Adam Ozimek argues that educators get more love than many realize:
The truth is that teaching is still a highly respected career, and we still lionize teachers in this country. One piece of evidence for this comes from a Harris Interactive poll that has asked the following question sporadically from 1977 to 2009:
I am going to read off a number of different occupations. For each, would you tell me if you feel it is an occupation of very great prestige, considerable prestige, some prestige or hardly any prestige at all?
So how do you think teachers have faired on this survey? It turns out the do quite well. As of 2009, 51 percent of respondents thought teachers had “very great prestige” and another 22 percent thought they had considerable prestige. This is compared to 17 percent and 22 percent for journalists, and 44 percent and 24 percent for police. Judging by the “very great prestige” percentage, teachers rank 6th under firefighters, scientists, doctors, nurse, and military officer. Only 10 percent of individuals thought teachers had hardly any prestige at all.
Freddie counters that while the American public may hold teachers high in esteem, the country’s elites do not:
Ozimek has repeatedly denied to me that the Ivy League striver types that are at the pinnacle of American aspirational culture have a low view of teaching as a profession. But we can let the people within those institutions speak for themselves. Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James Ryan — who, I presume, Ozimek would recognize as knowledgeable on this topic – says that only a minuscule percentage of Harvard students study education, despite the fact that almost 20 percent of Harvard students apply for Teach for America. And Walter Isaacson, who as president of the Aspen Institute has plenty of exposure to both educational research and elite culture, is quoted as saying there’s a perception that “it’s beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school to train teachers.” That’s reflected in institutional behavior: Cornell has stopped providing undergraduate teacher training. That actual institutional behavior tells us far more about what elites think of teaching than polling could.
The Dish 