As a group, what do teachers believe about religion, freedom of speech, family values, and economic inequality? Do they lean to the left or the right?
Robert Slater of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette dug into the treasure trove of statistics that is the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey to see what he could learn about teachers and their beliefs, and reports his findings in the new Education Next. Surprise: “liberal” teachers are more likely to attend church and want to ban pornography than non-teachers. They’re also more likely to oppose legal abortion. Teachers are less likely than other educated Americans to believe that homosexual relations are “not wrong at all.” The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher thinks the results show teachers are “wary of material that they believe can and does hurt children.”
Teachers are a fairly homogeneous bunch. There are more Americans teaching than doing any other kind of work—about 3.5 million people. Three out of four are women, and they earn nearly very close to the national average salary for workers with a college degree. Less than ten percent of U.S. teachers are African American, compared to about 13 percent of all Americans and 16 percent of their students. Their median age is 46.
“Though better educated Americans tend to be more liberal, teachers appear to be somewhat of an exception,” writes Slater. “On homosexuality and abortion, teachers tend to be more liberal than less educated Americans but more conservative than those with high levels of education.” But teachers are optimists, happily. About 69 percent believe the world is more good than evil, compared to about 53 percent of other Americans.
Update: Nice observation by Joanne Jacobs on this at Britannica Blog: “Most teachers aren’t trying to tear down the system,” she writes. “They are the system. “
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The Princeton Alumni Weekly has named Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp its 13th most influential alumni of all time (thanks, eduwonk, for the find). I admire her as much as anyone – although clearly not as much as the Princeton alums who put together this list – but it’s curious to look at the venerable names staring up the ladder at Kopp.
Ralph Nader, whose bona fides as a consumer advocate should have secured his place even before the 2000 election, made The Atlantic’s recent list of 100 most influential Americans ever, but that’s not good enough for Princeton. He’s tied at #25 with Donald Rumsfeld, who can thank Nader and the Floridians who voted for him, for his second tour as Secretary of Defense. Richard Feynman? The atomic bomb, quantum computing and nanotechnology? Less influential than TFA. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com? Barely in Kopp’s rearview mirror at #20. But shed no tears for any of them. Save your sympathy for eBay boss Meg Whitman. She gave Princeton $30 million to build a new residential house, named Whitman College, and didn’t even make the list.
Finally, someone needs to click over to Wikipedia’s list of Princeton University people as soon as possible and do a little editing. It’s a Who’s Who featuring hundreds of heads of state, governors, U.S. Senators, Supreme Court Justices, and bold-face names from literature, business, science, math and academia. One name is conspicuous in its absence, however: Wendy Kopp.
Must have been asleep at the switch last week. How else to explain missing the news that Chicago is planning to fire hundreds of teachers and close eight chronically lousy schools—two high schools and the elementary schools that feed into them. A followup story in today’s Tribune puts the stunningly ambitious plan in perspective. “No one knows if turnarounds work,” Andrew Calkins of the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute tells the paper. “We spent two years looking at turnarounds and could not find a single example of turnaround work that was successful and sustained and done on scale, not just one school.”
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