The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession
Kindle Highlights
Highlights
It is true that the majority of American teachers have academically mediocre backgrounds. Most have below-average SAT scores and graduate from nonselective colleges and universities.*1 It is also true that one large review of practices within typical American elementary school classrooms found many children—and the majority of poor children—“sitting around, watching the teacher deal with behavioral problems, and engaging in boring and rote instructional activities such as completing worksheets and spelling tests.” Another study of over a thousand urban public school classrooms found only a third of teachers conducting lessons that developed “intellectual depth” beyond rote learning.
merit pay was attempted in the 1920s, early 1960s, and 1980s. It never worked to broadly motivate teachers or advance outcomes for kids.
teachers are more, not less, likely than many other workers to get fired.
there is little evidence that better students make better teachers.
American schools are producing young adults who are less able than our counterparts in other developed nations to write coherently, read with understanding, and use numbers in day-to-day life. Even
We must focus less on how to rank and fire teachers and more on how to make day-to-day teaching an attractive, challenging job that intelligent, creative, and ambitious people will gravitate toward.
Beecher was a lifelong opponent of women’s suffrage; she thought politics a dirty game that would corrupt women’s God-given virtue. But
“motherteacher” ideal—the notion that teaching and mothering were much the same job, done in different settings.
Beecher had imagined a way for elite young women to go west, not as wives or mothers, but with a patriotic duty to their young, expanding nation—to educate the masses for democracy.
In 1837 Mann helped lead a Whig push to establish a state board of education to oversee local schools and require compulsory enrollment for all children. This was the flowering of the national common schools movement, a state-by-state effort to fund universal elementary education.
To train teachers, Prussia established normal schools, which admitted both male and female students between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, called normalites. They spent two years studying pedagogy and the subjects they would teach, and then passed a third year as an apprentice teacher in a real school. Considering
it was open only to female applicants because they would be cheaper than men for the state to employ as teachers.
many ways, we are still living with the teacher training system the common schools movement created.
“Education in this country will never reach its highest end,” she wrote in her autobiography, “till the care of the physical, social, and moral interests shall take precedence of mere intellectual development and acquirements.”
Mann agreed. “The teaching of A, B, C, and the multiplication table has no quality of sacredness in it,” he said in an 1839 lecture. Instead, the purpose of schooling was to lead students’ “affections outward in good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to God.”
He considered a French-style liberal arts education irrelevant to the masses in a popular democracy, where the most important task facing any man was, as a voter, to assess the moral character of candidates for political office.
This view of art and social good as in opposition to each other—with intellectual pursuits coded as somewhat decadent—contained more than a kernel of the Puritan ideology
Teaching became understood less as a career than as a philanthropic vocation or romantic calling.
this left a number of important educational problems unresolved. Should schools prepare students for particular occupations, or give all children the exact same education? If teachers were expected to be the chief architects of their pupils’ moral lives, what implications did this have for the role of parents—and was it reasonable to expect the influence of teachers to outweigh the influence of the family? How would common schools founded as purveyors of WASP morality deal with increasingly diverse student populations, soon not only Catholics but free blacks and immigrant Jews as well?
Beecher and Mann believed morality was the end of public education,
there was little public consensus on what American common schooling should look like.
Teaching here is consequently far more fatiguing than at the North.”
Cooper saw direct antipoverty work as part of her teaching mission.
legislation would have given the school superintendent the exclusive right to hire and fire teachers for neighborhood schools, while keeping teacher salaries frozen and assigning every Chicago child to either the vocational or academic track, which would have been segregated from one another. The bill was defeated. Teacher unionism had arrived as a potent force in American civic life.
What we need in Chicago is a set of teachers who will either work in harmony with the board of education or else get on the outside and stay there. Insurrectionists are not exactly fit guides for the young.” In
Indeed, teaching was not like many other unionized jobs. In education, poor job performance put children’s well-being immediately at stake. Yet Haley and the Federation organized against Cooley’s teacher evaluation plan without suggesting any alternative for judging teachers’ professional merit and distinguishing good from bad performers.
given the men’s many sexist assumptions about female teachers—that they should never become principals and should be paid less than male teachers—rather than collaborate in these areas, the Federation developed a stance of across-the-board animosity.
relative consensus among union leaders, school reformers, and intellectuals in favor of tenure. It
In order that teachers may delight in awakening the spirits of children, they must themselves be awake. We have tried to free the teachers. Some
want to make the schools the great instrument of democracy.
There has grown up here a fallacy that the schools should be run to give employment to us and in case of doubt the benefit should be given us, the employees. No private school, no public service, runs on that basis. It is an absurdity.
Like the Federation in Chicago, the New York union argued that students and their families should choose what courses to take, instead of being confined to a specific track,
New York’s Feinberg Law, which was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, concerned itself solely with teachers’ private political ideas, and whether those “anti-American” views were incompatible with educating the state’s children.
Certain educators—those who lived outside the cultural and political mainstream—were not welcome in the classroom. The irony is that from racial integration to the culturally relevant curriculum to the need for higher academic expectations for poor students of color, many of the radical teachers’ ideals would become mainstream school reform priorities over the coming decades.
President Johnson’s enormous popularity in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, as well as his peerless legislative maneuvering, allowed him to establish an unprecedented role for the federal government in local public education.
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the precursor to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind. The 1965 law, initially funded at the massive level of $1.2 billion per year, united the Left and center around a new role for Washington as a standard setter for state education agencies and local schools.
States that offered their low-income students more state-level funding would be rewarded with more money from the federal government.
Those sky-high expectations placed on educators—as revolutionary foot soldiers in the War on Poverty—are still with us today.
While there remains a consensus that income and educational opportunity are deeply linked, never again would a national school reform agenda be accompanied by so aggressive an antipoverty push.
grew.
tallk about suurroondkng issuus like heallth, nutrition, parebtall involvemennt, career planning
Only about 17 percent of American teachers are nonwhite, compared to 40 percent of American public school students.
They envisioned a National Teacher Corps that would give elite young people an opportunity to enter and then transform the teaching profession,
this vision of recruiting “better people” into teaching explicitly denigrated the wisdom of those teachers already working in high-poverty schools.
Corps interns were more likely than veteran teachers to believe poor students could graduate from high school, and less likely to indicate that “poor home backgrounds” prevented children from learning. Interns cited education as the most effective antipoverty tool, while veterans believed job training, a guaranteed income, and marketable skills were more valuable. The vast majority of Corps recruits did not become career teachers, but many did pursue jobs in educational administration or policy.
“Pygmalion in the Classroom,” by Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal and elementary school principal Lenore Jacobson. Rosenthal and Jacobson told San Francisco public school teachers the names of several of their students who had performed well on the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition and thus were expected to “bloom” academically.
clear that when teachers held low expectations, student achievement was actually hindered.
Bundy report argued for abolishing the city school board and turning over teacher hiring, tenure, firing, and matters of curriculum to between thirty and sixty neighborhood community boards partly elected by parents and partly appointed by the mayor.
during the urban teacher strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when unions opposed black and Hispanic community control in favor of job security for predominantly white teachers, the unions became downright villains not only to antilabor conservatives, but, for the first time, to large segments of the American Left as well.
the idea of community control of urban schools originated in Queens in 1964, among white opponents of school desegregation who believed parents should band together to prevent busing. Within
bad teachers hopped from school to school, often ending up at the schools in the poorest neighborhoods with the least political clout.*4
students realized their education was being compromised by the upheaval. They had to enter school through police barricades erected to separate picketing teachers from community control activists, some of them armed Black Panthers. More police were stationed on the school’s rooftop, wearing helmets and riot gear and carrying nightsticks. Helicopters buzzed overhead. “It was like someone was filming a movie or something,” remembered Karima Jordon, who was in ninth grade. “You couldn’t believe this was happening.”
collective bargaining actually allied teachers to the central administration of urban school districts—the exact constituency Margaret Haley had founded teacher unionism to counteract. Under collective bargaining, it was easier for unions to negotiate with one strong administrative body, such as a city superintendent, board of education, or mayor, than with a plethora of neighborhood school boards or principals, each with their own set of demands.
McCoy stated, poignantly, “Everyone else has failed. We want the right to fail for ourselves.”
is this okay? where is failure on gov vs community
Newark Teachers Union had negotiated the furthest-reaching contract in the history of American public education, one that freed all classroom teachers of “nonprofessional chores” such as cafeteria duty, hall duty, and dismissal-time supervision.
Nation at Risk, one of the most influential federal documents ever published.
promoting the idea that schools and teachers are the primary levers for improving the nation’s—and individual students’—standard of living, many accountability reformers accepted as inevitable the retrenchment of the welfare state in the realms of job creation, vocational training, housing, and child care. A Nation at Risk set the terms of a debate we are still having today.
everyone from the Black Power Left to the segregationist Right believed schools were failing, state policy makers, especially Democrats who supported greater school funding, knew they would have to justify education spending in terms of tough reform and results.
Teacher credentialing was “a hoax and an educational disgrace,” he concluded, blaming the misapplication of John Dewey’s ideas: an overemphasis on student-centered pedagogy at the expense of subject matter training in history, literature, math, and science. As
an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves….We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
To improve teacher quality, the commission recommended higher base salaries, merit pay to reward effective teachers, and stricter teacher evaluation systems that made it more difficult to earn and keep tenure. Most
no teacher wants to fail,” Sommer told Fred Hechinger, the eminent education columnist at The New York Times. “If they are failing, it’s because they get no supervision, no direction, no leadership.”
The report, quite smartly, differed from other national drives for school reform in that it focused on raising standards for all children, not just poor children. That helped it appeal to business leaders and middle-class parents,
teachers unions have had a long history of fighting attempts to institute subjective evaluation systems; at
Reagan administration achieved its education goals by displacing the previous era’s commitment to school desegregation.
for equality, tax syatem like sports luxury tax
Young minority males assigned to Charlotte schools that experienced an influx of non-white students were more likely to be arrested and imprisoned than their demographically identical neighbors who remained in more integrated schools.
for white/affluent studennts to attend lower income school = tax break?
Desegregation was never widely implemented outside the South, and where it was implemented, as in Charlotte or Montgomery County, it often succeeded in raising student achievement to a similar or greater degree than did later teacher accountability reforms. Today
states could choose their own standards and tests for kids and decide what constituted passing them, as well as what rendered a teacher highly qualified and certified.
one of the best things a teacher can do for her students is to set high, individualized expectations for each one of them, regardless of a child’s past performance or whether he comes to class with a label such as low-income, special education, or learning disabled.
formative assessment. To avoid teaching children what they have previously learned, teachers should assess students at the beginning of the school year and at the beginning of new units, to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Effective teachers can narrow, but not close, achievement and employment gaps that reflect broader income, wealth, and racial inequalities in American society. This reality
current achievement gap is driven much more by out-of-school factors than by in-school factors; differences in teacher quality account for perhaps 7 percent of the gap.
But it turned out that the group of students who had been assigned to just one top value-added teacher—a teacher one standard deviation more effective than the norm—experienced small, yet observable, differences in life outcomes. These students earned, on average, 1.3 percent more per year, the difference between a salary of $25,000 and $25,325.
reading skill is more closely tied to life outcomes than math skill
Like other research, this seems to suggest that the only way to truly learn how to manage one’s own classroom is to actually do the job.
Extended Learning Cultural Model,
In math, students graphed the relationship between income and social opportunity in various south L.A. neighborhoods. In social studies, they read conservative and liberal proposals for school reform
Our system is highly decentralized in terms of curriculum, organization, funding, and student demographics and needs, yet we have expected local schools to implement one-size-fits-all reform agendas imposed from above.
higher teacher pay—is absolutely associated with better student outcomes. We must take this evidence seriously, because we are not paying teachers the upper-middle-class salary that would align with our sky-high expectations for their work.