Teaching in America: The Slow Revolution

If the essential acts of teaching are the same for schoolteachers and professors, why are they seen as members of quite separate professions? Would the nation's schools be better served if teachers shared more of the authority that professors have long enjoyed? Will a slow revolution be completed that enables schoolteachers to take charge of their practice - to shoulder more responsibility for hiring, mentoring, promoting and, if necessary, firing their peers? This text explores these questions by analyzing the essential acts of teaching in a way that should help teachers become more thoughtful practitioners. It presents portraits of teachers (most of them women) struggling to take control of their practive in a system dominated by an aministrative elite (mostly male). The educational system, the authors argue, will be saved not by better managers but by better teachers. The only way to secure them is by attracting talented recruits, developing their skills, and instituting better means of assessing teachers' performance. Grant and Murray describe the evolution of the teaching profession over the 20th century, and then focus in depth on recen experiments that gave teachers the power to shape their schools and mentor young educators. They conclude by analyzing three equally possible scenarios depicting the role of teachers in 2020.