Dana Goldstein Explains How Teachers Became America's Most Embattled Profession
As promised, Dana Goldstein's thoroughly researched The Teacher Wars is more analytic than opinionated. Goldstein's objective narrative of assaults on the teaching profession lets the historical record take the place of commentary.
However, Goldstein's subtitle, "A History of America's Most Embattled Profession," recalls Babe Ruth's alleged prediction of where he would hit a homerun. She must have known the risks of such an unambiguous foreshadowing of her thesis. Had she failed to deliver an impeccably accurate and thoughtful historical analysis, deep-pocketed reformers would have assailed her as they have teachers. But, Goldstein hits the home run that her title predicted.
I was a professional historian, specializing in grassroots socialism during the Progressive era, before switching careers and becoming an inner-city teacher. So, I was looking forward to a refresher course on education history. I had no idea, however, that The Teacher Wars would teach me so much about my adopted profession, or how Goldstein's narrative would illuminate so many other social and economic dynamics.
The similarities between today's data-driven reformers and the "scientific management" of the early 20th century have always been obvious. Today's version of "Taylorism" often seems like a parody of the time and motion studies that sought to speed up the Model T assembly line. Contemporary reformers' top-down attempts to control teachers often seem like an unfunny version of Cheaper by the Dozen or, perhaps, an effort to treat teachers like Lucy in I Love Lucy's classic episode where the chocolate candy conveyor belt accelerates out of control. But, Goldstein recalls numerous other social movements that anticipated today's effort to micromanage the teaching profession.
Before reading Goldstein, for instance, I'd mostly missed the parallels between the absolute certainty of today's reformer warriors and 19th-century American Calvinists. The contemporary "teacher quality" movement bears a striking resemblance to the mid-1800s search for the "'motherteacher' ideal." It also embodies the complete certainty of so many reformers in the righteousness of their cause and the moral bankruptcy of those who believe differently.
Goldstein also makes two cogent points about the commonplace, moralizing attacks on male teachers during the 19th century. First, there was an economic motive for disparaging male teachers, and replacing them with less expensive female teachers. Second, teachers like Washington's Irving's fictional Ichabod Crane "may have been less cruel or stupid than frustrated."
Goldstein continues the second theme for the rest of her book. When describing controversy after controversy, she explains the role of a lack of resources in undermining educators' constructive efforts. Teachers and the education profession, not a lack of capacity for accomplishing their goals, were repeatedly blamed for inevitable failures.
Along with Elizabeth Green's Building a Better Teacher, Goldstein's The Teacher Wars offers a corrective against the reformers' repeated claims that progressive education reforms produced a history of failure. To take just one example, she Dana Goldstein Explains How Teachers Became America's Most Embattled Profession | John Thompson: