The Teacher Wars

A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

De: Dana Goldstein

Narrado por: Erin Bennett

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools.

“[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review

In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.

Brilliant!

Every school administrator and educational policymaker should be required to read this book. Otherwise we will continue to struggle in the same ways and repeat the same problems in education. As a teacher, I’m so grateful for this research because I can see historical patterns being repeated now and can at least start building and district discussions that might impact our children and students for the better. An incredibly important book.

Overall, pretty good.

This book is very informational and kind of historical. I do not enjoy reading historical books typically, but I found this one very interesting. It kind of goes over the history of education and how things have changed along the ways. I would recommend 👍🏼

Must Read for Teachers in the USA

This should be required reading for all teachers. Historical context sheds a blinding light on the seemingly modern issues in education today. Goldstein gets it.

A little bland at times.

Most of the Progressive Era reforms discussed in this book were incredibly fascinating to learn about. With that being said, it did have very large chunks of bland textbook-like sections of this book. Overall, very informative book of an incredibly difficult profession.

Historical mostly

Just not for me even though it was recommended. If you like the history of education then this one fits the bill.

Out of date before it was released. Disappointing.

Important: Do not use this to try to understand the conflict surrounding education and the pandemic. It is not in this book.

The first five chapters could have been condensed into two, but I struggled through them in hopes that the voluminous names and details would become relevant to current educational climates. Instead, the first one hundred and twenty five years of extra details could have been summarized into sexual and racial discrimination that continues to this day affecting teacher pay and student outcomes. Things finally began to feel relevant beginning in chapter 6.

I did, however, notice something odd. I noticed that even in later chapters, the author kept quoting information that never passed 2013. Ten years ago in education is an eternity! I hoped this book would help me understand the aftermath of Covid in my classroom. It was informative, but not helpful. I was dismayed to have invested this much time in a book only to hear in the epilogue that colleges were turning out nine times as many teachers as there were jobs available (also a 2011 or 2012 statistic). The current teacher shortages are not new information. A book released as “new” two weeks ago and with a copyright of 2022 should not contain statistics from ten years ago. Very disappointing.

Don’t expect entertaining, but it will be very informational (thus two stars instead of one). Unfortunately, it will not be current information. Had I been looking for historical info without a current events context, this would have been fine. But the description promised me an understanding of how education got “here”- not where we were ten years ago.

On a high note, the narrator is easy to listen to so she makes it easy to keep going even through the more laborious sections..