Ethical concerns about teachers and teaching occur in a variety of contexts and can be thought of in several ways. This article discusses (1) how ethical issues are represented in the law; (2) how ethical issues are represented in the National Education Association's (NEA's) code of ethics; (3) ethically based comprehensive views of education; (4) the role of ethics in educational policy; and (5) meta-ethical disputes relevant to education.
Ethics and the Law
The education codes of many states require that teachers be persons of good character. Most states also permit teachers to be dismissed for unethical conduct. States also forbid particular forms of misconduct, such as child abuse, sexual harassment, and drug abuse, and their violation may be grounds for dismissal.
What counts as good character or conduct can be a contentious matter. In past decades teachers might have been dismissed not only for drunkenness, homosexuality, unwed pregnancy, or cohabitation, but also for myriad other offenses against the moral code of their community. Some of these may still be gray areas; however, in recent years, courts have been inclined to insist that actionable immoral conduct be job-related, providing some protection for the private lives of teachers. Here a particularly contentious matter is whether being a role model is part of the job of teachers, because this expectation can expand public authority over the lives of teachers. In certain cases, as when teachers discuss controversial matters in class or employ controversial teaching methods, they may be protected by the First Amendment. Teachers, especially those who are tenured, are also likely to have significant due-process rights. Dismissal for immoral conduct is most likely when the teacher has committed a felony, in cases of inappropriate sexual advances toward students, or in cases of child abuse. In this last case, teachers may also have a duty to report suspected misconduct by others.
The kinds of misconduct dealt with by the law are usually acts that are (or can be viewed as) unethical in any context. Teachers, like others, are expected to not steal, kill, commit assault, abuse children, or engage in sexual harassment. Although the definition of immoral conduct in the law has not become coextensive with violations of criminal law, there is little in the meaning of immoral conduct that is distinctive to teachers or teaching.
The Nea Code of Ethics and Ethical Principles Internal to Teaching
The most prominent code of ethics for teachers is the NEA's Code of Ethics for the Education Profession. The preamble to this code begins: "The educator, believing in the worth and dignity of each human being, recognizes the supreme importance of the pursuit of truth, devotion to excellence, and the nurture of democratic principles. Essential to these goals is the protection of the freedom to learn and to teach and the guarantee of equal education opportunity for all."
The code has two sections with eight provisions in each. The first section, entitled "Commitment to the Student," promotes the freedom to learn, requires equal opportunity, protects students against disparagement, and protects privacy. The freedom-to-learn provisions prohibit teachers from preventing student inquiry, denying students access to diverse points of view, and distorting subject matter. The code-specific provisions do not assert affirmative duties for teachers to create an inquiry-oriented environment or to pursue educational objectives, which might be associated with the pursuit of truth, individual autonomy, or democratic principles. The prohibition against distortion of subject matter falls short of a prohibition of indoctrination.
The second section of the code begins with the comment that "the educator shall exert every effort to raise professional standards, to promote a climate that encourages the exercise of professional judgment, to achieve conditions which attract persons worthy of the trust to careers in education and to assist in preventing the practice of the profession by unqualified persons."
Among its enumerated provisions are prohibitions against misrepresenting one's own qualifications or those of others, prohibitions against assisting unqualified persons to teach, and prohibitions against the defamation of colleagues. Although the ideals expressed in the introduction of the second section of the code might lead one to expect specific provisions requiring conscientious professional development, the maintaining of qualifications, or the creation of a collegial learning environment, no such provisions are found.
The NEA code implicitly recognizes three sources of ethical ideals and principles. The first is what might be termed the ethics of inquiry. The second area might be called the civic ethic. That is, the NEA code recognizes those ideals and principles that regulate the public conduct of citizens of liberal democratic states to be ideals and principles that should also regulate the practice of education. A reason for this is that one goal of education is the creation of citizens. The third source of ethical ideals is the ideal of professionalism.
There are difficulties and questions associated with such ideals and principles. Consider the following examples:
- What fundamental values underlie these principles? The NEA code suggests that the value that underlies the ethics of inquiry is truth, but another possibility is autonomy.
- What is the best construction of these abstract principles? The NEA code indicates that students may not be unfairly excluded, denied a benefit, or given favoritism on the basis of a list of presumptively irrelevant characteristics. The use of the word unfairly cloaks a multitude of issues. For example, how do we know when exclusion or inclusion on the basis of race (one of the irrelevant characteristics listed) is unfair? Is affirmative action unfair?
- Are there values that must be balanced against these principles? In some understandings of professionalism, a core commitment of professionalism is: Those who know should rule. If so, professionalism in education needs to be balanced against the expectation that public schools are under the democratic authority of school boards and state legislatures.
- What is omitted? These three sources of ethical content do not clearly include various conceptions concerning human relations that seem relevant to teaching. Examples might be caring and trust. Nor are ideals such as promoting the growth of the whole child or creating community mentioned.
Ethics and the Philosophy of Education
It has been common in the philosophy of education to begin an inquiry into the aims of education by asking questions such as "What is the nature of the good life?" and "What kinds of societies promote the best lives?" The Greek philosopher Plato's Republic is a classical example. Such questions fall within the range of the subject matter of ethics. Answers to these questions can provide part of the framework for building a comprehensive vision of education rooted in what John Rawls has termed a "comprehensive doctrine" (1993, p. 13), and they may guide the professional practice of teachers. In societies characterized by what Rawls calls durable pluralism, there are serious difficulties with such an approach. In such societies, the educational systems cannot be rooted in a single comprehensive doctrine without marginalizing or oppressing those who hold other doctrines and without restricting personal autonomy.
Arguably, societies committed to liberal democratic values may respect pluralism and personal autonomy while also emphasizing creation of citizens. Amy Gutmann in Democratic Education (1987) argues that the central aim of the schools of a democratic society must be to develop democratic character. Eamonn Callan in Creating Citizens (1997) argues that societies committed to liberal principles of tolerance and reasonableness must provide students with an education enabling them to understand and sympathetically engage a variety of ways of life. It may, however, be argued that such an education is itself intolerant of those who wish to transmit a distinctive way of life to their children. One of the more difficult issues for the schools of liberal democratic societies is how to respect diversity while having common schools that produce good citizens.
Ethics and Educational Policy
The civic ethic provides conceptions that are relevant, not only to teachers' classroom practice, but to wide-ranging areas of educational policy. For example, it has been common in recent years to claim that equality of opportunity should emphasize equal educational outcomes instead of equal access or equal inputs. Assume that achievement can be measured by test scores. What pattern of test scores would be desired, and how should resources be distributed to attain it? Consider three possibilities:
- Emphasize increasing average test scores. Possible objections are that this is consistent with considerable disparity in levels of achievement. Moreover, average scores might be increased by focusing resources on the most able at the expense of the least able.
- Emphasize the achievement of the least advantaged or least able. Possible objections are that such an approach might lead to significant investment in the education of students where there will be only modest return, and resources will be used inefficiently.
- Emphasize getting all who are able above some threshold that defines minimal ability to participate in our society. This approach may lead to difficulties similar to the previous one.
These are competing principles for distributing educational resources. Although they concern such matters as state or school district budgets, in fact they may also concern the distribution of teacher time. They shed light on such questions as whether teachers should spend disproportionate time with those who are most needful or with those who will make the most progress. These various approaches are analogous to principles of distributive justice that are widely discussed in philosophical literature. The first is a utilitarian principle emphasizing the maximization of good outcomes. The second seeks to maximize the welfare of those who occupy the least advantaged positions in society. The third is a threshold view emphasizing getting everyone above some defined level. These principles illustrate the ways in which moral conceptions can inform policy and practice.
Meta-Ethical Issues
The term meta-ethics concerns the general nature of ethics instead of specific ethical prescriptions. Two meta-ethical disputes are the justice/caring debate and the postmodern critique of modernity.
The justice/caring dispute grows out of a critique of Lawrence Kohlberg's views of moral development by feminist scholars, principally Carol Gilligan. Kohlberg viewed justice as the central moral conception. Gilligan claimed in In a Different Voice that women's thinking about ethics emphasizes care. Other advocates of an ethic of care, such as Nel Noddings, have developed the notion into a robust view of ethics and of education. By the early twenty-first century there was some rapprochement between these views, based on the claim that both justice and caring should be a part of any adequate ethic.
A second meta-ethical perspective is postmodernism. Although understandings of this stance are complex and varied, one useful characterization of postmodernism claims that it is incredulity toward all grand meta-narratives. A grand meta-narrative is a sweeping and general view about human beings and society. Liberalism and socialism are examples. Postmodernists often argue that all such grand stories represent the perspectives of groups or eras and, when viewed as the single truth of the matter, are oppressive. Postmodern critiques often seek to deconstruct such meta-narratives by showing their biased character and how they serve the interests of some over others.
Summary
The following (not mutually exclusive) sources of ethical ideals and principles are relevant to an informed view of the ethics of teaching:
- 1. The law pertaining to teacher certification and dismissal, which is likely to proscribe only the most egregious behavior.
- 2. The NEA code of ethics. This code draws on three sources of ethical content.
- a. The ethic of inquiry.
- b. The civic ethic.
- c. An ethic of professionalism.
- 3. Ethical conceptions that inform educational policy, such as views of distributive justice.
- 4. Conceptions of human flourishing and the nature of liberal democratic societies.
- 5. Competing meta-ethical conceptions.
Of these sources, ethical conceptions rooted in the ethics of inquiry and in the civic ethic may have the most salience to teachers because they are associated with the paramount educational goals of advancing knowledge and creating citizens. They are "internal" to the activity of teaching. Other sources apply to schools because they apply broadly to most social institutions or human activities.
Bibliography
Bull, Barry. 1990. "The Limits of Teacher Professionalism." In The Moral Dimensions of Teaching, ed. John Goodlad, Roger Soder, and Kenneth Sirotnik. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Callan, Eamonn. 1997. Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Feinberg, Walter. 1998. Common Schools: Uncommon Identities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Fischer, Louis; Schimmel, David; and Kelly, Cynthia. 1999. Teachers and the Law. New York: Longman.
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gutmann, Amy. 1987. Democratic Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Katz, Michael; Noddings, Nel; and Strike, Kenneth A., eds. 1999. Justice and Caring: The Search for Common Ground in Education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. The Philosophy of Moral Development. New York: Harper and Row.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1993. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Peters, Richard. 1996. Ethics and Education. Atlanta, GA: Scott, Foresman.
Plato. 1964. The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sockett, Hugh. 1993. The Moral Base for Teacher Professionalism. New York: Teachers College Press.
Strike, Kenneth A. 1988. "The Ethics of Resource Allocation." In Microlevel School Finance, ed. David H. Monk and Julie Underwood. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
Strike, Kenneth A. 1990. "The Legal and Moral Responsibilities of Teachers." In The Moral Dimensions of Teaching, ed. John Goodlad, Roger Soder, and Kenneth Sirotnic. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Strike, Kenneth A., and Soltis, Jonas F. 1998. The Ethics of Teaching, 3rd edition. New York: Teachers College Press.
White, Patricia. 1996. Civic Virtues and Public Schooling. New York: Teachers College Press.
Internet Resource
National Education Association. 2002. "Code of Ethics of the Education Profession." www.nea.org/aboutnea/code.html.
— CAROL J. AUSTER
