The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession

This is a fascinating working paper from Matthew Kraft (Brown University) and Melissa Arnold Lyon (University at Albany). It's from last fall, but it's one o0f those papers to just hang on to because its relevance will not fade any time soon.

Kraft and Lyon tracked four aspects of the profession-- prestige, interest, preparation and satisfaction.

Prestige means the "reputation and social standing" of the profession, as measured by a variety of studies that look at that sort of thing by examining many factors. Interest looked at how many people wanted to get into the profession via traditional college teacher prep programs. Preparation--how many people are coming out of the pipeline? And satisfaction looks at measures of teacher job satisfaction.

The paper is a brisk 68 pages, and it reaches a conclusion that is simple and clear:

The time-series figures we present on the state of the teaching profession reveal dynamic and surprisingly consistent patterns across all four constructs. We find compelling evidence of three major periods of change in the status of the teaching profession across the last half century. Prestige, interest, preparation, and satisfaction declined rapidly in the 1970s, rose swiftly in the early to mid-1980s, remained somewhat steady for the next 20 years, and then began declining precipitously around 2010.

Emphasis mine. 

Ordinarily I would write up a study like this over at Forbes.com, but that space calls for a less personal approach, and this study surprised me by being extremely personal. I went through high school and college in the 70s, started my first teaching job in 1979, and retired in 2018. So this study basically covers my life, and it rings absolutely true.

So the study lays out its methods and data clearly, and it's right there for you to examine (it all seems solid to me), but I'm going to talk about how all this looked on the ground at the time.

The drop of the seventies was real enough. After I left for college, my old school district had its first teacher strike in pretty much ever. Many of them had started around the same time, and were middle-aged family guys who were noticing that wages hadn't kept up with life.  I graduated from a school where most folks were pre-med or pre-law; nobody was breaking down the doors of the ed department, and we understood that we were never going to be rich or beloved.

In 1979 I landed in Lorain, Ohio, just in time for a strike. By the late seventies we had all reached one of those moments that comes when everyone sort of agreed that teaching paid poorly, yet it took lots of noise and uprising to do anything about it, accompanied by the usual handwringing ("Yes, teachers should be paid better, but when they go about this it's so unseemly, and doesn't help their cause at all.")

And as the study suggests, right after I started in the profession, things got better. Pay got better, respect got better. And it stayed better for quite a while.

That precipitous decline of 2010? Well, that was a year. It was sinking in that the budgetary hammering of education from the Great Recession was not going to be followed by a rebound. It was also sinking in that Barrack Obama, rather than reverse the high stakes testing and manufactured failure policies of No Child Left Behind, was actually going to double down on them. We were all just starting to hear about Common Core by the end of the year. And Race to the Top and the Core were both premised on the idea that US public education was failing, and that failure was the root of other societal failures (like poverty), and that the cause of this massive failure was probably all those bad teachers. Even the president of the NEA, the Very Unfortunate Dennis Van Roekel, supported the Core not just because he thought it was swell, but because he appeared to buy into the whole Massive Failure of Public Education narrative. If you were a classroom teacher in the early teens, it seemed that nobody--not Republicans, not Democrats, not even union leaders--was supporting you. 

On the ground, there was a marked shift in how all these Great New Reform Ideas were delivered. Under No Child Left Behind, the emissaries from the state department of education descended upon us for waves of professional development, but it was all designed to win us over, to get us to buy in. They would talk, explain, cajole, and construct convoluted metaphors to try to get us to buy in.

But sometime right around 2010, that changed. The delivery of the Latest Big Thing became, "This is what's happening. We don't give a rat's ass whether you like it or not. You'll shut up and do as you're told, or we'll just roll over you." Well, in more bureaucratically diplomatic language, of course.

2010 was the Year It All Sank In, finally. The insane demands of high stakes testing, the ones that required every district to have 100% above average test scores by 2014, the ones laid out on a curve that shifted from a gentle upward slope to a steep cliff (a shift that was set up to coincide with Bush's successor), the ones that guaranteed that in 2014 every district in the country would be either liars of failures--all of this was a feature, not a bug. 

On a personal professional level, 2010 was about the year that I started losing the juggling battle. My life as a professional had always been about getting one more ball in the air, finding ways to be more efficient so that I could squeeze one more piece of learning into the year. But 2010 was around the point where my professional development became about not losing any more than I absolutely had to as the school took away days and weeks of teaching time to give practice tests, actual tests, and "We'd like you to start using these workbooks we've bought--we think they'd help get some of our at risk kids to achieve higher test scores." Data days. "We got you a sub so you can spend these days in a department meeting to align the curriculum with the standards (and in a few years, we'll do it again)."

And all of this, on the state, federal and local level, done to teacher-- not with them, and certainly not while consulting their expertise. "No thanks," said all the Powers That Be. "You've done enough already, what with destroying the US education system and global standing and economy and all." 

In other words, this part of the study's findings was completely unsurprising. But it's nice to have independent research to corroborate our lived experience.