Hatchetman wrote:
The conclusion of the report you cited:
Perhaps there is an irony in these changes. Historians tell us that when the public school system
was invented a century ago, the teaching force was transformed into a mass occupation that
was relatively low-paying, temporary, and designed predominantly for young, inexperienced
women, prior to starting their “real” career of child rearing (e.g., Lortie, 1975; Tyack, 1974).
Perhaps the changes we have traced represent not an entirely new face but a return to the old
face of the American teaching force.
A return to an old structure could have serious implications for the future status of elementary
and secondary teaching in the United States. Professionalization has long been a source of both
hope and frustration for teachers. Since early in the 20th century, educators have repeatedly
sought to upend the notion that teaching is akin to lower-skill industrial work where teachers are
interchangeable and easily replaced, and they have sought to promote the view that teaching
is highly complex work, requiring specialized knowledge and skills, and deserving of the same
status as traditional professions, like law, medicine, engineering, and academia. These efforts
to enhance the professional status of teaching have also long met with limited success. And if
teaching becomes an even larger, lower-paying line of work, predominantly employing young,
inexperienced women, who stay for limited periods, it does not suggest optimism for the
aspirations to promote the image of teaching as a respected profession.
At the same time, these possible future trajectories, and similarities between the contemporary
transformation of the teaching force and its previous incarnation, are strictly speculative on our
part. Nothing in our data analyses so far can be considered conclusive evidence that the teaching
force is, or will be, “better” or “worse” in one way or another. As we indicated at the beginning
of this report, thus far our objective has been exploratory and suggestive. At this point we have
more questions than answers.
As I said, there are "better" jobs out there, and there are many jobs that are worse. It falls right in the middle.