Can Professional Certification for Teachers Reshape Teaching as a Career?

Never before have educators and the public had such an opportunity to improve schooling by developing a staged career for teachers, Ms. Johnson notes. Whether and how they do that will depend on decisions they make and actions they take during the next decade. IT WAS Dan Lortie who first observed that teaching is an "unstaged" career - in the sense of lacking a progression of stages through which one can expect to advance.1 Yet teachers have long known - and often complained - that their responsibilities seldom change from the first to the last day of work. For most, the routines of planning, teaching, grading, and meeting recur with little variation through the years. In the end, it is memorable students rather than professional milestones that highlight the phases of a typical career in teaching. Analysts offer different explanations for the uniform character of teachers' careers. Teaching, widely regarded as "women's work" - a half-step above child care - is seldom thought to require the promotions that signal progress in male-dominated careers. Because child rearing has shaped women's employment patterns, teaching has also been a field of high turnover and thus not one that could easily be plotted out by stages.2 Further, analysts explain that the "egg crate" structure of schools, in which teachers work alone rather than as members of an integrated and tiered organization, reinforces the unstaged career.3 It is further fortified by the conservative culture of teaching, a culture that discourages efforts to distinguish individuals by competence, shuns those who proclaim their expertise, and protects educators from public judgment by their peers.4 Finally, some analysts conclude that the "horizontal" teaching career results not so much from gender roles, organizational structures, or professional culture as it does from teachers' unique conception of their work, which leads them to discover variety, develop expertise, and define success within the classroom rather than outside it.5 Over time, these factors, each of which probably plays a role in shaping the current career in teaching, interact and reinforce one another. As a result, not only are schools less effective than they might be, but teaching does not attract all the candidates it could. Individuals drawn to teaching by a love of learning or a delight in working with children often become disillusioned when they encounter the career's uniform responsibilities, roles, and rewards. Prospective teachers who are entrepreneurial, eager to lead, or ready to apprentice themselves to experienced colleagues often find that teaching offers little support for those ambitions.6 Thus professional knowledge remains privately protected, and expert practices are rarely transferred from one generation of teachers to the next. Meanwhile, the public persists in believing that anyone can teach. In the mid-1980s, school reformers began to critique the unstaged career of teaching and the atomistic school structures that sustained it. Would teaching attract stronger candidates if their employment were treated by others as a long-term, rather than a short-term, commitment? Would students be better served by a teaching staff whose members worked collaboratively, rather than as a "collection of individuals"? 7 The Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy considered such questions and in 1986 proposed a new professional structure for teachers' careers that would profoundly change their roles and relationships.8 No longer would all teachers hold the same rank; some among them would become "lead" teachers and use their expertise to revitalize schooling. In response to this proposal, some reforming districts introduced partial career ladders that included new titles for teachers, such as "novice" or "apprentice. "9 For the most part, though, these classifications were minor alterations in teachers' otherwise flat careers, usually affecting only the earliest years of their work. …