Sometimes it's not about the money: teaching and heart

The current press for market-based approaches to the reform of teacher education is part of the larger movement to privatize health, education, and many other public and consumer services. As proponents of privatization (whom I refer to here as "marketeers") often point out in articles and commentaries in outlets such as Chester Finn's Education Next, (1) the success of market-based approaches is entirely dependent upon competition and a strong competitive environment. A bold statement of the basics of marketbased reforms appears in an Education Next commentary by Frederick Hess (2001) who explains why a market approach to reforming the schools has thus far not been successful. Hess's article is replete with melodramatic mixed metaphors about schools and schooling--"straightjacketed" public schools with no "watchdog" shareholders, the need to allow competition to "bloom and thrive" by "shattering" constraints, and school systems "strangled" by politics and bureaucracy. Hess complains that the conditions that make the market work--investors looking for maximum financial returns, employees motivated by monetary incentives, and managers authorized to make immediate personnel decisions--are "almost nonexistent" (p. 1) in schools and other public or charitable efforts, "especially those devoted to tending the needs of children of the disadvantaged" (p. 3). From a market-based perspective, the Hess article (2001) claims that there are several key factors that keep competition from being a more effective tool for school reform. One of these is that "teachers are attracted to education for its child-centered, humanistic, and autonomous character" (p. 7)--a very unfortunate state of affairs, according to Hess, because it means they do not respond effectively to competition. To unleash the "market bulldozer" into school reform (the kind that compels businesses to "improve constantly--or be crushed") (p. 4), Hess asserts that there would have to be fundamental change in the culture of schools. Based on the premise that "competition is fundamentally about fear" and that the power of competition in education is that "people fear for their investments or their jobs" (p. 5), Hess offers a simple solution: The simplest way to strengthen competition is to make it more threatening. Public school employees who are concerned about losing their jobs, desirable assignments, or material rewards are much more likely to cooperate with efforts to respond to a competitive threat. (pp. 7-8) In concluding, Hess speculates that the discipline of the market would work best in large chains of for-profit schools that would attract a new breed of teachers "who care more about individual rewards and material incentives" and who are motivated by being part of a system "more reliant on self-interest" (p. 9). Presumably this new breed of teachers would not be like those whom Hess criticizes earlier in his article--the kind who enter teaching because they are committed to children or for other idealistic reasons. There are many possible critiques of Hess's (2001) article, not the least of which is to excoriate its patronizing tone about "the disadvantaged," which pairs public education with charity, and its utter failure to acknowledge the covenant to provide quality education to all participants in our society, which is a bedrock of a democracy. In this editorial, however, I want to concentrate on the exquisite and deeply disturbing irony of Hess's analysis of teachers and teaching--an analysis that is simultaneously so right and so wrong. Hess is absolutely right when he says that teachers are often attracted to the profession for reasons that are not about money or self-interested career advancement but are, instead, about children and what Hess calls "humanistic" reasons. The irony, of course, is that, at the same time that he is right about why many people go into teaching, Hess is dead wrong about the fundamental nature of the activity of teaching and about how to fix schools and schooling. …