one thing I kept wondering is:
I wonder why teaching didn't follow the model of other professions where they realy do have people's lives in their hands: doctors, mechanical engineers, dentists, nurses, psychotherapists, even software engineers all do things and build things from which people actually die or are maimed. And yet we don't tend to have the same response to these professions as we do teachers. (I wonder how much we really buy into the idea that we need the market to control people in this debate. IOW, what about private school teachers: surely there are bad ones there, we've heard the horror stories, no? Sadists one and all at boarding schools, nO? :)
I think it's very much about the way other professions organized and demanded that no one had a right to judge their work - even in spite of being in control of people's very lives: a doctor can kill you, a therapist can give you ambien causing you to sleep drive and kill 3 people, an engineer can build a bridge that collapses or buggy software that fails and kills people.
doctors, dentists, attorneys, engineers, nursing - all went the route of professionalizing. that is, when confronted with complaints from the public that their practice was harmful, and when the government got involved or threatened to, professional organizations emerged in order to do a number of things, among which:
1. professionalize: weed out bad practitioners from good. this sounds reasonable, until you think about the context within which, say, doctors did this. on the basis of zero scientific evidence to back up their claim to superior knowledge (see Thomas Haskell's study, Charles Bosk's ethnography), they insisted that they knew better than did midwives, etc.
2. certify: to assure the public and government that practitioners had gone through training and that training to demand professionalization
3. mobilize: emergence of professional associations to to explain to the public that they were only there for the good and to lobby the government to make sure that laws were created to advance their interests, as well as to shape and design, to their interests, any regulatory agencies and laws.
4. Propagandize: speak to the broad public to shape their views about the profession, to demonize those who dared intrude on their practice, etc.
5. self regulate: insist that the only people who could ever judge them were other professionals. Lay people - no matter what their authority in government, in another profession, as managers or owners of institutions for which they work, clergy - no one had authority to determine if they were a good practitioner. Clearly, there are some checks on this power, but people who have life and death in their hands, doctors, and who harm people in ways far more egregious than any one was ever harmed by a bad math teacher, do not have the same demands placed on them.
There's a reason this happened -- and I don't think it has to do with the "who" is effected by the practitioner -- not a legitimate reason at any rate. there's a reason why people think they have a right to run the show in the classroom, to decide that teachers are bad, to judge their work, etc. that few people dare to do when it comes to other professions who arguably kill people every day and get away with it. Obviously, it has to do with the way these professions manipulated politics to see to it this happened.
As Haskell and others writing on professions note, professions have claimed a scientific basis for knowledge that, at the time they actually do so, they have hardly any science to back up their claims. (ravi might be reminded of that video he linked to about software engineering having no science to back it up; yet, in CA, where he was speaking, they have professionalize engineering such that you must be certified.)