Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession tells the history of the United States’ “most controversial profession” through the stories of the teachers, reformers and school leaders who have shaped what education is today. She recently sat down with TT blogger Jonathan Gold to talk about her book.
What motivated you to write The Teacher Wars?
As a journalist covering the Democratic presidential primary in 2008 between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I noticed education was one of the few areas in which they disagreed. Obama came out as a critic of traditional teachers' union positions. I wanted to understand why public school teaching was so politicized in the United States compared to in other Western nations. Why did discussions of poverty so often end up turning to teachers as a solution? I suspected that answers lay in our past, and I wanted to create a readable book for a general audience explaining these trends.
The book begins with the insight that teaching is "the most controversial profession in America." Why do you think this is the case?
There are two big reasons why. First, because we have a relatively weak social safety net in the United States, but we do have public education, policymakers have asked teachers, again and again, to close inequality gaps. It turns out teachers are not able to close inequality gaps on their own. So we become disappointed in the work our teachers are doing, and that creates controversy. Second, it has become rare in the United States to belong to a union, and for many Americans, teachers are the only unionized workers with whom they regularly come into contact. So despite the fact that teaching is a very difficult job, and not well understood by non-teachers, there is resentment toward the union benefits that most public school teachers do receive, such as tenure and pensions.
What do you think today's social justice-minded teachers can learn from the stories in your book? Are there specific stories you think teachers might find enlightening?
I rarely interview a successful teacher, or research a history-making teacher from the past, who does not have a social justice mindset, even if they would not describe themselves that way. During the efficiency education craze of the 1910s and 1920s, it was radical to be like Mary McDowell in Brooklyn, who believed poor students should study an explicitly intellectual subject like Latin. When Southern schools were integrated, some black teachers volunteered to be transferred to white schools, where principals and colleagues were hostile to them, so they could help guide black children through this white environment and advocate for them. Communist teachers were some of the first to remove books from school libraries that were racist—books that essentially said black people were happy to be slaves.
There are a few moments in The Teacher Wars that highlight activism by students. Can you provide some specific details about these moments and reflect on what today's students might be able to take from those stories?
I'm glad you highlighted this! I was so intrigued by what I found researching Chapter Four— “‘School Ma'ams as Lobbyists’: The Birth of Teachers Unions and the Battle Between Progressive Pedagogy and School Efficiency.” At the birth of the teachers union movement, in Chicago in 1902, students went on strike before teachers did. They walked out of school to protest the removal of teachers from schools where students shared their ethnic background. Administrators thought an Irish-American teacher, for example, would be "too close" to her Irish-American students. Now we know that when teachers and students share an identity, that can create a richer learning experience, and it's part of the reason why it's so important for students today to demand more teachers of color.
Why do you think social studies teachers should design curricula about the history of education?
I've spoken about this book all over the country, and some of the most engaged audiences have been young students. They are the ones who have to take standardized tests, so they really want to understand why. Who came up with the idea to give students more tests in order to evaluate teachers? Is this a good idea? Does it help kids? They are just itching to discuss these issues that they live. In the part of my book that takes place in the present day, I write about Crenshaw High in Los Angeles, where teachers developed a curriculum about education reform and social justice. The kids mapped the relationship between income inequality, test scores and arrest rates. Teenagers have a strong sense of right and wrong. A social justice curriculum is therefore really uniquely effective with them.
Gold is a seventh- and eighth-grade history teacher at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island. You can reach him on Twitter @jonathansgold.
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