The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession by Dana Golds

Description: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein A brilliant young scholars history of 175 years of teaching in America shows that teachers have always borne the brunt of shifting, often impossible expectations.NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Agroundbreaking history of175 years of American education thatbrings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today-and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools." A lively account."-New York Times Book ReviewIn The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools-instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting "elite" graduates to teach-are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography DANA GOLDSTEIN comes from a family of public school educators. She received theSpencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at The Marshall Project. She lives in New York City. Review A New York Times Notable Book"Ms. Goldsteins book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic ... The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. If I were still teaching, Id leave my tattered copy by the sputtering Xerox machine. Id also recommend it to the average citizen who wants to know why Robert cant read, and Allison cant add." —New York Times"[A] lively account of the history of teaching.... The Teacher Wars suggests that to improve our schools, we have to help teachers do their job the way higher-achieving nations do: by providing better preservice instruction, offering newcomers more support from well-trained mentors and opening up the black box classroom so teachers can observe one another without fear and share ideas. Stressing accountability, with no ideas for improving teaching, Goldstein says, is like the hope that buying a scale will result in losing weight. Such books may be sounding the closing bell on an era when the big ideas in school reform came from economists and solutions were sought in spreadsheets of test data." —New York Times Book Review"Goldstein presents detailed case studies from different periods that should give pause to any contemporary reformer who claims to know exactly how to fix public schools in America. Her careful historical analysis reveals certain lessons useful to anyone shaping policy, from principals to legislators ... thorough and nuanced." —San Francisco Chronicle"Dana Goldsteins The Teacher Wars is the product of just what the teaching corps needs more of: open-minded, well-informed, sympathetic scrutiny that doesnt shrink from exposing systemic problems and doesnt peddle faddish solutions either." —The Atlantic"Engaging.... Goldstein ably sketches reformers past and present, asserting that the common force behind each new wave of school reforms is evangelical conviction, and that new movements often seem based more on faith than on factual evidence ... her ability to illuminate each new waves hype-disillusionment cycle is a welcome treatment of a fraught subject." —The New Yorker¶¶"A sweeping, insightful look at how public education and the teaching profession have evolved and where we may be headed." —Booklist, starred review"[An] immersive and well-researched history.... Attacking a veritable hydra of issues, Goldstein does an admirable job, all while remaining optimistic about the future of this vital profession." —Publishers Weekly"Think teachers are overpaid? Or are they dishonored and overworked? Both positions, this useful book suggests, are very old—and very tired ... Goldstein delivers a smart, evenhanded source of counterargument." —Kirkus Reviews"I wanted to yell Yes! Yes! Thank you for finally talking sense on page after page. Anyone who wants to be a combatant in or commentator on the teacher wars has to read The Teacher Wars." —Chris Hayes, host of MSNBCs All In with Chris Hayes and author of Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy"Its hard to know what to make of teachers. In the news and in the movies they are sometimes vampires sucking off public goodwill and sometimes saviors of Americas children. In this totally surprising book Dana Goldstein—who has always been Slates sharpest writer on education—explains how teachers have always been at the center of controversy. At once poetic and practical, The Teacher Wars will make school seem like the most exciting place on earth." —Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men"Dana Goldstein proves to be as skilled an education historian as she is an astute observer of the contemporary state of the teaching profession. May policy makers take heed." —Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers"A colorful, immensely readable account that helps make sense of the heated debates around teaching and school reform. The Teacher Wars is the kind of smart, timely narrative that parents, educators, and policy makers have sorely needed." —Frederick M. Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute "Dana Goldstein is one of the best education writers around. Her history of the teaching profession is that and much more: an investigation into the political forces that can help or hinder student learning." —Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy"Dana Goldstein has managed the impossible: Shes written a serious education book thats fresh, insightful, and enjoyable to read." —Michael Petrilli, Executive Vice President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute"Teaching has always been a political profession. We all have a dog in this fight. So I can hardly imagine anyone who could not profit from reading this erudite, elegant, and relentlessly sensible book. Listen to Dana Goldstein: We must quiet the teacher wars. Reading The Teacher Wars would be a great way to start." —Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland"If more people involved in todays discussion about education reform read this book, our national conversation about schooling would be deeper and more effective. Buy this book. Read this book. Share it with your friends who care about education. A very important work." —Peg Tyre, author of The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve "Why are todays teachers pictured simultaneously as superheroes and villains? In clear, crisp language, Dana Goldstein answers that question historically by bringing to life key figures and highlighting crucial issues that shaped both teachers and teaching over the past century. Few writers about school reform frame the context in which teachers have acted in the past. Goldstein does exactly that in thoughtfully explaining why battles over teachers have occurred then and now." —Larry Cuban, Professor Emeritus of Education, Stanford University Review Quote "Ms. Goldsteins book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic ... The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. If I were still teaching, Id leave my tattered copy by the sputtering Xerox machine. Id also recommend it to the average citizen who wants to know why Robert cant read, and Allison cant add." --New York Times "[A] lively account of the history of teaching ... The Teacher Wars suggests that to improve our schools, we have to help teachers do their job the way higher-achieving nations do: by providing Excerpt from Book Introduction I began this book in early 2011 with a simple observation: Public school teaching had become the most controversial profession in America. Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, and even the Democratic governor of deep blue Massachusetts, sought to diminish or eliminate teachers rights to collectively bargain. Teacher tenure was the subject of heated debate in statehouses from Denver to Tallahassee, and President Obama swore in his State of the Union address to "stop making excuses" for bad teachers. One rising-star Republican, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, even became a conservative folk hero after appearing in a series of YouTube videos in which he excoriated individual public school teachers--all of them middle-aged women--who rose at public events to challenge him on his $1 billion in education budget cuts, even as he cut $1.6 billion in corporate taxes. No other profession operates under this level of political scru- tiny, not even those, like policing or social work, that are also tasked with public welfare and are paid for with public funds. In 2010 Newsweek published a cover story called "The Key to Saving American Education." The image was of a blackboard, with a single phrase chalked over and over again in a childs loopy handwriting: We must fire bad teachers. We must fire bad teachers. We must fire bad teachers. Wide-release movies like Waiting for "Superman" and Wont Back Down, funded by philanthropists who made their fortunes in the private sector, portray teacher tenure and its defender, teachers unions, as practically the sole causes of underperforming schools. Everywhere I traveled as a reporter, from the 2008 Democratic National Convention to the 2010 meeting of former president Bill Clintons Clinton Global Initiative, powerful people seemed to feel indignant about the incompetence and job security of public school teachers, despite polls showing that the American public considers teachers highly respected professionals, nearly on par with medical doctors. Anxiety about bad teaching is understandable. Teachers do work that is both personal and political. They care for and educate our children, for whom we feel a fierce and loyal love. And they prepare our nations citizens and workers, whose wisdom and level of skill will shape our collective future. Given that teachers shoulder such an awesome responsibility, it makes sense that American politics is acutely attuned to their shortcomings. So I want to begin by acknowledging: 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. 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. In the Obama era, the predominant policy response to these very real problems has been a narrow one: to weaken teachers tenure protections and then use "measures of student learning"--a euphemism for childrens scores on an ever-expanding battery of hastily designed tests--to identify and fire bad teachers. One Colorado teacher told me (hyperbolically) that the disproportionate focus on punishing awful teachers made her feel "Ive chosen a profession that, in the public eye, is worse than prostitution." A spate of online videos and blog posts, in which angry teachers pub- licly quit their jobs, has gone viral. "I can no longer cooperate with a testing regime that I believe is suffocating creativity and innovation in the classroom," wrote Ron Maggiano, a Virginia high school social studies teacher and winner of two national teaching awards. In Illinois, Ellie Rubinstein tendered her resignation via YouTube, explaining, "Everything I loved about teaching is extinct. Curriculum is mandated. Minutes spent teaching subjects are audited. Schedules are dictated by administrators. The classroom teacher is no longer trusted or in control of what, when, or how she teaches." Olivia Blanchard chose to leave her Teach for America placement in Atlanta, where hundreds of thousands of dollars in merit pay bonuses had been paid to administrators and teachers who cheated by erasing and correcting students answers on standardized tests before submitting them to be graded. After a round of indictments, those teachers who remained in the district were left demoralized and paranoid. When Blanchard clicked Send on her resignation e-mail, she was "flooded with relief," she recounted in The Atlantic . Blanchard, Maggiano, and Rubinstein represent a larger trend. Polls show teachers feel more passionate and mission-driven about their careers than other American professionals. But a MetLife survey of teachers found that between 2008 and 2012, the proportion who reported being "very satisfied" with their current job plummeted from 62 to 39 percent, the lowest level in a quarter century. I had assumed this war over teaching was new, sparked by the anxieties of the Great Recession. After all, one-fifth of all American children were growing up poor--twice the child poverty rate of England or South Korea. Young adults were suffering from a 17 percent unemployment rate, compared to less than 8 percent in Germany and Switzerland. Over half of recent college graduates were jobless or underemployed for their level of education. A threadbare social safety net, run-amok bankers, lackadaisical regulators, the globalization of manufacturing, and a culture of consumerism, credit card debt, and short-term thinking might have gotten us into this economic mess. But wed be damned if better teachers couldnt help get us out. "Great teachers are performing miracles every single day," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in 2009. "An effective teacher? They walk on water." The rhetoric could provoke whiplash. Even as we were obsessed with the very worst teachers, we were worshipping an ideal, superhuman few. This confusing dichotomy led me to wonder: Why are American teachers both resented and idealized, when teachers in other nations are much more universally respected? In South Korea, teachers are referred to as "nation builders." In Finland, both men and women name teaching as among the top three most desirable professions for a spouse. Meanwhile, that old American saw--"Those who cant do, teach"--continues to reverberate, reflecting elite condescension toward career educators. I suspected that the key to understanding the American view of teachers lay in our history, and perhaps had something to do with the tension between our sky-high hopes for public education as the vehicle of meritocracy and our perennial unwillingness to fully invest in our public sector, teachers and schools included. For two hundred years, the American public has asked teachers to close troubling social gaps--between Catholics and Protestants; new immigrants and the American mainstream; blacks and whites; poor and rich. Yet every new era of education reform has been characterized by a political and media war on the existing teachers upon whom we rely to do this difficult work, often in the absence of the social supports for families that make teaching and learning most effective for kids, like stable jobs and affordable housing, child care, and health care. The nineteenth-century common school reformers depicted male teachers--90 percent of the classroom workforce in 1800--as sadistic, lash-wielding drunks who ought to be replaced by kinder, purer (and cheaper) women. During the Progressive Era, it was working-class female teachers who were attacked, for lacking the masculine "starch" supposedly necessary to preside over sixty-student classrooms of former child laborers. In the South during the civil rights era, Brown v. Board of Education prompted the racially motivated firings of tens of thousands of black teachers, as the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations looked the other way. Then, at the height of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it was inner-city white teachers who were vilified, for failing to embrace parental control of schools and Afrocentric pedagogical theories. Teachers have been embattled by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, business leaders, social scientists, activists on both the Right and Left, parents, and even one another. (As we shall see, some of the critiques were fair, others less so.) Americans have debated who should teach public school; what should get taught; and how teachers should be educated, trained, hired, paid, evaluated, and fired. Though weve been arguing about these questions for two centuries, very little consensus has developed. Amid these teacher wars, many extraordinary men and women worked in public school classrooms and offered powerful, grassroots ideas for how to improve American education. Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. Du Bois, 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 childrens 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 Details ISBN0345803620 Author Dana Goldstein Short Title TEACHER WARS Language English ISBN-10 0345803620 ISBN-13 9780345803627 Media Book Format Paperback Pages 384 Year 2015 Publication Date 2015-08-04 Subtitle A History of Americas Most Embattled Profession Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2015-08-04 NZ Release Date 2015-08-04 US Release Date 2015-08-04 UK Release Date 2015-08-04 Publisher Random House USA Inc DEWEY 371.1020973 Illustrations 8 PP. B&W Audience General Imprint Vintage Books We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:141690778;

Price: 41.76 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2024-11-11T02:31:43.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD