Is Teaching A Profession?

Reprinted from Taylor, Gerald and Robert Runté, eds.

Thinking About Teaching: An Introduction. Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

**** Richard Hersh, a distinguished former college president, shared this excerpt from his
essay, “Teaching Ain’t Brain Surgery-It’s Tougher!”

“In 1983, school reform efforts were catalyzed by the report of “A Nation at Risk.” Reform to date has
largely failed. Today we are a nation at greater risk educationally but the political pandering about “Leave
No Child Behind” will get us nowhere because the issue of quality teaching is ignored.

High quality teaching is the single most important factor in helping students to learn, a truism confirmed
by many years of research. This fact has been blithely ignored by critics and politicians attracted to the siren
calls for facile remedies such as school uniforms, computers, vouchers, and the latest bromide, high-stakes
testing. The result is inadequate student achievement and more than 50% of all teachers who leave teaching
in the first three to five years of their career.

The reasons for this state-of-affairs are straightforward and swept under the rug– the training of teachers
and the conditions for teaching are grossly inadequate. Moreover, in the face of an acknowledged short and
long-term teacher shortage, the imperative for excellent teachers and teaching conditions is profoundly
undermined by a patronizing “teaching ain’t brain surgery” mentality–the belief that anyone with an
undergraduate degree can teach. Teachers in a very real sense operate on the brain too but teaching ain’t
brain surgery–it’s tougher!

How are brain surgeons educated? Four years of undergraduate work, at least four arduous years of medical
school, and several additional years of internships and residencies are required to master the knowledge
and skills to operate on the finite topography of the brain. With such training, these superbly prepared
surgeons are expected by society to operate on one anesthetized patient at a time supported by a team of
doctors and nurses in the best equipped operating rooms money can buy. For this we gladly pay them
handsomely.

How are teachers educated? They receive a spotty four-year undergraduate education with little clinical
training. At best, an additional year for a Master’s degree is also required for professional certification.
Teachers are expected by society to then enter their “operating rooms” containing 22-32 quite conscious
“patients”, individually and collectively active. Often the room is poorly equipped, and rarely is help
available as teachers also attempt to work wonders with the brain/mind, the psychological and emotional
attributes of which are arguably as complex to master as anything a brain surgeon must learn. For this we
gladly pay teachers little.

Conditions for professional service matter. Contemplate the results if our highly educated and trained brain
surgeons were expected to work in the M.A.S.H. tent conditions equivalent to so many classrooms. In such
an environment we would predictably see a much higher rate of failure.

Or, consider if the roles were reversed-that brain surgeons were educated and rewarded as if teachers. It is
virtually impossible to contemplate because it is hard to conceive of any of us willing to be operated on by
someone with so little education or clinical training in a profession held in so much public disdain.
We take for granted that the current professional education, training, rewards, and working conditions for
brain surgeons are necessary and appropriate for the complexity and value of the work performed. Not so
obvious is that teaching well in one elementary classroom or five or six secondary school classes each day
is as difficult, complex, and as important a task as brain surgery. But to do it well, to be truly a profession,
teachers require exponentially more education, training, better working conditions and rewards than are
currently provided. Unless and until we acknowledge this reality we will not solve the teacher shortage
crisis and school reform will inexorably fail.

To guarantee excellent teachers, effective school reform, and ultimately high student achievement, we first
need to understand that teaching is at least as complex and as difficult as brain surgery and requires
significantly greater education, training, monetary reward and supportive operating conditions.

Transforming the education and training conditions is only one-half the solution. The “operating”
conditions in schools to enable professional teaching practice must be radically altered. Elementary and
secondary teachers today find themselves isolated in their classrooms. Teaching has become professionally
stultifying. With the additional school burdens of violence, drugs, multiple languages, bureaucratic
impositions, mainstreaming, and the obvious personal needs of so many students across all social and
economic strata, is it really surprising to find that so few are willing to enter or remain in this calling? The
best trained teachers will fail unless we provide a school setting that enables students and teachers to be
successful.”