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Journalist Dana Goldstein’s absorbing, ambitious first book, “The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession,” was released earlier this month and it’s already made the New York Times bestseller list. I sat down with her to talk about how race and gender have influenced education in the U.S. 
Race and gender are major themes in the book and in the history that you recount. Did you anticipate this being the case?
I knew I wanted to write an intersectional history of teaching; that was super important to me from day one. A lot has been written by historians about female teachers throughout history and quite a lot has also been written about the black educational tradition. I knew I wanted these two strains to be big parts of the book.
Catherine Beecher, who you describe early in the book as America’s first “media darling school reformer,” is depicted as having a clear bent toward a particular type of teacher: a middle class white female one. Where do you think we are today with the norms that shape who is the ideal teacher?
There are some parts of that early 19th century ideal that have persisted, particularly that the ideal teacher [who] is passionate and mission-driven. Back then [education] was very explicitly mission-driven. The mission was spreading Protestant ideas. Now the mission is that teachers are there to close achievement gaps. The mission is to bring poor kids up to middle class kids’ level and to help poor kids get ready for college. Teachers are not supposed to care about how much they get paid, and they are supposed to have a calling to do this work and not complain too much about the conditions of the labor.
Is our concept of the ideal teacher racialized?
We have discussed, on the policy level, quite a bit in recent years about getting more “elite” people to be teachers. Any time I hear language like that I wonder: “Are you talking about a Harvard grad who is probably white, maybe male? Do you think getting more people like that will solve our crisis?” 
What surprised you most about the history of race and education?
One of the really big things that surprised me was that the roots of this “no excuses” reform ideology that is so popular today was actually in black educational theories and ideas dating back to the 19th century. We often mischaracterize those movements today as something that white people are imposing on communities of color. Yet what I found is that in the ideas of Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois—figures who disagreed with each other on a lot of things and had a fertile debate—[valued] “no excuses,” strict discipline and academic rigor. Those things were, to a certain extent, areas of agreement among black educational leaders.
You can quite easily trace how the founders of the “no excuses” movement, for example the founders of the KIPP network of charter schools, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin [who are both white], were explicitly influenced by a female black teacher who they observed using these “no excuses” strategies. And there is a translation process that happens there, where this set of ideas of was mostly being used by teachers of color with children of color. Now a multi-racial group of teachers is using these strategies. When someone from your community says to you, “Look, there are no excuses,” that is very different from when someone from outside your community is telling you “no excuses.” Although these are very old ideas, what they mean in practice today is has changed.
And this teacher that the founders of KIPP were influenced by, do you know where her ideology came from?
Her name is Harriett Ball. I didn’t interview her myself but you see that black teachers use these strategies. They’re passed from black teacher to black teacher, generation after generation.
What do you think about the “no excuses” style?
I take a look at it in the book [considering] that those are the strategies that Teach For America (TFA) recruits are asked to learn. I think there is one aspect of it that is really successful: the high expectations. When you have high expectations for children’s academic achievement there is research that [shows that] kids do better. [Showing that] you believe intelligence is something that every child has the capacity to learn over time is fundamental to the “no excuses” philosophy.
But with the discipline strategies—walking in straight lines, wearing uniforms, eye tracking (literally following the teachers around the room)—there is very little persuasive research on any of those things. The research that does exist shows that these really strict strategies have the potential to backfire. The more time the teacher spends policing all those things, the less time they spend on the lesson. If you’re motivated to behave because you really want to learn, you’re going to learn more than if you’re motivated to learn because you’re going to get tossed out of the room in a really embarrassing and public way.
In the book you describe long-standing tension between veteran teachers and programs that seek to bring elite graduates into the school system. Do you see a racial tension in that dynamic?
Something that often gets overlooked is that alternative certification teacher programs are better at recruiting people of color than traditional teacher recruitment programs. The current group of TFA [teachers] is 50 ‘The Teacher Wars’ Author Talks Race and Gender in American Education - COLORLINES: