The Professional Life Cycle of Teachers

The Professional Life Cycle of Teachers
MICHAEL HUBERMAN
Universite de Geneve, Switzerland
Life-cycle research has been around, to be sure, since philosophers and

novelists have been studying lives. The more “scientific” treatment of lives,
however, has followed disciplinary tracks, each with its “marker” studies or
conceptualizations. For example, there is a clear, psychodynamic track run-
ning-from Freud through Henry Murray and Gordon Allport and culminat-
ing in Erikson’s eight normative “life-crises”1 and Robert White’s Study of
Lives.’ There is another, more sociological, track beginning in recent times
with the Chicago School and the revival of the oral history tradition, coupled
with the development of symbolic interactionism. Along the way, this school
has produced some important studies of adult socialization and career pat-
terning. Still another important influence has stemmed from the multi-
volume studies of “life-span developmental psychology.“3
The evolution of the life-span series has also reflected the conceptual and
methodological shifts the field as a whole has undergone since the 1960s. In
particular, the influence of the “organicist” approach has been attenuated.
We have come to see that many patterns once attributed to age-related influ-
ences are in fact as much or more the result of “cohort” or “period” influences,
which means that historical or sociological factors need to be counted more
heavily.4 We have also learned that human development beyond adolescence
is a far more discontinuous, fluid, dialectical, sometimes downright random
business once one begins to look at individual lives. Even those of us who
had banked heavily on the organicist approach’ have come to admit that
“age” is essentially a hollow variable, a sort of receptacle for the interplay of
multiple, differentially powerful determinants.
What do we know in particular about the careers of teachers? Until the
later 1970s, precious little, aside from Becker’s seminal study6 and a per-
ceptive chapter by Peterson on secondary-school teachers.’ Since then, the
picture has brightened. At present, both longitudinal and cross-sectional
approaches are flourishing. 8 Also, some of the most promising work has
come from England.9 We are beginning to understand how teachers’ careers
play out and which are the most influential determinants, within and outside
the institution.
Teachers
CollegeRecordVolume 91, Number 1, Fall l989
Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University
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32 Teachers College Record
GENERAL TRENDS IN THE LITERATURE
Conceptually, there are several ways of analyzing the professional life cycle
of teachers. In our current research, we have opted for a classic perspective,
that of the “career.”
THE “CAREER” AS A CONCEPTUAL LENS
Much of the seminal work on career development has sought, in effect, to

identify “sequences” or “maxicycles” that can describe not only the career
paths of individuals within the same profession, but also of individuals across
different professions.” This does not mean, of course, that these career se-
quences are invariant, that is, that they always play out in the same progres-
sion, nor that they are universal, that is, that all members of a given profes-
sion will pass through them.
Consider the early sequences of career development, the “exploration,,
stage and the “stabilization,, stage. In the exploration stage, an individual
makes a preliminary choice, investigates its parameters, tries out one or
several roles. If this phase is positive, we move on to the stage of stabilization
or commitment. Here, the individual focuses on the mastery of the core as-
pects of his or her work, on the identification of areas of strength, on the ne-
gotiation of a more personally congenial scope of work, on the attainment
of satisfactory conditions of daily work, and, for many, on the avenues lead-
ing to a more responsible and lucrative role within the profession.
On the whole, this progression illustrates a large number, oftentimes the
majority, of individuals studied within a given profession-but never the
totality of individuals nor of professions. As Super has pointed out, some
people stabilize early, others later, and some never.” Also, some people sta-
bilize only to “destabilize,, later on. Career development is thereby a process,
not a series of events. For some, this process may be linear, but for others
there will be plateaus, regressions, dead-ends, spurts, discontinuities. So the
identification of phases and sequences must be handled gingerly, as an
analytic heuristic, as a descriptive rather than a normative construct.
Still, the career perspective has some virtue. First, it allows us to compare
individuals across professions. Next, it is more limited, more focused than
the study of individual “lives.” It also incorporates both a psychological and
a sociological perspective into its analytic tissue. In other words, we are able
to follow the trajectory of an individual within a larger social structure-
usually an organization or a series of organizations-and thereby understand
how the characteristics of individuals affect the social surround and are, in
turn, affected by it.
In the work reported here, I have limited the career perspective even
more. First, it is restricted to the teaching profession and, within it, to sec-
ondary-school teaching. At the same time, I have studied only teachers, that
Life Cycle of Teachers 33
is, individuals having no, or very little, administrative responsibility during

their tenure. Strictly speaking, then, I am talking about the teaching career,
about the professional lives of people spending five to forty years in the classroom.
THE TEACHING CAREER: “‘PHASES” IN THE EMPIRICAL

LITERATURE
It would be fair- even charitable-to say that the empirical literature identi-
fying phases or stages in teaching is both uneven and inconclusive. There
are, however, some reasonably strong trends that recur across studies, even
across studies in different national contexts.
Survival and Discovery

At the phase of career entry, where empirical research is most plentiful, we
find the recurrent themes of “survival" and “discovery.” The survival theme
has to do with reality-shock, especially for teachers with no prior teaching
experience, in confronting the complexity and simultaneity of instructional
management: the preoccupation with self (“Am I up to this challenge?“), the
gulf between professional ideals and the daily grind of classroom life, the
fragmentation of tasks, the oscillation between intimacy and distance with
one’s pupils, the apparent inadequacy of instructional materials given the
diversity of pupil characteristics-the list goes on.12
On the other side of the ledger, the discovery theme translates the initial
enthusiasm of having one’s “own” pupils; one’s own classroom, materials,
and yearly program; and of feeling oneself a colleague among peers. Some
of these studies suggest that the survival and discovery dimensions coexist,
and that the latter allows the novice teacher to tolerate the former. There are,
however, also one-dimensional profiles, and profiles in which these two
themes are absent. For example, teachers with little initial commitment to
teaching ("I'll just have a look”) are not apt to perceive initial difficulties as
a matter of survival nor to stress the heady aspects of discovery.
Stabilization
The succeeding phase brings us directly to the classic life-cycle literature and
its treatment of commitment, stabilization, and “taking on adult responsibili-
ties.” In particular, authors in the psychoanalytic tradition have stressed the
significance, in the “healthy” process of ego development beyond adoles-
cence, of making a commitment to a defined professional role.13 Making that
commitment resolves the danger of ego diffusion through prolonged role dis-
persion or role uncertainty.
In teaching, the stabilization phase corresponds to a subjective choice (a
definitive commitment to this profession) and to an administrative act (an

official appointment or the granting of tenure). As many biographical
accounts indicate, such a commitment is not a simple affair, in that it entails
ruling out other possibilities (a career in research or in journalism, an artistic
career), the double act of choosing and of giving up other choices. This
appears to be especially hard for upper-secondary teachers, who are often
able to keep other options open for several years.
Stabilization also means an affiliation to an occupational community, free-
dom from direct supervision, and greater instructional mastery and comfort.
One has worked up a rudimentary instructional repertoire that fits most situ-
ations encountered in the initial three to four years of teaching, and one is
now adding to it, refining it, molding it to fit one’s own, more congenial style
of instruction.14 There is also an attendant sense of relief at having reached
this stage, of spontaneity, of pleasure and humor, even a touch of headiness,
in the ability to seize the moment, instructionally speaking.”
Experimentation/Activism
The stabilization phase is probably the most secure in the empirical litera-
ture, although it is by no means universal. Beyond this stage, however,
studies diverge. If, however, we take the mainstream-the modal sequence
outlined in the literature-we come on a phase of “experimentation” or “di-
versification.“16 Here, analysts stress one or more of the following three aspects.
First, the gradual consolidation of an instructional repertoire leads natur-
ally to attempts to increase one’s impact. This brings on a small flurry of ex-
periments - with different materials, different pupil groupings, different se-
quencing. Previously, this kind of pedagogical tinkering was impossible;
there was too much uncertainty, confusion, rigidity, and most attempts to
vary instructional treatments produced unpredictable and mostly unwanted
results.
Next, the desire to increase one’s impact in the classroom leads to an
awareness of the institutional barriers that are depressing or constraining
such an impact and, from there, to attempts to change the more surreal flaws
in the school or school district. This new-found activism can also bring on
new responsibilities (as coordinator of a project, as delegate), which can in
turn open avenues of career “promotion.“17
A third line of analysis: Having been a few times around the block, teach-
ers may be ready for new challenges, for new stimulation.18 The implicit
theme here is the newly emerging concern with growing stale in the pro-
fession, a malady one sees among older peers.
Taking Stock: Self-Doubts

In most empirical studies, the extent to which experimentation gives way to
some form of “mid-career crisis” is not clearly documented. Also, from one
study to another the symptoms range from the superficial to the critical-
from a gnawing sense of routine to a full-blown existential crisis over staying
in or leaving the profession. Some analyses insist on the growing sense of
monotony somewhere between the twelfth and the twentieth year of teach-
ing; others highlight feelings of disenchantment following attempts to reform
practice at the school or district levels. In both cases, there is a moment of
“stock-taking,” along with the realization that other careers will have to be
ruled out if one does not act quickly.
To call this an archetypal phase is unwarranted in the face of the data,
which may well be lumping together different perceptions occurring at
roughly the same time in the teaching career. For example, no study claims
that the majority of teachers studied reported a mid-career crisis.l9 Some re-
search- mine, for instance-does find up to 40 percent of the sample saying
that, at one or more points in their career, they seriously considered leaving
the teaching profession (more on this shortly). My data also dovetail with
that of others in showing that men are more subject to radical self-assess-
ments at this point in their career than are women, who appear better able
to relativize the importance of their career in relation to other commitments
in their lives.20 More on this later, too.
Serenity
This is more a leitmotiv than a strong finding in the literature on teacher
careers. It is especially present in Peterson’s seminal study of teachers in the
45-55 age group,21 most of whom describe a fluid shift from a phase of near-
manic activism (“I was young and vigorous . . . I threw myself into a thou-
sand adventures with my pupils”) to a phase of more “mechanical” but also
more “relaxed, self-accepting” activity in class. The gist here is that a gradual
loss in energy and enthusiasm is compensated for by a greater sense of con-
fidence and self-acceptance. As one of our respondents put it: “I don’t worry
as much about what can go wrong or what went wrong during the day. I
even forget my work when I come home. Mostly, I guess, I don’t expect
more of myself than I know I can deliver -no more whipping myself for not
being perfect. What I have to offer is good enough for me and for the pupils, too.”
Other studies sound a similar chord, but with little precision as to how
many in the sample are talking this way, and at what point in their career.22
These studies also bring out another, cognate theme: increased feelings of
serenity go hand-in-hand with the sense of greater relational distance vis-a-
vis pupils. The young teacher moves from the “older sister” role to the mater-
nal role to the grandmotherly role, while her pupils stay relentlessly young,
year after year. In part, it is the pupils who age-distance their teachers, not
only the teacher who disinvests gradually in relational closeness.
Conservatism
Peterson’s and Prick’s subsamples of older (50-60) teachers also tend to com-
plain a lot. 23 They bemoan the new generations of pupils (less disciplined,
less motivated, more “decadent”), the more negative public image of educa-
tors, the lax or opportunistic nature of school administrators, the lack of
commitment to the profession among younger colleagues. In Peterson’s
study, there is an explicit sequence-from serenity to conservatism-where-
as other research is more equivocal.
This intersects closely with empirical work in the life-cycle tradition that
highlights the link between age and dogmatism, with indications of increas-
ingly greater prudence, greater resistance to innovation, greater nostalgia for
the past, and more concern with holding on to what one has than with
getting what one wants. 24One should be careful here, in the realm of central
tendencies- of modal responses- where the combination of two other re-
spondent groups will outscore the mode and where respondent groups with
different points of reference are combined.25
Disengagement
As we shall see in a moment, life-cycle literature emphasizes a trend toward
increasing withdrawal and “internalization” toward the end of the profession-
al career. The tone is mostly positive: a gradual disengaging from investment
in one’s work to other engagements, and from “instrumental” concerns to
more reflective pursuits.
More specific work on teachers’ professional life cycle provides little more
than anecdotal evidence. Becker found such a trend in his subsample of older
teachers, but attributed it to frustrated ambitions, to an early “plateauing"
in the profession. 26Others suggest that the natural consequence of increasing
conservatism is that of disengagement from policies and practices of which
one disapproves.27 Peterson’s teachers seem to yearn for calmer years as they
approach retirement. 28 As many sociologists have pointed out, this trend
may be far less psychological in nature than a response to pressures from the
environment to cede one’s place to younger colleagues and fresher ideas.
In any event, a distinct disengagement phase has not been clearly demon-
strated in the educational literature-although shortly I will be trying to
make a case for one. More generally, however, there is no reason to believe
that the teaching profession would show trends different from other career
paths where the same determinants (physiological changes, social pressures)
are present.
A ROUGH-AND-READY SYNTHESIS OF TRENDS

IN THE LITERATURE
Having, at several points, underlined the tentative, often fragmentary na-

ture of these trends, let me still try to piece them together in Figure 1:
Years of Themes/Phases
Teaching
1-3 Career entry: “Survival”

and “Discovery”
4-6 Stabilization
/\
7-18 Experimentation/ Reassessment/
“Activis"[ /______ “Self-device"
19-30 Serenity/ Relational Conservatism

distance
31-40 Disengagement:
“Serene” or “Bitter”
Figure 1. Successive themes of the teacher career cycle:

schematic model.
As the figure shows, there is a single stream at career entry, through the sta-
bilization phase. There are then multiple streams at mid-career, converging
again into a single path at the end. Depending on the previous trajectory,
this final phase can be either serene or acrimonious. The most harmonious
trajectory would be this one:
Experimentation › Serenity › (serene) Disengagement

The most problematic trajectories would be these two:
Reassessment › (bitter) Disengagement
Reassessment › Conservatism › (bitter) Disengagement
I will return to these career scenarios shortly, as it becomes apparent whether

and how the trajectories of Swiss teachers in my sample actually play out.
More globally, these trends are consonant with the literature bearing
generally on the professional life cycle. In many ways, Kuhlen’s overarching
thesis is compelling: a fairly sharp curve of expansion, both in terms of ac-
tivity and career progression, then a gradual, usually fluid, disengagement.29
Yet, the nature of such a disengagement is controversial. The basic hypothe-
sis is psychological, that of a gradual internalization at 40-45 years of age,
notably among men. 30 This shift, often associated with metabolic changes,
corresponds to Jung's concept of “individuation,” a shift from instrumental
activity to introspective reflectiveness, from the narrow self to the archetypal
self. Even earlier, Heidegger had worked up an evocative formula for the
evolution, with increasing age, from a concern with “objects of experience”
to “modes of experiencing.“31
Others have-produced different but conciliable frames for this gradual
shift. For example, Erikson’s stages of “generativity” and “ego integrity” are
consonant with Jung’s, as is Sanford’s ultimate phase of internalization.32 On
the other hand, sociologists have looked elsewhere for determinisms. For
example, Friedman’s classic rejoinder to the psychological line of inquiry was
to suggest that social role pressures as of, say, 50-55 years of age call increas-
ingly for disengagement, independently of psychological impulses in that di-
rection.33 Still others have shifted the terms of the debate. For example,
Maehr and Kleiber have argued that professional “success)) means something
different at fifty-five than it did at twenty-five. 34 At fifty-five one would have
other interests, other investments that might not be associated with profes-
sional advancement in a material sense, but that would be equally “active.”
Reading more, working with two or three colleagues rather than with twenty
or thirty, drawing out a modest classroom experiment over several years, are
not necessarily signs of a lesser engagement, but simply of another kind of
engagement.
THE LIFE-CYCLE STUDY IN SWITZERLAND

This was not primarily a conceptually driven study, nor even one responding
to acute problems that needed resolution. Rather, it stemmed from two
motives. First and foremost was reckless curiosity. The initial research ques-
tions were irresistible from the start. For example, how did teachers construe
their activity at different moments of their career? How did they view young-
er and older peers? Were there “best years” for teaching? Would one choose
this career again? Were there moments when significant numbers of teachers
thought very seriously of leaving the profession? Did they feel, as Becker’s
teachers did, that over the years they were coming to resemble the institution
in which they worked, much as some people come gradually to resemble
their dogs? Was there an evolution toward greater fatalism or conservatism,
as the folk and research literatures suggest? What was the quality of the
initial teaching experience, and how did teachers overcome the uncertainties
and inadequacies of the initial year? Which core features of teaching were
“mastered” at which points in the career cycle, and what, if anything, was
done about the nonmastered features? How extensive was the burnout
phenomenon, and how did teachers contend with it? Which events in their
private lives had the greatest impact on their teaching, and what were these
impacts?
The second motive was more mischievous. As much of the literature on
“naive” social cognition has illustrated, people work up explanations for
social phenomena based on scant, often distorted data.35 For example, school
officials in Geneva “know” what happens to teachers over time: which “types”
grow stale and which do not, how many are ready to leave the profession,
which new instructional materials are not being used in older teachers’ class-
rooms, and the like. The evidential base for this knowledge, of course, is very
soft, resting as it does on a few concrete, lurid instances and on loose talk
in the late evening over brandy. Also, on closer examination, one official’s
knowledge is another’s nonsense, based on the same quality of information,
but these discrepancies get lost in the cigar smoke and conviviality. More im-
portant still, administrators tend to act-to administer their personnel, to
make personnel policy- on the basis of these assumptions. Another objective
of the study, then, was to look systematically at taken-for-granted pheno-
mena for which officials had available, firm, and often contradictory
explanations.
Some of these questions had been tried out in a preliminary study in 1978-
1979 (n = 30). It was then extended between 1982 and 1985 to 160 second-
ary-level teachers in Geneva and Vaud, of whom roughly two-thirds taught
at the lower secondary level and the remainder taught in the upper-second-
ary, pre-university division. There were slightly more women than men, in
accordance with the referent population. Four “experience groups,, were
chosen: 5-10 years of experience, 11-19 years, 20-29 years, and 30-39
years. Within this sampling frame (level, sex, years of experience), a random
sample was generated. It contained teachers of all subject-matter areas in
equivalent proportions to the population of reference.
Each interview lasted approximately live hours, spread over two sessions
so that both interviewer and interviewee could reflect on the first sitting.
Some of the questions were open-ended, whereas others called for responses
to flash cards and checklists. The data were then condensed into a twenty-
five page summary, and underwent both statistical and qualitative analyses.
The summaries were designed to prevent data overload at the back end of
the study and to yield leads that could be built into subsequent waves of in-
terviewing.36
Parenthetically, the sample size and methodology were meant to close a
gap. Most of the life-cycle studies, in teaching or in other professions, have
tended either toward the diminutive (50 informants) or the gargantuan
(500 informants). The idea here was to benefit from the tools of clinical and
ethnographic interviewing while having the possibility of making statistical
inferences to a larger referent population.
OF PHASES AND STAGES

In the remaining pages, let me try to review the main findings of the Swiss
study by nesting most of them within the construct of career “phases,, or
“stages."37 Many of these data came from the first question asked of respon-
dents. Its formulation was entirely open-ended, but in the mode of an ethno-
graphic interview. Informants were asked to review their career trajectory
and to see whether they could carve it up into phases or stages. For each
phase, they were to provide an overarching name or a theme and to note the
features constituting that theme. Adequate time was given to reflect and to
take notes. Aside from the constriction of the data into phases, there were
no constraints on the informant, who could choose any theme, any sequence,
any configuration of features. Also, since this was the opening question,
there were no cues inducing a response set, nor probing for “explanations,”
but rather for a descriptive narrative.
Informants had little trouble drawing the trajectory, identifying distinct
phases, and affixing thematic titles to each. Globally, they evoked three
kinds of themes:
metaphorical themes (“drowning,” “settling down,” “disenchantment,,,
“getting my second wind”)
administrative themes (“during my training,” “getting tenure,” “moving
into the upper secondary”)
historical themes (“the Cycle d’Orientation,” “Reforme II,” “May 1968"),
which had to do with major structural reforms in the school system or with
historical events having repercussions on school life.
On the summarizing sheets, each of the themes was listed in sequence,
Years Classic path Gradual path Entry from External problems
(range) (univ., teacher (substitute outside the
training) (n = 6) teaching and canton (n = 1)
univ.) (n = 4)
1-6 Easy beginnings (n = 5) Painful beginnings (n = 6)
good contacts-pupils overwhelming: anxiety

“manageable” pupils the university,
pedagogically at ease
enthusiasm
2-6
Stabilization (n = 8)
4-8 formal appointment (tenure)

consolidation of a basic teaching repertoire
emancipation
integration into a group of peers
(n =3) (n =3)
Experimentation Consternation
6-10 diversification administrative classes more

“consequential roles difficult life
change” key commissions poor results
cy
cle
routine
loss of ini- of
tial elan
I tea
Figure 2. Career trajectory for women at Cycle d’Orientation ch
(grades 7-9), 5-10 y ears of teaching experience (n = 11) ers
41
along with its constituent features, and several quotes gave the context and
the particularities. Then began the delicate task of comparing sequences,
themes, and features within and across subgroups. This was done with con-
ventional techniques of content analysis, notably those used for sociolin-
guistic data. The key decision rule was that a common theme had to include
either the specific term or a denotative analogue, and at least two features
describing the theme had to be identical. Subsets of protocols were content-
analyzed independently, then compared for interrater reliability. Protocols
went into the analysis only when these reliabilities passed the threshold of .80.
This procedure amounts basically to an “overlay” of individual trajector-
ies. With these data, the first analytic product was a chart for each subgroup.
Figure 2 sets out data for women with 5-10 years of teaching experience at
the lower-secondary level (the Cycle d’Orientation). At the far left is the
range of years mentioned by these eleven informants for each of the three
phases evoked. The themes for the phases (e.g., Phase 1: launching the
career; initial commitment,) are those of the study designers; as are the head-
ings in the topmost row: the streams followed by informants prior to teach-
ing. The middle section regroups informants’ material, with relatively little
standardization.
What can we learn here? The first phase divides those with “easy begin-
nings” from those with “painful beginnings.” Easy beginnings involve posi-
tive relationships with pupils, manageable pupils, the sense of pedagogical
mastery, and enthusiasm. Painful beginnings are made up of role overload
and anxiety, difficult pupils, heavy time investment, close monitoring by
teacher education staff, and isolation inside the school. The numbers next
to the themes and over the arrows refer to numbers of informants evoking
the theme and at least two of its constituent features and to those who
followed identical sequences. For the thematic material, at least one-fourth
of the subgroup had to share a common theme or sequence for these to be
included on the chart. This criterion gets increasingly stringent as one com-
bines sequences and moves to later phases, which some informants do not
mention.
The second phase, “stabilizing,” is noteworthy because it represents a
near-archetype for younger teachers. The theme invariably contains two fea-
tures, both of which are present here. The first has to do with pedagogical
stabilizing: feeling at ease in the classroom, consolidating a basic repertoire,
differentiating materials and treatments in light of pupils’ reactions or per-
formances. The second feature has to do with commitment to the profession,
which intersects with the moment of tenure. Each feature here, as it happens,
is a staple in the life-cycle literature38 and appears often in empirical work
on teachers’ careers .39
The two remaining features figure in most, but not all, subgroups: affirm-
ing oneself or emancipation. Teachers now feel free to follow their own leads
and to confront supervisors more aggressively. “Integrating into a group” of
peers means just that, but in many instances it is not achieved at the moment
of stabilization.
The third horizontal block, corresponding to the third phase, “new chal-
lenges, new concerns,” brings us back to another of the modal phases re-
viewed earlier. A subset of informants evokes explicitly a phase of experi-
mentation or diversification and/or attempts at consequential change. The
way informants describe this sequence is simple. Once a basic level of class-
room mastery is achieved, there is a need for refinement and diversity. On
the one hand, informants come to see that they can get better results by di-
versifying their materials and their modes of classroom management. On the
other hand, they feel the stale breath of routine for the first time. As one put
it, “If I didn’t get some novelty into my teaching, I’d dry up without noticing
it.” Also, these experiments typically reach outside the classroom. If not
schoolwide, they are at least multiple-classroom, and they typically entail
collaborative work with others. These features are present in virtually all
accounts of the experimentation phase. When one recalls that there are no
stimulus materials here- informants are not being asked whether they
underwent a stabilizing or an experimenting phase-these data are the more
compelling.
As the chart shows, however, the experimentation phase is only one of
three sequences, and the other modal sequence, “self-questioning,” is far less
upbeat. In other words, we would have to qualify the assertion that experi-
menting beyond one’s own classroom is somehow generic to the profession
at a given stage in one’s career.
FOUR MODAL SEQUENCES

A similar chart was drawn for each of the sixteen subgroups in the study
(four experience groups, both sexes, both levels of schooling-lower-second-
ary and upper-secondary). Successive analytic overlays were made across
groups, sexes, and levels, with care to respect the raw data each time themes,
features, or sequences were grouped. Out of this process came four modal
sequences, encompassing 90 percent of the 133 usable protocols, but repre-
senting many fewer sequences than found on any one chart:
SEQUENCE 1. HARMONY RECOVERED (5-10 and 11-19 years of

experience)
Painful beginnings › Stabilization › Experimentation
This process is common to the younger groups. In virtually all cases, the
overall theme and the sequence are identical across informants, and the ma-
jority of features for each theme are the same- that is, they mirror those
shown in Figure 2.
Must one begin painfully? Not necessarily, but fully a third of the sample
lived their initial experience that way, defining the first phase exclusively in
these terms. Elsewhere in the study respondents were asked to go over their
initial year of teaching in some detail. Close to half recited a familiar litany:
a sense of being overwhelmed, continual trial-and-error, vacillation between
excessive strictness and permissiveness, exhaustion, difficulties with pupil
discipline, fear of judgments on the part of other teachers or administrators,
intimidation by some pupils. These descriptions came after, not before, the
formal program of teacher preparation- a finding not restricted to Switzer-
land nor even to studies of European teachers. As we know, medical interns
talk this way, too, even those well into their internships. So there may well
be a (low) threshold to the amount of preparation for ongoing classroom
management that can be delivered in teacher education programs.40 Alterna-
tively, we may well be going about it wrongheadedly. It is worth noting that
those experiencing the fewest initial difficulties were, predictably, teachers
having done a lot of substituting, siblings in large families, scout leaders,
camp counselors, and “tourists”- mostly men-who had entered the profes-
sion accidentally, just to have a look.
SEQUENCE 2. REASSESSMENT AND SELF-DOUBT (5-10 and 11-19

years of experience)
Painful beginnings › Stabilization › Reassessment/self-doubts
Easy beginnings
This sequence also appears among younger teachers, ones defining them-
selves as being in the throes of a career “crisis” that has several sources:
incipient boredom (“Am I going to die with a piece of chalk in my hand?“)
doubts about an ultimate career choice (“I made a choice that wasn’t really
a choice; I backed into teaching. Now it’s too late to back out.“)
two or three sour years in succession, with difficult pupils, an inconvenient
schedule, nitpicking colleagues or administrators.
What is intriguing about this profile is that, superficially at least, it is
largely unpredictable from the first phase of the career. These teachers re-
semble their colleagues in most respects: in the type and intensity of their ini-
tial motivation, in their training, in the quality of their initial years of teach-
ing, in the features mentioned during the stabilization phase, even in the
events occurring in their private lives. Nor did more elaborate statistical
analyses identify other factors that discriminated between these teachers and,
say, those moving from a stabilization to an experimentation phase.
There are questions elsewhere in the study probing teachers about the
presence of a moment of crisis during their career. Were there moments, for
example, when they thought seriously of leaving the profession? For 43 per-
cent of the sample, there were. The timing was not fully consonant, however,
with the folk literature on mid-career crises. The “peak,, for such moments
of doubt was between seven and fifteen years into the profession-roughly
between twenty-nine and thirty-seven years of age. This is relatively early-
well under halfway through the career cycle.
Also, about half the reasons given were unequivocably institutional. That
is, respondents tended to define themselves as “worn down” by the routine
aspects of the profession or “disappointed” by the social climate or the quality
of administration within the building. It is, of course, more convenient to
blame the institution than one’s own shortcomings. It is also worth noting
here that Swiss secondary-school teachers, notably those in Geneva, are well
paid, work in tolerable, well-equipped surroundings with manageable co-
horts of pupils, and are saddled with very few extracurricular duties. Most
likely, the problem lies elsewhere: in the lack of what we have come to call
“quality of workplace” factors and, within this set, in those having to do with
instructional leadership, collegial exchange, and opportunities for profes-
sional development that inject stimulation and challenge into the conduct of
daily classroom life.41
On the other hand, some 40 percent of the other reasons given had no
painful edge. These teachers said simply that they would leave for more in-
teresting careers: ones they had toyed with earlier, or ones that had become
more attractive in the intervening years. Or that they would leave “just to
try something else.” The gist here was that they had, on the whole, enjoyed
their career in education, but were restless, ready to move on to something else.
SEQUENCE 3. REASSESSMENT: RESOLUTION AND NONRESO-

LUTION (11-19 and 20-29 years of experience)
Resolution - “a
second wind,,
Stabilization -› Reassessment
Nonresolution -
“it’s the system”
Teachers in this sequence are older and so further along in the career
cycle. Among teachers describing a phase of career crisis, the succeeding
phase has invariably to do with their success in overcoming it. One of the
more chilling findings of the study came here: Among this subset of teachers
from twelve to thirty years into the profession, fewer achieved resolution-
on their own terms-than did not. Moreover, their descriptions have the
ring of definitiveness; they see no sign of evolution in succeeding years.
Who are these people? A finer-grained analysis of the protocols suggests
that most are of two species. Within one species, many are teachers whose
beginnings were especially difficult, so much so that they had wondered early
on whether this was their calling. Others danced through the initial years,
then fell on a few tough years that, as the Swiss put it, broke all their teeth.
This shock, together with other ruminations, brought on the first serious
career crisis, described earlier. Others, still within this family, described
their crisis as having originated in unrealistic expectations regarding the pro-
fession, their colleagues and pupils, themselves. The resulting awareness-
“that teaching wears you down, that everyone muddles through . . . that in
twenty years I may be like some of the shriveled-up sleepwalkers I see in staff
meetings" - seems to come suddenly, one night, like the blow of a hammer.
What characterizes this subset is the intensity of the reassessment phase.
What is also distinctive is their impression of reliving that phase at one or
several points of their career, of not getting beyond it. This is as true of those
who tough it out as of those who take leaves of absence, take courses at the
university, throw themselves into new instructional projects, or disinvest
massively in school life to follow pursuits elsewhere. These devices are often
used and seldom conclusive. Clearly, these data call for a more clinical re-
reading. They do, however, indicate that, contrary to popular beliefs in the
teaching profession, reassessment at mid-career is not necessarily a univer-
sal, benign “growth,, experience nor necessarily a harbinger of kinder years ahead.
What of the other group of teachers whose phase of reassessment is not re-
solved happily? This group, more homogeneous, comprises many teachers
whose reactions to the reforms enacted in Geneva between 1962 and 1972
were unequivocal: “mindless,,, “demagogic,” “demeaning,” “self-delusive.”
Some of these people, notably the women who, until then, had not taught
in mixed-sex classes, were literally traumatized by reforms carried out in
May 1968 and accompanied by strikes, raucous assemblies, provocations
during classroom instruction, spontaneous “fairs” in the school, and the like.
None had much good to say about the evolution of the school system in the
past decade, except that “the mass movements of pupils have quieted down.”
Otherwise, there is a litany of woes: Pupils are less prepared and less moti-
vated; teachers are drowning in paperwork; spineless administrators have
caved in to political pressures (e.g., making Latin an elective); and so forth.
This is possibly an extreme example of the conservatism phase mentioned in
the longitudinal research on attitude change, touched on earlier.
As for those who achieve resolution, get their “second wind,” there are also
two, very interesting subsets. The first contains a large number of women
who have changed classrooms (taking on older or younger pupils), sections

(moving to less or more academic pupils), disciplines (reviving a “second”
discipline in which they were trained), or schools (‘What the hell-why not
try out another set of colleagues?,,), or who have become involved in new
projects. Their basic message is the following: Unless one forcibly introduces
novelty and challenge into one’s work every five or six years, within the few
degrees of freedom allowed, one will succumb to increasing lethargy and
cynicism, to a slow erosion of the spirit. What is intriguing here is the adverb
forcibly. The inference is that the profession insidiously discourages these
kinds of modest changes, through an unhappy mixture of administrative
constraints and the perks of increasing seniority, such that older teachers
make increasingly fewer shifts in their yearly routines. Several of these
women recounted anecdotes in which they were forced by department heads
or directors to change roles and, after the initial sense “of having been the
victim of a kind of administrative rape,” found themselves urging these
administrators to use more muscle on other colleagues.
The second subset comprises a large number of men who had been heavily
invested in multiple-classroom or multiple-school innovations, and who are
now disengaging gradually, turning their attention to interests outside the
school. These are, indeed, fascinating interview protocols, wholly in the
Jungian vein of individuation and transvaluation. The gist here is that one
has become aware of a disequilibrium in one’s activity-of an overinvest-
ment in the professional persona at the expense of other layers of the self.
There is a ludic self, a philosophic self, an affiliative self, who have all gone
hungry over the years as one’s libidinal nourishment went into career striv-
ings. Now it is time to let others run the extracurricular activities, the parent
groups, the fund-raisers, the reform committees; it is time to look after one-
self, or to look after others who live elsewhere than in schools.
These interviews connect to much larger chunks in the data set bearing
the same message. On the whole, the women in our sample make out better
than the men, nobably the women working part-time. By “make out better,”
I mean that they (1) are more likely to choose teaching again if life were to
be rerun, (2) have fewer episodes of burnout, (3) describe themselves more
often as “serene” or “self-actualized” later in their career. One of our female
informants explains it articulately:
I always kept a few side-bets, you know, even when I was full-time. I
had the children, of course, but I kept painting, too, and I stayed in touch
with other painters. . . . When things went crazy at school, I could look
to these other things and know that part of me was still intact. . . . What
I thought of myself wasn’t riding entirely on how well things went at work.
(teacher at lower-secondary school, 18 years of experience)
This is a lesson that many men in our sample learned late in the game,
or not at all. As a result, their careers often had a roller-coaster quality, a
manic phase of combative involvement, headlong innovation, unbridled

enthusiasm, followed by a phase of dejection, anger, and cynicism-which
then gives way to a new spurt. They are, as the excerpt above warns against,
putting all their chips on their professional self-image, with no countervailing
engagements outside the school.
The problem here is that too many contingencies within the school are
beyond the control of teachers. For example, a cohort of extraordinary pupils
one year can give way to a cohort of listless dolts the next, such that levels
of satisfaction within the classroom can be a sort of annual lottery. Another
example: Any innovation that goes beyond a single classroom- as most
do-is caught up in the micro-politics of the institution, or of the school dis-
trict, both of which are baroque and unpredictable. What is predictable is
that most of these innovations will be sufficiently watered down in the course
of implementation that the prime movers at the classroom level will perceive
a very low return on the intensity of their investment.42
Whether the women know better at some somatic level or whether they
have no choice initially, as they try to juggle child-rearing and full-time
teaching, is uncertain. Certainly, one of the main difficulties of the younger
women in our sample is that of finding an equilibrium between demands at
home and demands at school (see Figure 2). This is a difficulty never men-
tioned by the men: There are indications that many of the women are lucid
from the start, as one woman teacher said: “I knew that if I made the school
the center of my life, I’d burn out-like all those men around me are doing.”
SEQUENCE 4. RENEWAL, with a positive or negative issue (11-19,

20-29, 30-39 years of experience)
“Positive focusing’
(Several paths: -› Ren esp. “Promotion”)
Disenchantment
This is the most representative trajectory, at least within the sequence

shown here. At its initial stage, it includes 40 percent of the teachers of the
three age groups. Given the later branching out of the sequence, this per-
centage drops off slightly.
The term renewal (other informants speak of “reform” or “major change”)
implies structural reform here, and is primarily linked to sociohistorical in-
fluences. In effect, as mentioned earlier, between 1962 and 1972, the canton
of Geneva enacted a series of reforms: the creation of an “orientation” phase
after sixth grade and the elimination of primary-level “streaming,” the intro-
duction of both sexes (mixite) into the senior high schools, and the creation
of experimental high schools. There was, in addition, the strong influence
of the so-called events of May 1968 in Paris, the “students’ revolution.” All
secondary-school teachers were affected, as were many primary-school
teachers who taught in the upper grades and were assimilated into the orien-
tation schools. This constituted a promotion in terms of status, working
hours, and salary- thus the “promotion” theme mentioned on the chart.
As the chart shows, “renewal” is the determinant of successive phases, in
this case of the ultimate one. “Positive focusing” is the study designers’ term
for this; respondents spoke of “cultivating my garden” or of “doing my thing”
or of “specializing,” although the term “focusing” was present explicitly in 65
percent of the protocols. The gist was that the renewal phase had been ex-
pansive; teachers now wanted to contract. This meant focusing on a pre-
ferred grade level, subject matter, or pupil type; disinvesting in schoolwork
and increasing outside interests; reducing contacts with peers other than
those of one’s most convivial group; avoiding additional administrative tasks
or off-hours commitments; and not getting involved in future schoolwide in-
novations. The tone is resolutely optimistic, often “self-actualized,” but there
is a clear sense of pulling back, something even of a narcissist entitlement:
“I’ve done my share; now leave me alone to do what I want.”
“Defensive focusing” has many of the same features: specializing, reducing
commitments, using seniority to carve out a comfortable schedule, relating
only to a small circle of peers. The tone, however, is different. These are es-
sentially people who, like those mentioned in the previous sequence, were
brought kicking and screaming through the renewal phase. They are tradi-
tionalists who disapproved of the majority of changes enacted and who dis-
approve of the outcomes. The tone of their remarks is that now, when the
dust has settled, they can derive some satisfaction in their remaining years
from activities the system has not yet corrupted.
“Disenchantment” is a respondents’ term, and it carries a sense of bitter-
ness. Most informants approved of the renewals, but judge the sequel much
like the defensive focusers: amorphous pupils, Babbitt-like administrators,
ill-advised policies, mindless paperwork. There are, however, two new
chords. First, the theme of “fatigue, lassitude” comes through clearly. Next,
there is bitterness over the failure of the reforms, much of it directed at “turn-
coat” administrators who failed to follow through when the going got rough.
Most of these informants are men.
So the after-effects of major attempts at school improvement are, on the
whole, problematic. Some teachers withdraw serenely, others smugly, still
others with a sense of betrayal. This is the kind of finding, incidentally, that
appears far less in the American literature than in the European, perhaps
because’ the Europeans have less career mobility, even within the same
setting. Most of the teachers active in schoolwide reforms stick around in the
classroom after the party, and deal with the residue. They have not, unlike
many of their American counterparts, “moved on” to coordinating or ad-

ministrative jobs, and they are severe judges of the longer-term effects of
school-improvement projects.
Another reasonable hypothesis is that ambitious projects of school im-
provement may be “out of phase” later in one’s career. After the stabilizing
comes the experimenting or renewal, and after the renewal comes the limit-
ing and focusing. “Cultivating one’s garden,” much like Voltaire’s Candide
after his many, mostly disappointing, adventures, may well be generic to
later phases in the teaching career. It is certainly a leitmotiv, as we have
seen, in the life-cycle literature, with its trend toward greater “interiority,”
in parallel with a gradual physiological decline. It may or may not have to
do with the approach of retirement and with intimations of one’s mortality,
but is consistent with that hypothesis.43 To the extent, however, that it leads
to a disengagement from collective attempts to reshape institutional prac-
tices, it offers a dilemma that school officials will have to address.
CORROBORATING TRENDS: “CAREER SATISFACTION,”

“LOCUS OF CONTROL,” AND “IMAGES OF
MYSELF AS A TEACHER”
Logically enough, some of the same trends emerge from statistical analyses
of the career trajectories drawn by the informants, but they come from other
directions as well. In this study, an effort was made to predict the later phases
of teaching from earlier ones. Could one anticipate a career crisis, or predict
which teachers would report ultimate phases of satisfaction or disenchant-
ment? With self-report data, of course, the risks of such an exercise are even
greater, but it was possible to correct for many of these. Essentially, the
study designers boiled down data from the leitmotivs, nesting within each the
particular features mentioned. By generating factor scores for each infor-
mant, one could see which features within which leitmotivs discriminated be-
tween older teachers reporting an ultimate phase of satisfaction and those
describing that phase in terms of disenchantment.
It turned out that, statistically at least, the ultimate discriminant analysis
was powerful (canonical r = .84, p .001), predicting correctly 89 percent of
the cases of disenchantment and 97 percent of the cases of satisfaction. It did
not, however, predict them early, that is, before teachers were about 12-15
years into their career. Still, the few early predictors that emerged are sug-
gestive: Teachers who steered clear of reforms or other multiple-classroom
innovations but who invested consistently in classroom-level experiments-
what they called “tinkering" with new materials, different pupil groupings,
small changes in grading systems-were more likely to be satisfied later on
in their career than most others, and far more likely to be satisfied than their
peers who had been heavily involved in schoolwide or districtwide projects.
So tinkering, together with an early concern for instructional efficiency

(“getting it down into a routine, getting the materials right for most situa-
tions I run into”), was one of the strongest predictors of ultimate satisfaction.
Inversely, heavy involvement in schoolwide innovation was a fairly strong
predictor of disenchantment after 20-25 years of teaching. Tending one’s
private garden, pedagogically speaking, seems to have more payoff in the
long haul than land reform, although the latter is perceived as stimulating
and enriching while it is happening.
There is additional material on this theme from other sections of the inter-
view schedule. For example, an effort was made to find out about shifts in
informants’ “locus of control,” possibly from a more “activist” to a more “fatal-
ist” mode.44 They were given a flash card with a scale (alpha = .68) consist-
ing of three item pairs:
la. There are pupils for whom one can do very little, no matter how
hard one tries.
lb. All pupils are “reachable,” provided one invests the necessary time
and energy.
2a. Ultimately, the results of well-designed innovations are worth the

effort and complications involved in carrying them out.
2b. Often, innovations are well designed, but they involve too many
complications and too much effort relative to the results obtained.
3a. Teaching is probably the most important activity in my life.

3b. Teaching is one of many important activities in my life.
Informants were asked to answer the items for “now,” for “after 2-3 years of
teaching” and, in the case of more experienced teachers, “after 8-12 years.”
As with other questions, before answering they were brought back concretely
to these periods of their career with data from their responses to other
questions.
The plots of the mean scores showed a gradual, linear, and significant de-
crease in activist responses over time; all the scores moved progressively and
inexorably into the more fatalist zone of our scale. There were also some con-
sistent interaction effects. In particular, men began higher in the activist
zone and fell more precipitously over time into the fatalist zone. Similarly,
informants explained their responses by saying they were progressively less
willing to invest heavily in their careers and in attempts to change local prac-
tices more specifically. Aside from observations about their own fatigue or
realism, there was also a decreasing belief in the inherent plasticity of the system
that seemed to accompany, or possibly increase, the drift toward disengagement.
One final analysis. At the end of the interview, informants were given an
attitude inventory in the form of a semantic differential containing twenty-
five adjective pairs arrayed along a six-space scale, for example, energetic/
worn out, ambitious/modest, serene/worried.45 The regnant construct for
filling out the scale was “Myself as a Teacher. " The task was to situate oneself
along the scale for each adjective pair at different points in one’s career: the
first two years, after 7-10 years, after 15-20 years, and, if appropriate, for
a fourth time (“now” or after 30 years of teaching) for the older teachers.
Some hypotheses from the life-cycle literature and from the empirical
studies of teachers’ life histories (reviewed earlier) were incorporated into the
scale. In particular, five constructs were built into the full set of adjective
pairs: Engagement, Activity, Serenity, Confidence, and Efficacy. The hypo-
thesis was that, over time, there would be a decrease in perceived Engage-
ment and Activity and an increase in perceived Serenity, Confidence, and
Efficacy. Consonant with that literature, then, the expectation was to see
wavering energy and commitment, at least beyond 12-15 years of experi-
ence, but also growing self-acceptance and self-confidence.
The data, analyzed with repeated-measures analyses of variance, played
out roughly as hypothesized. For the three measurement periods (1-2 years,
7-10 years, 15-20 years), the older teachers became considerably less active.
The trends for all adjectives were in the more passive direction, and are
strongest in the cases of “worn out” and “inactive.” These trends sharpened
still more when the last measurement period was added (more than 30 years
of teaching experience). Similarly, the trend toward disengagement was con-
sistent and strong. Increased skepticism accounted for much of this, along
with a greater sense of routine. The sample also shifted significantly in the direction
of greater serenity: more serene, relaxed, and at ease later in the career.
There was also, as expected, a trend toward greater self-confidence as a
teacher: more confident, happier, less vulnerable (but also more convention-
al). For “efficacity” the trend was the same for two adjectives on this scale
(more effective, more decisive) and different for the two others (slightly less
prudent and more indulgent toward themselves and toward pupils).
Incidentally, some of the indulgence toward pupils has to do with teachers’
private lives. When asked about this shift in self-image, many informants
harked back to another point in the interview, when they were asked about
events in their private lives that had had an impact on classroom life. The
most important event was “having children of school age” (accounting for 62
percent of the responses); it enabled teachers to see their own pupils with dif-
ferent, more understanding eyes-especially as their own children reached
the age of their pupils. For some, this was often hellish-“an adolescent
jungle all day, and then I get it again when I come home.” For most, how-
ever, having children the ages of their pupils was a de-centering experience
of profound influence. Our protocols are virtually saturated with citations
like this one:
I have to admit it: until my own son began to fail math, I never really
understood how kids in my class could fail math. After all, I was really
good at math-I mean Pm a math-physics teacher. . . .I just couldn’t
reconstruct their reasoning process-how they came to misrepresent
simple mathematical problems. Now I can. It’s a pity that it took me 15
years -until my own child got to the grade level I teach.
Surveying the semantic differential data, it is as if there exists a compen-
satory model of investment and reward-growing serenity at the expense of
lessening involvement. At least this is the way this sample of teachers defines
itself globally. It is also a self-definition that smacks of smugness: disengaged
but serene, skeptical but effective, pessimistic about the larger scene but re-
laxed and confident about one’s own theater of activity. This is a profile that
looks stubbornly recalcitrant to any change from without. Of course, it is not
clear that pupils would define their teachers in this way, nor their spouses.
Also, these adjectives may not mean the same to different cohorts at the same
point in their careers, not to speak of meanings at different points in the
career cycle. One is presumably not serene in the same sense at 35, after
l0-12 years of teaching, as at 55, after 30-32 years. Perceptually, however,
these trends make good horse sense.
CONCLUSION
Modal trends such as these are suspect. Put together, they would probably
describe no single individual in the sample, and only pieces of subgroups.
They are, in fact, normative constructs enabling us to keep analytic order
in our minds until we can handle more differentiation and complexity. In
effect, the most interesting questions may involve subsets of informants:
Which teachers sign on to collective reforms at several points in their career?
How are they different from the modal group and from sceptics and
laggards? How soon can progressive focusers and disenchanters be identi-
fied? Nevertheless, these findings are not to be dismissed. In this study, at
least, they override most generational and institutional differences, and they
match patterns within life-cycle research inside and outside education, not
to speak of the archetypal themes of poetry and drama.
There is, however, an important macro-variable underrepresented in this
study: the school as an organization. To be sure, some measures of institu-
tional influence were included. For instance, people were asked whether
some of their peers- and later, whether they themselves-seemed to evolve
gradually as a set, that is, whether they began to look, talk, act, and think
more like one another. As Becker had hypothesized the socialization effect,
people come to resemble the institutions in which they work.46 (The answer
here was largely yes, and some of the examples were wondrous, such as lec-
turing bus drivers and telephone operators, filling out forms in triplicate
when none were needed, taking on the mentality of a “functionary”). There
were probes elsewhere in the study for the effects of institutional climates,
working arrangements, modes of decision making, degrees of centrality/
autonomy, and the like. The core problem, however, lay elsewhere.
It lay in the fact that there was little variability within the sample on insti-
tutional factors. The Geneva school system is nothing if not homogeneous,
even across school levels; Napoleon passed through here, and left behind the
French monolithic administrative heritage. Without variance, there is little
an empirically minded researcher can do in the search for determinants.
Similarly, it may just be the case that some of the determinants just re-
viewed, given an interpretation that is primarily psychological, are in fact
overriding effects brought on by the nature of the institution in which this
sample has lived through the thirty-five years covered in the study. Some in-
formants, in fact, make precisely this complaint in describing the toll organi-
zational life has taken on them.
There is, however, some variability over time: New schools were created,
others restructured, and many teachers moved from one to another, or even
divided their time between them. Their remarks are instructive. From this
over-time perspective, there appeared at different moments schools in which
the number of burned-out teachers was near-epidemic and others with sup-
port mechanisms enabling people to look after their own in times of personal
distress. There were schools in which the level of instructional mastery was
far higher and which contained numerous informal mechanisms for over-
coming skill deficiencies. This was especially important in that teachers in
this study, as in others, used informal “networking” mechanisms for virtually
all of their pratical in-service needs.47
This study did not, however, get a good grip on the characteristics of these
schools, probably because of its concentration on the career trajectories of in-
dividual actors within them. This needs to be done, quickly. It just may be
the case that there are institutional environments in which teachers do not
disengage, do not end up tending uniquely their own gardens, do not feel
the stale breath of routine after only 8-10 years into the profession, and in
which teachers only hear about mid-career crises in other buildings or other
districts. If so, the research community is singularly well placed to identify
them and to specify the conditions under which others, too, might play out
their careers in such places as these.
Notes
1 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 247-74.
2 Robert White, The Study of Lives (New York: Dryden, 1952).
3 Paul Baltes and Orville Brim, Life-Span Development and Behavior, vol. 4 (New York:
Academic Press, 1982).
4 For a good critique of organicist approaches, see Dale Dannefer, “Adult Development
and Social Theory: A ParadigmaticReappraisal,”American Sociological Review 49, no. 1 (1984):
100-16.
5 Mea maxima culpa. Cf. Michael Huberman, Adult Development and Learning from a Life-
cycle Perspective (Paris: Royaumont, 1971); and idem, Cycle de Vie et Formation (Vevey: Editions
Delta, 1974).
6 Howard Becker, ‘The Career of the Chicago Schoolmaster," in Sociological Work: Method
and Substance, ed. Howard Becker (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), pp. 34-69.
7 W. Peterson, “Age, Teacher’s Role and the Institutional Setting,” in Contemporary Re-
search on Teacher Effectiveness, ed. Bruce Biddle and William Elena (New York: Holt Rinehart,
1964), pp. 268-315.
8 For example, Kenneth Newman, “Middle-aged, Experienced Teachers’ Perceptions of
their Career Development” (Paper presented at American Educational Research Association
meeting, San Francisco, 1979); R. B. Adams, “Teacher Development: A Look at Changes in
Teachers’ Perceptions across Time,” Journal of Teacher Education 23, no. 4 (1982): 40-43; and
Lawrence Ingvarson and Peter Greenway, “Portrayals of Teacher Development,” Australian
Journal of Education 28, no. 1 (1984): 45-65.
9 Stephen Ball and Ivor Goodson, eds., Teachers’ Lives and Careers (Sussex: Falmer Press,
1985); and Patricia Sykes, Linda Measor, and Peter Woods, eds., Teacher Careers: Crises and
Continuities (Sussex: Falmer Press, 1985).
10 For a classic study, see Donald Super, The Psychology of Careers (New York: Harper &
Row, 1957); for recent work, see C. B. Derr, ed., Work, Family and the Career: New Frontiers in
Theory and Research (New York: Praeger, 1980).
11 Donald Super, “Coming of Age in Middletown,” American Psychologist 40, no. 4 (1980):
407.
12 For typical instances, see Frances Fuller, “Concerns of Teachers: A Developmental Per-
spective,” American Educational ResearchJournal 6 (1969): 207-26; and S. A. Veenman, “Per-
ceived Problems of Beginning Teachers,” Review of Educational Research 54, no. 2 (1984):
143-78.
13 The classic, nontechnical references here are Erikson, Childhood and Society; White, The
Study of Lives; Daniel Levinson et al., The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1978); and Roger Gould, Transformations: Growth and Change in Adult Life (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1978).
14 For a good discussion of this point, see Heidi Watts, “Starting Out, Moving On, Run-
ning Ahead” (San Francisco, Calif.: Teachers Centers Exchange, 1979). Occasional Paper.
15 See Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, “The Lives of Teachers,” in Handbook of Teaching and
Policy, ed. Lee Shulman and Gary Sykes (New York: Longman, 1985), pp. 241-59.
16 Such a distinct phase is reported, for example, in Sharon Feiman-Nemser, “Learning
to Teach,” in Handbook of Teaching and Policy, pp. 153-54; and in Patricia Sykes, “The Life Cycle
of the Teacher,” in Teacher Careers: Crises and Continuities, pp. 31-37.
17 This is a key point made in several places in the study by Leo Prick, Career Development
and Satisfaction among Secondary-School Teachers (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
1986).
18 See Michael Cooper, “The Study of Professionalism in Teaching” (Paper delivered at
American Educational Research Association meeting, New York, 1982), pp. 6-11.
19 For exemplars of a mid-career crises in teaching, see Prick, Career Development and Satis-
faction, pp. 35-47; Sykes, “The Life Cycle of the Teacher,” pp. 51-54; and Herve Hamon and
Patrick Rotman, Tant qu’il y aura des Profs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984), pp. 132-47.
20 Cf. Prick, Career Development and Satisfaction, p. 17.
21 Peterson, “Age, Teacher’s Role and the Institutional Setting.”
22 Cf. A. M. Rempel and R. E. Bentley, “Teacher Morale: Relationship with Selected
Factors, Journal of Teacher Education 21, no. 4 (1970): 534-39.
23 Peterson, “Age, Teacher’s Role and the Institutional Setting,” p. 285; and Prick, Career
Development and Satisfaction, pp. 22-26.
24 Marker studies include Marjorie Lowenthal et al., Four Stages of Life (San Francisco,
Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1975); Carol Ryff and Paul Baltes, “Value Transition and Adult Develop-
ment of Women,” Developmental Psychology 12 (1976): 567-78; and Mathilda Riley et al., Aging
and Society, vol. 1 (New York: Russell Sage, 1968).
25 This point is made tellingly by David Hultsch and Judy Plemens, “Life Events and Life-
Span Development,” in Life-Span Development and Behavior, vol. 2, ed. Paul Baltes and Orville
Brim (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 1-36.
26 Becker, “The Career of the Chicago Schoolmaster.”
27 E.g., Prick, Career Development and Satisfaction.
28 Peterson, “Age, Teacher’s Role and the Institutional Setting.”
29 Raymond Kuhlen, “Developmental Changes in Motivation during the Adult Years,”
in Relationships of Development and Aging, ed. J. E. Birren (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C Thomas,
1964), pp. 257-83.
30 Bernice Neugarten ed., Middle Age and Aging (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968); and Bernice Neugarten and Nancy Datan, “The Middle Years,” in American Handbook
of Psychiatry, vol. I, ed. S. Arieti (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 492-608.
31 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 97-98.
32 Nevitt Sanford, Self and Society (New York: Atherton, 1966).
33 E. L. Friedman, “Changing Value Orientations in Adult Life,” in Sociological Backgrounds
of Adult Education, ed. Robert Burns (Syracuse, N.Y.: CSLEA), pp. 43-67.
34 See Martin Maehr and Douglas Kleiber, “The Graying of Achievement Motivation,”
American Psychologist 37, no. 7 (1981): 787-93.
35 For a superb review of research in this field, see Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human
Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1980).
36 Readers interested in this methodology should consult Matthew Miles and Michael
Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis: A Sourcebook of New Methods (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage,
1984).
37 Readers interested in a fuller overview of this research and who are literate in French
can consult Michael Huberman et collaborateurs, La Vie des Enseignants (Lausanne: Delachaux
et Niestle, 1989).
38 Cf. J. E. Rosenbaum, Careers in a Corporate Hierarchy (New York: Academic Press, 1983);
and Donald Super, “A Life-span, Life-space Approach to Career Development,” Journal of
Vocational Behavior 13 (1980): 282-98.
39 Cf. Kirstin Field, Teacher Development: A Study of the Stages in the Development of Teachers
(Brookline, Mass.: Teacher Center Brookline, 1979); and Sykes, “The Life Cycle of the
Teacher.”
40 For a thorough discussion of this problem, including entry into other professions (law,
engineering), see Mary Kennedy, Inexact Sciences:Education and the Development of Expertise (East
Lansing, Mich.: National Center for Research in Teacher Education, MSU, 1987), especially
pp. 18-35.
41 There is a good deal of literature on this dimension. For a somewhat less normative
discussion than is often the case, see Judith Warren Little, “Seductive Images and Organiza-
tional Realities in Professional Development,” Teachers College Record 86, no. 1 (Fall 1984):
84-102; and Susan Rosenholtz, “Effective Schools: Interpreting the Evidence,” American Journal
of Education 93 (1985): 352-88.
42 See, for example, Michael Huberman and Matthew Miles, Innovation Up Close: How
School Improvement Works (New York: Plenum, 1984), especially pp. 134-51.
43 This hypothesis is advanced in the classic paper of Elliot Jacques, “Death and the Mid-
life Crisis,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 46 (1965): 502-14.
44 See J. B. Rotter, “Generalized Expectancies for Internal versus External Control of
Reinforcement,” Psychological Monographs 80, no. 1 (1966), whole no. 609; for an adaptation to
teaching, see Janet Rose and Frederic Medway, “Measurement of Teachers’ Beliefs in their
Control over Student Outcomes" Journal of Educational Research 74, no. 3 (1981): 185-91.
45 C. E. Osgood et al., ‘The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1957); and idem, Cross-Cultural Universals of Affective Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1975).
46 Becker, “The Career of the Chicago Schoolmaster.”
47 For a general analysis of this issue, with illustrative data from the Swiss study, see
Michael Huberman, “What Knowledge Is of Most Worth to Teachers? A Knowledge-use Per-
spective,” Teaching and Teacher Education 1, no. 3 (1985): 251-62.
The University of Louisville School of Education is pleased to announce the
competition for the 1990 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education,
made possible through the creative philanthropy of Mr. H. Charles Grawemeyer. The
award, accompanied by a monetary prize of $150,000, will be given to the author(s)
of the theory, policy proposal, technological advance, program initiative, or research
study published in the recent past that is judged to have the most potential for
educational improvement.
The purpose of this award is to stimulate worldwide the dissemination, public

scrutiny, and implementation of ideas that have potential to contribute to
improvement in educational practice and attainment. The award is intended not only
to recognize the individual(s) responsible, but also to draw critical attention to the
award-winning ideas, proposals, or achievements.
The criteria for judging the quality of submissions will be originality, creativity,
feasibility, and scope of potential applicability. The University invites nominations
from professional educators, educational institutions and organizations, and editors
and publishers of journals and books worldwide. Self-nominations will not be
considered. Submissions written in a language other than English will need to be
accompanied by an English translation. All nominations and supporting materials

must reach the University by January 31, 1990. The winner will be announced in the
spring of 1990. Later in 1990 the winner will give a formal presentation in Louisville
to facilitate discussion and further dissemination of the award-winning work.
Nominations and requests for entry forms or further information should be sent to:
University of Louisville
Grawemeyer Award in Education
School of Education
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky 40292 U.S.A.
Accountability for Professional Practice
LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND
Teachers College, Columbia University
The issue of educational accountability is probably the most pressing and

most problematic of any facing the public schools today. Gone are the days
when a local town council hired the village schoolmaster and fired him at will
for any cause. Gone, too, are the days when schoolteachers were so respected
in their office that anything within the schoolroom walls was accepted as the
rightful and unquestioned prerogative of school officials. A more highly edu-
cated populace has greater expectations of schools, and a more knowledge-
oriented economy raises both the costs and benefits of school success or fail-
ure. Today, schools are being held to account by politicians, the general pub-
lic, and parents for results they should be expected to produce and, often,
for results over which they have little or no control.
In recent debates about improving American schools and increasing ac-
countability, the professionalization of teaching has surfaced as a prominent
strategy, now being pursued in a variety of ways by policymakers and practi-
tioners across the country. Though many changes in the areas of teacher prep-
aration, certification, and compensation have accompanied the reform dis-
cussion, many questions remain regarding how schools should operate to sustain
and nourish effective teaching based on professional norms and understandings.
At the same time, concerns for school accountability are as pronounced as
they have ever been in our nation’s history. Policymakers want to find ways
to ensure that students learn, and they struggle to find a lever that will pene-
trate a giant, fragmented system engaged in a difficult and complex under-
taking. If the promises of professionalism are to bear fruit, the contributions
of professional accountability to improved education must be activated in
concrete ways in schools.
In this article, I explore the contributions of professionalism to school ac-
countability in the context of a new phenomenon in American education: the
professional development school. Such schools, in their infancy in more than
a dozen cities around the country, are intended-like teaching hospitals-to
model state-of-the-art practice while simultaneously refining and spreading
it. They are to be places where experts train and socialize novices, where re-
search and theory are translated into practice, and where practical knowl-
Teachers College Record Volume 91, Number 1, Fall 1989

Copyright ©by TeachersCollege, Columbia University
0161-4681/89/9101/059$1.25/0
edge is translated in turn into research and theory. Such schools are, in
short, the harbingers of an accountable profession, as they assume the mis-
sion of testing, transmitting, and further advancing the ethical norms and
knowledge-based standards of professional practice. As models of profession-
al practice, these schools should become models of professional accountabil-
ity as well.
THE GOALS OF ACCOUNTABILITY
In the current debates about accountability, cacophony rules. There is little

agreement, and perhaps even less clear thinking, about what accountability
means, to whom it is owed, and how it can be operationalized. Many policy-
makers seem to equate accountability with something like the monitoring of
student test scores, averaged for classrooms, schools, or school districts.
Some believe that accountability can be enacted by statutes prescribing
management procedures, tests, or curricula. Unfortunately, these approaches
to accountability leave the student, the parent, the teacher, and the educa-
tional process entirely out of the equation. The production of a test score or
a management scheme does not touch the issue of whether a student’s educa-
tional interests are being well served.
We need to begin to articulate what we mean by accountability, and in
particular, what we mean by professional accountability. I suggest here that
a meaningful system of accountability for public education should do three
things: it should (1) set educationally meaningful and defensible standards for what
parents and members of the general public can rightfully expect of a school
system, school, or teacher; (2) establish reasonable andfeasible means by which
these standards can be implemented and upheld; and (3) provide avenues for
redress or corrections in practice when these standards are not met, so that ulti-
mately students are well served.
Within this framework, I will explore how current systems of accountabil-
ity are structured and how they would need to be changed to provide honest
and useful vehicles for accountability in the context of schools intended to
promote professional practice in teaching.
MODELS OF ACCOUNTABILITY
Social transactions in our society are managed in a variety of ways, ultimate-

ly subject to democratic control. Through legislative bodies, the populace
can decide whether an activity should be a subject of government regulation
and where that regulation should begin and end. When legislative govern-
ment involvement has been eschewed or limited, control of an activity may
revert, in whole or in part, to professional bodies, courts, or private individ-
uals in their roles as clients, consumers, or citizens;
In any of these instances, accountability mechanisms are chosen to safe-
guard the public interest. These include at least the following:
political accountability - elected officials must stand for reelection at reg-
ular intervals so that citizens can judge the representativeness of their views
and the responsiveness of their decisions
legal accountability - courts must entertain complaints about violations of
laws enacted by representatives of the public and of citizens’ constitution-
ally granted rights, which may be threatened either by private action or
by legislative action
bureaucratic accountability - agencies of government promulgate rules and
regulations intended to assure citizens that public functions will be carried
out in pursuit of public goals voiced through democratic or legal processes
professional accountability-governments may create professional bodies
and structures to ensure competence and appropriate practice in occupa-
tions that serve the public and may delegate certain decisions about occu-
pational membership, standards, and practices to these bodies
market accountability-governments may choose to allow clients or con-
sumers to choose what services best meet their needs; to preserve the utili-
ty of this form of accountability, monopolies are prevented, freedom of
choice is protected, and truthful information is required of service providers
All of these accountability mechanisms have their strengths and weakness-
es, and each is more or less appropriate to certain types of activities. Political
mechanisms can support the public establishment of general policy directions
in areas subject to direct government control. Legal mechanisms are most
useful when rights or proscriptions are clearly definable and when establish-
ing the facts is all that is needed to trigger a remedy. Bureaucratic mech-
anisms are most appropriate when a standard set of practices or procedures
can be easily linked to behavioral rules that will produce the desired out-
comes. Market mechanisms are helpful when consumer preferences vary
widely, when the state does not have a direct interest in controlling choice,
and when government control would be counterproductive to innovation.
Professional mechanisms are most important when safeguards for consumer
choice are necessary to serve the public interest, but the technology of the
work is uniquely determined by individual client needs and a complex and
changing base of knowledge.
There are, of course, incentives in any of these systems for individuals to
shirk their missions or for functional inadequacies to impair performance.
(Public servants may use their positions for private gain; courts may become
overloaded; bureaucrats may fail to follow regulations; professionals may

overlook incompetence; markets may break down due to regulatory or eco-
nomic failures.) These problems can, presumably, be addressed by efforts to
make the systems work more perfectly, often by overlaying another account-
ability mechanism against the first as a check and balance, for example,
enacting an ethics in government law that adds legal accountability vehicles
to the electoral process for governing the actions of public officials.
However, even when such mechanisms function perfectly, any given mode
of accountability has intrinsic limits that must be weighed in the choice of
which to use under varying circumstances. Electoral accountability does not
allow citizens to judge each specific action of officials; nor does it necessarily
secure the constitutional rights or preferences of citizens whose views and in-
terests are in the minority. Legal accountability cannot be used in all cases:
The reach of courts is limited to that which can be legislated; not all citizens
have access to courts, and they are buffered from public opinion. Bureau-
cratic accountability does not guarantee results, it concerns itself with pro-
cedures; it is effective only when procedures are known to produce the de-
sired outcomes, and when compliance is easily measured and secured. Pro-
fessional accountability does not take public preferences into account; it re-
sponds to an authority outside the direct reach of citizens and may satisfy
its purposes while ignoring competing public goals. Market accountability
does not ensure citizens’ access to services and relies on the spontaneous
emergence of a variety of services to allow choice to operate as a safety valve
for poor service provision.
Because of these intrinsic limits, no single form of accountability operates
alone in any major area of public life. Hybrid forms are developed to provide
checks and balances and to more carefully target vehicles for safeguarding
the public interest toward the particular matters they can best address. The
choices of accountability tools - and the balance among different forms of
accountability -are constantly shifting as problems emerge, as social goals
change, and as new circumstances arise.
ACCOUNTABILITY IN EDUCATION
In education, it is easy to see that legal and bureaucratic forms of accounta-

bility have expanded their reach over the past twenty years, while electoral
accountability has waxed and waned (with local and state school boards oper-
ating with reduced authority in some instances, and the purviews of elected
and appointed officials shifting in many states). Market accountability is
more often discussed as a possibly useful vehicle, but still rarely used, except
in a few districts that offer magnet schools or other schools of choice. Pro-
fessional accountability is gaining in prominence as an idea for strengthening
teaching quality, but it is yet poorly defined and partially at odds with other
forms of accountability currently in use.
Accountability 63
BUREAUCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY
Bureaucratic organization and management of schools has increased since

the early part of this century, when “scientific management” principles were
first introduced into urban schools in an effort to standardize and rationalize
the process of schooling. The view underlying this approach to managing
schools is as follows: Schools are agents of government that can be adminis-
tered by hierarchical decision making and controls. Policies are made at the
top of the system and handed down to administrators, who translate them
into rules and procedures. Teachers follow the rules and procedures (class
schedules, curricula, textbooks, rules for promotion and assignment of stu-
dents, etc.), and students are processed according to them.
This approach is intended to foster equal and uniform treatment of clients
and standardization of products or services, and to prevent arbitrary or ca-
pricious decision making. It works reasonably well when goals are agreed on
and clearly definable, when procedures for meeting the goals can be speci-
fied, when the procedures are straightforward and feasible to implement,
and when following these procedures is known to produce the desired out-
comes in all cases. Bureaucratic accountability ensures that rules will be pro-
mulgated and compliance with these rules will be monitored. The promise
that bureaucratic accountability mechanisms make is that violators of the
rules will be apprehended, and consequences will be administered for non-
compliance.
When bureaucratic forms are applied to the management of teaching, they
rely on a number of assumptions:
that students are sufficiently standardized that they will respond in identi-
cal and predictable ways to the “treatments” devised by policymakers and
their principal agents
that sufficient knowledge of which treatments should be prescribed is both
available and generalizable to all educational circumstances
that this knowledge can be translated into standardized rules for practice,
which can be operationalized through regulations and reporting and in-
spection systems
that administrators and teachers can and will faithfully implement the pre-
scriptions for practice thus devised and transmitted to schools
The circular bottom-line assumption is that this process, if efficiently ad-
ministered, will produce the outcomes the system desires. If the outcomes are
not satisfactory, the final assumption is that the prescriptions are not yet suf-
ficiently detailed or the process of implementation is not sufficiently exact.
Thus, the solutions to educational problems always lie in more precise speci-
fication of educational or management processes.
In the bureaucratic model, teachers are viewed as functionaries rather
than as well-trained and highly skilled professionals. Little investment is

made in teacher preparation, induction, or professional development. Little
credence is given to licensing or knowledge acquisition. Little time is af-
forded for joint planning or collegial consultation about problems of practice.
Because practices are prescribed outside the school setting, there is no need
and little use for professional knowledge and judgment. Thus, novice
teachers assume the same responsibilities as thirty-year veterans. Separated
into egg-crate classrooms and isolated by packed teaching schedules, teach-
ers rarely work or talk together about teaching practices. A rationale for
these activities is absent from the bureaucratic perspective on teaching work.
In the bureaucratic conception of teaching, teachers do not need to be
highly knowledgeable about learning theory and pedagogy, cognitive science
and child development, curriculum and assessment; they do not need to be
highly skilled, because they do not, presumably, make the major decisions
about these matters. Curriculum planning is done by administrators and
specialists; teachers are to implement a curriculum planned for them. In-
spection of teachers’ work is conducted by hierarchical superiors, whose job
it is to make sure that the teacher is implementing the curriculum and pro-
cedures of the district. Teachers do not plan or evaluate their own work; they
merely perform it.
Accountability is achieved by inspections and reporting systems intended to
ensure that the rules and procedures are being followed. Teachers are held ac-
countable for implementing curricular and testing policies, grading policies, as-
signment and promotion rules, and myriad other educational prescriptions, wheth-
er or not these treatments are appropriate in particular instances for particular
students. As a consequence, teachers cannot be held accountable for meeting
the needs of their students; they can only be held accountable for following standard
operating procedures. The standard for accountability is compliance rather than
effectiveness.
The problem with the bureaucratic solution to the accountability dilemma
in education is that effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive,
and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized. By its
very nature, bureaucratic management is incapable of providing appropriate
education for students who do not fit the mold on which all of the prescrip-
tions for practice are based.
PUBLIC VERSUS CLIENT ACCOUNTABILITY
At present, I think it is fair to say that the use of legal and bureaucratic
accountability mechanisms in education far outweighs the use of other
forms, and that these mechanisms have overextended their reach for actually
promoting positive practices and responsiveness to public and client needs.
This statement should not be glossed over too lightly, though, for public and
Accountability 65
client needs are not identical, and positive practices are defined in the eye
of the beholder. Indeed, there is a special tension in public education be-
tween the goals held by governments for public schools and the goals held
by the clients of schools, for which different forms of accountability are
needed. Because the needs, interests, and preferences of individual students
and parents do not always converge with the needs, interests, and prefer-
ences of state or local governments, the question of accountability in educa-
tion must always be prefaced by the questions “to whom?” and “for what?”
Public schools have been created primarily to meet the state’s need for an
educated citizenry. Indeed, public education is not so much a right accorded
to students as an obligation to which they are compelled by law. State goals
include (1) socialization to a common culture (education to meet social
needs); (2) inculcation of basic democratic values and preparation of students
to responsibly exercise their democratic rights and responsibilities (education
to meet political needs); and (3) preparation of students for further educa-
tion, training, and occupational life (education to meet economic needs). To
meet these goals, the state further defines what type of socialization is de-
sired, what manner of democratic preparation is to be given, and what forms
of preparation - forms useful to the state’s economic goals-are to be offered.’
Furthermore, the state has an interest in providing educational services
both equitably (sometimes, this state interest has had to be enforced by
courts when it is ignored by legislators) and efficiently, so that taxpayers’
burdens are not. excessive or their tax monies wasted. Since equity and
efficiency are difficult concepts to operationalize, they cause special account-
ability problems for bureaucrats and professionals to resolve. They also fre-
quently stand in conflict with the needs and interests of individual students,
as for example when “same” treatment does not produce appropriate treat-
ment, or when “efficient” education does not produce quality education.
Individual consumers (parents and students) often hold social, economic,
and political goals different from those of the state government, and they
very often disagree about how to pursue even the commonly held goals. Fur-
thermore, child-oriented definitions of student “needs” rarely match state
definitions, since the former are unique to the individual child, and the latter
are promulgated for all children in a state, or for specified groups of children.
These definitions continually confront a tension that Thomas Green refers
to as the dialectic between the “best” principle and the “equal” principle.* The
best principle is the proposition that each student is entitled to receive the
education that is best for him or her; the equal principle is the proposition
that each is entitled to receive an education at least as good as (equal to) that
provided for others. In translation through legal or bureaucratic vehicles,
“equal to” means “the same as,” since these vehicles must operate by uniform
standards. Efforts to individualize instruction through these vehicles invari-
ably must create groups of children, all of whom are then to be treated alike
(hence, the tendency to create identifiable subsets of children, by age, grade

level, measured ability, curriculum track, and so on). This may solve the
state’s problem of specifying inputs and desired outcomes, but it does not
solve the student’s or teacher’s problem that children will still, come what
may, fit untidily into the containers designed for them.
Thus, accountability for accomplishing state goals is a very different con-
cept from accountability for accomplishing clients’ goals. Indeed, account-
ability for meeting the needs of individual students is often in conflict-or
at least in tension -with accountability for securing the public’s preferences
for education. Teachers and public school officials are the arbiters of these
tensions. They strive to achieve a balance between meeting the state’s goals
and the needs of individual students. This requires a great deal of skill, sen-
sitivity, and judgment, since the dilemmas posed by these two sets of goals
are complex, idiosyncratic, and ever-changing.
Increasingly, though, attempts to provide public accountability have
sought to standardize school and classroom procedures in the hopes of find-
ing “one best system” by which all students may be educated. Codified by
law, and specified more completely by regulation, these attempts have both
“teacher-proofed” and “student-proofed” schooling, leaving little room for
innovation or improvement of education. Indeed, this approach is criticized
in recent reports as having created a situation in which “everyone has the
brakes but no one has the motors” to make schools run well.3
Ironically, prescriptive policies created in the name of public accountabil-
ity have begun to reduce schools’ responsiveness to the needs of students and
the desires of parents. In the cause of uniform treatment and in the absence
of schooling alternatives, large numbers of students “fall through the cracks”
when rules, routines, and standardized procedures prevent teachers from
meeting individual needs. Those who can afford to do so leave for private
schools. Those who cannot are frequently alienated and ill served.
The theory underlying the press for teacher professionalism is that
strengthening the structures and vehicles for creating and transmitting pro-
fessional knowledge will prove a more effective means for meeting students’
needs and improving the overall quality of education than trying to prescribe
educational practices from afar. This theory is based on a conception of
teaching as complex, knowledge-based work requiring judgment in nonrou-
tine situations and on a conception of learning as an interactive and indi-
vidually determined process. These conceptions limit the applicability of le-
gal and bureaucratic remedies for ensuring learning, by asserting the differ-
ential nature of effective interactions between teachers and learners that is
beyond the capacity of laws and regulations to predict or prescribe.
PROFESSIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Professionalism depends on the affirmation of three principles in the conduct

Accountability 67
and governance of an occupation:

1. Knowledge is the basis for permission to practice and for decisions
that are made with respect to the unique needs of clients.
2. The practitioner pledges his first concern to the welfare of the client.
3. The profession assumes collective responsibility for the definition,
transmittal, and enforcement of professional standards of practice and
ethics.
Professionals are obligated to do whatever is best for the client, not what
is easiest, most expedient, or even what the client himself or herself might
want. They are also obligated to base a decision about what is best for the
client on available knowledge-not just that knowledge acquired from per-
sonal experience, but also that clinical and research knowledge acquired by
the occupation as a whole and represented in professional journals, certifica-
tion standards, and specialty training. Finally, professionals are required to
take into account the unique needs of individual clients in fashioning their
judgments about what strategies or treatments are appropriate.
These are fine goals, but how are they operationalized to result in some-
thing that might be called professional accountability? In policy terms, these
requirements suggest greater regulation of teachers- ensuring their compe-
tence through more rigorous preparation, certification, selection, and evalu-
ation - in exchange for the deregulation of teaching- fewer rules prescribing
what is to be taught, when, and how. This is, in essence, the bargain that
all professions make with society: For occupations that require discretion and
judgment in meeting the unique needs of clients, the profession guarantees
the competence of members in exchange for the privilege of professional con-
trol over work structure and standards of practice.
The theory behind this equation is that professional control improves both
the quality of individual services and the level of knowledge in the profession
as a whole. This occurs because decision making by well-trained profession-
als allows individual clients’ needs to be met more precisely, and it promotes
continual refinement and improvement in overall practice as effectiveness,
rather than compliance, becomes the standard for judging competence.
It is important to note, too, that professional authority does not mean
legitimizing the idiosyncratic or whimsical preferences of individual class-
room teachers. Indeed, in other public-service occupations, autonomy is the
problem that professionalism is meant to address. It is precisely because prac-
titioners operate autonomously that safeguards to protect the public interest
are necessary. In occupations that have become professionalized, these safe-
guards have taken the form of screens to membership in the profession and
ongoing peer review of practice. Collective autonomy from external regula-
tion is achieved by the assumption of collective responsibility. Responsible
self-governance requires, in turn, structures and vehicles by which the pro-
fession can define and transmit its knowledge base, control membership in the
occupation, evaluate and reline its practices, and enforce norms of ethical practice.
In theory, then, teacher professionalism promises a more potent form of
accountability for meeting students’ needs than that which courts and
bureaucracies can concoct. It promises competence, an expanding knowl-
edge base, concern for client welfare, and vehicles for enforcing these claims.
In many respects, such accountability also serves the needs of the state by
promoting better practice; but, because professional accountability is expli-
citly client-oriented, it will not fully represent the preferences of the general
public. Hence, in working through a concept of professional accountability,
we must keep in mind its limits for achieving public accountability as well
as its promise.
THE NATURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY IN

PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE SCHOOLS
Professional practice schools have three missions with respect to account-

ability. First, they should model a professional form of accountability as it
might ultimately be seen in all schools. Second, as induction centers, they
implement a key accountability function for the profession as a whole. Third,
as knowledge-producing institutions, they support and help to build the
foundation on which professional accountability ultimately rests. These
missions, as suggested by the earlier-stated criteria for accountability mech-
anisms, require that professional development schools devote considerable
attention to defining educationally meaningful standards of practice, creating
reasonable meansfor upholding these standards, and establishing vehicles for
redressor corrections of problems that arise.
The goals of professional accountability are to protect the public by en-
suring that (1) all individuals permitted to practice in certain capacities are
adequately prepared to do so responsibly; (2) where knowledge about prac-
tice exists, it will be used, and where certainty does not exist, practitioners
will individually and collectively continually seek to discover the most re-
sponsible course of action; and (3) practitioners will pledge their first and pri-
mary commitment to the welfare of the client.
PREPARATION FOR RESPONSIBLE PRACTICE
The first of the goals listed above- that all individuals permitted to practice
are adequately prepared-is crucial to attaining the conditions for and bene-
fits of professionalism. So long as anyone who is not fully prepared is ad-
mitted to an occupation where autonomous practice can jeopardize the safety
of clients, the public’s trust is violated. So long as no floor is enforced on the
level of knowledge needed to teach, a professional culture in schools cannot
Accountability 69
long be maintained, for some practitioners will be granted control and auto-
nomy who are not prepared to exercise it responsibly.
Professional practice schools serve a crucial function in the preparation of
professional teachers. They are charged with completing the initial education
of prospective teachers, by ensuring that they have the tools to apply theory
in practice and by socializing them to professional norms and ethics. This
mission requires (1) a conception of the understanding and capabilities to be
acquired by novice teachers before they are allowed to practice autonomous-
ly; (2) means by which these understandings, including ethical and norma-
tive commitments, can be acquired with a high probability of success; and
(3) safeguards to ensure that those sent forth from such schools are adequate-
ly prepared. In addition, as models of responsible professionalism, these
schools must offer assurances to parents who send their children to such
schools that they will not be harmed by the (literal) practice of novices.
A Conception of Teaching
In highly developed professions, the knowledge expected to be acquired in
an apprenticeship or internship is decided by the profession through ac-
crediting bodies that sanction such programs and through certification ex-
aminations that are taken after the induction experience is completed. Until
such time as these professional structures are available in education, though,
professional practice schools will be at the forefront of defining what it is that
a teacher needs to know to safely practice without intensive supervision.
In pragmatic terms, this is where the first knotty challenge facing such
schools will arise. Although professionalism starts from the proposition that
knowledge must inform practice, teacher education is often denounced and
frequently avoided on the grounds that either it does not convey the knowl-
edge necessary for real teaching (alternative certification plans argue that
this can be acquired on the job), or that there is no knowledge base for teach-
ing anyway. Even trained and licensed teachers will come to their first teach-
ing experiences with variable levels and types of knowledge, given the diver-
sity of preparation experiences and the disparate standards for licensure both
within and across states.
In wrestling with a conception of teaching knowledge, then, professional
practice schools will form an implicit conception of their “curriculum” that
must be based on assumptions-sure to be violated-about what novice
teachers might already be expected to know. Even before they have begun,
such schools will have to decide whether they will assume the mission of pre-
paring, sometimes from "scratch,” the unprepared, or whether they will de-
velop some type of admissions standard that approximates a level of knowl-
edge upon which they feel they can successfully build. A possible middle
ground is that the school will diagnose novices’ knowledge at entry, requiring
supplemental coursework in specific areas where a minimal understanding

of rudiments of content or pedagogy has not yet been acquired.
This is more than an academic question, particularly for large city school
systems, which have many new entrants admitted on emergency or alterna-
tive certificates without prior teacher education, and others who are hired to
teach in fields for which they have not had complete subject matter prepara-
tion. The choices made in this regard will determine in many respects what
methods of preparation and levels of responsibility will be suitable for novice
teachers.
There are many statements possible about what kinds of understandings
and capabilities professional development schools should seek to exemplify
and impart. Shulman, for example, classifies the elements of teaching knowl-
edge as follows:
-content knowledge;
-general pedagogical knowledge, with special reference to those broad
principles and strategies of classroom management and organization
that appear to transcend subject matter;
-curriculum knowledge, with particular grasp of the materials and pro-
grams that serve as “tools of the trade” for teachers;
-pedagogical content knowledge, that special amalgam of content and
pedagogy that is uniquely the province of teachers, their own special
form of professional understanding;
-knowledge of learners and their characteristics;
-knowledge of educational contexts, ranging from the workings of the
group or classroom, the governance and financing of school districts, to
the character of communities and cultures; and
-knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values, and their philo-
sophical and historical grounds.4
To this list, I would add a grounding in professional ethics, so that teach-
ers can responsibly resolve dilemmas of teaching practice. The goal, as
Shulman puts it, “is not to indoctrinate or train teachers to behave in pre-
scribed ways, but to educate teachers to reason soundly about their teaching
as well as to perform skillfully."5
Whatever the precise definition of knowledge that is arrived at, the pro-
fessional development school must have in mind what its expectations are for
the understandings that undergird professional practice. It is on this basis
that the school selects its staff, develops its program for induction, and as-
sesseswhether novices have been adequately prepared to practice autonomously.
Structuring Professional Practice

The basic task here is constructing an organization that will seek, transmit,
and use knowledge as a basis for teaching decisions; that will support inquiry
Accountability 71
and consultation and maintain a primary concern for student welfare. Be-
cause knowledge is constantly expanding, problems of practice are complex,
and ethical dilemmas result from conflict between legitimate goals, the es-
tablishment of professional norms cannot be satisfied by prescriptions for
practice or unchanging rules of conduct. Instead, the transmission of these
norms must be accomplished by socialization to a professional standard that
incorporates continual learning, reflection, and concern with the multiple effects
of one’s actions on others as fundamental aspects of the professional role.
For a professional development school, the accountability dilemmas asso-
ciated with structuring practice are at least twofold:
1. How can the school guarantee that novices are given adequate prepa-
ration?
2. How can the school encourage the use of appropriate practices for all
children it serves?
The induction mission of the school ought to warrant that those working
with new teachers are themselves exemplars of good teaching; that the ex-
periences of the new teachers will be structured to explicitly address the
understandings they are expected to acquire; and that some means for as-
sessing the progress of new teachers are used.
Faculty who are engaged in the induction of new teachers may or may not
be all of the faculty employed in a professional development school. If the
school is to be an exemplar of good practice, certainly all of the staff must
be committed to the tenets of professionalism and the goals of the school.
Those who are specifically charged with the preparation of new teachers
must themselves meet the standards of teaching knowledge and disposition
toward which new teachers strive. This suggests that these faculty will be
carefully selected for their capacities to teach adults as well as children. Selec-
tion should be conducted by other teaching professionals according to the
standards earlier defined. If the school is to model professional account-
ability, selection by peers according to professional standards is a funda-
mental feature of the professionalization process.
What distinguishes the form of professional preparation envisioned here
from the usual approaches to teacher induction is that, because a standard
of practice is envisioned and articulated, haphazard or idiosyncratic training
and experiences will be insufficient to guarantee that the standard has been
met. Consequently, pairing of a beginning teacher with a mentor in a single
class setting is not adequate to the task. The school must structure the experi-
ences of beginning teachers so that they encounter a range of teaching situa-
tions and acquire a set of teaching and decision-making abilities. This sug-
gests that the school has an explicit curriculum for beginning teachers com-
posed of (1) formal instructional experiences, such as seminars, clinical con-
ferences, readings, and observations of other teachers; and (2) clinical exper-
iences in which the beginning teacher, under supervision, systematically en-

counters and examines the major domains of teaching knowledge.
In order to safeguard the welfare of students and facilitate the learning of
novice teachers, beginning teachers should not have sole responsibility for a
standard teaching load; they need to be given an appropriate and graduated
degree of responsibility for teaching students and the opportunity to review
major teaching decisions with expert faculty. Indeed, important decisions
about students should not be made in isolation. The requirement for consul-
tation is both a protection for students and a means of transmitting knowl-
edge; it is also a means for socializing new teachers to norms of inquiry and
collaboration.
In addition, beginning teachers should acquire experience with a variety
of students and types of classes. To develop generalizable teaching skills and
the ability to exercise judgment in diverse teaching situations, new teachers
should learn to work with students at different cognitive stages and per-
formance levels, from differing family backgrounds, and in different subject
areas within the disciplinary or grade-level domain.
Finally, accountability for performing the training mission must be
secured by assessing new teachers’ progress toward the acquisition of profes-
sional knowledge and norms of conduct. Such assessment should be the basis
for decisions about according additional responsibility for students to devel-
oping teachers and about “certifying” that novices are sufficiently prepared
at the close of their experience to practice autonomously. At minimum, this
process should include frequent feedback to new teachers, establishment of
opportunities to acquire those skills not yet adequately mastered, and consul-
tation at regular intervals.
The conditions for responsible practice in a professional development
school obviously must include structures that promote inquiry and consulta-
tion among the faculty as a whole, not just those immediately engaged in
supervising novices. Teacher isolation promotes idiosyncratic practice and
works against the development and transmission of shared knowledge.
Changing the egg-crate classroom structure and the groupings of students
and teachers that maintain isolation will require major changes in teaching
arrangements to promote team efforts and legitimize shared time. Many pos-
sibilities for reorganizing instruction, such as those pursued in the Coalition
of Essential Schools6 and other similar initiatives, can be considered. With
respect to the accountability question, several features of school structure are
particularly important:
the extent to which the organization of instruction fosters responsibility for
individual students, that is, client-oriented accountability
the extent to which the school structure fosters the use of professional
knowledge beyond that represented in the experiences of individual teachers
Accountability 73
the extent to which the school structure supports continual self-evaluation

and review of practice
Client-oriented accountability requires that teachers primarily teach stu-

dents rather than teaching courses, that they attend more to learning than to
covering a curriculum. If teachers are to be responsible for students and for
learning, they must have sufficient opportunities to come to know students’
minds, learning styles, and psychological dispositions, and they must be able
to focus on student needs and progress as the benchmark for their activities.
This seems obvious, but it is improbable, if not impossible, as schools are
now structured. The current structure assures that specific courses and curri-
cula will be offered and students will pass through them, usually encounter-
ing different teachers from grade to grade and course to course, succeeding
or failing as they may. This system does not offer accountability for student
learning, only for the processing of students.
Client accountability entails at least two implications for the organization
of schooling: that teachers will stay with students for longer periods of time
(hours in the day and even years in the course of a school career) so that they
may come to know what students’ needs are, and that school problem solving
will be organized around the individual and collective needs of students
rather than around program definitions, grades, tracks, and labels.
Use of professional knowledge poses other requirements: that decision
making be conducted on the basis of available professionwide knowledge, not
on the basis of individual proclivity or opinion, even collective opinion.
When most schools do not even stock professional journals in their libraries,
the challenge implied by this requirement is profound. In addition to shared
time and expectations of consultation and collective decision making, vehi-
cles must be found for teachers in professional development schools to have
access to the knowledge bases relevant to their work and to particular, imme-
diate problems of teaching practice. Linkages to universities and access to
professional development opportunities go part way toward solving this
problem, but more is needed. Professional practice schools may need to
create their own research teams to examine and augment available knowl-
edge if practice is to be thus grounded.
Research in the professional development school setting serves an impor-
tant function for the development of knowledge, but it poses dangers as well.
Experimentation can harm students, if it is conducted without care and
appropriate safeguards. Too much innovation for its own sake can result in
faddism and lack of a coherent philosophy over time and across classrooms
in a school. Thus, research in the professional development school must also
be subject to careful faculty deliberation as to its necessity, desirability, and
probable effects on children; to monitoring while in progress; and to the in-
formed consent of parents.
Finally, ongoing review of practice is central to the operation of profes-

sional organizations. This evaluative function serves the joint purposes of
monitoring organizational activities and establishing a continuous dialogue
about problems of practice among the practitioners themselves. The very
distant analogue in school systems is program evaluation, an activity gen-
erally conducted by central office researchers who report findings to govern-
ment sponsors and school board members. Teachers are neither the major
producers nor consumers of such information. Hence, neither they nor their
students are the major beneficiaries of such evaluation results.
Teachers must wrestle with and take responsibility for resolving imme-
diate, concrete problems of teaching practice if teaching lore is ever to be
transformed into meaningful professional standards. One could envision
many methods for achieving this. Standing committees-such as those used
in hospitals could meet regularly to review practices in various subject areas
or grade levels, or to examine other functional areas: academic progress;
grading policies; student and teacher assignments to particular courses, pro-
grams, or teams; development of student responsibility; organization of in-
struction; and so on. Or more flexible approaches might be tried. Ad hoc re-
search committees might be formed to examine particular problems, both as
they manifest in the school and as they have been addressed by research.
Faculty meetings could be used to investigate curricular strategies and other
matters within and across departments or grade levels. What is critical is that
teachers have both time to pursue these evaluations as part of their role
(rather than as “released” or extracurricular time) and authority to make
changes based on their collective discoveries.
One other point is worth making here: These evaluative and decision-
making functions should be engaged in by all of the teachers within the
school, including the novices in training. Some proposals for “teacher leader-
ship” envision a small cadre of lead teachers or master teachers who partake
of administrative decision-making authority, while everyone else goes on
about their work. The trickle-down theory of expertise does not presume a
professional standard for all teachers; professional accountability does.
Teachers will learn to weigh and balance considerations, to inquire, consult,
and make collaborative decisions, to use and develop teaching knowledge to
the extent that they are expected to do so. Socialization into these norms of
inquiry and collaboration must be part of the preparation of beginning
teachers and part of the daily life of all teachers if they are to begin to per-
meate the profession.
Safeguardsfor Professional Practice

Even with all of the professional accountability mechanisms described above,
there are dangers that the needs of some students will not be diagnosed or
fully met, that the concerns or preferences of parents will be inadequately
Accountability 75
attended to, that through the continual juggling of multiple and competing
goals some will be lost in the effort to secure others. Members of a profession,
while setting their own standards, cannot seal themselves off too tightly from
public scrutiny or from their clientele. When they do, they endanger their
rights to self-governance, as other professions have discovered in recent years.
A number of means for providing safeguards and voice for clients and the
public will have to be considered and shaped to fit the requirements for a
professional development school:
hierarchical regulation, which expresses the contract made between a state
or district and its populace
personnel evaluation, which establishes avenues for ensuring faculty
competence
participation and review procedures for parents, which create clear and
meaningful avenues for expression of parent views and concerns
reporting vehicles, which transmit the accomplishments of students in the
school to parents and the general public
Standard practices in each of these areas are inadequate to provide gen-
uine accountability. In many cases, standard practice also undermines pro-
fessional practice. New contracts must be forged with states, districts, teach-
er associations, parents, and the public. A full exploration of the content of
these new contracts is beyond the scope of this article, but the nature of the
terrain is sketched briefly in what follows.
The problems associated with hierarchical regulation of teaching have
been articulated earlier. In school bureaucracies, authority for decisions and
responsibility for practice are widely separated, usually by many layers of
hierarchy. Boards and central administrators make decisions while teachers,
principals, and students are responsible for carrying them out. It is for this
reason that accountability for results is hard to achieve. ‘When the desired
outcomes of hierarchically imposed policies are not realized, policymakers
blame the school people responsible for implementation; practitioners blame
their inability to devise or pursue better solutions on the constraints of
policy. No one can be fully accountable for the results of practice when
authority and responsibility are dispersed.
Yet policymakers have a responsibility to ensure fairness in the delivery
of educational services, and district officials are liable for the actions of
schools residing within their jurisdictions. Not all regulations can be dis-
pensed with in the cause of professional practice. A heuristic is needed for
sorting those regulations that must be observed from those that must be rene-
gotiated or waived. As a first step, it is useful to divide responsibilities into
those that must be centrally administered and those that, by their nature,
cannot be effectively administered in a hierarchical fashion.
Wise offers a useful distinction between equity and productivity concerns.

The former generally must be resolved by higher units of governance, since
they “arise out of the conflicting interests of majorities and minorities and of
the powerful and powerless. Because local institutions are apparently the
captives of majoritarian politics, they intentionally and unintentionally dis-
criminate. Consequently, we must rely upon the policymaking system to
solve problems of inequity in the operating education system.“’ On the other
hand, productivity questions cannot be solved by regulation, since the ap-
propriate use of teaching knowledge is highly individualized, while policies
are necessarily uniform and standardized. Thus, policy decisions about
methods of teaching and schooling processes cannot ever meet the demands
of varying school and student circumstances. These require renegotiation for
the accommodation of professional practice.
Personnel evaluation, by this rubric, falls in the domain of professional de-
termination. This could lead to its substantial improvement or to its avoid-
ance and demise. This is a critical function of a profession, as the first
promise a profession makes is oversight of competence to practice. The
shortcomings of traditional evaluation practices and the outlines of more pro-
ductive professional practices are described in detail elsewhere.* In brief,
these entail increased peer involvement in design and implementation of
evaluation, and separation of the processes for encouraging professional
learning from those for making personnel decisions (by committee and with
attention to objectivity and due process safeguards). All of this is more easily
said than done, however, and the resolution of issues regarding collective
bargaining relationships, appropriate roles for administrators and teachers,
and political turf battles will require courage and leadership from teachers.
Parent voice is particularly important and problematic for a professional
development school. In the first place, the unique qualities of the school will
be uncomfortable for some parents. In addition, professional practice must
be guided, to the extent possible, by knowledge, even where that conflicts
with client preferences. On the other hand, best practice is never absolute
or fully informed by research; it is a matter of judgment and frequently
unique to the individual child, about whom the parent has substantial knowl-
edge. The multiple goals of schooling will often stand in tension with one
another. Parents must have a voice in determining the balance among goals
as they are compelled by the state to entrust their children to schools. Thus,
parent voice must be secured in a fashion that few schools have yet managed.
The first requirement, I believe, is that professional development schools
must, for their clientele as well as their faculties, be schools of choice. No
child should be compelled by neighborhood residence or other criterion to
attend the school, although attendance should be open for those in the com-
munity who desire it. This both safeguards the rights of parents and students
to voice their preferences for a form of education with which they feel com-
fortable and protects the school from the task of satisfying a clientele that
might otherwise have widely differing and even opposing points of view. It
also provides the school with information, legitimacy, and a form of external
review. If schools of choice are chosen, they are legitimized; if they are not,
self-examination is required.
Beyond choice, which is the easy part of the answer, parent voice can be
fostered by (1) school structures for shared governance, (2) accessible review
and appeals processes, and (3) parent involvement in decision making about
individual children. Structures for shared governance, such as school-com-
munity councils, can provide a vehicle for the shared interests of the parent
community to find legitimized and regular expression in the school context.
Perhaps the most proactive form of shared governance among parents,
teachers, and administrators is seen in Salt Lake City, where decision-mak-
ing turf that is the joint domain of parents and faculty (e.g., the school sched-
ule, discipline policies, and curricular emphases) is delegated to councils for
determination by consensus and parity vote.9
Mechanisms for review and appeal of specific concerns and complaints by
a neutral third party supplement the shared governance mechanism, by pro-
viding a clear avenue for the resolution of individual problems. These mech-
anisms also provide information and external review for the school as a
whole. Finally, the expectation that parents will be included in discussions
of important decisions concerning their children prevents the insulation of
the professional decision-making process from exposure to the real-world cir-
cumstances and concerns of families and communities.
The issue that most tie knots in discussions of accountability is the ques-
tion of how individual and school expectations and accomplishments can be
transmitted in an educationally productive manner to parents, students, and
the public at large. Because school goals are numerous, diffuse, and difficult
to quantify, simple statements of objectives and results can never completely
capture what schools do or what their students accomplish. The counter-
productive outcomes for instruction of mindlessly adopting simple perform-
ance measures, such as averages of student achievement test scores, have
been well documented.” Though less discussed, even student grading mech-
anisms can work against student success. The assumption behind grading
schemes that students are to be ranked against each other and that their ac-
complishments can be captured in a single letter or number can trivialize the
educational strivings of individual students and undermine their motivation
and self-esteem, activating the Pygmalion principle rather than supporting
learning.
Yet reporting vehicles serve an important accountability function by giv-
ing information to parents and policymakers about school practices and stu-
dent progress. The press for such information is increasing and cannot be
avoided. Professional practice schools must be at the forefront of efforts to
devise educationally productive means for reporting what they and their stu-
dents do. Untangling this knotty problem is well beyond the scope of this
article, but I can point to a few promising directions.
Recent emphasis in a few school restructuring efforts on “high-fidelity”
representations of student accomplishments-demonstrations, exhibitions,
and projects, for example-seeks more valid and less artificial tools for edu-
cational assessment. Narrative reports of student progress accompanied by
cumulative portfolios can better represent what a student has learned than
a letter grade. Such forms also better represent what the teacher and school
have sought to accomplish by depicting the form of instruction as well. Much
can be learned from the assessment systems of other countries, which stress
these kinds of representations of learning as a means for both reporting out-
comes and supporting meaningful and useful education.”
Ultimately, though, to satisfy the press for public accountability, entirely
new means of reporting the aggregate accomplishments of students in a
school will need to be developed. This puzzle is one that professional devel-
opment schools will undoubtedly encounter before they, or the profession,
have developed a complete answer to it.
POSTSCRIPT
Professional accountability seeks to support practices that are client-oriented
and knowledge-based. It starts from the premise that parents, when they are
compelled to send their children to a public school, have a right to expect
that they will be under the care of competent people who are committed to
using the best knowledge available to meet the individual needs of those chil-
dren. This is a different form of accountability than that promised by legal
and bureaucratic mechanisms, which assure that when goals have been
established, rules will be promulgated and enforced.
Professional accountability assumes that, since teaching work is too com-
plex to be hierarchically prescribed and controlled, it must be structured so
that practitioners can make responsible decisions, both individually and col-
lectively. Accountability is provided by rigorous training and careful selec-
tion, serious and sustained internships for beginners, meaningful evaluation,
opportunities for professional learning, and ongoing review of practice. By
such means, professionals learn from each other, norms are established and
transmitted, problems are exposed and tackled, parents’ concerns are heard,
and students’ needs are better met.
In such a system, parents can expect that no teacher will be hired who has
not had adequate training in how to teach, no teacher will be permitted to
practice without supervision until he or she has mastered the professional
knowledge base and its application, no teacher will be granted tenure who
has not fully demonstrated his or her competence, and no decision about stu-
Accountability 79
dents will be made without adequate knowledge of good practice in light of

students needs. Establishing professional norms of operation, by the vehicles
outlined above, creates as well a basis for parent input and standards and
methods for redress of unsuitable practice that do not exist in a bureaucratic
system of school administration.
This work is not easy, and will not be accomplished quickly. As Clark and
Meloy have noted:
We counsel patience in the development of and experimentation with
new organizational forms. We have been patient and forgiving of our
extant form. Remember that new forms will also be ideal forms. Do not
press them immediately to their point of absurdity. Bureaucracy as an
ideal form became tempered by adjectival distinctions-bounded, con-
tingent, situational. New forms need to be granted the same exceptions
as they are proposed and tested. No one seriously imagines a utopian
alternative to bureaucracy. But realistic alternatives can be formed that
consistently trade off control for freedom, the organization for the in-
dividual. And they can be built upon the principle of the consent of the
governed.12
This, in sum, is the challenge that faces professional development schools.
Notes
1 Arthur E. Wise and Linda Darling-Hammond, “Education by Voucher: Private Choice
and the Public Interest,” Educational Theory 34, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 29-47.
2 Thomas F. Green, Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1980).
3 Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, A Nation Prepared: Teachersfor the 21st
Century (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1986), p. 89.
4 Lee Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform,” Harvard
Educational Review 57, no. 1 (February 1987): 8.
5 Ibid., p. 13.
6 See, for example, Ron Brandt, “On Changing Secondary Schools: A Conversation with
Ted Sizer,” Educational Leadership 45 (February 1988): 30-36.
7 Arthur E. Wise, Legislated Learning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p.
206.
8 Linda Darling-Hammond, “A Proposal for Evaluation in the Teaching Profession,”
Elementary School Journal 86, no. 4 (March 1986): 1-21.
9 Arthur E. Wise, Linda Darling-Hammond, Milbrey Wallin McLaughlin, and Harriet
T. Bernstein, Teacher Evaluation: A Study of Effective Practices (Santa Monica, Calif.: The RAND
Corporation, 1984).
10 Walt Haney and George Madaus, “Effects of Standardized Testing and the Future of
the National Assessment of Educational Progress” (Working paper for the NAEP Study Group,
Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy, Boston College, Chestnut
Hill, MA, 1986); and Linda Darling-Hammond and Arthur E. Wise, ‘Beyond Standardiza-
tion: State Standards and School Improvement,” The Elementary SchoolJournal 85, no. 3 (1985):
315-36.
11 See, for example, Doug A. Archbald and Fred M. Newmann, Beyond Standardized Test-
ing: Assessing Achievement in the Secondary School (Reston Va.: National Association of Secondary
School Principals, 1988); Educational Testing Service, Assessment in the Service of Learning
(Princeton, N.J.: ETS, 1988); Bobby Fong, The External Examiner Approach to Assessment
(Washington, D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 1987); and Clare Burstall,
“Innovative Forms of Assessment: A United Kingdom Perspective,” Educational Measurement:
Issues and Practice, Spring 1986, pp. 17-22.
12 D. L. Clark and J. M. Meloy, “Recanting Bureaucracy: A Democratic Structure for
Leadership in Schools” (unpublished manuscript, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.,
October 1987), p. 40.

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The Professional Life Cycle of Teachers

Life-cycle research has been around, to be sure, since philosophers and

GENERAL TRENDS IN THE LITERATURE

THE “CAREER” AS A CONCEPTUAL LENS

Much of the seminal work on career development has sought, in effect, to

is, individuals having no, or very little, administrative responsibility during

THE TEACHING CAREER: “‘PHASES” IN THE EMPIRICAL

Survival and Discovery

definitive commitment to this profession) and to an administrative act (an

Taking Stock: Self-Doubts

A ROUGH-AND-READY SYNTHESIS OF TRENDS

Having, at several points, underlined the tentative, often fragmentary na-

1-3 Career entry: “Survival”

19-30 Serenity/ Relational Conservatism

Figure 1. Successive themes of the teacher career cycle:

Experimentation › Serenity › (serene) Disengagement

I will return to these career scenarios shortly, as it becomes apparent whether

THE LIFE-CYCLE STUDY IN SWITZERLAND

OF PHASES AND STAGES

1-6 Easy beginnings (n = 5) Painful beginnings (n = 6)

good contacts-pupils overwhelming: anxiety

4-8 formal appointment (tenure)

6-10 diversification administrative classes more

FOUR MODAL SEQUENCES

SEQUENCE 1. HARMONY RECOVERED (5-10 and 11-19 years of

Painful beginnings › Stabilization › Experimentation

SEQUENCE 2. REASSESSMENT AND SELF-DOUBT (5-10 and 11-19

Painful beginnings › Stabilization › Reassessment/self-doubts

SEQUENCE 3. REASSESSMENT: RESOLUTION AND NONRESO-

who have changed classrooms (taking on older or younger pupils), sections

manic phase of combative involvement, headlong innovation, unbridled

SEQUENCE 4. RENEWAL, with a positive or negative issue (11-19,

(Several paths: -› Ren esp. “Promotion”)

This is the most representative trajectory, at least within the sequence

many of their American counterparts, “moved on” to coordinating or ad-

CORROBORATING TRENDS: “CAREER SATISFACTION,”

So tinkering, together with an early concern for instructional efficiency

2a. Ultimately, the results of well-designed innovations are worth the

3a. Teaching is probably the most important activity in my life.

The purpose of this award is to stimulate worldwide the dissemination, public

accompanied by an English translation. All nominations and supporting materials

The issue of educational accountability is probably the most pressing and

Teachers College Record Volume 91, Number 1, Fall 1989

THE GOALS OF ACCOUNTABILITY

In the current debates about accountability, cacophony rules. There is little

Social transactions in our society are managed in a variety of ways, ultimate-

overloaded; bureaucrats may fail to follow regulations; professionals may

In education, it is easy to see that legal and bureaucratic forms of accounta-

Bureaucratic organization and management of schools has increased since

than as well-trained and highly skilled professionals. Little investment is

PUBLIC VERSUS CLIENT ACCOUNTABILITY

(hence, the tendency to create identifiable subsets of children, by age, grade

Professionalism depends on the affirmation of three principles in the conduct

and governance of an occupation:

THE NATURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY IN

Professional practice schools have three missions with respect to account-

PREPARATION FOR RESPONSIBLE PRACTICE

supplemental coursework in specific areas where a minimal understanding

Structuring Professional Practice