THE TEACHER'S MILLSTONE
Stiehm, Judith H.
The Teacher's Millstone by JUDITH H. STIEHM The teacher traditionally has given both the social status and the material reward of his occupation a rating of "U"—unsatisfactory. Yet there has been...
...The teacher esteems professional standing...
...The board is the visible version of public opinion...
...Sensing wariness in the applicant's continued silence, the principal carefully explained that while the administration felt such membership was indicative of a teacher's ability and attitude, it was certainly not compulsory...
...While status as a professional is clearly a desirable symbol, it has become, clearly, a new instrument of control which is used to check salary increases by denying to teachers their only instruments of power: teacher organization and the strike...
...The doctrine can be stated in a number of ways: "An educational objective must be approved by society," "Society decides what should be taught...
...Sometimes it is only necessary to notify a principal that one of his staff is talking in an unseemly fashion and to note that a principal is expected to control his school...
...When the question was raised in the course of the job interview, she indicated that she had deliberately left the question blank since she was unfamiliar with these groups and was not accustomed to joining things she did not whole-heartedly endorse...
...In modern times the teacher has finally achieved middle-class social rank with a lower middle-class wage...
...The point is, institution hopping is possible...
...An education degree candidate could do a thesis on "The Use of Professionalism in Morning Announcements for the Purpose of Genteel Coercion...
...The interviewing principal then made it clear that teachers in the school district endorsed these organizations, that the groups were extremely active, and that, indeed, the district always had 100 per cent membership...
...The teacher is dealing with immature minds...
...A professional is not subject to such a body...
...Half of these credits are usually in practice teaching or on-the-job training...
...Thus, while an engineer, scientist, or dietician may study no longer than a teacher, he may be regarded as a professional because virtually his entire course of study is devoted to specialized knowledge...
...I appeal to my fellow-teachers: Let us deliver ourselves from this thrall-dom...
...Since this particular instrument of power is used in foreign lands by politically fervent students and other "extremist" groups, and is used at home almost exclusively by workers who are clearly not "professional," most teachers regard it as suspiciously brutish...
...A fair though admittedly conservative definition of a profession might be: "An occupation requiring advanced and/or specialized training in which proficiency is evaluated by other members of the given occupation and salary is commensurate with excellence of performance...
...Further, the question of support and participation in such organizations is brought up in the interview...
...Generally teachers regard themselves as servants of the community, as transmitters of mores, customs, prejudices, and previously established knowledge...
...This is probably the way things must be done...
...Such objections have always been made by parents or lay people in the community...
...This would at least give the married male teacher a standard of living comparable to that of other teachers...
...The teacher is to impart what the community wants imparted...
...Three credits are essentially liberal arts courses concerning the history, philosophy, or psychology of education...
...The salary enables them to dress with cachet, drive a three-year-old automobile, pursue a musical, artistic, or scientific hobby, and spend the summer months traveling, studying, or dawdling...
...Professionalism" is used by the educational hierarchy to obtain desired behavior from teachers, and used by society generally to keep salaries low...
...While our attention is focused on the carrot, we are being driven off the road to higher wages and improved teaching conditions...
...It is these persons, outside the teaching field, to whom the teacher is subjected for evaluation and adjudication...
...Occasionally he simply rewrites a report before presentation to the school board or to the public...
...Now this is not necessarily base...
...In some cases the superintendent may resort to direct individual censure, or to dropping a laboriously-fashioned committee report on salary scales in the waste basket...
...This means, of course, recourse to the threat or even the use of the strike...
...Hence a most important instrument of power is removed from the arsenal of those teachers who succumb to this form of snob appeal...
...And why can the superintendent secure compliance with policy established by his company union...
...In one case I know of, a new teacher left this question unanswered because she was reluctant to join unless it became clear that her chance for a job was contingent upon it...
...Even in these courses the student does not so much concentrate on a body of specialized and substantiated knowledge but experiments with devices and techniques gleaned from the experience of others...
...Our value is measured by public opinion, not by others in the education field...
...Control can often be subtly exercised simply by having a representative of the superintendent at all meetings...
...His weapon is the following formula: "I think you should understand that uncooperative behavior is unprofessional...
...The Statistical Abstract of the United States 1960, reports that the 1959 median annual salary of teachers was $4,324...
...Gilbert your $2.50 for the Association dinner...
...One interesting experiment a school board might make would be to grant dependency allowances to teachers similar to those granted by the armed services...
...Unlike the professions, the teacher's salary is usually unrelated to performance...
...Furthermore, summer is not a vacation period but a twelve week "lay-off"—a period of unemployment...
...This leaves six credits at the most relating to educational methods...
...In order to be effective, a genuine teachers' organization should be composed exclusively of classroom teachers and should issue publicity and lobby on the local level with avowed self-interest, as well as carry on programs on the state and national levels based on classroom and pupil problems and interests...
...Attendance might be considered a professional obligation...
...There is no concept of academic freedom accorded the teacher such as is fairly well established for the college instructor...
...He is acting simply as a transmitter for the community...
...Its members may include an occasional scholar, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a mother, but most frequently the typical board member is a successful businessman...
...What is to be done...
...Occasionally a teacher will lay claim to the rights of academic freedom...
...It is not composed of teachers...
...The school board is the body directly concerned with rewarding, retaining, or releasing teachers...
...The most important factor in disproving any claim to professionalism by a secondary or primary school teacher is that the ultimate evaluation JUDITH H. STIEHM it a former teacher in a suburban school near Philadelphia, and she has worked for the Institute of International Education...
...Still, the right to intellectual error is generally accorded an instructor, and reprisals do not often result in blacklisting of the "trouble-maker...
...o? a teacher's work is not made by an association of classroom teachers, but by the public opinion of the particular community he serves...
...The theme is clear...
...These educational associations forestall other forms of teacher organization by pleading for unity and by calling themselves "professional" organizations...
...Instead, salary schedules are mechanistically determined on the basis of the number of years spent in the classroom (both as student and as teacher...
...Some college is always ready to welcome to its faculty a martyr in the cause of academic freedom (if only to atone for the professor fired last year for refusing to take a loyalty oath...
...But to solve the basic problem, the teacher must do as all elements in society do...
...Sometimes a transgressor stays on in his own institution even though he does not receive promotion or merit increases...
...If a teacher should display superior teaching abilities, he is quickly promoted to the non-teaching role of administrator or eased out of the school...
...A secondary teacher ordinarily has only eighteen credits in the field of education...
...One who does and retains his job is a. person whose own values coincide with those of the community, and whose outspoken opinions are directed against, for example, "free thinkers" like James Conant, who is interested in changing the school sys...
...He is working with minors whose behavior and thoughts are still subject to parental control and for whose behavior the parents must still accept responsibility...
...Ironically, the aspiration toward the first commendable goal seems to inhibit attainment of the latter...
...Professionalism is a plump, juicy carrot dangled in front of our noses by our superiors and society to secure policy adherence and attendance at non-compulsory affairs...
...For a better professional group record REGISTER and VOTE...
...However, the average education is rapidly increasing in length, and, more important, a teacher's period of study is still three or four years shorter than that of the recognized professions of law, medicine, dentistry, or university teaching...
...Even more important, it is substantially below that of the urban worker, whose median annual income in 1958 was $5,460...
...We are not professionals...
...True, most salary schedules are adequate for the bachelor, the maiden lady, and the "working-for-the-fun-of-it" wife...
...In other districts, improvements can be won only by more forceful action...
...in the most extreme cases, he resorts to institution hopping...
...The two principal aspirations of today's teacher seems to be recognition of teaching as a "profession," and improved salary schedules...
...But it should be recognized and emphasized that the teacher is not acting upon superior knowledge or upon his own responsibility...
...However, since he had been with us for a number of years, had always joined before, was badly in debt because of hospital bills, and was paying dues for his wife, also a teacher, we felt that his explanation was acceptable...
...However, just as an efficient principal vetoes student council action he deems unsound, the efficient school superintendent does not hesitate to use his official powers to silence teachers who are too demanding and to control the functioning of the local education association...
...So, when a vacillating teacher is commanded on the early morning news broadcast by such a snorting decisionmaker as Admiral Hyman Rickover to "get back to work at teaching our children and start acting like professionals," the teacher might just do it...
...According to the most recent comparative figures available (those of 1950), the income of a male teacher was identical with that of a mail carrier, and substantially below that of a business manager, salesman, typesetter, or foreman...
...Such pragmatic action is regarded, unfortunately, as extremely undignified and unprofessional...
...We are not paid on the basis of performance...
...The married male teacher dresses without chic, drives a ten-year-old car, reads as a hobby, and works during the summer at menial and temporary jobs to pay the interest on the mortgage...
...Striking is not professional...
...This suffices, partly because the teacher desperately wishes to be regarded as a professional, and partly because unprofessional conduct is grounds for dismissal in any school district...
...In fact," he said, "just two years ago one of the teachers in the district elected not to join...
...This pledge is obtained by having each job applicant answer in writing the question: "Are you willing to support the national, state, and local education associations...
...It is true that a teacher's training is advanced over that of the population as a whole...
...They recognize that they are not truth-seekers but propagandists for Christian-Judaic religious values, for patriotism (right or wrong), and governmental institutions...
...To compound the irony, teachers cannot ever hope, by definition, to qualify as professionals...
...While membership in such organizations is large, it is not necessarily representative of classroom teacher commitment or approval, for in many school districts a contract to teach is contingent upon a pledge to join local, state, and national associations...
...Only too often board members are selected and elected to keep school taxes down rather than because of superior insight into the ends of society and the educative means of achieving those ends...
...Further, a teacher's training is not sufficiently specialized to qualify him as a "professional...
...Primary or secondary school teaching fulfills none of these requirements...
...These professional organizations often are used on the local level to lead teachers to believe that they are participating in a democratic forum in much the same way that teachers lead students to believe that student councils are a democratic forum where they may obtain effective action as well as express opinion...
...Even if teachers are well organized outside the framework of the education associations, propaganda and lobbying often prove fruitful only in a prosperous and enlightened community with low property taxes...
...Yet there has been remarkable improvement in both over the centuries...
...Teachers of classical Greek and Roman times were frequently slaves...
...He must utilize his latent power...
...There are teacher organizations, and teachers' unions, but a primary force working against them is the National Education Association (NEA) and its state and local affiliates...
...This salary, of course, is not comparable to those of the professions, such as the physician's $15,000, the lawyer's $10,500, or the engineer's $8,750...
...Most teachers, however, do not claim the prerogatives of intellectual freedom...
...However, most American adults are married, and it is still true that the male supports most families...
...or, "Our goal is to develop wholesome personalities and participating citizens...
...Worse, teachers have fallen for the appeal...
...He must organize, propagandize, and threaten...
...Professionalism is even invoked to guide teacher action in relatively insignificant affairs...
...Our training is neither advanced nor specialized...
...During the Middle Ages pedagogues graduated to the rank of lower clerics...
...It is true that there are daily reprisals against college professors who have too audibly supported miscegenation, socialism, free love, Krebiozen, or integration...
...The chief flaw in professional associations is that they are composed not just of classroom teachers, but also include principals, administrators, and school superintendents whose power is disproportionate to their number, and whose foreman-like job it is to keep teachers functioning at maximum efficiency while receiving minimum benefits...
...It is natural that parents expect the public schools to reinforce these values taught at home...
...Indeed, most engineers escape their technical courses only long enough to take freshman English, American history, and perhaps ROTC...
...A typical note in the morning announcments might be: "Some of you have not yet paid Mrs...
...At election registration time mimeographed sheets may bear these tidings: "For your professional responsibility REGISTER and VOTE...
...A teacher's salary makes family support a near impossibility...
...It is significant that there is no record of a teacher being the complainant in a court case regarding such problems as Bible reading and prayer in a public school's daily schedule...
...While the aspiration to professionalism is absurd, the teacher's salary grievances are legitimate...
Vol. 25 • July 1961 • No. 7
