The US has had the same arguments about teachers for 100 years
Should teachers be judged based on their students' test scores? Should they get tenure and job protections that other workers don't? Should education schools recruit the best and the brightest, or change how they teach future teachers entirely?
Those are some of the hottest questions in the education debate. And it turns out that none of them are anything new: Americans have been arguing about teachers and comparing our schools to other countries' for as long as the country has had schools.
In her new book, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession, journalist Dana Goldstein explores the history of teaching in the US from the early 19th century through Teach for America. For more than 100 years, Americans have argued about who should be able to teach, what role teachers play in helping kids escape poverty, and how teachers should be judged on their work.
Goldstein and I talked Friday about teachers' unions, teacher tenure, and the strong sense of déjà vu her book sheds on today's education policy debates.
Libby Nelson: We spend a lot of time talking about who should be a teacher, or why good teachers are important, in a way we don't about other professions — even professions that play critical roles, such as doctors. Why are teachers so central?
Dana Goldstein: The first reason has to do with the role that we expect teachers to play in our inequality debate. We're having this huge national conversation about socioeconomic inequality and to somewhat of a lesser extent about poverty, especially childhood poverty. And really we see teachers held up as people who can help us solve this problem.
Because we have a relatively weak social safety net, we're really asking them to close these gaps between life outcomes for middle-class kids and life outcomes for poor kids. We are in a way setting ourselves up to be somewhat disappointed. That's not to say that teachers don't make an impact. We know from the latest economic research that teachers dohave a big impact on kids. But as big as the impact is, it is a secondary impact. The home, the parenting, the neighborhood and the socioeconomic status of the family are still the primary impact.
So that's one reason why teaching is controversial and embattled.
The second reason has to do with the fact that teaching is a unionized profession. It really comes down to what [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten says to me, that America looks at teachers as "islands of privilege." Only 7 percent of workers are in unions. So the fact that teachers have this strong body representing their interest, they have generous pensions they can look forward to, that The US has had the same arguments about teachers for 100 years - Vox: