We Need MANY More Teachers than Doctors or Lawyers
It was a little surprising to see the AFT take a stand against the edTPA teacher licensing test given President Randi Weingarten’s support for similar “bar exams” for teachers, and it got me thinking about “professionalizing” teaching in general.
That teaching needs to be “professionalized” is a mostly-platitudinous claim, but you often hear from both sides in the education reform debates.
You often hear people reason about professionalization by analogy: that we need to change the way teachers are certified to make the profession more similar to law or medicine.
This is probably a bad way of thinking about teaching.
It’s easy to forget, but the United States actually needs a lot of teachers. In 2012, public and private K-12 schools employed roughly 3.7 million teachers.
For comparison, in 2012 the United States employed approximately 835,000 doctors and 1,268,000 lawyers.
In other words, we need three times as many teachers as we have lawyers and We Need MANY More Teachers than Doctors or Lawyers | Paul Bruno:
