The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

by Dana Goldstein

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools.

“[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review

In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345803627
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	166,884
Product dimensions:	5.14(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

DANA GOLDSTEIN comes from a family of public school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at The Marshall Project. She lives in New York City.

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Introduction
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Excerpted from "The Teacher Wars"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Dana Goldstein.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 "Missionary Teachers": The Common Schools Movement and the Feminization of American Teaching 13

Chapter 2 "Repressed Indignation": The Feminist Challenge to American Education 33

Chapter 3 "No Shirking, No Skulking": Black Teachers and Racial Uplift After the Civil War 47

Chapter 4 "School Ma'ams as Lobbyists": The Birth of Teachers Unions and the Battle Between Progressive Pedagogy and School Efficiency 66

Chapter 5 "An Orgy of Investigation": Witch Hunts and Social Movement Unionism During the Wars 91

Chapter 6 "The Only Valid Passport from Poverty": The Great Expectations of Great Society Teachers 110

Chapter 7 "We Both Got Militant": Union Teachers Versus Black Power During the Era of Community Control 133

Chapter 8 "Very Disillusioned": How Teacher Accountability Displaced Desegregation and Local Control 164

Chapter 9 "Big, Measurable Goals": A Data-Driven Vision for Millennial Teaching 189

Chapter 10 "Let Me Use What I Know": Reforming Education by Empowering Teachers 231

Epilogue Lessons from History for Improving Teaching Today 263

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 281

Selected Bibliography 317

Index 325

Editorial Reviews

A New York Times Notable Book

“Ms. Goldstein’s book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic ... The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. If I were still teaching, I’d leave my tattered copy by the sputtering Xerox machine. I’d also recommend it to the average citizen who wants to know why Robert can’t read, and Allison can’t add." —New York Times

“[A] lively account of the history of teaching.... The Teacher Wars suggests that to improve our schools, we have to help teachers do their job the way higher-achieving nations do: by providing better preservice instruction, offering newcomers more support from well-trained mentors and opening up the ‘black box’ classroom so teachers can observe one another without fear and share ideas. Stressing accountability, with no ideas for improving teaching, Goldstein says, is ‘like the hope that buying a scale will result in losing weight.’ Such books may be sounding the closing bell on an era when the big ideas in school reform came from economists and solutions were sought in spreadsheets of test data.” —New York Times Book Review

“Goldstein presents detailed case studies from different periods that should give pause to any contemporary reformer who claims to know exactly how to fix public schools in America. Her careful historical analysis reveals certain lessons useful to anyone shaping policy, from principals to legislators ... thorough and nuanced.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars is the product of just what the teaching corps needs more of: open-minded, well-informed, sympathetic scrutiny that doesn’t shrink from exposing systemic problems and doesn’t peddle faddish solutions either.” —The Atlantic

“Engaging.... Goldstein ably sketches reformers past and present, asserting that the common force behind each new wave of school reforms is evangelical conviction, and that new movements often seem based more on faith than on factual evidence ... her ability to illuminate each new wave’s ‘hype-disillusionment cycle’ is a welcome treatment of a fraught subject.” —The New Yorker¶
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“A sweeping, insightful look at how public education and the teaching profession have evolved and where we may be headed.” —Booklist, starred review

"[An] immersive and well-researched history.... Attacking a veritable hydra of issues, Goldstein does an admirable job, all while remaining optimistic about the future of this vital profession." —Publishers Weekly

"Think teachers are overpaid? Or are they dishonored and overworked? Both positions, this useful book suggests, are very old—and very tired ... Goldstein delivers a smart, evenhanded source of counterargument." —Kirkus Reviews

“I wanted to yell ‘Yes! Yes! Thank you for finally talking sense’ on page after page. Anyone who wants to be a combatant in or commentator on the teacher wars has to read The Teacher Wars.”  —Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes and author of Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“It’s hard to know what to make of teachers. In the news and in the movies they are sometimes vampires sucking off public goodwill and sometimes saviors of America’s children. In this totally surprising book Dana Goldstein—who has always been Slate’s sharpest writer on education—explains how teachers have always been at the center of controversy. At once poetic and practical, The Teacher Wars will make school seem like the most exciting place on earth.” —Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men

“Dana Goldstein proves to be as skilled an education historian as she is an astute observer of the contemporary state of the teaching profession. May policy makers take heed.” —Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers

“A colorful, immensely readable account that helps make sense of the heated debates around teaching and school reform. The Teacher Wars is the kind of smart, timely narrative that parents, educators, and policy makers have sorely needed.” —Frederick M. Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute

“Dana Goldstein is one of the best education writers around. Her history of the teaching profession is that and much more: an investigation into the political forces that can help or hinder student learning.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy

“Dana Goldstein has managed the impossible: She's written a serious education book that's fresh, insightful, and enjoyable to read.” —Michael Petrilli, Executive Vice President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

“Teaching has always been a political profession. We all have a dog in this fight. So I can hardly imagine anyone who could not profit from reading this erudite, elegant, and relentlessly sensible book. Listen to Dana Goldstein: ‘We must quiet the teacher wars.’ Reading The Teacher Wars would be a great way to start.” —Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland

“If more people involved in today’s discussion about education reform read this book, our national conversation about schooling would be deeper and more effective. Buy this book. Read this book. Share it with your friends who care about education. A very important work.” —Peg Tyre, author of The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve

“Why are today's teachers pictured simultaneously as superheroes and villains? In clear, crisp language, Dana Goldstein answers that question historically by bringing to life key figures and highlighting crucial issues that shaped both teachers and teaching over the past century. Few writers about school reform frame the context in which teachers have acted in the past. Goldstein does exactly that in thoughtfully explaining why battles over teachers have occurred then and now.”  —Larry Cuban, Professor Emeritus of Education, Stanford University

From the Publisher

In The Teacher Wars, her lively account of the history of teaching, Dana Goldstein traces the numerous trends that have shaped "the most controversial profession in America." Along the way, she demonstrates that almost every idea for reforming education over the past 25 years has been tried before—and failed to make a meaningful difference.

The New York Times Book Review - Claudia Wallis

Ms. Goldstein's book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic. A hate-read is nigh impossible. (Trust me, I tried.) While Ms. Goldstein is sympathetic to the unionized public-school teacher, she also thinks the profession is hamstrung by a defensive selfishness, harboring too fine a memory for ancient wounds. The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. If I were still teaching, I'd leave my tattered copy by the sputtering Xerox machine. I'd also recommend it to the average citizen who wants to know why Robert can't read, and Allison can't add.

The New York Times - Alexander Nazaryan

06/30/2014
Teaching in America, which began as an informal, seasonal job heavily influenced by locale, has evolved into a highly politicized and polarizing profession, argues Goldstein in this immersive and well-researched history. Goldstein, who comes from a long line of teachers, claims that teaching has historically been viewed as a profession best staffed by women and that there’s been a persistent classist (not to mention racist) undercurrent in education that continues to this day via programs that focus on test scores and ratings. Readers may be surprised to learn that hot-button issues, such as overcrowding and teaching ESL, are hardly new. The author also discusses educational fads, the battle for federal funding, the vilification of teachers’ unions, and the nation’s almost pathological obsession with data and statistics. Goldstein closes with recommendations for the future, including: better pay; more perspective on test scores; and the expansion of teachers’ purviews in the classroom. Attacking a veritable hydra of issues, Goldstein does an admirable job, all while remaining optimistic about the future of this vital profession. Agent: Howard Yoon, Ross Yoon Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2014-08-27
Think teachers are overpaid? Or are they dishonored and overworked? Both positions, this useful book suggests, are very old—and very tired. Public school teaching, writes education journalist Goldstein, is "the most controversial profession in America." Politicized from the beginning, teaching had an aura of do-gooder, civilizing purpose. As she writes, Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher had a lively correspondence around the creation of a "Board of National Popular Education" whose aim was to send East Coast schoolmarms to the frontier in the hope of taming it more thoroughly. It also combined that social service aspect with the trappings of professionalism and especially unionism, which in time has armed the critics and foes of public education with plenty of ammunition: It's certainly difficult to get an inept but tenured teacher fired, though probably not as hard as Chris Christie would have it. It would likely surprise Christie to learn that public school tenure has been practiced since at least 1909, long before unions were empowered to intervene in due-process matters between teachers and administrators. While looking into the origins of seemingly modern controversies, such as teaching to the test and the feminization of teaching, Goldstein shows how constant the battles have been. At the same time, she turns in points that ought to condition the discussion (but probably won't, given its shrillness), including the observation that "differences in teacher quality" have only a small bearing on test outcomes overall—which is not to say that teachers don't matter but instead that we ought to stop relying so heavily on tests. In an epilogue, Goldstein ventures other ideas for reform, including raising teacher pay and, yes, using tests as diagnostic tools more than ends in themselves. Probably not likely to sway opponents of public education, whose numbers and influence seem to be growing, but Goldstein delivers a smart, evenhanded source of counterargument.

Kirkus Reviews