Schoolteacher

A Sociological Study

Dan C. Lortie

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226773230
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Upon its initial publication, many reviewers dubbed Dan C. Lortie's Schoolteacher the best social portrait of the profession since Willard Waller's classic The Sociology of Teaching. This new printing of Lortie's classic—including a new preface bringing the author's observations up to date—is an essential view into the world and culture of a vitally important profession.

1

The Hand of History

By showing institutions in the process of transformation, history alone makes it possible to abstract the structure which underlies the many manifestations and remains permanent throughout a succession of events.

Claude Lévi-Strauss,

Structural Anthropology, p. 22

Occupational pasts are not all alike. Some, particularly in technological fields, are short; of those with longer histories, some display comparative stability and continuity while others feature sharp turning points and considerable change. It is important to consider such histories; as Lévi-Strauss points out, “only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society” (Lévi-Strauss 1967, p. 13). In this instance, we will trace the development of selected characteristics of teaching to provide background for later analyses and to ascertain the balance between continuity and change within the occupation. An estimate of that balance will help us to understand the social system which prevails in public school teaching.

Although my debts to historians will become evident, the approach taken here is more sociological than strictly historical. Good history captures the spirit of an era, connecting events so that we perceive unities in otherwise disparate happenings. The developmental strategy used in this chapter, however, sacrifices that advantage to a search for continuities and discontinuities in the evolution of an institution. Perhaps we should call the method “structural chronology” rather than history, for we shall move across time periods and restrict our focus at any given point to particular considerations. The goal is to achieve an overview of how teaching has come to be the kind of occupation it is today.

The rubrics used to organize the several chronologies derive from the sociological study of institutions and occupations. (For examples, see Caplow 1954; Gross 1958; E. Hughes 1958; and Taylor 1968.) The first deals with the position of teachers in the authority structure of public schools. The second and third refer to economic matters; whereas one is general, the other deals specifically with the different meanings monetary rewards have for men and for women. In the fourth section, the social position of teachers is discussed, with special attention to their social rank and the way society has regarded them. Succeeding sections discuss the growth pattern of the occupation and arrangements governing admission and training, and are followed by a brief recapitulation of associational bonds within teaching. The chapter concludes with some comments on the relative balance of change and continuity in the development of the occupation.

The Organizational Imperative

American teachers, especially since the early nineteenth century, have generally worked in organizations.¹ Fee-for-service instruction by individual teachers has been limited to tutoring the children of wealthy families and teaching special skills like music and dancing. Transactions between teachers and their students have usually been mediated by a third party; in public education, that party has consisted of a school board composed of elected or appointed citizens. Such boards have participated in raising funds, provided physical facilities, and supervised the instruction of children in a given geographical area. The fact of school board authority has been a constant, but its exercise has changed in interesting ways. And changes have also occurred in the methods teachers have been permitted to use in asserting and sustaining their authority over children.

Schooling and teaching were neither uniform nor institutionalized during the first century and a half of europeanized life on the American continent. We must, as historians caution, avoid projecting current conceptions onto different times (Bailyn 1960; Cremin 1970), but we can find some patterns in the descriptions of colonial schools found in Elsbree’s book on teaching (1939). Those who taught school (most were men) were hired by local authorities for designated periods to perform stipulated duties for predetermined salaries. Those who taught were likely to do other kinds of work as well, for occupational life was considerably less specialized than it is today. Officials in the community assessed the would-be teacher’s moral standing and his knowledge of what he was expected to teach—clergymen figured prominently in such screening. Once under contract the teacher performed his schoolhouse duties single-handedly. Local communities developed strategies for monitoring the performance of the teacher: the usual procedure was to visit the school periodically and demand recitations from the students. Elsbree’s judgment is that this overseeing was little more than “superficial appraisal” (p. 71). He contrasts such arrangements with those prevailing in city school systems during the 1930s: noting that “there was no hierarchy of officers common to our present city school systems,” he concludes that “the teacher was perhaps more nearly his own boss at this time [the colonial period] than at any subsequent period.” There was little restraint on the teacher’s authority—physical means (“rule by ferule”) were fully accepted. Since the schoolhouse was physically separated from the community, the teacher had considerable privacy in the conduct of his day-to-day work.

The citizen governing board emerged during the colonial period and became a key building block in the system of mass schooling that was constructed during the nineteenth century (Tyack 1967). Originally a subcommittee of selectmen, it grew into a distinct body with unique rights and responsibilities. Although the formation of the Republic placed education under state authority, de facto powers moved to local school boards which gained authority over most facets of the schools. The formal structure which emerged during the nineteenth century was monolithic: unlike the federal government’s division of power between executive, legislative, and judiciary branches, all formal powers were concentrated in the citizen governing board. One fails to find, for example, any clear distinction between “administrative” and “professional” domains in the school systems which grew out of the Common School Crusade. As school systems multiplied in number and grew in size, they became more bureaucratized. By the twentieth century the superintendent had become the chief administrative officer responsible for implementing school board decisions. The outcome of bureaucratization was to divide the “third party’’ [the governing body] into two layers, one consisting of part-time citizens, the other of full-time administrators. Through time, administrators increasingly stood in for boards in supervising teacher activities and affairs.

Urbanization resulted in the development and spread of multiple-classroom schools during the nineteenth century. The teacher’s working conditions and status were naturally affected. He lost some of the privacy which had enhanced his independence during colonial times. Furthermore, a teacher was no longer the teacher: those instructing the young became members of a category of persons so employed in the local school. Larger units required coordination and other administrative tasks, which were assigned to principals and superintendents and, later, to their assistants. (One must not forget, however, that in many rural areas the one-room schoolhouse was sustained well into the twentieth century. As late as 1956, there were 34,964 one-teacher schools in the United States [Tyack 1967, p. 470].) Thus the dominant mode of schooling in twentieth-century America has consisted of thousands of school districts with a hierarchy of offices and some degree of bureaucratization (Bidwell 1965; Lortie 1969). Teachers became employees supervised by full-time, physically present administrators acting on authority delegated by school boards.

Authority relationships between teachers and students have also shifted. Earlier teachers, as was noted, were expected to use physical force to control their charges; gradually, however, the role of the student was redefined as new conceptions of the proper treatment of children arose. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, laws and school custom changed; increasingly sharp limits were placed on the teacher’s use of physical punishment. There is a paradox in this transformation of values and practices: the teacher’s use of physical coercion was limited at about the same time compulsory education became the rule. The presumption that students attended school voluntarily became void just when teachers were forced to maintain their authority through persuasion and other leadership qualities. Discipline took on a different coloration under such conditions: teachers had to learn how to “motivate” students regardless of whether they or their parents wished them to be in school.

The hierarchization of schools and the diffusion of compulsory attendance produced dual “captivity” in the relationship between teachers and students. Students were assigned to particular schools by place of residence, and once in school they were allocated to specific teachers by school administrators. Teachers, having accepted employment in a given school district, were assigned to a school by the superintendent and to particular students by the principal. Thus neither student nor teacher had much to say about their relationship: each was forced to come to terms with an externally imposed requirement of cooperation. It is a truism of sociology that formal requirements can induce informal evasions, and some parents undoubtedly manage to influence the placement of their children. Teachers, moreover, have fought hard to gain seniority rights in the matter of transfer within school systems, and this grants some freedom in the kinds of students experienced teachers will teach. Such choice, however, remains categorical rather than individual; unlike fee-for-service professionals, teachers cannot build a clientele of selected individuals.

Whatever the reasons, American teachers have not seriously challenged the conception of school governance as the proper province of part-time citizens. Yet the actual capacity of boards and administrators to wield their legal powers has not been constant throughout the years of the modern school system. Important change has occurred in the century or so since Mann and others led the Common School Crusade. Elsbree’s judgment of the situation in the 1920s and 1930s appears accurate; it seems that the subordination of teachers was greatest then (Elsbree 1939, p. 71). Callahan (1962) has described the ideologies of school officials of that time. Importing imagery from business and “scientific management,” they saw teachers as similar to factory hands—as agents charged with implementing detailed specifications developed in central headquarters. Despite considerable stability in the formal powers of school boards and officials, power relationships have changed over the last four or five decades, and such changes were well under way before collective bargaining attained genuine potency. Although they have rarely challenged the authority system in principle, teachers have worked together to offset the capacity of boards and administrators to use their formal rights.

In the early days of the modern school system, school boards certified teachers, hired and fired at will, and paid individual teachers as they thought appropriate (Elsbree 1939, p. 338). Certification was centralized, however, at the turn of the century; it became the responsibility of state officials acting under publicly enacted rules and regulations. Teachers managed to introduce and amplify the concept of permanent tenure for classroom teachers of all kinds, and legislation became general which made it increasingly difficult for employers to dismiss teachers after they had served their initial probationary period (Elsbree 1939, p. 476). Teachers backed single-salary payment schedules which aligned payment with such “objective” qualifications as years of education and service. The diffusion of these three changes took time, but once they were general, each limited the power of school authorities. Boards and administrators could no longer define who was or was not “a teacher.” They lost the power of hiring and firing at will and the leverage they had possessed by paying teachers individually. We have of course seen additional changes with the advent of widespread teacher bargaining. As I shall argue later, some of those changes fulfill the same function of limiting hierarchical authority.

The assertions of teachers have not emphasized their “positive” collegial powers, but they have increased their “negative” powers. They have, in short, been able to achieve structural changes which reduce the power of superordinates by restricting the capacity of officials to affect the personal goals of teachers. Teachers have not pressed to reorder the hierarchy in which they find themselves: at least publicly, their associations continue to honor the idea of citizen control over schools. (Only in isolated instances have they attempted to replace administrative powers with teacher groupings.) Although the pyramid of authority in today’s school looks much like that found a century ago, the powers of those in superordinate positions have been somewhat reduced. But today as yesterday, teachers continue to work in settings where formal authority is vested in board members who do not belong to their occupation and are therefore beyond the reach of its internal controls.

On Income

Public school teaching takes place under the aegis of corporate bodies located in the public sector. Parsons states that the incomes of persons working in the public sector—at similar levels—are lower but more secure than those earned in the private sector. He sees a trade-off between the amount of money received and the amount of risk entailed (Parsons 1958). Teacher incomes today fit the model of public sector employment, but formal employment security did not occur until relatively recently.

Given the novel and complex situation facing the early colonists, Bailyn portrays their discovery of means for financing schools as an impressive achievement (Bailyn 1960). The forms of support they knew in Europe did not work in the wilderness. After decades of experimentation with various combinations of contributions, fees, taxes, rents, and so forth, they settled on the local taxation of property holdings. Such taxation was incorporated into the common school model developed during the nineteenth century; subsequently it has provided most of the money needed to operate the public schools. In recent years, however, state governments have augmented their contributions and the federal government has begun to use its taxation resources to assist local school districts (Campbell, Cunningham, and McPhee 1965).

The form of financial support developed by the colonists and subsequently extended into the system of mass education developed later did more than permit the existence of public schools: it shaped them in fundamental ways. Bailyn notes that “the piper came to call the tune,” as financial arrangements underscored the power of local citizens over the schools. The use of property taxation held down levels of expenditure, for as Benson indicates (1961, p. 18), it is a highly visible and relatively painful kind of tax. Those who determined the level of expenditures for schools (normally school boards with review by local governments) were, being local, accessible to the population of taxpayers and likely to give serious consideration to complaints about excessive costs. The preponderant share of school expenses has always been teachers’ salaries. Fiscal arrangements, therefore, have exerted conservative pressures on teacher income.

Historians who discuss teacher income tend to use adjectives like “low” and “underpaid.” Elsbree, after heroic efforts to uncover the comparative income of colonial teachers, placed the average at about that earned by skilled artisans—above that of common laborers but below the incomes of ministers, physicians, and lawyers (Elsbree 1939, p. 97). Tyack reports that incomes received by teachers in 1841 “were below the wages paid to artisans . . . and often below the earnings of scrubwomen and day laborers” (1967, p. 414). One suspects that the tendency of historians to see teacher incomes as too low springs from a “just wage” approach; teacher incomes seem discordant in terms of usual ideas of social rank. Economists may argue that teachers have been paid “the going rate,” but many in our society have considered teacher incomes as somehow inappropriate given the importance of education. Until “teacher militancy” and the forceful action of the last few years, newspaper editorialists frequently prefixed the word “teacher” with the adjective “underpaid.”

Benson’s observations on teacher income support the application of Parsons’s comments to teachers (Benson 1961b, p. 289). Although the level of payment has risen steadily over the last eighty years, the climb in income has not changed teachers’ relative position within the economy. Benson reports that teachers receive (on the average) five to seven thousand dollars less per year than four other college-based occupations. He also points out that teaching salaries display a low, fixed ceiling; the typical salary schedule projects an ultimate income which is no more than twice that received in the first year. The latter pattern is more characteristic of public than private sector income profiles.

Elsbree points out that colonial teachers possessed security advantages over those who did not work for salaries or have annual contracts—they could count on a stipulated, predictable amount of money in return for their work (p. 96). But the assurance that one’s employment was secure for years in advance did not come until tenure provisions became widespread during the first half of this century. Before then, teachers could be dismissed easily not only for incompetence but for a variety of infractions against morality stringently defined. As we shall see throughout this book, the economic realities of teaching play an important role in its nature: they undergird its social class position and the shape of careers within the occupation.

The Differential Value of Money Rewards

Continuities and changes in the sex composition of the teaching force have played an important part in the development of the occupation. Since the economic implications of these shifts have been particularly significant, we shall give them particular attention.

The modal teacher of the colonial period was male, a schoolmaster who taught in a “petty school” where basic reading and arithmetic were learned. Less frequently, he taught in the more advanced “grammar schools” of the day (Cremin 1970). Women teachers existed, but apparently constituted a minority. They taught primarily in “dame’s schools” in which pupils studied in the teacher’s home. Some women also taught in the summer sessions of the regular schools. Elsbree reports that the salaries earned by women teachers were “consistently lower than those awarded men” (p. 96).

Thousands of schools were created as public education expanded during the nineteenth century, and it was not long before the schools were staffed primarily by women. By 1870, for example, there were 123,000 women teaching and 78,000 men; year after year thereafter, the proportion of women increased (Tyack 1967, p. 470). By 1930 there were five times as many female as male teachers, and the men who did teach taught primarily in the higher grades.

Butts and Cremin do not find the feminization of teaching mysterious; they see the cause as economic, since women could be hired for considerably less than men (Butts and Cremin 1953). Teaching was comparatively attractive to women: they had, after all, few alternatives. The major options they faced were domestic service, employment in factories, and types of work which were extensions of feminine functions in the home—such as laundering and baking (Ogburn 1933). The widespread use of the typewriter and the accompanying explosion of office employment opportunities for women did not occur until the turn of the century, and nursing, social work, and library positions did not become numerous until the twentieth century. The vigorous industrial and commercial expansion which followed the Civil War, on the other hand, reduced the relative attractiveness of teaching for men; those were, one recalls, the years of the famous advice “Go West, young man.”

It is tempting to use Linton’s ideas to account for the increase in women teachers during the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth (Linton 1936, p. 117). He argued that societies tend to assign work roles to men or women; shifts toward women predict that men will withdraw even where economic reasons are not compelling. But the generalization has not been true in high schools, where teaching became and remained evenly distributed between men and women. The latter division persisted through the introduction of “equal pay for equal work” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface 2002
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Hand of History
• 2. Recruitment and Reaffirmation
• 3. The Limits of Socialization
• 4. Career and Work Rewards
• 5. Perspectives on Purpose
• 6. Endemic Uncertainties
• 7. The Logic of Teacher Sentiments
• 8. Sentiments and Interpersonal Preferences
• 9. Speculations on Change
• Appendix A. Sample Description
• Appendix B. The Questions
• Notes
• References
• Index