The Teacher Wars Read Free Page B

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. We must quiet the teacher wars and support ordinary teachers in improving their skills, what economist Jonah Rockoff, who studies teacher quality, calls “moving the big middle” of the profession. While the ingenuity and fortitude of exemplary teachers throughout history are inspiring, many of their stories, which you will read in this book, shed light on the political irrationality of focusing obsessively on rating teachers, while paying far less attention to the design of the larger public education and social welfare systems in which they work.
    To understand those systems, we will begin our historical journey in Massachusetts during the first half of the nineteenth century. 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, a reality we have lived with for twocenturies—as the children of slaves and immigrants flooded into the classroom, as we struggled with and then gave up on desegregating our schools, and as we began, in the late twentieth century, to confront a future in which young Americans without college degrees were increasingly disadvantaged in the labor market and thus relied on schools and teachers, more than ever before, to help them access a middle-class life.
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    *1 Recent data shows teachers’ academic qualifications improving, but it is unclear whether this is a lasting development or a short-term trend due to weak private sector hiring during the recession.
    *2 These are the actual categories of the four rating systems used in the New York City public schools between 1898 and 2014.

• Chapter One •
“Missionary Teachers”
    THE COMMON SCHOOLS MOVEMENT AND THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN TEACHING
    In 1815 a religious revival swept the Litchfield Female Academy, a private school in a genteel Connecticut town.
    In those years, there werefew truly “public” schools in the United States. The U.S. Constitution did not mention education as a right (it still doesn’t), and school attendance was not compulsory. Schools were generally organized by town councils, local churches, urban charitable societies, or—in more remote parts of the country—ad hoc groups of neighbors. A mix of tuition payments and local tax dollars supported the schools. Two-thirds of American students attended one-room schoolhouses, where as many as seventy children from age five through sixteen were educated together, usually by just one overwhelmed schoolteacher, who was nearly always male. School was held only twelve weeks per year, six in the summer and six in the winter. There were rarely any textbooks on hand, and the most frequent assignment was to memorize and recite Bible passages. Naughty children were whipped or made to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap.
    At Litchfield, a relative island of privilege, girl after girl loudly and publicly achieved the state of “conversion” expected of all fervent Calvinists, a transcendent, nearly manic period in which God’s plan for one’s life would be revealed, setting an individual upon her predestined path toward heaven. Conversion tended to be catching, like the flu. But fourteen-year-old Catharine Beecher refused to convert. This made her conspicuous, because she was the daughter of a celebrity preacher.
    Her father, Lyman Beecher, first came to the public’s attention after he delivered a passionate sermon against dueling in the wake of Alexander Hamilton’s death in 1804 at the hands of Aaron Burr. He cast himself as a moral compass on matters both religious and secular. In sermons and articles, he opposed Catholic immigration and the spread of