Chapter 1. The teaching profession and its knowledge base1

Professions and semi professions

Howsam et al. (1985) classify teaching as a semi-profession because it lacks one of the main identifying characteristics of a full profession: professional expertise. They argue that teaching lacks a common body of knowledge, practices and skills that constitute the basis for professional expertise and decision-making. This is a consequence of the practice of teaching not being founded upon validated principles and theories. In their view, few teachers use existing scientific knowledge, nor do they contribute to building a scientific knowledge base through the development of principles, concepts and theories or to validating practices. As a consequence, there are no agreed-upon performance standards for evaluating teachers to continue in the profession. Importantly, the quality of the preparation of teachers and induction into the profession is poor as a consequence of the absence of a common body of scientific knowledge underpinning professional expertise and transmitted via teacher educators during initial teacher education.

Likewise, Hoyle (1995b) argues that teaching satisfies some but not all criteria of a profession. His defining criteria, also within a taxonomic perspective, are somewhat different from those of Howsam et al., but there are some important similarities. For example, in characterising full professions, Hoyle (1995b: 12) argues that “although knowledge gained through experience is important, this recipe-type knowledge is insufficient to meet professional demands and the practitioner has to draw on a body of systematic knowledge”. Furthermore, in the case of professions, the acquisition of knowledge and development of specific skills requires a lengthy period of higher education and training, during which the practitioner undergoes a process of socialisation to the professional values, centred on the client’s interests and made explicit through a code of ethics. Like Howsam et al., Hoyle considers decision-making to be an important characteristic of professions because professions require the practice of skills in situations that are not routine and where professional judgement, based on a systematised body of knowledge, will need to be exercised when encountering new problems. Both scholars stress the importance of autonomy over professional judgement regarding daily practice, as well as autonomy over control of regulating the profession, such as the setting of admissions criteria, performance standards and licensing.

A semi-profession meets some, but not all, of the criteria for professions. For example, Etzioni (1969) describes semi-professions as occupations where training is shorter, status tends to be less legitimated, there is a less established right to privileged communication, a less specialised body of knowledge and less autonomy from supervision or societal control than professions. In some cases, semi-professions are occupations that are in the process of becoming professions through a process known as “professionalisation”. This process refers to achieving the status of a profession (Evetts, 2012), or “the degree to which occupations exhibit the structural or sociological attributes, characteristics and criteria identified with the professional model” (Ingersoll and Merrill, 2011: 186). Box 1.2 illustrates the characteristics of semi-professions as proposed by Howsam et al. who compiled the characteristics from various sources.

The concept of professionalism

Defining when an occupation is or is not a profession is closely related to the discourse of professionalism. For example, Freidson (2001) names two basic assumptions underlying the professionalism of an occupation: (1) unique and specialised tasks that can only be performed by members of the occupation who have the required formal training and experience and (2) work that cannot be standardised, rationalised or commodified. Freidson (2001: 2) defines professionalism as a “set of interconnected institutions providing economic support and social organisation that sustains the occupational control of [the] work”. Professionalism exists “when the organized occupation gains the power to determine who is qualified to perform a defined set of tasks, to prevent all others from performing that work, and to control the criteria by which to evaluate performance” (Freidson, 2001: 12). The ideal elements of professionalism as proposed by Freidson are illustrated in Box 1.3.

The concept of professionalism can also be used to describe the attitudes and psychological attributes of members of a profession or of those aspiring to be professionals (Ingersoll and Merrill, 2011). Pratte and Rury (1991, as cited in Shon, 2006: 4) define professionalism as “an ideal to which individuals and occupational groups aspire in order to distinguish themselves from other workers”. Thus, professionalism could be perceived as an occupational value.

Hargreaves (2000) investigated the historical processes underlying the development of teacher professionalism among several different countries and identified four phases: the pre-professional age, the age of the autonomous professional, the age of the collegial professional and the age of the post-professional or postmodern professional. Teaching in the pre-professional era was considered to be “technically simple”. It employed the transmission method of teaching, and training occurred through apprenticeships by observing more experienced teachers. Beginning in the 1960s, during the age of the autonomous professional, teacher salaries increased and teacher education was increasingly based on university courses. Teaching practice and classroom pedagogy became subjects of inquiry. During the age of the collegial professional, beginning in the 1980s, teachers became members of professional communities. Teachers participated in professional collaborations and teacher education was moved to universities. However, the 1980s also saw the introduction of educational reforms and increasing complexity in education governance. By consequence, teachers’ roles and responsibilities began to change. The current post-professional age is being influenced by economics, globalisation and digital communication, and these changes are bringing further uncertainty to teachers’ professionalism. As a consequence, the status of the teaching profession, as it relates both to its prestige as well as to its governance, is being influenced by various factors, including sociological, political, cultural and economic ones.

Teaching governance and autonomy

Indeed, issues of governance and self-regulation are two factors that have exerted a strong (often negative) influence on the status of the teaching profession in recent years. Hargreaves (2000) argues that, up until the collegial era, the occupational changes in teaching had been moving toward increasing teacher autonomy and by consequence teacher professionalism. However, since then and continuing today, the intensification of educational reforms and governance structures that are becoming increasingly more complex are eroding teachers’ autonomy, resulting in a path towards the de-professionalisation of teaching. Some argue that teachers have lost whatever autonomy they might have had in decision-making over pedagogical theory and their classrooms and have become functionaries or employees of hierarchical organisations (Lortie, 1975 in Biddle, 1995). Performance-based compensation schemes are an example of how teachers are perceived as employees who are expected to achieve certain outcomes in order to earn their salaries. Other evidence suggests, to the contrary, that recent decentralisation trends increase schools’ autonomy and also enlarges professional autonomy of teachers (Burns and Köster, 2016). Regardless of these arguments, a number of scholars have similarly argued that autonomy is one of the basic elements of teacher professionalism (Whitty, 2008; OECD, 2016a) and one of the key identifying characteristics of a profession (e.g. Etzioni, 1969; Hoyle, 1995b; Howsam et al., 1985; Reagan, 2010).

The extent of autonomy in the teaching profession is context dependent and varies both between and within countries. Within each context, the extent of autonomy granted to teachers will be the result of how the profession is governed at local or regional, national and international levels, and in the case of the teaching profession, its governance is dependent on the governance of education as whole. To illustrate the complexity involved in the governance of the teaching profession, Figure 1.1 displays some of the major factors (and this is not an exhaustive set) that come into play in the governance of the profession – much of them having to do with the increase in accountability of education systems in recent decades. For example, the extent of decision-making power that teachers have over factors such as school inspections, teacher appraisal, performance standards, credentialing and licensure, will determine the degree of autonomy teachers have over their profession in their context. According to Hargreaves and Flutter (2013), the increasing emphasis on accountability through national or international tests of student performance is likely to influence the status of the profession. This is related to issues of trust in the profession; whether teachers are considered responsible for what they do and how they can affect the extent to which they are trusted, and by consequence whether their profession as a whole is trusted.

Figure 1.1. Factors affecting the governance of the teaching profession

The less decision-making power granted to teachers within this complex system, the less autonomous the profession. By consequence, the profession is perceived as less prestigious. Indeed, empirical data exist to support this relationship. The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), which collects teachers’ self-reported perceptions about the learning environment and working conditions in their schools, shows a strong positive association between the extent that teachers participate in decision-making and the likelihood that society values teaching as a profession (OECD, 2014a). In countries where teachers are not included as decision-makers, the teaching profession is less likely to be valued in society.

Governance and autonomy are just two of the factors that are frequently debated in the literature related to their influence over the status of the teaching profession. There are a range of other factors which in combination interact in complex ways to determine the resulting status, as illustrated in Figure 1.2 (in no particular order). Two that have been debated at length by policy makers and economists alike are salary and working conditions. In writings related to the sociology of professions, Hoyle (1995b) identified one noteworthy characteristic of full professions that does not appear in the list of Howsam et al. (1985). According to Hoyle (1995b: 13), “lengthy training, responsibility, and client-centeredness are necessarily rewarded by high prestige and a high level of remuneration”. Likewise, in the UNESCO/ILO (2008: 21) recommendation, the word “status” is used to refer to “the working conditions, remuneration, and other material benefits accorded them [teachers] relative to other professional groups”.

Figure 1.2. Possible determinants of the status of the teaching profession

Indeed, salary and working conditions are often implemented as policy levers for improving the profession’s prestige. This is because in most OECD countries and partner economies teacher salaries are lower compared to occupations requiring equivalent levels of education, and the salary difference is often cited as one of the primary reasons for the perception of the profession’s lower status. For example, OECD data indicate that across OECD countries primary-school teachers earn on average 81% of the salary of a tertiary-educated 25-64 year-old full-time, full-year worker; lower-secondary teachers are paid 85% of that benchmark; and upper-secondary teachers are paid 89% of that benchmark salary (OECD, 2016b). In terms of working conditions, factors often cited as negatively impacting the profession’s status include large class sizes, long teaching hours, excessive workloads, poor job security, lack of instructional resources, poor school safety, little or no access to professional development opportunities and excessive administrative duties (Leitwood, 2006). Some policy initiatives have tried to improve one or more aspects of teachers’ working conditions for raising the status of the profession with varying degrees of success (Hargreaves et al., 2007).

Public perceptions of the teaching profession

One factor that might play a role in shaping the public’s perception of the teaching profession is the media (Cameron, 2003). Media sources can portray a negative image of teaching, usually through film, but often via news reports, for example, when there are contract disputes between the government and teacher unions (Hargreaves et al., 2007). Others have written about how the importance of the “clients” of a profession affect its prestige (Eraut, 1994). In the case of teaching, the clients are children, and because children have a lower social standing than adults, by consequence the profession is lower in social status. Also, patriarchal attitudes in societies may contribute to the devaluation of teaching due to the high proportion of women in the profession (Hoyle, 1995a).

Indeed, teaching is predominantly a women’s profession. According to recent OECD data (2016b), women make up 97% of teachers at the pre-primary level, 82% at the primary level, 68% at the lower secondary level, 58% at the upper secondary level, and only 43% at the tertiary level. Additionally, recent international reports indicate that the proportion of female teachers is increasing (Commonwealth Secretariat and UNESCO, 2011). Interestingly, “a preponderance of women” is argued to be a characteristic of semi-professions identified by Howsam et al. (1985: 18). Often referred to as the “feminisation” of the teaching profession, the overrepresentation of female teachers has been argued to have a detrimental effect on its occupational status (Hoyle, 1995a).

Some have argued that the overrepresentation of female teachers may partly be the result of the profession attracting individuals (irrespective of gender) who value predictable work hours and long summer vacations because this corresponds well to the schedules of families with children (Podgursky, 2003, 2011). Because of issues such as family responsibilities and structural barriers such as limited opportunities for promotion, teaching is often perceived to be “career-less” (Lortie, 2002). OECD data indicate that, in most countries, opportunities for promotion and new responsibilities are generally limited for teachers who want to stay in the classroom (Schleicher, 2011). Even when upward mobility is an option, salaries are still smaller in relation to other hierarchical organisations. Poor career prospects and limited opportunities for continued learning and professional growth contribute to lowering the profession’s prestige (Hargreaves, 2009).

Accessibility

The teaching profession is generally viewed as easily accessible. When compared to other professional occupations such as medicine or law, selection into initial teacher education is not competitive. Factors such as the quality of prospective applicants into initial teacher education programmes and minimum entry requirements are highly related to occupational prestige. For example, it has been argued that those who enter teaching are generally of lower academic achievement than those who enter other professional occupations such as medicine or law (Hoyle, 1995a, 2001), and many scholars and policy makers have advocated for raising entry standards (Darling-Hammond, 2005; Carlo et al., 2013; Eurydice, 2015). To add to this, the rise of alternative entry routes might affect the profession’s prestige (Hargreaves and Flutter, 2013). Alternative entry routes and the private tutoring industry are often accused by teachers and teacher unions of contributing to the continued de-professionalisation of teaching (Finn and Petrilli, 2007). In some contexts, the rise of alternative entry routes has necessitated reducing the duration or scope of initial teacher preparation thereby impacting the depth of knowledge and skills to be acquired by graduates, or by restricting teacher education to the learning of routine-like, prescriptive practices, leading to further claims of de-professionalisation. On the other hand, alternative routes can also be effective (Humphrey et al, 2008). For example an evaluation of teachers in the U.S. trained through different routes to certification revealed no statistical difference between traditional preparation and alternative routes in terms of their impact on student achievement (Constantine et al, 2009).

Often, however, ease of accessibility has to do with market drivers affecting supply and demand, which are often out of the control of the profession itself. For example, opening up the profession through alternative entry routes or the lowering of entry requirements are usually the result of policies aiming to fill teacher shortages, either due to changing demographics, challenges in recruiting new teacher candidates, or teacher attrition. It is often suggested that there is a high attrition rate for novice teachers leaving the profession. For example, in the USA it has been reported that almost 50 percent of those who enter teaching leave before their fifth year of practice (Ingersoll and Perda, 2012; Perda 2013 as cited in Ingersoll and Merill, 2013). However, there is some variation between countries. For example in Israel 32% of upper secondary teachers leave the profession within their first 5 years, in England 27% and in the Netherlands 22.5% (OECD, 2014b). Hence, Hargreaves and Flutter (2013) introduce elements such as recruitment and retention as factors influencing teaching’s status.

At the same time, challenges in teacher recruitment and retention have been argued to be the result (rather than determinant) of the poor status of teaching. For instance, despite high demand for teachers or ease of access into the profession, many OECD countries and partner economies face challenges in recruiting new, particularly high-ability candidates and retaining quality teachers in the workforce. This is related to another approach to exploring the status of the teaching profession having to do with whether teaching is an attractive career choice (Everton et al, 2007; Carlo et al., 2013; Eurydice, 2015). A recent study investigating the career expectations of secondary school students in countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2006, reported that, on average across countries, only 5% of students indicated that they planned to work in the teaching profession (OECD, 2015). Whether challenges in recruitment and retention or the quality of prospective applicants are the result or the cause of the profession’s poor status remains an open question.