Whatever the pay scale, few jobs seem more quintessentially middle class than teaching. No one ever gets rich as a teacher. Still, while it’s relatively low on the professional ladder, teaching is a bona fide career in a society where the middle is being whittled out of existence. Teachers are still generally on the right side of a jagged economic divide in that we receive salaries (not hourly wages), health care benefits, and paid vacation—a particularly prized perk of unusual duration. Teaching has been an actual profession for a little over a century now, a development spurred by a series of convergent phenomena: a Progressive movement that spurred professionalization in many occupations; the emergence of schools of education offering graduate degrees; and an influx of men taking what has often been considered “women’s work.”
As with so many other occupations in the twenty-first century, the economic foundations of teaching have been eroding, however, particularly in the growing number of communities quietly buckling under economic stress, as well as those insisting on quantitative measures of student performance as a basis of future employment. There have, moreover, always been tiers that fall short of steady, secure employment — teaching assistant jobs, substitute teaching, sabbatical or maternity leave appointments, and the like. Some of these occasionally lead to a full-time slot, but it’s in the very nature of such positions that nothing is guaranteed. We can’t escape — do we really want to escape? — hierarchical tiers in even the most level of socioeconomic landscapes.