The Teacher Wars
A History of America's Most Embattled Profession
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Narrated by:
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Erin Bennett
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By:
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Dana Goldstein
About this listen
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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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)
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On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto - a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the 16th century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the history of the ghetto in Europe, as well as later efforts to understand the problems of the American city.
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Impressive
- By Jean on 12-10-16
By: Mitchell Duneier
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The New Education
- How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux
- By: Cathy N. Davidson
- Narrated by: Carolyn Cook
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
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Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy.
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Practical Enough / Scholarly Enough
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A Nation of Nations
- A Story of America After the 1965 Immigration Law
- By: Tom Gjelten
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was 90 percent white, 10 percent African American, with a little more than 100 families who were "other". Currently the African American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than 50 percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually "Americanize".
By: Tom Gjelten
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Higher Education in America
- By: Derek Bok
- Narrated by: Steven Cooper
- Length: 18 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Higher Education in America is a landmark work - a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the current condition of our colleges and universities from former Harvard president Derek Bok, one of the nation's most-respected education experts. Sweepingly ambitious in scope, this is a deeply informed and balanced assessment of the many strengths as well as the weaknesses of American higher education today.
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Long but not deep
- By ProfGolf on 05-13-16
By: Derek Bok
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The Global Achievement Gap
- Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills our Children Need - and What We Can Do About it
- By: Tony Wagner
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
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Education expert Tony Wagner situates our school problems in the context of the global knowledge economy and analyzes the skills necessary for our young people to succeed.
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made obsolete by 'MostLikelyToSucceed'-still great
- By MichaelS on 04-01-16
By: Tony Wagner
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Mothers of Massive Resistance
- White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
- By: Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
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Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials.
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commendable topic....
- By CB on 10-25-19
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Creative Schools
- The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education
- By: Lou Aronica, Ken Robinson
- Narrated by: Ken Robinson PhD
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
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Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.
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The Answer to Why Students Stop Trying
- By Alison Sattler on 07-21-15
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The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935
- By: James D. Anderson
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James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern Black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing Black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into Black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters.
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Against all Odds
- By tubby on 10-21-22
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Why I Stand
- From Freedom to the Killing Fields of Socialism
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American Individualism has been the crown jewel of a nation that has prioritized God, family, and freedom to out-dream its obstacles. It is the freedom of this individual spirit that is under attack by its adversarial ideology, Marxist Socialism. This destructive ideology has resulted in “killing fields” of bodies, souls, and dreams of billions worldwide. Consistent is the destruction of manhood, womanhood, the family, and every pillar that supports love of God and country. Why I Stand documents an ideology that uses trust to divide and betray.
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Eye opening!
- By Susan Nelson on 03-04-19
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Radical
- Fighting to Put Students First
- By: Michelle Rhee
- Narrated by: Shannon McManus
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
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Part memoir, part manifesto, Radical is this fearless advocate's incisive, intensely personal call-to-arms. Rhee combines the story of her own extraordinary experience with dozens of compelling examples from schools she's worked in and studied-from students from unspeakable home lives who have thrived in the classroom to teachers whose radical methods have produced unprecedented leaps in achievement. Radical chronicles Rhee's awakening to the potential of every child, her rage at the special interests blocking badly-needed change, and her recognition that it will take a grassroots movement to create outstanding public schools.
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Good read after seeing Waiting for Superman
- By Marie on 04-10-13
By: Michelle Rhee
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Jane Crow
- The Life of Pauli Murray
- By: Rosalind Rosenberg
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A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.
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What a legacy!!!
- By Paul on 03-08-21
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This Noble Land
- My Vision For America
- By: James A. Michener
- Narrated by: Arthur Addison
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
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This Noble Land is Michener's most personal statement about America, an examination of the issues that threaten to fragment and undermine the nation - racial conflict, the widening gulf between rich and poor, the decline of education, the inadequacies of our health care system - as well as a thought-provoking prescription for sustaining our "outstanding success". First published shortly before Michener's death, This Noble Land stands as a wake-up call for a troubled era, infused with the wisdom and passion of a lifetime.
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A startling realization
- By Amazon Customer on 08-15-15
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What listeners say about The Teacher Wars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-22-23
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.
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- Kenzie D
- 04-20-23
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 👍🏼
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- elyse arrington
- 07-08-24
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.
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- Robby
- 08-06-23
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.
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- Jason
- 04-03-22
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..
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