The Teacher Wars Read Free Page A

project with sympathy for educators. American public school teaching has typically attracted individuals taking their first, tentative steps out of the working class, and one of them was my maternal grandfather, Harry Greene, a high school dropout. In his first career as a printer, he led a drive to organizea union at a nonunion shop, and for a while the fallout from that made it difficult for him to find work. When he was fifty-two years old, Harry finally earned an associate’s degree, and in 1965 began teaching vocational courses in New York City public high schools. He benefited from the early years of teacher collective bargaining. As a teacher, my grandfather made a steady middle-class salary with periodic raises for the first time in his life. That financial stability allowed my mother, Laura Greene, to attend a four-year private college.
    My dad, Steven Goldstein, was another first-generation college graduate who became a public school teacher. He attended Adelphi University on a soccer scholarship. Always the jock, my dad discovered he had a passion for history, too, and taught middle and high school social studies for ten years before going into school administration, because he wanted to earn more money. He worked in several socioeconomically integrated suburban school districts, and would sometimes say that the teachers union could be an administrator’s greatest ally in removing a bad teacher from the classroom.
    In addition to being the daughter and granddaughter of educators, I attended public schools in Ossining, New York, with a diverse group of white, black, Latino, and Asian classmates. A few parents, like my mom, commuted down the Hudson River to New York City for corporate jobs; others were single mothers on public assistance or line cooks in the kitchen of our town’s maximum-security prison, Sing Sing. But regardless of whether they were college professors or home health aides, the most involved parents in Ossining wanted their kids in the classrooms of the most experienced teachers. My junior-year math teacher, Mr. DiCarlucci, wore a full suit and tie every day, accessorized with blingy gold jewelry. Though he taught precalculus, he assigned research papers on high-level concepts like topology, to inspire us to stick with math over the long term. The white-haired Mr. Tunney guided English classes through dense classics like
All the King’s Men
with uncommon energy drawn from his infectious love for the books he taught. When teachers like that retired, the entire community mourned.
    When I began reporting on education in 2007, I quickly learned how lucky I had been. Most American schools are socioeconomicallysegregated, very little like the integrated schools I attended in Ossining, where highly qualified teachers aspired to build long careers, and to teach both middle-class and poor children.In 2005, the average high school graduation rate in the nation’s fifty largest cities was just 53 percent, compared to 71 percent in the suburbs.International assessments conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, show 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 our most educated citizens, those with graduate degrees, are below world averages in math and computer literacy (though above average in reading). I do not believe schools are good enough the way they are. Nor do I believe that poverty and ethnic diversity prevent the United States from doing better educationally. Teachers and schools alone cannot solve our crisis of inequality and long-term unemployment, yet we know from the experience of nations like Poland that we don’t have to eradicate economic insecurity to improve our schools.
    What I do believe is that education reformers today should learn from the mistakes of history. We must focus