One teacher works with 40 students a day, another with 150. One stands austerely on a raised platform in an unadorned cinderblock room. Another weaves around a brightly decorated classroom, laughing and chatting with small clusters of students. One teacher saves up her meager salary for months to replace a broken washing machine. Another spends weekends in her second home and collects shoes. Across the globe, being a teacher means very different things: poverty or affluence, low status or prestige.
At the same time that these vast differences exist, rhetoric about education and reform, in the United States and around the world, hardly takes the working and living conditions of teachers into account. Policy-makers, corporations, politicians, and curriculum reformers focus on everything but how the reforms they propose will affect the viability of the profession, its appeal to the best and brightest. Today, charter schools, standardized testing, and accountability are the catch-phrases for reform. Thirty years ago, it was site-based management and essential skills. In the neo-progressive 1970s, the answer to failing schools meant an open curriculum and elective choice for students. Two decades before that, it meant back-to-basics and intelligence testing. In whatever era one looks, the one variable that would make the most difference is the one that is consistently overlooked: the teacher, her attitudes about herself, and her place in the larger culture.
Some years ago, I collaborated with my husband, Sam, a veteran urban high school teacher, on a book about school reform entitled Teacher-Centered Schools: Reimagining Educational Reform in the 21st Century.1 The book was predicated on a commonsense thesis: if America is really interested in reforming and improving its schools, it needs to attract a talented workforce and, even more important, retain those teachers over the course of a career. There is an extraordinary body of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, showing that great teachers change lives. Even accounting for parental income and differences in cultural privilege, the number one factor in improving student achievement on any measure of success – including standardized test scores – has been continuously shown to be the intellectual skill and preparation of the teacher.2 In that earlier study, we argued that to truly transform society, America needs to make the work of teaching so desirable that every brilliant, creative, and idealistic young person graduating from college will automatically gravitate to that profession, considering teaching as a first choice – not a last-ditch fallback when other options fail. And in order to attract the very best and brightest into the field, and retain them over time, schools need to rethink their priorities, to focus their energies and support not only on the students but on the teachers. If we could build a system that afforded professional prestige and prioritized the needs of teachers – many of whom, if we are lucky, will remain in that system for thirty years or more – we will have found the most effective way for saving failing schools.
This book tests that theory in a global and comparative way. For the last three years, I have been looking at how teachers around the world perceive their profession and their place in the culture. What is the state of teacher prestige internationally? Do teachers around the globe see themselves as American teachers do? Are their complaints the same? Are their views about the meaning and value of their work the same? And what are the implications of those teacher attitudes for the twenty-first century world? I try to answer those questions here by tracing the experience of teaching in seven different cultures, documenting that work through the eyes and words of individual practitioners.
A History of Second-Class Status
To understand the changes that are taking place in the profession around the world, it is useful to begin at home. The history of the teaching profession in the United States offers interesting parallels to evolving attitudes in other countries. Teaching in America is not a high-status occupation, and it has never been one. Since the very first years of European presence in the New World, the teacher’s place in the community was always secondary at best. Historians have ample, concrete evidence of this. We know, for example, that teachers in the seventeenth century were assigned the duty of sitting up with the dead, sweeping out the church, and other tasks that were eschewed by clergy. Records show that early teachers were often paid in grain or, if a community decided they were dissatisfied with the outcomes of their children’s education, they were simply not paid at all.
In the earliest years of the Republic, when grammar school teachers were mostly men, popular stereotypes emerged of teachers as brutal and incompetent, effete or effeminate. Depictions found in the memoirs of people such as Bronson Alcott and in short stories by Washington Irving and Philip Freneau show teachers as superstitious, dim-witted, and obsessed with their meager salaries. Sadistic and bullying, these characters are often depicted as having entered the profession under duress, remaining in it on sufferance and exiting as soon as something better came along. One particularly vivid example of this vision can be found in the work of the eighteenth-century scholar and poet John Trumbull, who documents the making of a new teacher in a poetic satire aptly entitled, “The Rare Adventures of Tom Brainless.” After charting the progress of his moronic teacher protagonist through Harvard, where he sleeps and cheats his way to a diploma, Trumbull presents us with a portrait of the teaching candidate:
Teaching, in short, was depicted as the default profession for fools and scoundrels. Indeed, for ordinary Americans in the early nineteenth century – farmers and cattle-rangers, millworkers and miners – deep biases existed against those who did not engage in manual labor. Teachers were seen as idlers, individuals who were too frightened or lazy to engage with the “real world.”
This stereotype of the disengaged teacher changed with the feminization of the profession, a shift that began with the rise of the common schools in the early nineteenth century, and then quickly became endemic by the 1870s. An exploding population, combined with new mandates for universal public education, created massive teacher shortages. In an effort to fill classrooms, reformers such as Horace Mann and James Carter argued to initially resistant communities that women were actually superior candidates for teaching positions. Unlike men, women were naturally modest, self-sacrificing, and subordinate. Women could be paid little without complaint. Women’s piety and self-abnegation, they argued, would serve a Christian nation in ways that could only be healthful to the moral development of children. The feminization campaign was presented as a win-win prospect: hire women for the moral uplift of your community and save money in the process. Mann and Carter proved to be fantastically successful: at the start of the nineteenth century, roughly one in ten teachers was a woman. By the first decade of the twentieth century, almost 90 percent were women.4 Teaching became a “calling” – a term not found in eighteenth-century descriptions of the profession but pervasive in popular magazines, newspapers, and novels by the second decade of the nineteenth century.
This yoking of teaching with self-effacement and service can be found in the earliest writings addressed to female teachers, often, ironically, from other women. It reaches its nineteenth-century apotheosis in Catherine Beecher’s famous 1846 injunction to educated women to abandon the idleness of class privilege and devote themselves to the service of children. In her address entitled “Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy,” Beecher lays out a scenario for the feminization of the American teaching force that formally cast the work in explicitly religious terms:
The plan is to take women already qualified intellectually to teach, and possessed of missionary zeal and benevolence, and to send them to the most ignorant portions of our land, to raise up schools, to instruct in morals and piety, and to teach the domestic arts and virtues …
Beecher had an almost messianic view of the profession. She goes on to imagine the teacher in her Western home as follows:
If our success equals out hope, soon in all parts of our country … the Christian female teacher will quietly take her station, collecting the ignorant children around her, teaching them habits of neatness, order and thrift, opening the book of knowledge, inspiring the principles of morality, and awakening the hope of immortality. Soon her influence in the village will create a demand for new landowners, and then she will summon from among her friends at home, the nurse, the seamstress, and these will prove her auxiliaries in the good moral influences, and in Sabbath school training.5
Feminization, then, allowed for service and sacrifice to become the prevailing metaphor of the work, and by the early twentieth century, the cult of service was deeply embedded in public consciousness about the profession. Indeed, the earliest comprehensive sociology of the profession, published in 1932 by Barnard professor Willard Waller, shows how successful that campaign had become by the twentieth century. In this early ethnography of teaching, Waller described a job where the concept of professional service has devolved into servitude or even slavery. A teacher’s contract, reproduced in Waller’s volume, documents a level of community control that is almost impossible to believe:
I promise to take a vital interest in all phases of Sunday-school work, donating of my time, service, and money without stint for the uplift and benefit of the community.
I promise to abstain from all dancing, immodest dressing, and any other conduct unbecoming a teacher and a lady.
I promise not to go out with any young men except in so far as it may be necessary to stimulate Sunday-school work.
I promise not to fall in love, to become engaged or secretly married.
I promise not to encourage or tolerate the least familiarity on the part of any of my boy pupils.
I promise to sleep at least eight hours a night, to eat carefully, and to take every precaution to keep in the best of health and spirits, in order that I may be better able to render efficient service to my pupils.
I promise to remember that I own a duty to the townspeople who are paying me my wages, that I owe respect to the school board and superintendent that hired me, and that I shall consider myself at all times the willing servant of the school board and townspeople.6
“Women teachers,” Waller concluded, “are our Vestal Virgins.”
A Global Perspective on the Profession
In considering the history of the profession outside the United States, however, the story is very different. Globally, the work of teaching has been historically both prestigious and desirable. In Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, teachers were traditionally drawn from the educated elite, a status that drew veneration, not contempt. Countries such as China and Japan are built on cultural norms that venerate teachers and see their role as crucial to civilized order. A Chinese friend told me that from early childhood, he heard repeated the ancient mantra: “A teacher for a day is a father for a lifetime.” China’s most famous professional teacher was Confucius, the first to call for the education of the masses, to focus his teaching on “how to be good,” on self-improvement and ethical living. Chinese still point to Confucius as a symbol of the profession and its link to ethical and spiritual principles. In the Islamic world, teaching has its own extraordinary history, a celebration of secular wisdom that dates back to the ninth century where teachers in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad taught subjects ranging from agriculture to medicine, philosophy to mathematics. Even in Europe, where the earliest teachers were linked to the Church, the profession was held in the highest of repute. Literacy and scholarship were seen as precious currency. Again, while teachers were not wealthy, they were among the most respected people in society. Teachers were among the elite, an attitude about the profession that persisted in many European countries throughout much of the twentieth century. In Soviet Bloc countries such as Poland and Romania, the rise of Communism did not dampen that historical respect; rather, it served to nurture it. As the instrument for socialization and indoctrination, the role of the teacher in Communist countries was critically important, carrying a kind of immovable authority. Impoverished countries in Africa turned to their teachers as symbols of hope. Any chance of future prosperity resided in the teacher and the tangible value of knowledge so closely associated with teachers.
Starting in the late twentieth century, that sense of the specialness of the teacher seems to have quickly eroded, spurred on by economic changes, globalization, and the Americanization of international cultures. As a researcher, I had begun to see evidence of this change by chance, through an earlier comparative project. In 2006, I began gathering classroom teacher narratives – lengthy personal stories – from veteran high school teachers all over the world. I was teaching a course on qualitative research in education and had gone looking for cases and examples beyond the American-based materials I had on hand. A local nongovernmental organization (NGO), the Institute for Training and Development (ITD), offered an ideal cohort for collecting and developing those materials. Each year, ITD had been bringing twenty to thirty English teachers from around the world to participate in a six-week summer program, where they learned about American culture through lectures and discussions, and then embarked on a mind-bending trip through the American West. Articulate and deeply engaged in their profession, the teachers who participated in these summer programs came from developed Western countries such as France and Germany, but also from some of the most remote places on earth. I began to gather personal essays from anyone in the groups who cared to participate, asking these international teachers to simply document their daily experiences in the classroom and to speak about how their work had changed over time. I was astounded by the descriptions that emerged. A teacher from Togo, in the South Pacific, described his community as so destitute that students took their lessons sitting in trees. A teacher from Tipo Tipo in the Philippines said that constant tribal warfare posed a daily threat to her life. There were also teachers from Eastern Europe who had lived through the dramatic cultural transformations of the last generation, describing their impact on schools in a way that was fascinating and sad at the same time. Teachers from Ghana, Nigeria, and other African countries described how their careers have spanned extraordinary economic and political changes. Indeed, virtually all the teachers who contributed narratives to the project had seen the nature of their work dramatically change. The general consensus was that teaching had become an increasingly undesirable profession. The basis of the status shift seems to derive from different sources, but for those teachers working in emerging or developing countries, the change was universally perceived as a transition to Western values – values that are defined as “anti-intellectual” and “relativist.” There were dozens of examples of this perspective in the essays. Anya, an English teacher from Poland for example, wrote bitterly:
The reverence for learning has been replaced with the West’s obsession with a quick buck. While it is still true, according to the Polish values, that one should not consider the financial aspect of a [career], this is changed in practice now after the communist system collapsed. Bright and resourceful teachers, once quite certain about their teaching vocation, leave schools after a couple of years, seizing the opportunity for … a better life. Schools attract those who have been losing everywhere else.
In most every narrative, the same complaints emerged again and again. Jeanette, a black teacher from South Africa whose essay is included in the volume, sees the shift in status happening – ironically – after apartheid. As a young teacher in an all-black school in 1991, Jeanette remembers feeling as if she was a respected professional. Though pay was low, teachers were venerated as examples of those who had “made it” in a segregated society where poverty was the norm. Now, as an administrator charged with developing curriculum in an integrated system, she sees the erosion of status among both black and white teachers. Alphonse, a teacher from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), wrote about his experiences over the course of a thirty-year career. His powerful description of life in the classroom presents a dark picture of the profession that has less to do with inadequate resources and more to do with shifting attitudes:
It is important to note that from the 1960s to the 1980s, the teaching profession was characterized by social, cultural, and intellectual prestige in the DRC. An English teacher was well paid. The work was a high-status occupation in a country where few were educated. Teaching a foreign and international language like English was considered to be an extraordinary accomplishment for a person in a country where the rate of illiteracy was higher than 70 percent. English teachers could easily travel to English speaking countries on diplomatic and cultural/educational missions.
Starting in the early eighties, however, the conditions of teaching began to deteriorate along with the social status afforded to teachers. This occurred because of growing corruption, immorality, and general ill-governance on the part of those charged with managing the educational system. As foreigners left, conditions worsened, resources were worn out and not replaced, and curricula languished. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the systematic deterioration of the schools has left its mark on those who remained in the field.
Today, the Congolese teacher’s attitude toward his profession is generally that of dread, deceit, and shame. Although the teacher training period ranges from three to five years in a higher education institution, a trained teacher’s salary is generally extremely low. For this reason, the teacher’s social status has plummeted. Many are now as poor as those who are altogether illiterate. Indeed, English teachers in the Congo must often supplement their meager salaries by tutoring illiterate people in their own homes.
Daily work in schools is marked by deprivation: most teachers teach in overcrowded classrooms with insufficient resources, no benches, desks, or air conditioners. Typically, where desks or benches are available, pupils sit four or more to a single desk. It should be noted that all the teachers, male and female, receive the same treatment in the DRC. The poor treatment is meted out equally across genders
There is no social security for Congolese teachers. The Congolese teacher has never benefited from the national health insurance. A sick or dying teacher is bound to rely on his colleagues or relatives for social or financial assistance. There is no retirement policy. Since retired teachers are left alone without any financial or social assistance, they often die shortly after they retire.
In a country where teachers’ living and working conditions are deteriorating every day and where there is little to no professional development, it is hard to imagine that many will devote their careers to the work.
What has become increasingly clear to me through the course of collecting these narratives is that we in the United States are no longer alone in this dilemma of undervaluing our teachers. Just as America’s best and brightest began choosing other work when it became available to them, so have those in the rest of the world. As economies grow, as expanding wealth creates an acquisitive middle class, potential teachers will continue to be wooed into higher-paying and more attractive work. And with the teaching profession yoked as it is to the idea of service and sacrifice, the cachet of the work diminishes. The moral of the exercise seemed disturbingly clear: unless we listen to teachers’ voices, worldwide, unless we heed their complaints, it will become increasingly difficult to fill the classrooms of the world with committed, intelligent teachers.
Methodology
The seven teachers in this study are presented through the methodological lens of ethnographic portraiture, an approach to qualitative research that has a distinguished history in the work of twentieth-century scholars. The phrase itself – ethnographic portraiture – requires parsing, since each term carries with it certain distinct resonances. It is a kind of scholarship that moves between art and science, between the objective and the subjective, in ways that require explanation.
As an ethnography of the lives of seven teachers, my research represents an attempt to enter into the world of my subjects using the anthropologist’s tool of participant observation. Unlike quantitative researchers, ethnographers are not concerned with forming generalizations or with parsing cause and effect. Their goal is simply to create a window into real-life experience. It is in this sense that my profiles are ethnographic. In developing these portraits, I spent my days immersed in the lives of my subjects. We shared meals and sometimes living space; we engaged in ongoing, open-ended conversations. I met friends and colleagues. I also supplemented my understanding of the work lives of these teachers by gathering artifacts that impacted their daily lives: schedules and curricula, government mandates, and school memos. This kind of triangulation – using the voices of subjects, my own first-hand experiences, and the material data available through institutions and archives – affords a rich mine of material for understanding a life.
I also refer to these chapters as portraits, something drawn or composed with an organizing aesthetic in mind. The notion of seeing ethnography as an art form dates back at least to the early 1970s in the work of seminal researchers and theorists such as Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Culture, 1973) and John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972). Both of these scholars laid the groundwork for a form of interdisciplinary thinking and cross-field methodology that is fundamental to twenty-first-century research. In The Interpretation of Culture, Geertz speaks about the highly interpretive nature of ethnographic work, even as the researcher works to remain true to the details and intentions of the social reality she is documenting. What I am calling portraiture, Geertz called “thick description,” a phrase that evokes the multilayered nature of the process, the building up of a realistic image through layers of metaphorical paint.7
Emerging more recently from this tradition is the work of Harvard anthropologist Sara Lightfoot, whose body of research walks the delicate line between art and scholarship. Lightfoot defends the portraitist’s stance in ethnography by analyzing the nature of artistic sight: “Portraits make subjects feel ‘seen’ in a way they have never felt seen before,” she writes, “fully attended to, wrapped up in an empathetic gaze.”8 As a research strategy, portraits are designed to capture the richness and complexity of human experience in social and cultural contexts, honoring the perspectives and the voices of the people who are negotiating those experiences, blurring the boundaries between aesthetics and empiricism.
Qualitative research of this kind never pretends to be completely free from bias. Indeed, it seems inherent in the nature of the methodology that the researcher’s voice and vision should make themselves manifest to some extent. This is particularly true in research efforts that span cultures. By definition, the researcher is an outsider looking in. Adding a different nationality to that outsider status necessarily makes the work even more challenging. No matter how much research I do in preparation for my work, I will never be Taiwanese or Azeri. I can only bring my own empathetic gaze to what I see. Addressing the problem of objectivity and subjectivity, Geertz likens the work of ethnography to the playing of a Beethoven quartet where interpretation is inevitable, but the score is Beethoven’s. Berger, though writing specifically about visual art, also reinforces the profound impact of subjectivity on all human creative work. “The way we see,” he writes, “is affected by what we know and what we believe.”9 One image, one action, one statement can be read differently depending on who is looking, when, and why. As Lightfoot and others have contended, the subjectivity that is inevitably present in ethnography can be seen in positive terms, as an enriching factor rather than a negative one. In order to successfully identify with another person’s perspective, Lightfoot contends, one must be able to experience and reflect on one’s own.
This subjectivity also operates on the level of the teachers profiled here. My intention, in this book, is not to develop portraits of the education systems in seven countries but to profile the way seven teachers experience their work. Those are two very different endeavors. It is relatively easy to find factual material about class size, licensure laws, pay scales, and other information documenting the structures and regulations of international education systems. Here, however, the focus is primarily on what teachers tell me about those rules and structures, and their statements are not always corroborated by the latest statistics or government reports. I see this occasional discrepancy as a vital part of what I am trying to achieve in my research, exploring the disconnection between mandate and practice or between what statistics claim and what teachers actually experience.
In American and British educational scholarship, a suspicion of numbers has long served as a quiet corrective to the empirical research that dominated the field in the first half of the twentieth century. The “process-product” research of the 1970s – a bottom-line form of teacher assessment that reduced classroom practice to a series of scripted behaviors – inspired a furious backlash that opened the way to ethnography, portraiture, and the privileging of teacher’s voices, both in policy making and in setting the research agenda for scholars. During the 1970s and 1980s, many qualitative educational studies, newly interesting to mainstream audiences, made their way into popular literature. Jonathan Kozol, Greg Michie, Samuel Freedman, and others showed us that portraiture had the power to spur political change in a way that statistics did not.10 Ethnography and case studies became central tools in teacher education programs, and doctoral students (including myself) were encouraged to listen to teachers’ voices and to pitch our narratives to a popular audience. That interest in a teacher-focused approach to research has abated considerably in the last decades, especially in the wake of “No Child Left Behind” and the renewed concern for a concrete bottom line of educational outcomes. It is harder to find ethnographic studies in major educational journals; they are replaced more frequently by efficacy studies of high-stakes testing and descriptions of new digital technologies.
One of the factors that makes this work useful and timely, then, is that it reasserts the value and currency of understanding a teacher’s lived experiences. If American teachers’ voices have been heard less in the last decades, international teachers have been heard almost not at all, neither in English-language journals nor in journals in their own countries.
Subjects
The countries I have chosen to write about are profoundly varied: wealthy and poor, first world and third world, secular and religious. In choosing which teachers to profile, I looked for a way to document as wide a range of experiences as possible. One source for selecting countries to study was the international Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, the common examination sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and given to fifteen-year-olds in seventy-five countries around the world. Because the test is so inclusive and so politically powerful, it seemed sensible to use it as one factor in determining where to focus my attention. Given my initial hypothesis, that there is, within a culture, a correlation between the success of students and the prestige of teaching, it made sense to select countries that seemed to perform at the top and bottom of the PISA assessment rankings. Included here, then, are some of the world’s highest-scoring countries (Finland, Taiwan) and lowest-scoring ones (Chile, Azerbaijan, Greece). There are also countries that score in the middle of the pack – highly developed countries such as the United States and France – that express confusion and consternation over their lagging performance. Together, their placement on the PISA scoreboard is one more piece of information useful in considering how and why respect for teachers matters in attracting and retaining teachers.
I came to select the individual teachers in this study based on a number of factors. The first and most crucial was their willingness to participate in the research and their ability to articulate what they do and why, how they feel about their work and their lives, and what the future of teaching looks like in their country. All seven of the teachers profiled here are at the top of their fields: two have won national teaching awards, and all are both talented and experienced. Their skill and their veteran status make listening to these teachers all the more important; their years in the field offer perspective; and their concerns carry weight. Four of the seven teachers were participants in the summer program at the ITD in Amherst, and so they had already been vetted by both the State Department and by the Fulbright Foundation, which helped sponsor that program. The other three were found through colleagues, through word of mouth, and after ongoing email conversations across the span of a year. Because I knew the individual portraits would ultimately invite comparisons across countries, I selected only high school teachers in public schools. Beyond this shared trait, the teachers profiled in this book differ a good deal. They are male and female, married and single. They represent a range of races and ethnicities, are gay and straight, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist.
The book begins with a consideration of teaching in Finland, the country that has made headlines in the last few years for its remarkable educational transformation and its astounding ascent on international measures of student performance. In Chapter 1, I describe the work and life of Annukka Suonio, an eighteen-year veteran English teacher in Tampere, Finland’s second-largest city, located north of Helsinki. Annukka is in many ways the embodiment of Finland’s new educational system, embracing technology and thriving in the newly informal and collaborative system of schooling established less than three decades ago. Annukka, like all teachers in Finland, develops her own curriculum and works collaboratively with colleagues in a school structure that is at once child-centered and adult-centered. Her enthusiasm for teaching and her belief in the methods she employs was unparalleled among all the teachers I studied. Some of Annukka’s colleagues, however, offered a more subdued assessment of present-day Finnish schools, and their voices, too, are included in this chapter.
The freedom and creativity in evidence in Annukka’s classroom were hardly visible in the Taipei classroom of Fen-juan Kuo, the subject of Chapter 2. Feng-juan is also an eighteen-year veteran, but she is a teacher of literature (Chinese) and an artist with a very different sensibility from Annukka’s. This chapter documents her more modest lifestyle, her solitary and focused work life, and her more traditional attitudes about teaching and learning. Where Annukka moves around her classroom encouraging collaboration, creativity, and open-ended talk, Feng-juan stands on a platform, lecturing to rows of uniformed students. That two countries as dissimilar as Finland and Taiwan could score in the top five on PISA tests is a curious fact that I will discuss at some length in the Conclusion of this book.
Chapter 3 describes the work of Vassiliki Michailodou, a teacher of English at an alternative public high school in Athens. Vasso, as she is called, has lived through the brutal deprivations brought on by austerity measures in Greece, having seen her salary cut by 50 percent over the course of a year, and her school stripped of all staff support. Teachers carry a heavy teaching load while rotating into the newly vacant jobs of secretaries and janitors. For Vasso, teaching cannot be separated from the political environment in which she is working, and her attitudes toward her students and her work mirror in conscious and unconscious ways her liberal values and progressive ideals.
Gulnaz Haciyeva, the subject of Chapter 4, is an award-winning teacher from Mingechevir, Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan and Greece share the dubious status of falling low on the PISA scale, and even a glimpse at the conditions of teaching in both countries is enough to explain why. Gulnaz’s school is bereft of resources, and her own work as a teacher is insufficient for earning a living wage. This chapter considers the transformation for Azerbaijani teachers between a Soviet past, when teaching carried status, and an independent present, where top students opt for more glamorous and high-paying professions. Gulnaz finds resources for her classes wherever she can, having become skilled at networking, applying for grants, and tapping into funds that others have not found. Still, her life as a teacher is very difficult, requiring her to work three jobs and travel from site to site in order to earn a decent wage.
Chapter 5 considers the life of Laurence Manfrini, a French teacher working in the diverse banlieue of Paris, the area made infamous after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the terrorism of 2015. Laurence teaches in a school with a large immigrant population. Her own classes, however, are less integrated than others in the school. She is a teacher of the classes preparatoires, a long-standing program designed for the most intellectually elite students in France. Conversations with Laurence and her colleagues underscore the dramatic challenges faced by France as it strives to balance an ideal of rigor and a commitment to democracy with the changing reality of its schools and students. For French teachers, concerns about falling standards and the future of French culture invariably bump up against concerns about access and equality.
Chapter 6 describes the working life of a teacher in Santiago, Chile, where again, politics, class, and a long history of oppression color the work of the teacher. The profile of Mauricio Ramirez, an English teacher in a public girls’ school in central Santiago, addresses all the injustices and aspirational reforms that have impacted Chilean schools in the past twenty years. Mauricio has lived through the abuses of Pinochet and the hopeful years that followed. But strikes and protests continue to interrupt the school year, and drastic differences remain between affluent and poor schools. Mauricio’s down-to-earth perspective on teaching and school reform in Chile reinforces the sense that change is more complex and elusive than politicians would like to admit.
I end this exploration of teachers’ lives with a chapter about Bonnie Fineman, a high school English teacher in Windsor, Connecticut. As I discuss in Chapter 7, Bonnie’s school is in many ways representative of many American public schools: north of Hartford, Connecticut, the population of Windsor High School is wholly diverse, and its sprawling campus embodies the postwar ideal of social mixing, a shopping mall array of courses and tracks. Bonnie and her colleagues teach students who read five or six grades below level, as well as brilliant students headed for the Ivy League. She herself is exceptionally gifted at reaching every student, regardless of background or skill level. Her observations about what works and what doesn’t, what needs to happen to support and attract great teachers into her school, is particularly interesting in light of the teachers’ voices that preceded hers.
Chapter 8 seeks to draw connections across these portraits, to highlight what is the same and what is different and, more important, to consider why those similarities and differences exist. Much has been written in the last decade about the difficulty of transferring best practices across various cultures. Whenever I champion certain practices in Finland, for example, colleagues and friends invariably say, “But isn’t that a much less diverse country?” The assumption, I suppose, is that diversity (and here, I believe, most people mean racial diversity) creates inevitable and stubborn barriers to the fair treatment of teachers – an absurd notion. Economic diversity is certainly a factor in the quality of schooling, but a country such as Taiwan, which performs at the top of the PISA list, is highly diverse in terms of social class. Others point to limits in district spending as if this were an immovable barrier to student success. A close, comparative look at where money is spent within school districts around the world shows dramatic differences in priorities. In the United States, accountability measures, administrative salaries, and standardized testing drain huge percentages of school budgets. In countries such as Finland, with the very best education systems, the cost per pupil is less than in America, even though the teachers are better paid relative to the cost of living. They are not spending more money, it seems; they are simply spending money differently. In the last chapter of this book, I address this issue of “transfer,” looking closely at how countries “sell” the profession of teaching, and how teachers see themselves in the larger context of their societies. Ultimately, I argue that comparing the working lives of teachers internationally is an important step in understanding how to improve education everywhere and that focusing on the appeal of the profession to the world’s best and brightest should be a global priority in the twenty-first century.
The final chapter presents excerpts from the personal narratives of other teachers around the globe. These are the voices of those teachers I came to know through my work with the ITD. Though I could not visit their classrooms, I have included excerpts from their stories, written in their own words (mostly unedited, and with minimal grammar changes), which provide a rich and vivid addition to the portraits that precede them. Some of these teachers write about dramatic moments in their teaching lives; others simply describe, in their own words, how they earned their positions, how they feel about their work, or what their daily experiences are like in the classroom. Whether their stories are dramatic or quotidian, they are interesting, shedding a light on lives that would otherwise be invisible to the world.
