

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

K-12 Teaching: A Service Industry

At The New Republic, "Making the Grade" poses this about the difference between college professors (notice that term "professor," as in "one who professes") and K-12 teachers:
"The vast majority of states have long granted public school teachers tenure. The way it works is simple: After a certain number of years, teachers qualify—'virtually automatically' in most states, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality—for a form of job protection that makes it extremely difficult to fire them for the rest of their careers. 
"The system is analogous to the protections that university professors receive—but with one important conceptual difference. Universities are not just educational institutions; they are our country’s idea factories. And so it makes a certain amount of sense that we would want university professors—the people our society relies on to explore ideas, including unpopular ones—to enjoy protections from ideological or intellectual retribution.
"But this rationale doesn’t apply at the K–12 level. So what is the case for K–12 teacher tenure? The truth is, there isn’t a good one."
Diane Ravitch has confronted this argument as "bizarre," but otherwise, I have heard little challenging of this sentiment, leading me to wonder how powerful this claim is.

Some of us in education, scholarship, and research have argued that the corporate-driven "no excuses" reform movement aims to make teaching a service industry, but I now wonder: Is K-12 teaching already considered just a service industry?

And if so, who is to blame for this?

Every professional organization, every administrator, and every teacher who have grabbed chairs at the table serving the Common Core State Standards—well, that's a start for the blame.


  1. When was it not a service organization for national ideologies, primarily the business ideology? We are reaping the confluence of a consistency of messages via our national institutions, are we not? Recall the excerpt I offered from Burke the other day:




  2. This is a very important topic for the reform of public education. It is at the core of the miss-guided efforts of the business community to fix the schools. They see us a kind of service to the parents. Like a cleaners, we have a task to do, they think, and when we do it poorly they want to take their business elsewhere (like to private schools), or, if that's not possible, punish us until we do better.
    The problem is that they are viewing public education as if it were a private business; one whose job it is to satisfy the customer, namely the parents of the kids.
    But we are not private. Our customers are the public, the people who pay for the schools. We have been seen as private, though, because the public aspects of our program don't work very well these days.
    It didn't start out this way. When our schools were first founded, in the towns and districts throughout the country, the public in those small districts could see how they benefited from their support of the schools. They could see with their own eyes how the graduates made their towns stronger and better. In time, though, these graduates moved away to other towns and the connection between costs and benefits of the schools became less clear. The partial benefit the taxpayers got from the schools, due to that mobility of the graduates, meant that they only wanted to partially support the schools. Ergo our current stagnation and mediocrity.
    To "solve" this problem the schools pulled back from this public system of finance that no longer worked very well and concentrated on just being a "service" to the parents. That they could still do well, since the parents get a 100% return from their efforts through their life-long connection to their own children. The schools themselves, in effect, made themselves into a species of private education, "serving" the families of the current students and not the public in general.
    So, what should we do? Let's get back to being a truly public program. Let's find ways to show the general public, not just the parents, that we are providing them with a benefit. That's what other public programs do, like the police and public health. This means finding a way to document the value of our graduates to society in general. We could do this. It would be complicated, but worth the effort.
    One strategy would be to replace the state governance of the schools with a national system of education, leaving the local districts alone. This would solve the mobility of the graduates problem and allow us to demonstrate our public benefit. Then we would no longer be just a "service."

  3. Anonymous10:37 PM

    From the perspective of private corporate tyrannies, students are "human resources," or "human capital." They just don't acknowledge that perspective (it just wouldn't sound good, from a public relations viewpoint) until students turn 18.

    Perhaps schools should be renamed "human resource development and exploitative centers"?