The Teacher Wars

A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

By: Dana Goldstein

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2022 Dana Goldstein (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

A New York Times Notable Book of 2014

“Ms. Goldstein’s book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic.... The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. If I were still teaching, I’d leave my tattered copy by the sputtering Xerox machine. I’d also recommend it to the average citizen who wants to know why Robert can’t read, and Allison can’t add." (New York Times)

“[A] lively account of the history of teaching.... The Teacher Wars suggests that to improve our schools, we have to help teachers do their job the way higher-achieving nations do: by providing ­better preservice instruction, offering newcomers more support from well-trained mentors and opening up the ‘black box’ classroom so teachers can observe one another without fear and share ideas. Stressing accountability, with no ideas for improving teaching, Goldstein says, is ‘like the hope that buying a scale will result in losing weight.’ Such books may be sounding the closing bell on an era when the big ideas in school reform came from economists and solutions were sought in spreadsheets of test data.” (New York Times Book Review)

“Goldstein presents detailed case studies from different periods that should give pause to any contemporary reformer who claims to know exactly how to fix public schools in America. Her careful historical analysis reveals certain lessons useful to anyone shaping policy, from principals to legislators...thorough and nuanced.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

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 👍🏼

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.

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..