Treating teachers as professionals

Karen W. at Education in Iowa has a great post questioning whether all the talk of treating teachers as professionals is consistent with depriving them (and their students) of so much say over what happens in the classroom. “The heart of a profession,” she points out, “is the special duties that a professional owes to persons with whom we enter professional relationships” – in this case, the children. She then imagines what the teaching profession might look like if it carried with it the kind of professional obligations to children that lawyers have to their clients. Lawyers, for example, must often defer to their clients’ wishes, and cannot permit third parties who pay them to control their exercise of professional judgment. Should analogous principles come into play in the teaching profession? Check it out..