The New Professionalism? Examining Charter Teachers' Views of the Teaching Profession

• In Event: 66.057 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 66.057-20 - Everybody's Doing It: Principals and Teachers Making Sense of Evaluation, Reform, and Charter Schools

Abstract

This study focuses on how charter school teachers view the teaching profession, an increasingly important topic given the growing role of alternate routes to teaching and charter schools in serving students of color. Views of the profession influence whether to teach, where to teach, and for how long.

Participants often credited a sense of status to their program or the “brand” of their charter school rather than to the teaching profession itself. In the absence of extensive and rigorous pre-service preparation, teachers expected individual schools/organizations to provide a sense of status and to develop their knowledge and expertise. This reliance on schools as sites of teacher development may distract from the need to develop teaching as a profession more generally.

Authors

• Chris Torres, Michigan State University

• Jennie Weiner, University of Connecticut