A Spectre is Haunting American Scholars: The Spectre of “Professionism”

This essay in the Educational Researcher , by Walter Metzger, is a critical appraisal of recent scholarship on professionalism in our society. It deserves a wide reading m the educational research community because professionalism is an animating theme in the current wave of reform whose implications are complex, controversial, and ill understood. An appreciation of shifts in scholarship on professionalism supplies insight on current policy issues and will improve the debate underway on the proper nature and direction of reform.