The Teacher Wars Quotes

“Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“In short, teachers are more, not less, likely than many other workers to get fired.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Teachers do work that is both personal and political.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“What’s more, veteran teachers who work long-term in high-poverty schools with low test scores are actually more effective at raising student achievement than is the rotating cast of inexperienced teachers who try these jobs out but flee after one to three years.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“There’s a problem when we’re creating a job you can’t do if you have kids,” Dennis Van Roekel, former president of the National Education Association, told me. “There are a lot of us who spend too much time working. But ultimately, you need time for family, time for community, time for church.” According to a union executive who has negotiated charter school contracts across the country, at many schools teachers are expected to eat lunch with their students, and have no prep period to plan lessons. At others, when a teacher calls in sick, the school will not hire a substitute, but will instead require other teachers to fill in during their prep periods. At one Chicago charter school, teachers complained that they had so little free time during the day that they could not visit the bathroom.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“But influential business leaders were eager proponents of numbers-driven merit pay for teachers. Ross Perot, for example, pushed Dallas to implement a plan to use test scores alone to evaluate teachers and distribute pay increases. So it was ironic that private industry had, by the 1980s, mostly turned away from efforts to pay white-collar workers according to strict productivity measures, finding that such formal evaluation programs were too expensive and time-consuming to create and implement. Research showed that companies with merit pay schemes did not perform better financially than did organizations without it, nor were their employees happier. Instead, management gurus recommended that workers be judged primarily by the holistic standards of individual supervisors.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“at the city level, support for community control didn’t have much to do with teaching and learning. It was about money, political alliances, and power.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Yet annual pay for entry-level elementary school teachers, 97 percent of whom were women, had been frozen for twenty years at $500 (about $13,300 in today’s dollars).”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Moreover, with the possible exception of high school—level math teachers, there is little evidence that better students make better teachers. Some nations, such as Finland, have been able to build a teaching force made up solely of star students. But other places, such as Shanghai, have made big strides in student achievement without drastically adjusting the demographics of who becomes a teacher.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“It is…advisable that the teacher should understand, and even be able to criticize, the general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered. He is not like a private soldier in an army, expected merely to obey, or like a cog in a wheel, expected merely to respond to and transmit external energy; he must be an intelligent medium of action. JOHN DEWEY, 1895”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Advocates for universal public education, called common schoolers, were challenged by antitax activists. The détente between these two groups redefined American teaching as low-paid (or even volunteer) missionary work for women,”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“in 2012, companies with over a thousand employees, the closest private counterpart to large urban school systems, lost only about 2 percent of their workforce from firings, resignations, and layoffs combined. In short, teachers are more, not less, likely than many other workers to get fired.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Compared to federal workers, who one study found are fired at an annual rate of .02 percent, teachers are exponentially more likely to be terminated”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Even we set aside the nearly 50 percent of all beginner teachers who choose to leave the profession within five years—and ignore the evidence that those who leave are worse performers than those who stay—it is unclear whether teachers are formally terminated for poor performance any less frequently than are other workers.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“A Nation at Risk. The report’s unforgettable introduction artfully deployed the militant language of the Cold War in service of school reform: If 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.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“One Colorado teacher told me (hyperbolically) that the disproportionate focus on punishing awful teachers made her feel “I’ve chosen a profession that, in the public eye, is worse than prostitution.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“So the next step in American education reform may be to focus less on top-down efforts to ferret out the worst teachers or turn them into automatons, and more on classroom-up interventions that replicate the practices of the best.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“When value-added is calculated for a teacher using just a single year’s worth of test score data, the error rate is 35 percent—meaning more than one in three teachers who are average will be misclassified as excellent or ineffective, and one in three teachers who excel or are terrible will be called average.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Why do national reform priorities keep getting misinterpreted on the ground? The federal Department of Education has no power over state legislatures or education departments. There are no federal inspectors of local schools to make sure principals, superintendents, and school boards understand how to use complex new tools like value-added measurement of teachers. Unique among Western nations, our national government does not produce or select high-quality tests, textbooks, or reading lists for teachers to use. Lastly—and perhaps most importantly—we consistently expect teachers and schools to close achievement gaps and panic when they fail to do so. But we do not provide families with the full range of social supports children need to thrive academically, including living-wage employment and stable and affordable child care, housing, higher education, and vocational training, in addition to decent nutrition and health care.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“He complained that Bostonians had paid a collective $50,000 for tickets to see the European ballerina Fanny Elssler, known “for the scantiness of her wardrobe.” This was the same amount of money, total, paid to Massachusetts teachers each year. What did society value more—salacious dancing or schools?”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“In fact, Donald Boyd’s 2010 study of teacher transfer requests in New York City found that teachers who choose to leave underperforming, high-poverty schools tend to have been less effective, as measured by value-added, than teachers who stay in tough assignments over the long haul, like Caputo-Pearl. A number of other studies have found similar results at the district level—teachers who flee urban school systems are less effective than those who stay. It is the constant churn of first-year teachers and administrators that makes these schools and districts so unstable.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“South Carolina’s fourth-grade music exam, administered via computer, asks: “When singing a melody together with a friend, what dynamic level should you sing? A) Louder than your friend B) Not too loud and not too soft C) Softer than your friend or D) the same as your friend.” (The correct answer is D.) Students are then shown a measure of sheet music and asked to identify which of four electronic recordings matches the notation.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Student behavior had been a challenge, Walmsley told me. One girl sometimes got up from her seat to dance across the classroom. A boy with a special-ed diagnosis could answer problems on paper but had trouble speaking up in front of his classmates. On a quiz, he wrote Walmsley a note: “Teacher, you think I’m stupid, but I’m not.” On the wall was a chart showing a ladder, each level representing one behavioral demerit. Step 1 is a warning. At Step 3, a child is sent to the “icebox,” an isolated chair at the back of the classroom. By Step 5, a parent is notified, and the child is removed from the classroom. Each student’s name was written on a wooden clothespin, and as he or she accrued demerits, the pin moved up the ladder. Like Arpino with her kindergarteners, Walmsley spent an extraordinary amount of time policing how his fourth graders sat. Were their eyes “tracking” the teacher? Were pencils resting in the pencil groove of the desk? He didn’t hesitate to give demerits for small infractions. “Remember how I was talking about chocolate milk? How milk and chocolate are our products?” he asked the students, referencing the previous day’s multiplication lesson. When a boy named Anthony answered, “Yes!” he earned a demerit for speaking out of turn. By the end of the period, Anthony’s clothespin had moved up the ladder, and Anthony was sitting in the icebox, scowling.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“The school’s principal, Bennetta Washington, was married to the city’s future mayor, Walter Washington, and was a politically connected reformer willing to take a chance on a young white woman.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Annex students took few English classes and no math. They spent the day learning “homemaking” skills, such as simple sewing, and left school with scant qualifications for either employment or further education.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“The Legion also cultivated a relationship with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, an opponent of the income tax and increased funding for teacher salaries and schools (all priorities of the AFT). In 1935 Hearst’s papers ran a series of articles written by a Legion commander, attacking public school teachers who explained the Depression as a failure of free markets. Teachers who did not purchase Liberty Bonds, did not display the American flag in their classrooms, or did not salute the flag were depicted in Legion literature as a “fifth column” loyal to the Soviet Union. Principals, school boards, and mayors sympathetic to the Legion—or scared to buck the group—targeted such teachers for investigation and sometimes dismissal.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions “disloyal” to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans’ organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation’s public schools. The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation’s youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“At the Auditorium Building on September 8, the labor movement hosted a rally to organize against the Loeb Rule. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor told the crowd that businessmen were engaged in a campaign “to eliminate men of brain and heart and sympathy and character” from the teaching force. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, a former member of Mayor Dunne’s progressive school board, spoke about the threat the Teachers Federation had long posed to corporate interests more interested in lowering their own taxes than in improving the education of other people’s children. “All over this country, in one form or another, it is a fight between what has been called the Interests, the special interests, and the interests of the public, the interests of the common people. That is the fight.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“Female activists accused male businessmen of knowingly dodging their taxes over the course of decades, as politicians looked the other way. After Haley gave an exhaustive report on thirty years of Illinois tax history, the stately Jane Addams rose to frame the fight in more visceral, sentimental terms. Additional tax revenue could pay not only for higher teacher salaries, she said, but also for better public sanitation, to protect poor children’s health. When businessmen evade taxes, “property … loses its moral value,” Addams said, and she called on the entire community to unite to “bring [businessmen] back to a sense of moral obligation, in order to make it seem righteous to pay taxes—because I imagine that to many men, it seems righteous to evade taxes if you can do it in the interests of the stockholder.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

“In 1850, four-fifths of New York’s eleven thousand teachers were women, yet two-thirds of the state’s $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men. It was not unusual for male teachers to earn twice as much as their female coworkers.”
― Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession