Welcome to the Profession, Madame President:

Dear Madame President: I elect to use the feminine form of salutation neither as prophecy nor as preference but simply as a welcome alternative to the traditionally male form with which we address the president. Nevertheless, this approach is not random. Teaching and teacher education have traditionally been viewed as women's work and practiced by women. Like nursing, teaching has never been taken seriously among the more august professions. The feminist historian Susan Reverby (1987) once observed that nursing's contemporary difficulties can be traced to a historical dilemma: nursing's "order to care in a society that refuses to honor caring" (p. 1). I might paraphrase Reverby regarding teaching. "Teaching's struggles are shaped by its historical obligation to free the mind and to nurture the spirit in a society with deep ambivalence about both enlightenment and caring." Of course, Madame President, you may turn out to be a man. Perhaps you will be a graduate of an Ivy League university. Perhaps you earned your degree from a state institution. Perhaps you will have graduated from a faith-based college or a military academy. All of these flourish in our country, a nation replete with a greater variety of postsecondary institutions than any in the world. Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower were university presidents, the former before becoming the president of the United States, the latter thereafter. Of one thing we can be certain: You are probably the graduate of a law school! We haven't had a president educated as a schoolteacher since LBJ. I suspect that most of my fellow correspondents will urge you to pass new legislation to encourage young people as well as career switchers to become teachers by improving salaries and working conditions, by removing the oppressive sanctions associated with No Child Left Behind (while I hope retaining its emphasis on standards, attention to groups traditionally underserved, and the need for well-prepared teachers who can assume professional responsibility for learning) and by developing a federal education policy that works through rewarding good work rather than by punishing "evildoers." I also expect that they will ask you to support higher standards for teachers, more vigorous support for teacher education, and incentives for colleges and universities to give greater attention and support to their teacher education functions. I certainly hope they will ask you to throw your weight behind loan forgiveness programs for those who pursue long-term teaching careers. This may well mean that special loans become available for graduate students, much like medical students who opt for public service on Indian reservations or in other high-need settings. I'm so confident they will bring those policies to your attention that I won't even mention those matters. I have a somewhat different request of you, Madame President. I want you to support the work of teachers at all levels by serving as a persistent, relentless, and self-conscious model of an educated person. I further implore you to define the president's role as the principal teacher of our nation, the model educator, whose responsibility is to exemplify the habits of mind, habits of practical judgment and action, and habits of the heart that we associate with our ideal for all well-educated citizens in a democracy. Even more important, I implore you to define your role as the principal learner in our society, taking every opportunity to make your own intellectual and moral development visible and transparent to your fellow citizens. I'm interested in your actions and your thoughts, because you are on TV every day, on the front page of the newspapers every morning, on the Web incessantly. You are, whether you like it or not, both a positive and a negative role model for all Americans. I write to implore you to become self-consciously, intentionally, and willfully a persistent model of an educated person in a democracy, in all its many manifestations. …