Who feels entitled to delegitimize you?

 What did I learn working in and studying higher education for two decades?

That a think tank at an Ivy League school trumped a state-school's institute with 40 years of experience and grassroots research/networks of thousands of practitioners.  These networks were composed of mostly women who do the actual teaching, boots on the ground, of reading, writing and mathematics to first year students who struggled in those subjects.  But because "Ivy League" automatically means better, egghead old white dudes with pedigrees (look it up, it's not just dog food) could theorize and publish on best-practices, pontificate, scientize, authorize, and legitimize the work that overwhelmingly women and people of color do.  Almost ALL OF WHOM got at least MASTERS DEGREES in the last century because No Child Left Behind and other rigorization efforts required it of us.  Many of those teachers still owe student loan debt on those masters degrees which are basically worth garbage now that national guard troops can supervise classrooms instead of credentialed experienced educators.  

Deprofessionalization.  Feminization.

Does delegitimizing a field, a group of teachers, mean something?

My dad as a public school teacher in the 1970s had union protections, good wages, and respect from parents and administrators.  He was able to raise a family on a teacher's salary. He gradually saw that respect and buying power evaporate.  He later spoke of principals who would side with a parent rather than defend a teacher.

All three of my then parents worked in the public schools in our rural community.  (I have a complicated family tree)  The women, my mother and later my step mother, did not earn a living wage in their work as secretary and teacher's aide.  They did not have union protections.  My mother's salary as a single parent qualified me and my brother for reduced lunch in the same district where she was employed full-time.

By the time I was beginning my teaching career, I also did not have union protections although I met with other faculty to discuss bringing the union to our campus my first year.  Later that summer a pro-union person left the institution not by his choice.  That had a chilling effect on the rest of us, at least it did on me.  To my knowledge there is still no faculty union at that institution.

Yes there is definitely a crisis teacher shortage in 2022, and also it has been a long time coming as the field went from something special requiring a college degree which historically was only available to men to a field which is presently approximately 90 percent white-identifying women.  As with many fields, as soon as it is seen as feminized, it becomes deprofessionalized.  Glorified babysitters.  Just pay the National Guard 60% more to supervise a gym-full of students on permanent study hall.  

See also Hidden Figures, women, many times non-white women, who were the first computer programming experts, who were the calculators before electronic calculators existed.  In the 1980s deliberate marketing to boy children sent the message that personal computers are for boys.  Within a generation computer science degrees led to high wage careers, and women in computing were memory-holed.

(Yes, the current crisis is about this deprofessionalization.  It is also about the right-wing goal of dismantling public education)

In the decades that I was a teacher, 1994-2015, we also experienced federal legislation called No Child Left Behind, which set a goal of every teacher with a masters degree and 30 post-baccalaureate credits in their certification field, causing THOUSANDS of teachers to figure out how they were going to keep their jobs by making time to take night/weekend classes to fulfill this new requirement.  Some people who already had a masters degree learned that courses that didn't count towards these 30 classes in their discipline might have to get A SECOND masters degree.  It was madness.  It is disrespect and dismissal and deprofessionalization just as it was requiring credentials which used to confer a sense of respect.

The goalpost kept moving further away: the more credentialed we got, the less esteem we got.  

I'm not going to write about active shooter drills, other than that I have been on three different campuses during active shooter lockdowns with real shooters.  I think I have some PTSD about it.  We shouldn't have to live like this.

I named this post who feels entitled to delegitimize you because I want to name the people who are moving the goalpost, who are creating the conditions, who are memory-holing that teachers are essential workers, are essential to producing and reproducing a society of people who have the skills to be citizens, to be adults, to be pro-social contributors to communities built on reciprocity rather than exploitation.  I'm proud to legitimize teachers as co-creators in the infrastructure that creates these worlds.  

Those people are also sometimes ourselves.  How have I worked to delegitimize others?  When have I been on a hiring committee which dismissed out of hand certain candidates because they didn't seem to be a good fit?  Petty beauracrats make the world go round with creating and following policies and procedures and also sort of making up rules of exclusion as we go along.  

"I'd like to see where that policy is documented in writing," can be a helpful phrase.

When we legitimize, we create autonomy for those agents.  Autonomy leads to accountability, which is also necessary.  To delegitimize teachers as glorified babysitters (and c'mon, BABYSITTING IS ALSO SUPER IMPORTANT) absolves them of their responsibility in doing damage within our existing systems.  With accountable autonomous legitimized teachers we can demand they use their expertise in best practices for learning, over 100 years of formalized higher education research, to actually create responsive forward thinking schools to prepare young people to navigate and build the world they inherit.

Ways I've felt delegitimized in academia (see also "run out of town" post/podcast):

A friend told me that a doctorate in education is inferior to a doctorate in philosophy.  Like in all circumstances, across all time, forever amen.

A member of my dissertation committee didn't think my type of ethnography counted as ethnography because my field work didn't look like her field work, and so maybe I shouldn't get the degree after all?  Or maybe I should re-do the fieldwork even though I had spent two years preparing this 267 page seven chapter dissertation?

A progressive organization looking to hire a post-doc explicitly excludes my type of doctorate.  

Anyone who taught "college-level" writing courses (as opposed to "developmental" writing courses which did not confer college credit) who thought they knew more about writing pedagogy than people who had masters degrees in rhetoric and composition and years of experience teaching writing.  Because a philosophy-based degree in Literature gives you tons of preparation in the teaching of writing.