The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

Author:Dana Goldstein [Goldstein, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53696-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

The report went on to depict a “rising tide of mediocrity”: a twenty-year decline in SAT scores, electives like cooking and drivers ed considered acceptable substitutes for physics and calculus (at the so-called “shopping mall high school”), and Japanese and German public school graduates who were able to engineer more desirable cars and better machine tools, kneecapping the U.S. economy. American teachers were dullards drawn from the “bottom quarter” of high school and college graduating classes, and they were especially deficient in math and science.

To improve teacher quality, the commission recommended higher base salaries, merit pay to reward effective teachers, and stricter teacher evaluation systems that made it more difficult to earn and keep tenure. Most of the European and Asian nations that built high-prestige teaching professions after World War II required prospective teachers to spend several years training for the classroom. A Nation at Risk made a different suggestion, in line with the American tradition of missionary teaching: to allow career changers and young college grads who had not studied education to quickly obtain “alternative” teaching credentials.

Better teachers were just one of four priorities the commission identified. The others were raising expectations for students and adding rigor to the high school curriculum, lengthening the school day by one hour and the school year by forty days, and encouraging the federal government to play a larger role in setting the national education agenda and funding it. But the report was released into a political climate of budget-cutting fervor—federal aid for poor children’s education was cut by 16 percent in Reagan’s first term—and a culture war. There was little enthusiasm in Congress for providing the massive influx of funding needed to extend learning time, the costliest proposal in A Nation at Risk. The idea of more rigorous, universal curriculum standards was also a nonstarter; the American Right had long demonstrated an overactive paranoia about supposedly liberal national attempts to influence the curriculum of local schools—a paranoia Reagan fully shared as a former anticommunist activist. Consequently, despite A Nation at Risk’s broad set of recommendations, policy makers focused increasingly on teachers alone: their training, demographic traits, and how they were evaluated and paid.

The teaching establishment—unions and teachers colleges—was divided in its response to the report. At the American Federation of Teachers, most high-level staffers were reluctant to support any initiative of a presidential administration that wanted to cut school funding and provide vouchers to parochial schools. But Al Shanker, who had become AFT president in 1974, bucked his advisers—and his counterpart at the National Education Association—to embrace the core message of A Nation at Risk, that American schools were failing. “I like the phrase ‘a nation at risk’ because those words put education on the same par as national defense,” he told his members. This was a bold position, in stark contrast to how most unionists felt about the report; in the words of Dennis Van Roekel of the NEA, who at the time led the state teachers union in Arizona and later served as NEA president, “I took it as a personal insult.

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