 500,000 are physicians. The remainder are trained practitioners with talents that complement those of doctors. In a well-run medical practice, surgeons do not spend time filing out patient charts or negotiating with insurance companies; these responsibilities are left to nurses or support staff. Schools might find more thoughtful ways to employ lead instructors who have had more intensive training and complementary staff who have had less, and then apportion instructional or administrative roles accordingly.
• And third, technology offers another menu of options to change the way some education services are delivered. Today’s staffing model assumes enough talented teachers that every community will be able to fill all of its classrooms with effective teachers. This expensive ‘people-everywhere’ strategy limits the available talent pool, as some potentially effective educators may be unwilling to relocate to the communities in need. Technology may make it possible to pipe in expertise to complement and compensate for the limitations of any local teaching force. Perhaps the most significant impact of education technology is its potential to eliminate obstacles posed by geography. Web-based delivery systems can take advantage of the wealth of highly educated, English-speaking people in nations like India willing to tutor children at relatively inexpensive rates. For example, Washington, D.C.-based SMARTHINKING Inc. uses American and international tutors to provide intensive instruction to students. Students can log on to the company’s website twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and work in real time with experts in various academic subjects.

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