The Teacher Wars
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—————. One Day All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001.
Kopp, Wendy, with Steven Farr. A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing an Excellent Education for All. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.
Schneider, Jack. “Rhetoric and Practice in Pre-Service Teacher Education: The Case of Teach for America.” Journal of Education Policy (August 2013).
Shapiro, Michael. Who Will Teach for America? Washington, D.C.: Farragut Publishing Company, 1993.
THE STANDARDS, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND SCHOOL CHOICE MOVEMENTS
Bornfreund, Laura. “An Ocean of Unknowns: Risks and Opportunities in Using Student Achievement Data to Evaluate PreK–3rd Grade Teachers.” Early Education Initiative, New America Foundation, May 2013.
Brill, Steven. Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.
Carr, Sarah. Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.
Cohen, David K., and Susan L. Moffitt. The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Mathews, Jay. Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2009.
Mehta, Jal. The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Perlstein, Linda. Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. New York: Henry Holt, 2007.
Rhee, Michelle. Radical: Fighting to Put Students First. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.
About the Author
Dana Goldstein comes from a family of public school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwartz 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.
An oil portrait of Catharine Beecher, c. 1830, when she was already—in her early thirties—America’s first media-darling school reformer. American teaching had been a largely male profession, but as Beecher recruited well-bred young East Coast women to become pioneer teachers in the West, she helped transform teaching into acceptable work for middle-class ladies. She attacked male teachers as “intemperate … coarse, hard, unfeeling men, too lazy or stupid” to educate America’s children.
(Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut)
A daguerreotype of Horace Mann, c. 1844, when he was the nation’s first state secretary of education, in Massachusetts. Mann realized employing female teachers would save taxpayers millions of dollars due to women’s lower wages. He idealized female educators not as academics but as “celestial” public servants motivated by Christian faith and moral purity.
(Massachusetts Historical Society)
An 1848 portrait of Susan B. Anthony, when she was a twenty-eight-year-old teacher at the Canajoharie Academy in upstate New York. She proudly wrote home about this plaid dress, wondering if her sisters, who did not earn their own wages, did not “feel rather sad because they are married and can not have nice clothes.” Anthony would soon travel across New York State organizing female teachers to demand equal pay.
(Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1856 with her daughter Harriot. Stanton was a wealthy woman who educated her seven children at home. She disdained the teaching profession as “a pool of intellectual stagnation” and hoped young women would soon be able to pursue more prestigious careers in law, medicine, and the clergy.
(Library of Congress)
Charlotte Forten in 1860 at the age of twenty-three. An affluent black woman born free in Philadelphia, Forten volunteered to teach in a one-room schoolhouse for emancipated slaves in the South Carolina Sea Islands. She helped inaugurate a tradition of privileged, highly educated African Americans serving the race through teaching. Forten called her time on St. Helena Island “a strange, wild dream”—one that challenged many of her pious preconceptions about lifting her people out of dependence and poverty.
(Getty Images)
Emancipated slaves working with cotton at Port Royal in the South Carolina Sea Islands, 1862. As part of the Port Royal Experiment, the Union initially offered the freedmen communal ownership of their former owners’ land. But President Andrew Johnson ended the project in 1866, allowing former slave owners to return and reclaim their property. Many of the students Charlotte Forten taught became sharecroppers.
(Library of Congress)
W. E. B. Du Bois, the pioneering theorist and historian of African American education, who taught for one summer in a rural, black public school. He believed black teachers should be part of the college-going “talented tenth,” writing that teachers must “be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.” In 1901 his critique of Booker T. Washington and strict vocational tracking for black children cost Du Bois an appointment to lead the colored public school system in Washington, D.C.
(Library of Congress)
Margaret Haley, leader of the nation’s first teachers-only union, the Chicago Teachers Federation, founded in 1897. Called a “lady labor slugger” and accused of leading teachers and children into “sedition” and “revolt,” Haley understood that through an alliance with male, blue-collar organized labor, female teachers could better advocate for equal pay, the vote, and increased school funding.
(Chicago History Museum)
Ella Flagg Young, c. 1810–1815, when she was the superintendent of the Chicago public schools—the first woman in the United States to lead an urban education system. Young began her career as a teacher and fought vocational tracking based on IQ scores. Inspired by her mentor John Dewey, she argued, “In order that teachers may delight in awakening the spirits of children, they must themselves be awake”—meaning intellectually engaged and empowered by their work.
(Library of Congress)
In 1940 the American Federation of Teachers expelled the New York City Teachers Union (TU), afraid its communist politics would taint the still-nascent teacher unionism movement. The TU then affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO). In this promotional image from a 1945 issue of the New York Teacher News, a white-collar teacher forges a partnership with a blue-collar worker.
(October 13, 1945, issue of the New York Teacher News, Collection of the Tamiment Library, New York University)
New York City Teachers Union members lobby for substitutes’ rights and multicultural education, 1945. This gadfly band of young teachers, many of them communists, fought aggressively for academic freedom and for schools to embrace a broad antiracist, antipoverty agenda—a platform that anticipated many later-twentieth-century goals of education reform.
(November 3, 1945, issue of the New York Teacher News, Collection of the Tamiment Library, New York University)
Alongside his own elementary school teacher, “Miss Kate” Deadrich Loney, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1965. As a young man Johnson taught in a segregated, Mexican American public school in rural south Texas. He later portrayed teachers as revolutionary foot soldiers in the War on Poverty. Federal funding for poor children’s schools would “bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said.
(Francis Miller, the LIFE Picture Collection, Getty)
Al Shanker in 1965, as president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. The UFT was the nation’s first major teachers union to earn collective bargaining rights. With a series of daring stri
kes, Shanker and his union raised teacher pay and empowered teachers in the education policy debate. Though he advanced many ideas for school improvement, from racial integration to pre-K to tests of teachers’ subject-matter knowledge, Shanker was infamous as a defender of teachers even when students got in the way. He once said, “Listen, I don’t represent children. I represent the teachers.”
(Library of Congress)
By a show of hands, members of the United Federation of Teachers vote overwhelmingly for a strike on the first day of school, September 9, 1968. Al Shanker is at the podium. “This is a strike that will protect black teachers against white racists and white teachers against black racists,” he said. But some UFT members were motivated more by fear of activists and parents of color making demands on urban teachers and schools.
(Bettmann/Corbis)
Rhody McCoy, administrator of the community control experiment in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, Brooklyn. In 1968, McCoy attempted to remove nineteen tenured teachers and administrators from the neighborhood’s public schools, all of them white. The action provoked a sixty-thousand-teacher strike led by Al Shanker. McCoy believed that if black and Hispanic parents got involved in their children’s schools, they would be able to show white teachers how to “set a tone so you didn’t have any such thing as ‘disruptive children.’ ”
(Bettmann/Corbis)
Secretary of Education Terrel Bell and President Ronald Reagan meeting at the White House in 1983, the year A Nation at Risk was published to widespread acclaim. The federal report, Bell’s brainchild, depicted a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American public education, and blamed dullard teachers drawn from the bottom quarter of high school and college graduating classes. While promoting merit pay and alternative certification for teachers, Bell and Reagan ended the federal government’s commitment to school desegregation.
(Corbis)
A Teach for America corps member works in her third-grade classroom in Washington, D.C., 2008. Her white board references the priorities of the standards and accountability school reform movement: high standardized test scores on the DC-CAS exam and other forms of measurable learning growth.
(Brendan Hoffman/AP/Corbis)