The current press for market-based approaches to reform of teacher education is part of larger movement to privatize health, education, and many other public and consumer services. As proponents of privatization (whom I refer to here as marketeers) often point out in articles and commentaries in outlets such as Chester Finn's Education Next, (1) success of market-based approaches is entirely dependent upon and a strong competitive environment. A bold statement of basics of marketbased reforms appears in an Education Next commentary by Frederick Hess (2001) explains why a approach to reforming schools has thus far not been successful. Hess's article is replete with melodramatic mixed metaphors about schools and schooling--straightjacketed public schools with no watchdog shareholders, need to allow to bloom and thrive by shattering constraints, and school systems strangled by politics and bureaucracy. Hess complains that conditions that make work--investors looking for maximum financial returns, employees motivated by monetary incentives, and managers authorized to make immediate personnel decisions--are almost nonexistent (p. 1) in schools and other public or charitable efforts, especially those devoted to tending needs of children of disadvantaged (p. 3). From a market-based perspective, Hess article (2001) claims that there are several key factors that keep from being a effective tool for school reform. One of these is that are attracted to education for its child-centered, humanistic, and autonomous character (p. 7)--a very unfortunate state of affairs, according to Hess, because it means they do not respond effectively to competition. To unleash market bulldozer into school reform (the kind that compels businesses to improve constantly--or be crushed) (p. 4), Hess asserts that there would have to be fundamental change in culture of schools. Based on premise that competition is fundamentally about and that power of in education is that fear for their investments or their jobs (p. 5), Hess offers a simple solution: The simplest way to strengthen is to make it threatening. Public school employees are concerned about losing their jobs, desirable assignments, or material rewards are much likely to cooperate with efforts to respond to a competitive threat. (pp. 7-8) In concluding, Hess speculates that discipline of would work best in large chains of for-profit schools that would attract a new breed of teachers who care about individual rewards and material incentives and are motivated by being part of a system more reliant on self-interest (p. 9). Presumably this new breed of teachers would not be like those whom Hess criticizes earlier in his article--the kind enter teaching because they are committed to children or for other idealistic reasons. There are many possible critiques of Hess's (2001) article, not least of which is to excoriate its patronizing tone about the disadvantaged, which pairs public education with charity, and its utter failure to acknowledge covenant to provide quality education to all participants in our society, which is a bedrock of a democracy. In this editorial, however, I want to concentrate on exquisite and deeply disturbing irony of Hess's analysis of teachers and teaching--an analysis that is simultaneously so right and so wrong. Hess is absolutely right when he says that teachers are often attracted to profession for reasons that are not about money or self-interested career advancement but are, instead, about children and what Hess calls humanistic reasons. The irony, of course, is that, at same time that he is right about why many people go into teaching, Hess is dead wrong about fundamental nature of activity of teaching and about how to fix schools and schooling. …
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Sep 18, 2023
Salma Soliman 
Open Access