Education and Women Teachers
Roots in history:
From the landing at Plymouth Rock to today, educators and community members have debated over the best way that government should fulfill its responsibility to educate citizens. Underlying these debates are three central questions: What is the purpose of a public education? Who is to receive the educational
Services provided by the public? And, how does government ensure the quality of these educational services? In various forms, these questions lay beneath all educational changes and reform measures in American history.
Today, school choice, bilingual education, and testing are the hot issues being debated in communities, government chambers, and newspaper op-ed pages. These reform initiatives have lofty goals of increasing access, raising standards of quality, spawning innovation, and empowering students. But as promising as each of these initiatives may be, each produces unintended consequences, thus increasing the complexity of the debate.
Our goal in this material is not to encourage debate but to start deliberation. Contemporary issues cannot be reasonably discussed outside the context of history. To understand where we want to go, we need to first understand how we have come to this point. What follows is an exploration of these issues and their antecedents in history. These topics and timelines are intended to inform community members about the legacy of these vital issues in education today.
Public education today is a product of more than a century of reform and revision. In each era, visionary individuals have taken the lead and transformed the system to meet their ideals. Below are some of the women and men who have shaped our experience of school. One of them was Catherine Beecher, A rebellious nature that surfaced in her youth and continued through her adult years led to challenge accepted notions of femininity and the education of women in the nineteenth century. Born in East Hampton, New York, and raised there and in Litchfield, Connecticut, Beecher’s aversion to the social expectations for women in her well-heeled sphere expressed itself early in the founding of the Hartford Female Seminary.
In her teachings and writings Beecher extolled the power of women in the family by advising them to assume control over domestic affairs. To Beecher, the role of women as mothers served a great purpose in the health of American democracy. She believed women’s education should prepare them for roles of responsibility and that higher education for women should train them as teachers-a natural public extension of women’s role in the family. Beecher published many pamphlets promulgating her positions, and also founded the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati and the Milwaukee Female Seminary.
Linda Brown Thompson- As a third-grader in Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s, Linda Brown Thompson is often credited with single-handedly bringing down segregation in America. The truth is far more nuanced and interesting.
In fact, Brown’s family was just one of thirteen African-American families recruited in Topeka by the NAACP. In 1950, the national civil rights organization was busy enlisting plaintiffs nationwide in preparation for a legal assault on the “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling that had permitted segregation in American schools for half a century.
In the fall of 1950, the Browns and 12 Topeka families were asked by the NAACP to try and enroll their children in their neighborhood white schools, with the expectation that they would be rejected. The NAACP then filed a lawsuit against the Board of Education in Topeka. That lawsuit and others brought on behalf of plaintiffs in Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, DC were presented together on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. By alphabetical accident, because Brown’s name started with a ‘b’, the landmark 1954 decision that ended legalized segregation in America went down in history as “Brown v. Board of Education.”
The Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous — the doctrine of “separate-but-equal” was inherently unconstitutional. Delivering the court’s opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren asserted that “segregated schools are not equal and cannot be made equal, and hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws.” This landmark ruling began our nation’s long journey toward school desegregation.
Deborah Meier has spent more than three decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, advocate, and ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the U.S. Meier was born in New York City in 1931 and was educated at Antioch College and the University of Chicago. She began her teaching career in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia as an elementary and Head Start teacher, continually fascinated with why schools did not work well and what was needed to fix them. She is the author of The Power of Their Ideas, Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem and an outspoken critic of state-mandated standards and tests. Meier is currently the principal of the Mission Hill School, a K-8 pilot elementary school recently established in Boston’s Roxbury community. Despite all of the praise including a MacArthur Fellowship and several honorary degrees form elite schools, Meier’s commitment remains simple and sincere: “What I wanted was to create thoughtful citizens — people who believed they could live interesting lives and be productive and socially useful. So I tried to create a community of children and adults where the adults shared and respected the children’s lives.”
Women teachers and Teacher power: In 1956 Myron Lieberman wrote, the predominance of women in teaching is one of the most important and neglected facts about American education”. In spite of this realization, in the years that have passed little attention has been paid to the effects of the feminine role in teaching.
Most of what has been written has concerned itself with the effect of women teachers on the students. Almost nothing has been written directly on the effect of women in teaching on teaching organizations, despite the rise of the subsequent manifold increase in writing on the role of women in American society.
Writers who have dealt with teacher organizations and teacher militancy have almost unanimously seen the presence of women teachers as harmful for teacher organizations.
These statements about women teachers about women teachers express common attitudes:
• The number of women in teaching “must be regarded as one of the two or three most important obstacles to the professionalization of education . “
• The large concentration of women in public school teaching will decrease the power and effectiveness of teacher organizations. “
Some writers show open hostility toward women:
• “Teaching may still be dominated by middle-aged matrons and young women who use the schools as a convenient stop-gap between college and marrying, but these groups will no longer set the tone.”
• “Teaching is not one occupation, but two. There are men teachers and women teachers.”
There are two main reasons why women teachers are seen as having a negative effect on teaching organizations. First, it is claimed that the high turnover rate among women teachers makes it difficult for teacher organizations to be effective. Secondly, it is claimed that women are less willing to support the goals and actions of the teacher organizations and thus the women undermine the organizations’ operations.
There are not been any real understanding of or sympathy for the women teachers’ position. It is necessary to look at the participation of women in teacher organization with a different perspective. less
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