Not For Teacher

Malcolm Harris:

The fight documented in Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars may be a lost cause

The tag line to Dana Goldstein’s new book The Teacher Wars is “A history of America’s most embattled profession.” That Goldstein, an education journalist now at the fledgling Marshall Project, can make that claim without ruining her credibility before the first page speaks to the unique role educators play in American society. They’re (mostly) unionized government employees, but they spend their time working alone. We ask that they produce standardized results and demonstrate individualized care at the same time. We say their work is invaluable and pay them as if they were semiskilled. They come under frequent attack from all corners of the political map. Whether that necessarily makes teachers more embattled than psychologists or babysitters or coal miners or housewives I’m not sure, but they are certainly curious.

The biggest reason teachers are so embattled is that their unions still exist. While other segments of American organized labor have declined in size dramatically over the past few decades, educators have managed to hold on, at least until recently. As a result, the debate around the teaching profession is incredibly polarized: Union members and their allies are fighting an existential battle for their jobs, while their opponents are constantly devising new schemes to chip away at what the unions have left. Both sides have made support for teachers a question of character, with little room for good faith in between: Either you believe teachers’ unions are important and must be protected, or you think they’re a moribund obstacle to “reform.” I confess that when I began Goldstein’s book, I feared it would be a pro-union pity plea, but her writerly commitments are to the historical record, and she gives readers a solid and critically detached account.teacher-wars-cover picDana Goldstein The Teacher Wars Doubleday (368 pages)

At the beginning of the teacher wars in the 1830s, progress was built on a foundation of pseudoscience, malarky, and personal psychology. Horace Mann, the architect of American public education, was also an avid phrenologist. Goldstein is careful to point out that skull-­measuring—though racist and fully fraudulent—was considered innovative and liberal compared with early 19th century Protestantism. At least phrenologists believed people could learn.

Mann pushed forward a unified and compulsory Massachusetts state school system based on a similar Prussian model. From the start, Mann imagined teaching as women’s work, and not just any women: “Mann depicted these cost-effective female educators as angelic public servants monitored by Christian faith: wholly unselfish, self-abnegating, and morally pure.” Women weren’t just cheaper to hire; they were also assumed to be naturally nurturing and pious enough to teach godly behavior. “Teaching,” Goldstein writes, “was promoted as the female equivalent of the ministry: a profession whose prestige would be rooted not in worldly rewards, such as money or political influence, but in the pursuit of satisfaction that came from serving others.” In other words, you can pay teachers in work.