Re-centering the Profession in U.S. Teacher Workforce Policy: The PWP Model

• In Event: Policy impacts on the K12 Teacher Workforce

Abstract

Fifty years after Dan Lortie's Schoolteacher offered a sociological framework for understanding teaching as a profession, U.S. education policy has moved decisively in the opposite direction. Over the past two decades, teacher workforce policy has been dominated by individual-level interventions derived from the economics of education: value-added evaluation systems, performance-based compensation, alternative certification pathways, and human capital management frameworks. This paradigm rests on genuinely important evidence that individual teachers vary substantially in their effects on students, with consequences that persist into adulthood. Yet the cumulative results at scale have been disappointing. Merit pay programs show minimal or no effects across rigorous evaluations. Alternative pathways have expanded entry while increasing early-career attrition. High-stakes accountability has pressured schools without building the instructional capacity needed for sustained improvement. Most consequentially, the United States now faces a teacher shortage crisis—declining preparation enrollment, expanding emergency credentials, rising attrition—that individual-focused reforms have been unable to resolve.

This paper argues that the disappointing results reflect a structural mismatch between the level at which interventions have been deployed and the level at which the problem is located. Drawing on the sociology of professions (Abbott, Freidson, Larson), institutional analyses of American education (Labaree, Mehta), and the economics-of-education literature itself, the paper develops the Profession-Workforce-Profession (PWP) model. The model specifies that the teaching profession—understood as an institutional structure encompassing compensation, preparation, career pathways, working conditions, and autonomy—shapes the teacher workforce in a foundational, sequential relationship. Individual-level interventions either strengthen or weaken this foundation depending on whether they complement or substitute for professional infrastructure. A stylized mathematical formalization makes the contrast explicit: the workforce paradigm implicitly treats profession quality as the sum of individual teacher quality, while the PWP model treats it as the product of an institutional foundation and context-conditioned individual effectiveness, with the supply distribution itself endogenous to professional conditions.

Applied to the U.S. experience from 1975 to the present, the model illuminates a pattern existing accounts leave unexplained: as the professional foundation weakened through stagnant compensation, rising preparation costs, narrowing autonomy, and deteriorating working conditions, individual-focused reforms became increasingly extractive rather than productive, accelerating a degrading cycle the interventions themselves could not reverse. DC's IMPACT program emerges as an instructive exception, succeeding precisely because it coupled rigorous individual accountability with substantial investment in base compensation. The paper addresses alternative explanations—selection effects in international comparisons, the efficiency case for targeted interventions, and the political feasibility of profession-level reform—and articulates a research agenda focused on profession-level mechanisms, cross-state comparative designs, and the threshold conditions under which individual-level interventions shift from depleting to strengthening the profession. The central implication is that sequencing matters: profession-level investment is the precondition for productive individual-level intervention, and the research infrastructure to study it is a precondition for evidence-informed policy at the unit of analysis where structural change must occur.

Author

• Etai Mizrav, Northeastern University
  Presenting Author