It may well be that we want teachers to be fired more often than other professionals because their work is so much more important. Still, the public conversation about teaching rarely offers a realistic sense of scale—of how many bad teachers there truly are, and what it would take to either improve their skills or replace them with people who are apt to perform at a higher level.
It is often said that teachers ought to be as elite and high performing as attorneys or doctors. But teaching employs roughly five times as many people as either medicine or law. There are 3.3 million American public school teachers, compared to 691,000 doctors and 728,000 attorneys. Four percent of all civilian workers are teachers.
In some recent years just as many new teachers were hired—over 200,000—as the total number of American college graduates minted by selective institutions, those that accept fewer than half of their applicants. The National Council on Teacher Quality estimates that high-poverty schools alone hire some 70,000 new teachers annually. Reformers sometimes claim that this huge demand for teachers is driven by overaggressive class-size limits, and they argue for decreasing the number of teachers while raising class sizes and recruiting a smaller, more elite group to the profession. In California and Florida, poorly designed class-size laws did lead to the overhiring of underqualified teachers. But the leading teacher demographer, Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania, has shown that the decrease in average elementary school class sizes since 1987, from 26 to 21 children, does not fully explain the “ballooning” of the teaching force. There are two other factors that together account for a larger part of the change: first, the explosion of high-needs special-education diagnoses for students, such as those with autism-spectrum disorders, and second, the increase in the number of high school students who enroll in math and science courses. Those trends are not likely ones we can or should reverse. While teacher prep programs in regions with an oversupply of teachers should raise their admission standards or shut down, calls for 100 percent of American teachers to hail from selective colleges are, frankly, absurd, especially if we also lay off the bottom, say, 2 to 15 percent of teachers each year—66,000 to 495,000 people—as many reformers would like. Currently, just 10 percent of teachers are graduates of selective colleges. Teach for America recruited 6,000 teachers in 2013. Another elite alternative certification program, The New Teacher Project, recruited about 1,800 teaching fellows. Urban teacher residencies, which are also highly competitive, produced some 500 teachers. These are tiny numbers relative to demand.
Moreover, with the possible exception of high school—level math teachers, there is little evidence that better students make better teachers. Some nations, such as Finland, have been able to build a teaching force made up solely of star students. But other places, such as Shanghai, have made big strides in student achievement without drastically adjusting the demographics of who becomes a teacher. They do it by reshaping teachers’ working days so they spend less time alone in front of kids and more time planning lessons and observing other teachers at work, sharing best practices in pedagogy and classroom management. According to Andreas Schleicher, a statistician who researches schools around the world, Shanghai “is good at attracting average people and getting enormous productivity out of them.” The future of American education likely looks similar. As John Dewey noted in 1895, “Education is, and forever will be, in the hands of ordinary men and women.”
I came to this project with sympathy for educators. American public school teaching has typically attracted individuals taking their first, tentative steps out of the working class, and one of them was my maternal grandfather, Harry Greene, a high school dropout. In his first career as a printer, he led a drive to organize a union at a nonunion shop, and for a while the fallout from that made it difficult for him to find work. When he was fifty-two years old, Harry finally earned an associate’s degree, and in 1965 began teaching vocational courses in New York City public high schools. He benefited from the early years of teacher collective bargaining. As a teacher, my grandfather made a steady middle-class salary with periodic raises for the first time in his life. That financial stability allowed my mother, Laura Greene, to attend a four-year private college.
My dad, Steven Goldstein, was another first-generation college graduate who became a public school teacher. He attended Adelphi University on a soccer scholarship. Always the jock, my dad discovered he had a passion for history, too, and taught middle and high school social studies for ten years before going into school administration, because he wanted to earn more money. He worked in several socioeconomically integrated suburban school districts, and would sometimes say that the teachers union could be an administrator’s greatest ally in removing a bad teacher from the classroom.
In addition to being the daughter and granddaughter of educators, I attended public schools in Ossining, New York, with a diverse group of white, black, Latino, and Asian classmates. A few parents, like my mom, commuted down the Hudson River to New York City for corporate jobs; others were single mothers on public assistance or line cooks in the kitchen of our town’s maximum-security prison, Sing Sing. But regardless of whether they were college professors or home health aides, the most involved parents in Ossining wanted their kids in the classrooms of the most experienced teachers. My junior-year math teacher, Mr. DiCarlucci, wore a full suit and tie every day, accessorized with blingy gold jewelry. Though he taught precalculus, he assigned research papers on high-level concepts like topology, to inspire us to stick with math over the long term. The white-haired Mr. Tunney guided English classes through dense classics like All the King’s Men with uncommon energy drawn from his infectious love for the books he taught. When teachers like that retired, the entire community mourned.
When I began reporting on education in 2007, I quickly learned how lucky I had been. Most American schools are socioeconomically segregated, very little like the integrated schools I attended in Ossining, where highly qualified teachers aspired to build long careers, and to teach both middle-class and poor children. In 2005, the average high school graduation rate in the nation’s fifty largest cities was just 53 percent, compared to 71 percent in the suburbs. International assessments conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, show American schools are producing young adults who are less able than our counterparts in other developed nations to write coherently, read with understanding, and use numbers in day-to-day life. Even our most educated citizens, those with graduate degrees, are below world averages in math and computer literacy (though above average in reading). I do not believe schools are good enough the way they are. Nor do I believe that poverty and ethnic diversity prevent the United States from doing better educationally. Teachers and schools alone cannot solve our crisis of inequality and long-term unemployment, yet we know from the experience of nations like Poland that we don’t have to eradicate economic insecurity to improve our schools.
What I do believe is that education reformers today should learn from the mistakes of history. We must focus less on how to rank and fire teachers and more on how to make day-to-day teaching an attractive, challenging job that intelligent, creative, and ambitious people will gravitate toward. We must quiet the teacher wars and support ordinary teachers in improving their skills, what economist Jonah Rockoff, who studies teacher quality, calls “moving the big middle” of the profession. While the ingenuity and fortitude of exemplary teachers throughout history are inspiring, many of their stories, which you will read in this book, shed light on the political irrationality of focusing obsessively on rating teachers, while paying far less attention to the design of the larger public education and social welfare systems in which they work.
To understand those systems, we will begin our historical journey in Massachusetts during the first half of the nineteenth century. Advocates for universal public education, called common schoolers, were challenged by antitax activists. The détente between these two groups redefined American teach
ing as low-paid (or even volunteer) missionary work for women, a reality we have lived with for two centuries—as the children of slaves and immigrants flooded into the classroom, as we struggled with and then gave up on desegregating our schools, and as we began, in the late twentieth century, to confront a future in which young Americans without college degrees were increasingly disadvantaged in the labor market and thus relied on schools and teachers, more than ever before, to help them access a middle-class life.
* * *
*1 Recent data shows teachers’ academic qualifications improving, but it is unclear whether this is a lasting development or a short-term trend due to weak private sector hiring during the recession.
*2 These are the actual categories of the four rating systems used in the New York City public schools between 1898 and 2014.
• Chapter One •
“Missionary Teachers”
THE COMMON SCHOOLS MOVEMENT AND THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN TEACHING
In 1815 a religious revival swept the Litchfield Female Academy, a private school in a genteel Connecticut town.
In those years, there were few truly “public” schools in the United States. The U.S. Constitution did not mention education as a right (it still doesn’t), and school attendance was not compulsory. Schools were generally organized by town councils, local churches, urban charitable societies, or—in more remote parts of the country—ad hoc groups of neighbors. A mix of tuition payments and local tax dollars supported the schools. Two-thirds of American students attended one-room schoolhouses, where as many as seventy children from age five through sixteen were educated together, usually by just one overwhelmed schoolteacher, who was nearly always male. School was held only twelve weeks per year, six in the summer and six in the winter. There were rarely any textbooks on hand, and the most frequent assignment was to memorize and recite Bible passages. Naughty children were whipped or made to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap.
At Litchfield, a relative island of privilege, girl after girl loudly and publicly achieved the state of “conversion” expected of all fervent Calvinists, a transcendent, nearly manic period in which God’s plan for one’s life would be revealed, setting an individual upon her predestined path toward heaven. Conversion tended to be catching, like the flu. But fourteen-year-old Catharine Beecher refused to convert. This made her conspicuous, because she was the daughter of a celebrity preacher.
Her father, Lyman Beecher, first came to the public’s attention after he delivered a passionate sermon against dueling in the wake of Alexander Hamilton’s death in 1804 at the hands of Aaron Burr. He cast himself as a moral compass on matters both religious and secular. In sermons and articles, he opposed Catholic immigration and the spread of liberal Unitarianism, supported the gradual elimination of slavery and the “re-colonization” of black Americans to Africa, and celebrated American expansion into the West as a sign that God intended the Protestant United States to lead as “a light to the nations”—a phrase he borrowed from the prophet Isaiah. In 1830 he would speak out against President Andrew Jackson’s brutal relocation of Native American families from the Southeast to land west of the Mississippi River.
Those views were fairly liberal for their time. Lyman Beecher’s faith was not. He preached predestination, the doctrine that holds that a baby is fated from birth for either salvation or damnation, and that his deeds on earth can hardly change the outcome. In riveting sermons, Beecher would sketch a vivid portrait of the death and perdition of sinners, their brows sweating and extremities growing cold as they sunk down to hell.
Catharine Beecher hated disappointing her father, to whom she was very close. He would even boast that Catharine was “the best boy he had”—quite a statement coming from a man with seven sons! But she found Bible study “irksome and disagreeable” and chafed against the notion of original sin. How could an unformed child be guilty of all of humanity’s past corruptions? She was far more passionate about poetry than religion; several of her verses were published in journals while she was still a teenager. She earned every academic distinction and then took up the only job considered socially respectable for a young woman of her class: She worked as a finishing school teacher of the “domestic arts”—needlepoint, knitting, piano playing, and painting. In truth, Catharine hated those feminine pastimes. She would later lament the “mournful, despairing hours” she had once devoted to such activities, which were thought to raise a girl’s value on the marriage market. But for Catharine, wage earning was an important goal, at least until marriage. Her mother had died when she was sixteen, and Lyman Beecher quickly remarried. The preacher had a dozen younger children to support, including the future author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
At a party in the spring of 1822, when Catharine Beecher was twenty-one years old, she met Horace Mann. He had grown up on a farm in Franklin, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston, and was at the time a twenty-six-year-old law student in Litchfield, rumored to have political ambitions. Mann had already heard of Beecher: She was the famous preacher’s iconoclastic daughter, and a published poet, too. Up to this point in his life, Mann, though tall and handsome, had demonstrated almost no interest in women, even pretty ones. (His roommate at Brown University would recall Mann as someone so self-serious that he had committed “not a single instance” of youthful misbehavior.) But Beecher was different. With tightly wound curls framing a square-jawed face, she conveyed a certain harshness, which she had inherited from her father. The young teacher was fascinating not because she was beautiful, but because she was intelligent.
Beecher and Mann traded thoughts that evening on the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott; later Mann regretted that the conversation had produced only “truisms” on his part, nothing at all “tremendous” to demonstrate the depth of his ideas. But no matter, for Beecher was already engaged to a far more accomplished man: Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a math prodigy who at the age of twenty-four had become Yale’s youngest-ever tenured professor, and had already written several well-regarded textbooks. Fisher had grown up a few farms away from Mann in Franklin, and Mann gossiped in a letter home to his sister that Beecher “is reputed a lady of superior intellect” and would “probably make the Professor a very good help-mate.”
Impressed as he was with Beecher, Mann had underestimated her. She was destined not to be a housewife, but to assume her father’s mantle as a leading public intellectual. Together, she and Horace Mann would define public education as America’s new, more gentle church, and female teachers as the ministers of American morality.
Less than two weeks after Beecher met Mann, her fiancé drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland. Fisher had been on his way to Europe for a yearlong tour of the continent’s universities, to study alongside the leading scientists of the day. They had planned to marry the following spring. Now Beecher’s future was uncertain. “I lie down in sorrow and awake in heaviness, and go mourning all day long,” she wrote. Following several months of confinement in her father’s home, she fled to the Fisher family farm in Franklin. Alexander’s parents asked if Beecher might tutor their younger children, a teenage boy and two small girls, who had lost not only their beloved eldest brother, but also their academic mentor.
Upon her arrival, a depressed Beecher retreated to the Fisher attic, where she searched obsessively through her dead fiancé’s diaries and letters. She was surprised by what she found. The couple’s courtship had been stilted and almost all their time together chaperoned. It turned out she had not known her fiancé very well at all. Alexander Fisher’s diaries laid bare a tortured soul who, at the age of nineteen, endured a case of “delirium,” so torn was he between the obligations of religion and his attraction to his true passions, math and science. During this episode, Fisher suffered from delusions of grandiosity, believing he could deploy mathematical problem solving to save the universe from sudden destruction. When the mania passed, Fisher returned to his scientific studies at Yale, chiding himself for a lack
of religious faith, which he described as “an incapacity … of making moral truth the subject of steady contemplation.” Like Beecher, Fisher had devoted years of tedious Sundays to devotional study, only to regretfully conclude in 1819, when he was a professor, that his spiritual life was “a blank,” and he would never achieve conversion. Around this time, he stopped keeping a journal and devoted himself full-time to planning lessons, writing textbooks, and counseling his Yale students.
Beecher was moved by Fisher’s frustrations with traditional religion—so similar to her own—and by his eventual decision to commit himself fully to a career as a scholar and teacher. She felt certain, for the first time in her young life, that predestination was false. Fisher had been a good man—a saved man—not because he had converted, but because he had done good in his life. Beecher wrote to her father: “The heart must have something to rest upon, and if it is not God, it will be the world.”
Beecher’s new conviction that public works could serve society as well as private faith set her off on a career in education. As a girl, she had been denied the academic opportunities granted to Fisher to study classical languages, master higher-order mathematics, and immerse herself in contemporary political thought. The Litchfield Female Academy had been organized around religious piety, public shaming, and social positioning. Each morning, the students would queue up to submit to a barrage of leading questions posed by the commanding headmistress: Have you been patient in acquiring your lessons? Have you spoken any indecent word or by any action discovered a want of feminine delicacy? Have you combed your hair with a fine-tooth comb and cleaned your teeth every morning? Have you eaten any green fruit during the week? Every girl was required to keep a daily journal of her spiritual faults; entries notable for either their righteousness or depravity were read aloud to a Saturday morning general assembly—with names attached. The school’s pedagogical techniques were stultifying, and entirely typical of the era. In class, the headmistress merely read aloud to her pupils; for homework, the girls regurgitated in their journals all the trivia they could remember: the longitudes and latitudes of various countries, the dates of major battles, the lineages of British kings. Math instruction ceased before algebra or trigonometry, while chemistry and physics were neglected entirely.
The Teacher Wars Page 2