We Don’t Need Celebrity Teachers
In a recent posting on Good Education, Jose Vilson lamented how there aren’t any celebrity K-12 teachers who can “speak to the collective conscience of the educational experience,” as if this was somehow a prerequisite for teachers to gain the autonomy, status and respect they deserve.
This is a completely absurd notion with some pretty unfortunate implications. Anthony Bourdain, Wolfgang Puck and Jamie Oliver may have increased the number of people wanting to cook good food at home, but they have done nothing to elevate the status or wages of the hash slingers and burger flippers who do the majority of restaurant cooking. If anything, the glorification of celebrity chefs contributes to the misperception that good restaurants are the product of a single talented artisan, obscuring the contributions of the prep cooks, servers, buyers and dishwashers. Teaching, like cooking, is a social endeavor. Individual teacher skill depends on interactions with colleagues, families, mentors, while the quality of a school improve more when there is collaboration and support between teachers than on the existence