When Hillary Clinton was interviewed for the Humans of New York project, she recalled taking the exam for law school when she was a Harvard student in the late 1960’s. She and a friend were the only females in a room full of males. The males bullied Hillary and her friend mercilessly for being there. “Why would a woman want to become a lawyer?” the men kept challenging.

“You don’t need this. You have other things you could do,” said some of the men who felt the role of lawyers should be reserved for them. Women should stay home, they said. Iron their husband’s starched shirts. Cook for the family. Raise the couple’s children.

“If you get my spot in law school, I’ll have to go to Vietnam and I’ll die,” a man told her angrily.

At about the same time Hillary was applying to law school, I started out in the teaching profession. We were all women in that field. Teaching had been one of the few careers open to women for the previous hundred years. During all that time, public school teaching had remained somewhere on a par with carding wool and folding fitted sheets – as if all it took was practice and a deft hand.

If you think teaching is that simple, try it for a day. My colleagues and I spent hours – after school , weekends, vacations – inventing our own classroom materials to supplement the texts. We attended workshops, read books and bought our own supplies, all in the interest of creating hands-on activities that engaged learners in constructing knowledge. At my teacher’s salary of $3,900, I also taught Head Start in the summers to make ends meet.

Teachers everywhere, in the late sixties and early seventies, talked about women’s issues all the time. The women’s movement was just beginning. Jobs for female doctors, lawyers and managers started to gain traction, but women who taught felt stuck. The systemic inequalities of their roles both at home and at school became more and more obvious. 

Most teachers had husbands who expected that they would go home after school and get dinner on the table, wash all the dishes, do all the ironing, clean the house, go grocery shopping, bathe the kids and put them to bed and lay out everyone’s clothes for the next day. Before teachers began their work day at school, they made breakfast for their own families and packed lunches for their kids to bring to school.

If a man had an interest in education, he skipped out of classroom teaching experience as quickly as possible, usually three years, and went straight for courses in educational administration. He was then deemed qualified to fill positions as school principal or superintendent of schools. That classroom teaching stuff was women’s work, beneath him.

Of course, the school boards that hired principals and superintendents were all male back then, so this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Men made better school administrators because men hired them and men saw only males as school administrators. Just as most men (and many women) today, fifty years later, can only envision a male in the role of President.

These males, these so-called educational leaders, were awkward and uncomfortable around children. If they entered a classroom, it was to talk to the teacher. A principal rarely bent down to talk to a child, or folded his adult legs into a child’s chair at the reading table, or ate lunch with the children in the cafeteria. Principals interacted with children primarily as disciplinarians – just like the role of so many dads at home. Real administrators spent their days in meetings and doing desk work.

Today, over half of our public school teachers have advanced degrees. Females are starting to populate positions of authority within the public school system. Women have also elevated their status in the community at large. They occupy positions on school committees and school boards along with many other business and civic leadership roles.

The role of principal is fairly evenly distributed between men and women now. Over a quarter of superintendents are women – a number that has been growing rapidly since the 1990’s. Women in positions of authority typically come up through the ranks, spending years in the classroom teaching children before taking on roles in school administration.

In contrast, even today, fewer than one-quarter of public school teaching positions are filled by men.

This spring, some unredressed issues in the public schools have surfaced. Teachers all over the country are on strike. Particularly in states that have been paying teachers so poorly they have to get supplemental jobs all year round, teachers have walked out in state-wide protests this spring. These same states have been funding their schools at such a low level the staff and students are left with outdated, rotting text books and slums for schools.

The teacher’s strikes are as much about the history of oppressing women in this profession as they are about the sad state of schools and teacher salaries. It is a women’s uprising half a century in the making. More and more people who teach in public schools are becoming exhausted by the demands and frustrated to the nth degree by the lack of public support for teachers.

Over this same 50 years, men have dominated positions in legislatures and on committees that determine how much and what kind of educational testing is done in classrooms, and which textbooks will be used. Men have dominated school board positions that have the authority to determine teacher salaries. Men have dominated selectmen positions that have the authority to fund schools at a level that allows for structural and maintenance improvements. The school districts that are protesting tell a miserable story: their leaders have been doing a lousy, short-sighted job at all levels for decades.

All of which has me thinking about the current interest among government officials in privatizing the public school system.

Men in the public school system are failing. They can’t make it on a classroom teacher’s salary because the pay has remained so low and the demands are so unrealistic. Teacher’s salaries are still funded as if they are intended to be a supplemental income for a family that has one high-salary adult worker.

Men are losing out on administrative positions to women who are more qualified, women who have advanced academic knowledge and who also know and understand the skills of classroom teaching. Men have lost credibility on school committees and school boards to women who can grasp both the budgetary issues and the human issues.

Now along comes the bandwagon touting the idea of privatizing education. Why do we need that? Because men have been spending their time in for-profit organizations. They have been CEOs and they understand the role of CEO. They have failed to make school administrative roles completely in the image of the CEO, but that is what they aspire to.

Men have had it with public schools – the work is too hard, there is little opportunity for advancement and the pay is miserable, compared to the corporate for-profit world. They want to get an MBA and be done with it. These PhD requirements for positions of educational authority are waste of time, in their view.

Men would like to take back positions in educational leadership, reverse the trend of  women rising to the top. Phooey on all this touchy-feely stuff about inspiring greatness and educating the whole child.  Phooey on addressing the quality of each child’s learning experiences, regardless of special needs or physical handicaps. Phooey on having a profound understanding of the learning process.

This imaginary world where women who teach stay in the classrooms forever, where men are in control of schools again and where administrative salaries can be comparable to pharma CEOs or Wall Street bankers is just that – imaginary. It lives only in imagined models of a nation-wide charter school system. It depends on narrowing the focus of education down to basic skills in math, science, English and history, a curriculum that can then be further narrowed down into test items constructed by the for-profit testing industry. That, in turn, lowers the skill level for the job of a classroom teacher, justifying lower pay.

Public school classrooms have been so much more than this lifeless blueprint for privatizing our schools. School classrooms have historically been the place where moral-ethical values have been studied, debated and shaped; the place where our constitutional system of government is understood; the place where students are given the necessary skills for citizenship and full participation in a democracy; the place where community and national pride is fostered; the place where each student’s unique talents are discovered and nurtured.

Women are intimately concerned with the whole child. Whether or not they are in the classroom, whether or not they have children of their own, women tend to be devoted observers of children. They take on the role of guiding and teaching children wherever they are – at home, out in the neighborhood, at sporting events, and in schools.

Women who supervise teachers are the same way – promoting self-direction, nurturing talent, motivating teachers to learn new skills and take on leadership roles. It may be true after all that the education profession should be dominated by women, from the ground up.