The Teacher Wars

For over two centuries, Americans have debated who should teach public school, what should be taught, and how teachers should be trained, paid, evaluated, and fired. In The Teacher Wars, journalist Dana Goldstein traces this history from the early nineteenth century to the present, arguing that recurring cycles of moral panic about bad teachers have distracted reformers from the structural investments needed to make teaching an attractive, challenging profession. She contends that the tension between sky-high hopes for public education as a vehicle of meritocracy and a persistent unwillingness to fully fund the public sector explains why American teachers are both idealized and vilified.

Goldstein begins in 1820s New England, where Catharine Beecher, daughter of a celebrity preacher, and Horace Mann, Massachusetts's first secretary of education, championed universal public schooling. Beecher argued that pious young women would make better and cheaper teachers than the men who then dominated classrooms, while Mann opened Prussian-style normal schools, or teacher training academies, only to women because they could be employed at lower cost. Mann justified feminization by idealizing women as angelic public servants motivated by Christian faith, and teaching became understood less as a career than as a philanthropic calling. Low pay, minimal professional training, and chronic underfunding became entrenched features of the system.

The feminist movement challenged this status quo. Susan B. Anthony, who spent a decade teaching in upstate New York, delivered a landmark 1853 speech arguing that women's cheap labor drove down the profession's prestige. By 1850, four-fifths of New York's teachers were women, yet two-thirds of salary dollars went to men. Anthony organized female teachers to demand equal pay, but the Civil War diverted the movement. By 1890, only one-third of teachers nationally were men, and Harvard president Charles William Eliot called for higher pay and "some permanence of tenure" (42) to professionalize teaching.

After the Civil War, African American educators developed a powerful tradition of racial uplift through teaching. Charlotte Forten, a free-born Black woman from Philadelphia, volunteered to teach formerly enslaved people in the South Carolina Sea Islands, creating lessons built around racial pride. W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated the proper education for Black students: Washington emphasized vocational training at Tuskegee Institute, while Du Bois championed a classical liberal arts education for the "talented tenth" (56), the most academically promising Black students. Anna Julia Cooper, born to an enslaved mother, taught Latin at M Street High School in Washington, D.C., where Black students outperformed white students on district-wide exams, and she established a settlement house using "sympathetic methods" (64) to research each student's home life. By 1915, southern states spent three times more on white children's education than on Black children's.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Margaret Haley helped found the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF) in 1897 after two decades of frozen entry-level pay and classrooms crammed with 40 to 60 students. She discovered that corporations were evading taxes on school-owned land and won a landmark Illinois Supreme Court ruling compelling utility companies to pay back taxes. The CTF's affiliation with the Chicago Federation of Labor gave disenfranchised female teachers access to political power. Educator Ella Flagg Young, who became the nation's first female superintendent of a major city school system in Chicago in 1909, championed a vision in which teachers were creative intellectuals, not "automatons" (81) following scripted lessons. The era produced three lasting victories: women's suffrage in Illinois in 1913, the founding of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in 1916, and tenure protection for teachers in 1917.

From World War I through the Cold War, waves of patriotic moral panic targeted teachers with dissident politics. Mary McDowell, a Quaker Latin teacher in Brooklyn, was fired in 1918 for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge requiring "unquestioning loyalty to the military policy of the government" (93). During the Depression, an unusually well-educated cohort entered urban teaching because discrimination limited opportunities in other professions. In New York, communist teachers created a form of social movement unionism that fought for rigorous curricula in poor schools and removed racist textbooks, anticipating later reform priorities. During the McCarthy era, 378 New York City teachers lost their jobs in anticommunist purges, most of them tenured and professionally distinguished. Historian Howard K. Beale observed that it was "the exceptional teacher" (98), not the average one, who was hurt by these investigations.

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declared school segregation unconstitutional, but enforcement was slow. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, directing $1.2 billion per year to low-income schools, and accompanied this legislation with broader antipoverty measures. Yet desegregation devastated Black educators: Between 1954 and 1971, the nation lost over 31,000 Black teaching positions as white school boards reassigned Black teachers to unfamiliar subjects, gave them poor evaluations, and fired them (119). In the late 1960s, teachers unions collided with the Black Power-influenced community control movement. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, an elected community board dismissed 19 white teachers in 1968, provoking strikes by 60,000 teachers that shut schools for a fifth of the year. Test scores showed the experiment had been educationally disastrous, with third graders falling from four months behind to 12 months behind (158). Unions won these battles but saw public confidence decline sharply.

The Reagan era brought the accountability movement to national prominence. The 1983 A Nation at Risk report depicted a "rising tide of mediocrity" (170) and recommended merit pay, stricter evaluation, and alternative certification. Two-thirds of states launched new testing programs, but merit pay plans collapsed within a decade. The Clinton and George W. Bush administrations expanded testing further through No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which required all students to reach proficiency by 2014, producing perverse incentives: States made tests easy, curricula narrowed, and cheating scandals emerged in multiple districts.

In 1989, Princeton senior Wendy Kopp proposed Teach for America (TFA), a privately funded corps of elite college graduates who would teach in low-income schools. Research found TFA corps members about equally effective as other new teachers, with slightly stronger results in math. Meanwhile, value-added measurement, a technique estimating individual teacher impact from student test score growth, gained influence despite high error rates: With one year of data, more than one in three teachers would be misclassified as effective or ineffective. President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program, launched in 2009 with $4 billion in stimulus funds, incentivized states to evaluate teachers based on student test data. Two-thirds of states changed their laws, but results were mixed. Vanderbilt research found merit pay bonuses did not improve outcomes, most teachers were still rated effective under the new systems, and an explosion of testing in previously untested subjects produced absurdities, including first graders taking seven pencil-and-paper tests in art class.

Goldstein concludes by profiling promising alternatives to top-down accountability. Peer review systems use expert veteran teachers to coach and evaluate struggling colleagues. The Children's Literacy Initiative places experienced teachers in schools where others observe and learn research-based reading strategies, producing measurable gains. Urban teacher residencies, such as the Memphis Teacher Residency, require a full year of apprenticeship in a mentor's classroom, achieving 87 percent four-year retention compared to nearly 50 percent loss of new urban teachers nationally. At Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, teachers led a curriculum overhaul focused on interdisciplinary, neighborhood-based learning, only to see the school reconstituted, a turnaround process involving mass staff dismissals, despite improving results. Goldstein argues that sustainable reform must be built on the expertise of the best teachers rather than fears of the worst, through higher pay, rigorous training, peer collaboration, diverse recruitment, and the use of tests as diagnostic tools rather than instruments for punishing educators. "This is how we will achieve an end to the teacher wars" (274).