“I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.”
Rodney Dangerfield
A few years back I received a nice, but unfortunately negative response to a book proposal about education. Having spent years selling and also being frequently rejected for book and article ideas of all sorts, the rejection was not particularly painful, just another aspect of the writing game, but part of the reasoning for the rejection opened a door to perception with respect to how teachers are viewed by the general public in terms of professionalism and expertise.
As with much in this blog, my book proposal concerned teaching and pathways to better performance of schools. As part of the proposal, I noted over 30 years of successful classroom experience in challenging environments, nationally published articles, numerous teaching awards, and a master’s degree in education, what I considered to be fairly solid credentials. Apparently, these weren’t considered very significant. Let me share part of the literary agent’s response.
“I understand that you have experienced these situations firsthand, but I am unsure what gives you the authority to prescribe treatments. Unfortunately with the marketplace today, readers of these kinds of texts expect people with serious qualifications, and I just can’t tell if you have them,” the agent replied.
One set of key words in the response was “the authority to prescribe treatments.” I began to think about prescribing treatments in general and drew parallels to other professionals. For example, if I were a doctor writing about how to stay healthy, would my expertise be questioned by someone out of the medical field? Had I been a CPA writing about how to best keep business records for tax purposes, would my credentials be challenged? Would a lawyer have to provide “serious qualifications” to publish a book advocating a new law? For that matter, would a professional mechanic be questioned about credentials when writing a book on choosing a used car?
I doubt it, in fact, with regard to the latter question about a mechanic, I have a book in print now about motorcycle mechanics “Building Budget Brits” that I sold to a publisher that now markets the book internationally to great reviews. I have never taken so much as a single class of any mechanical nature. I possess no professional certificates in the mechanical field. I’ve never even worked full time as a mechanic.
I learned motorcycle mechanics like many people learn anything well, by doing it a lot, in this particular case by turning wrenches and making mistakes on old motorcycles I owned over the course of three decades. Ironically, I have a hundred times more experience and expertise as an educator than as a mechanic, multiple certifications in two different states, numerous awards, over a hundred positive written evaluations of my work by supervisors with advanced degrees, but I have been judged as lacking “serious qualifications” in a profession after devoting over 30 years of my working life in it.
What’s the difference? Ahh…now we get to the heart of the matter, don’t we? I think I know, at least partially, what’s going on here, and I’d bet a week’s time serving as a substitute teacher in an in-school suspension room (there’s the voice of experience talking) most veteran teachers know as well as I do why I was challenged. What we have here is, essentially, simply a matter of professional respect, of which, in contemporary times, classroom teachers often have very little.
I believe there are several reasons for the Rodney Dangerfield treatment.
One of the biggest perception and respect issues is that deep down way too many people think they can or could teach as well as most holding current credentials. Support for my theory is prevalent. For one good example, in most states teachers can be and often are hired when they lack professional certification. Actually, this is how I started my career, but I soon found drawing a paycheck as a teacher and actually being one are two completely different things. I was a warm body stuck into a classroom nobody else wanted. But if I attempted to practice law or medicine without proper certification, I would have gone to jail.
Semantics play a part too. Teacher and teaching mean many different things to many different people. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard media types, usually negatively, identify someone as a “teacher” when the individual in reality was a substitute “teacher” at some school, but the first part of the job description was found unnecessary. Granted, while many substitute teachers really are professionals, many others are nothing more than childcare workers or babysitters. I must admit some fully certified teachers aren’t any better than most substitutes, and sadly, quite a few are a lot worse. Unfortunately, the number of people claiming the “teacher” title and not living up to the mission is another huge credibility factor. I’ve known several who probably couldn’t spell “prescription” much less prescribe corrective measures for education. I understand the credibility problem. Guilt by association, I guess.
I’ve often employed educator to differentiate between a true professional and one who is not, but this also is subject to wide variations of interpretation. Still, educator, to me anyway, requires a formal education in a given academic area and high proficiencies in this area as well as being a true and skilled professional in the art and science of pedagogy. There is a world of difference here, and in my view, a person with the attributes just described has every right to “prescribe treatment” to anything related to teaching and education.
Getting back to differentiation, I think the failure to better classify and identify teachers professionally also leads to a lack of respect for masters of the craft. Differentiating accurately and fairly, however, must involve a highly complex evaluation process and many different variables because great teaching is much like great art, almost infinite dimensions of excellence exist. Although some states are beginning to credential teachers using “master” terminology and a national organization exists to confer this status on those completing its program, the credentialing processes are largely operated at a distance and at least one state allows master designation after only three years of teaching. This leads me to question master teacher designations in general, making me, I guess, just as skeptical of competency as the literary agent and now growing even more sympathetic of her need for clear proof. The true proof of mastery, however, isn’t easily established.
Actually, much still needs to be done to even clearly define what makes a master teacher and how to best evaluate one, and it should come as no surprise why the public has a hard time recognizing high competency and “serious qualifications.” Ultimately, however, the work going into creating a better foundation and more widely utilized identification process should bear fruit on many trees, from public acceptance of exceptional professionalism to creating compensation packages for those identified as masters so, unlike current trends, people who become master teachers actually keep teaching, instead of using the designation as a stepping stone out of the classroom as is tragically common today. The more you know, the less contact you have with kids is a very strange operational system but a cornerstone of current education practice. Oops, there I go prescribing again. Mea culpa.
In absence of clearer lines of mastery demarcation that are more universally understood and widely accepted, many true master teachers are never identified, just as I’m fairly sure some less than outstanding teachers are bestowed honors they have not earned and do not deserve. Some people, for example, might really be exceptional mostly at documentation and jumping through academic hoops. Having a PhD, for one example, does not directly translate into being a master teacher, although many not in the education field might question what I know to be a reality. Regardless, I’ve personally known more than a few PhDs who were terrible teachers, and conversely, was mentored by a woman early in my career who was a master teacher in every way but formal education.
My early career mentor had been certified to teach black children when she had only two years of college study, a practice allowed under an old racist system in Louisiana. These teachers, almost all of them African American, were grandfathered by the new certification system upon integration of the Louisiana public school systems in the 60s. This wonderful African American teacher with limited formal education came to my rescue in 1980 when I was a first year teacher about to drown in my own incompetence.
My mentor’s lack of formal education would exclude her acceptance into the master teaching designation by name today, but surely not by skill. Still, she was a master teacher that any school would deeply appreciate and highly value, a condition easily proved by observing her work in classrooms and the results she obtained from her students. My point is identification of true master teachers will be a complex, multi-dimensional process, but still worth the time to develop and implement more fully than it is now and will most likely demand, if the process is truly genuine (no guarantee in academia) many routes to the same destination.
As for the process of identification, I think this must be done over a relatively long period of time and deeply demonstrated in actual practice with frequent person-to-person contact on the part of the teacher and evaluators. One must be able to walk the talk day in and day out under a wide variety of teaching circumstances while consistently demonstrating a high level of proficiency before I’d call anyone a master teacher. While long distance evaluations, portfolios, college credits, and student test scores all have their place in the evaluation of a master teacher, the numerous intangibles are also of enormous value and critically important parts of the equation. The ability to deal with lunatic parents, misguided administrators, deeply disturbed special education students and the direct opposite, highly gifted over-achievers all go into the master teacher’s tool box where many more skills and abilities must also be at the ready.
As for me personally, I could have gone through the process of finding an organization granting master teacher designation but chose not to. In fact, my district encouraged the process and offered to pay the fees if I remember correctly. I decided I had better things to do with my time because, then and now, I knew after decades of practice and training, I was already a master teacher and nearly all of my supervisors, peers and students recognized this. Consequently, I decided I didn’t need strangers conferring an existing distinction.
But that’s kind of tricky to put into a resume, isn’t it? And even if I could, many would still question the claim’s validity. I’m thinking maybe I should get one of those phony doctorate’s degrees and print up a few more lofty acknowledgements. Who knows, it might help sell my book, but it certainly wouldn’t make me a better teacher.