Words&Dirt

This book’s title might connote a tense battlefield, with ruler-brandishing teachers firmly entrenched against the remonstrations of an angry citizenry.  But, like any serious student of history, author Dana Goldstein knows such simplistic images belie the messy truth about wars, which is that they are rife with broken borders, double crossings, unexpected victories, and crushing defeats.  So it has been with America’s public education system.

The Teacher Wars is a fascinating, much needed historical account of public teaching in America over the last two centuries.  It contains a host of well written, nuanced narratives about important figures in American education, each of which adds a particular flavor to the nation’s complex dialogue about what public schools are for and how best to run them.  Goldstein is careful not to lionize or condemn any single individual or point of view, aiming instead for a rich portrait of perspectives that eschews dichotomous or naive interpretations of educational goals and challenges.  As an in-depth look at the history of the American teacher, this book is an excellent resource.  Unfortunately, it fails to address the full scope of pressing problems facing today’s public schools, many of which are downplayed or omitted entirely.

The most useful historical lesson here is that America’s past is peppered with precedents for today’s educational difficulties.  From the very start, public educators have debated issues of teacher pay and tenure, school funding, the place of morality in curriculum, racial discrimination, vocational versus intellectual tracks, the role of parents in educating their kids, and the question of how much exhaustion and stress teachers should take on trying to teach impoverished students.  Rather than the occasional flareup in bad times, moral panics about teacher quality have actually been the norm.  Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, ideological and political factions were constantly forming, breaking up, and reforming––each claiming to be doing what’s best for students and the nation.  Goldstein’s research is a goldmine of anecdotal and statistical information about historical methods and experiments to improve schools; these often resemble the “innovative strategies” touted by contemporary education reformers.  Merit pay, fastidious evaluation of teachers by administrators, test-based tracking, union busting, “alternative” parochial schools, teacher witch hunts––these have all been tried before, with varying but rarely laudable results.

The Teacher Wars does an exceptional job of placing heated education debates in their proper historical context, allowing the careful reader to parse the differences between methods that have failed in the past and genuinely new attempts to bring American education fully into the 21st century.  While Goldstein has provided a useful tool for understanding why we’ve come to be where we are, her discussion and evaluation of current educational crises is markedly less insightful.  The book’s last few chapters contain a lot of information, most of which is dominated by jargon and statistics that don’t adequately address the underlying causes of the teacher assessment craze or the deep socioeconomic divide today’s teachers must desperately combat.

Given the general challenge of figuring out what to keep and what to cut in telling any historical narrative, it’s fair to assume Goldstein erred on the side of a tight focus on teachers in particular.  But there are many external factors that directly affect the ability of teachers to do their jobs, and The Teacher Wars does a paltry job of mapping them out.  There is no mention of how technology is changing the nature of teaching or the expectations of students, little discussion of across the board cutting of music and arts programs in favor of a “college for everyone” model, no candid discussion about the motivational distinctions between private and public schools, zero information about vocational training and technological unemployment, and far less attention to poverty than is necessary given the crucial and proven relationship between educational outcomes and socioeconomic factors.  In general, Goldstein neglects the complex relationship between publicly-funded education and the democratic way of life––the only context in which having a public education system makes any sense.  At 276 pages, Goldstein’s book is not so sprawling as to justify cutting an additional chapter or two to take up some of these issues and explain how they relate to the future of the teaching profession.  Anyone who is a teacher or who has regular contact with the teaching community knows that we can’t have a full and inclusive discussion about improving American education without assuming a broad view that takes the above issues into account.

These critiques would be less germane if Goldstein had not included an epilogue in which she makes explicit recommendations about how schools should treat and support teachers in the future.  Her suggestions, while generally insightful and practical, fall somewhat flat because they are not situated within the greater scope of public education’s place in American democracy.  As a historian, Goldstein does an admirable job; she is less effective as a cultural critic and purveyor of workable solutions.

All of this is not to say Goldstein hasn’t made an important contribution to our understanding of what teaching in America has meant, means today, and will mean in the future.  Her final message––that bottom-up solutions fueled by teacher collaboration are preferable to and more effective than top-down government policies––is poignantly articulated and deeply resonant with people who want to see schools solve problems with local resources rather than external ones.  While bad teachers do exist and ought to be supported or occasionally driven out of the profession, Goldstein is right to remind us that the typical veteran teacher is a vast repository of educational experience and wisdom, one that current systems leave largely untapped.

In 1916, Chicago public schools superintendent and teacher advocate Ella Flagg Young declared that “Some day the system will be such that the child and teacher will go to school with ecstatic joy. At home in the evening, the child will talk about the things done during the day and will talk with pride. I want to makes the schools the great instrument of democracy” (85). A century later, this statement makes Young seem equal parts prophet and naive idealist. There’s little doubt that many children come home from school in exactly this fashion, and less doubt that plenty more do not, and perhaps never will. The Teacher Wars reminds us that to move forward, we must occasionally look back and trace our tracks. That is how we continue to hone this intricate, obstinate, and ultimately invaluable “instrument of democracy.”

Rating: 8/10