Reformation of the teaching profession: A genealogy of the Oklahoma Commission for Teacher Preparation as a regulatory standards board .

Abstract

Utilizing public and private archives, media reports, state and federal reports, literature of professional organizations and oral history interviews, the second portion of the paper presents the case---the Oklahoma Commission for Teacher Preparation---the analysis of which points to how Bledstien's notion of professionalism became manifest in Oklahoma. An instrumental case study design was applied to investigate how twentieth century notions of professionalism contributed to the establishment and initial implementation of OCTP.

The pattern of responses by contemporary case study participants revealed historical consistency in professional factionalism, the relationship between accreditation, licensure and certification

Unlike medicine and law that used boards of peers to maintain standards for the field, education experienced persistent issues that consistently inhibited the development of teaching as a profession. Since the late nineteenth century, professional factiousness lowered the status of education, resulting in attrition and difficulties in recruitment. With recurring teacher shortages, standards were frequently lowered and professionalizing issues of accreditation, licensure and certification were negatively affected. To arrest the downward cycle of status and quality, the consistent solution on the part of those arguing for greater teacher regulation, and those arguing for more professional autonomy, was the establishment of a governing board comprised of representatives from the field.

In 1995, the Oklahoma legislature established the Oklahoma Commission for Teacher Preparation (OCTP) to improve education by upgrading standards for teachers. By 2000, forty-three states maintained similar independent, semi-independent, or advisory standards boards designed to oversee various aspects of professionalism, including licensure and certification of teacher candidates, professional development of in-service teachers, and oversight of teacher preparation programs. The first part of this study analyzes the historical conditions that led to similar uses of regulatory boards of educators to professionalize teaching. The issues surrounding OCTP as a professionalizing board have been contextualized using Foucault's method of genealogy. Early nineteenth to late twentieth century commissioned reports and task force findings were "unearthed" and examined for evidence of the previous utilization of teacher's boards comparable to regulatory boards for other fields such as medicine (AMA) and law (ABA).