Professional Ethics and the Classroom
To understand the importance of professional ethics in the classroom, look back to the election season of 1964.
As Barry Goldwater rose to prominence, a magazine surveyed more than 1,000 psychiatrists to assess his state of mind, most of whom were happy to oblige. The responses outraged Goldwater, who successfully sued the magazine for libel. Equally important, the comments damaged the credibility of the field. "Psychobabble reported by the media undermines psychiatry as science," former American Psychiatric Association President Herbert Sacks wrote in an article discussing the incident.
As a result, psychiatry, as a profession, agreed to stop publicly diagnosing public figures without personally examining them. The so-called "Goldwater rule" is an example of how professionals can look at the ethical issues that impact their field and collectively come to consensus on how to address them. It also serves as a guideline for individual psychiatrists who may be prompted to offer their own verdicts about individuals they know - or don't know - in social or public settings.
Now think how a similar situation might play out for a teacher in a school setting - for example, if I suspect that a student may have an inappropriate crush on another teacher. I know the teacher hasn't encouraged this interest, but nonetheless this is a potential blind spot he or she needs to be made aware of. But how do I address this? If I talk to the teacher, chances are it will sound like a personal judgment about the way he or she relates to students. If I bring it up with an administrator, chances are it will be construed as a failing on the teacher's part that could impact his or her career. And what if I'm wrong? So chances are I'll stay silent, even if the situation ultimately winds up damaging the credibility of the teacher, the school and the profession as a whole.
What's the difference? Psychiatrists, like doctors, lawyers, and their counterparts in a variety of other fields, deal with highly nuanced relationships that can create the same kinds of gray areas that often arise in a school setting. But these professions have established codes of professional ethics to guide practitioners as they navigate a broad range of gray areas. Just as importantly, these professionals are trained to think about these ambiguous situations and to discuss them with each other as part of their preparation to enter their respective fields. Neither of these things is true for educators, who by the very nature of their jobs face a constant series of gray areas with only their personal experience and values as a guide. The isolation that so many of us love when we close our classroom doors to teach, works against us when we have to face challenging ethical issues where there is no collective understanding of how to address them.
The lack of a code of ethics in education obviously impacts individual teachers who face difficult decisions and don't have an outlet to discuss them with peers. But it's also shaped how the profession - and education is by far one of the largest professions in the country - has evolved.
A key element of any profession - and the one I argue that actually makes it a profession - is the extent to which the field has created a way to regulate itself in these ways. The absence of this self-regulating function has contributed to the many ways in which educators are undervalued as professionals. It's also led to a vicious cycle that has impacted the profession for the worse. In the absence of a clearly articulated code of ethics, policymakers feel obliged to spell out the requirements for teacher behavior in highly specific laws and policies. These rules, which often don't acknowledge the highly variable nature of teachers, schools, and students, over time limit teachers' ability to make decisions on their own, which in turn, creates a need for additional, ever more specific teacher guidance. If you've ever wondered why some school districts have spelled out in writing that parent gifts worth $24.99 are acceptable and those worth $25 are a violation of policy, that's why.
Codes of ethics evolved in other professions as a result of similar difficult questions. The American Medical Association's code of ethics, for example, were largely created to help physicians reconcile the conflicting needs of serving patients at a time when infectious diseases were difficult for medical professionals to avoid contracting. In many states, the bar exam and other licensing requirements for lawyers focus extensively on ethics. Ethics also are an integral part of the discussions law school students are required to have with professors and their peers - conversations that provide models for how they can continue addressing ethical dilemmas once they are practicing law.
That's not to say these fields don't have their own challenges - professionals in any field make mistakes, sometimes out of ignorance, and sometimes out of intent. But professionals in these fields have ways of addressing them with each other - and at times, preventing each other from unwittingly making serious mistakes - that we as educators simply do not.
As a former teacher devoted to introducing educators and the field as a whole to the importance of professional ethics, I often say that ethics should be one leg of a three-legged stool - as important to being a teacher as mastery of content and pedagogy. While that's clearly not been the case to date, professional ethics is now emerging as an important component of education policy and practice. In this series of articles, we'll explore the challenges of instilling professional ethics in education and discuss promising changes that could help transform the field - and make it a profession on par with medicine, law and other fields that have empowered their members to regulate themselves in important ways.
