AERA Open - January-December 2023, Vol. 9, No. 1 - Do Teachers Feel Valued in Society? Occupational Value of the Teaching Profession in OECD Countries

Oct 15, 2026

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Teachers’ occupational value and how it shifts under accountability reforms is analyzed using 2018 TALIS data to map global patterns across OECD countries. Findings show an overwhelming majority of teachers report feeling undervalued in almost all participating OECD nations. Undervaluation is linked to less collective teacher effort for school improvement and higher job dissatisfaction in the United States, Australia, Finland, and Korea, while effects of compensation, classroom autonomy, and decision-making involvement vary by national context.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages21

Reading Time53 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Background: teacher status and accountability reforms

Research gap: consequences and predictors

Data and analytical approach (TALIS)

Findings: perceived occupational value across OECD countries

Findings: working conditions and cross-country variation

Keywords and article focus

AERA Open January-December 2023, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 1–21 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584231179184 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2023. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Do Teachers Feel Valued in Society? Occupational Value of the Teaching Profession in OECD Countries Motoko Akiba Florida State University Soo-yong Byun Pennsylvania State University Ewha Womans University Xiaonan Jiang Kyeongwon Kim Alex J. Moran Florida State University Teacher accountability reforms implemented around the globe have heightened a sense that teachers are losing the support of policymakers and the general public. To examine the global pattern in teachers’perception of occupational value and identify possible outcomes and predictors, we analyzed the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data. We found an overwhelming majority of teachers feel undervalued in almost all OECD countries. In addition, teachers who feel undervalued reported less collective teacher effort for school improvement and job dissatisfaction consistently in four countries of comparison with different policy contexts—the United States, Australia, Finland, and Korea. However, the relationships between three working conditions impacted by accountability reforms—compensation, classroom autonomy, and involvement in school decision-making—and perceived occupational value varied across these four countries. Specifically, these working conditions seem to matter more in the United States, where the teacher policy context produces greater disparities across schools in teacher qualifications, distribution of qualified teachers, and degree of professional control. Keywords: teacher social status, teacher professionalization, teacher policy, comparative education, international education Introduction The professional status of teaching has long been a focus of research in the United States (Hargreaves, 2009; Ingersoll & Collins, 2017, 2018; Rowan, 1994), and previous studies have shown that the complexity of teaching often goes unrecognized and unrewarded (Ingersoll & Collins, 2018; Rowan, 1994). More recently, the policy climate focusing on test-based accountability during the last two decades starting from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and strengthened in the Race to the Top program in 2010 and the most recent 2015 reauthorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act in the United States seems to have heightened a sense that teachers are further losing the respect and support of policymakers and the general public to perform the complex and challenging responsibility of educating the future citizens (Ingersoll & Collins, 2017; Rentner et al., 2016; Wills & Sandholtz, 2009) . This trend is indeed global as many countries have implemented various teacher accountability reforms with a goal of improving teacher quality ranging from teacher education and certification reforms to teacher evaluation and compensation reforms (Müller & Hernández, 2010; Osborn, 2006; Price & Weatherby, 2018) . Scholars have argued that many of these policies were developed under an assumption that teachers are the main cause of disappointing student learning outcomes and holding teachers and teacher education institutions accountable will improve teaching quality and student learning (Akiba, 2017; Akiba & LeTendre, 2018; Paine & Zeichner, 2012; Tatto, 2007). In this global policy climate, it is not surprising to see in a recent OECD report that teachers are feeling severely undervalued in many countries (OECD, 2020) . What is not yet fully understood is the possible consequences of teachers feeling undervalued. Previous studies Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.o

FAQs

What data and method are used to study teachers’ occupational value?

The analysis uses 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data to examine global patterns in teachers’ perceptions of occupational value.

Do teachers generally feel valued across OECD countries?

Yes. A large majority of teachers report feeling undervalued in almost all OECD countries studied.

Which working conditions influence perceived occupational value differently across countries?

Compensation, classroom autonomy, and involvement in school decision-making relate to perceived occupational value in different ways across the compared countries, with the United States showing stronger cross-school disparities linked to these conditions.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam