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Title: The segmentation of teacher professionalisation
Citation Type: Book, Section
Publication Year: 2022
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Abstract: The United States has a highly decentralised system of schools, rooted in the nation’s rural beginnings, and there has never been a central governmental agency regulating teachers’ professional status (Sedlak, 1989; Ingersoll & Collins, 2018). This has had important implications for the expansion of its teaching force, and for patterns of segmentation and differentiation within it. In this chapter, we examine these aspects of the teaching profession during the period from the mid-twentieth century to beyond the year 2000. We utilise data from the decennial national census and government publications. In this manner, we are able to identify key steps and stages in the development of teaching as a distinctive profession in the United States, and the manifold ways that it has been segmented. Segmentation has been discernible in multiple dimensions among American teachers, and it has changed over time. Its various facets have included regional differences in professional standing and social status; urban-rural distinctions in the same; distinctions between primary and secondary teachers; and different degrees of professional stature between men and women, and between different racial and ethnic groups. Furthermore, the salience of such lines of segmentation has shifted, largely in response to economic development, market forces in the demand for teachers, and historical patterns of discrimination along lines of gender, race and ethnicity. Altogether, a general process of convergence has made regional differences less important, along with gender distinctions, while urban-metropolitan-rural and racial/ethnic lines of segmentation have become somewhat more noteworthy. These changes reflected larger shifts in the regional and metropolitan organisation of the American economy and its education system since the nineteenth century (Saatcioglu & Rury, 2012).
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Authors: Rury, John L.; Hurst, Jennifer
Editors: Dumay, Xavier; Burn, Katharine
Pages: 38-61
Volume Title: The Status of the Teaching Profession: Interactions Between Historical and New Forms of Segmentation
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education
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