The Teacher Wars

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The Teacher Wars Page 33

by Dana Goldstein


  3 Another study of over a thousand: Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger, Gathering Feedback for Teaching (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, January 2012).

  4 Polls show teachers: The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School Leadership (February 2013).

  5 “Great teachers are performing miracles”: Dana Goldstein, “Teaching and the Miracle Ideology,” The American Prospect, July 15, 2009.

  6 In Finland, both men and women: Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 73.

  7 Depending on whom you ask: For more on estimates of the number of ineffective teachers who cannot improve, see chapter 9, especially comments from economist Eric Hanushek and New Haven superintendent Garth Harries.

  8 teachers were fired for cause: See the Schools and Staffing Survey of the National Center for Education Statistics, http://​nces.​ed.​gov/​surveys/​sass/​tables/​sass​0708_​2009320_​d1s_​08.​asp.

  9 Compared to federal workers: Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven, “Federal Government Should Increase Firing Rate,” Tax and Budget Bulletin (Cato Institute report, November 2002).

  10 But in 2012, companies with over a thousand: See Federal Reserve economic data, http://​research.​stlouisfed.​org/​fred2/​graph/​?​g=​q7M. Also Bureau of Labor Statistics Business Employment Dynamics report, http://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/f.09.chart3_d.gif.

  11 Four percent of all civilian workers: Richard M. Ingersoll, Who Controls Teachers’ Work? Power and Accountability in America’s Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15.

  12 The National Council on Teacher Quality estimates: E-mail correspondence between author and Maegan Rees of National Council on Teaching Quality, October 23, 2013.

  13 But the leading teacher demographer: Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill, “Who’s Teaching Our Children?” Educational Leadership (May 2010).

  14 According to Andreas Schleicher: Thomas L. Friedman, “The Shanghai Secret,” New York Times, October 22, 2013.

  15 “Education is, and forever will be”: John Dewey, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, ed. Reginald D. Archambault (New York: Modern Library, 1964), 199.

  16 In 2005, the average high school graduation rate: Christopher B. Swanson, Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap (Editorial Projects in Education report, America’s Promise Alliance, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, April 2009).

  17 International assessments: OECD, OECD Skills Outlook 2013 (November 2013).

  CHAPTER ONE: “MISSIONARY TEACHERS”

  1 few truly “public” schools: For summaries of schooling in early-nineteenth-century America, see C. F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); and Lawrence Cremin, The American Common School (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1951).

  2 In riveting sermons: Horace Mann to Lydia Mann, April 11, 1822, Horace Mann Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  3 “best boy”: M. Rugoff, The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 314.

  4 “irksome and disagreeable”: Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 32.

  5 “mournful, despairing hours”: Ibid., 7.

  6 “not a single instance”: Mary Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association of the United States, 1937), 26.

  7 “is reputed a lady”: Horace Mann to Lydia Mann, April 11, 1822, Horace Mann Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  8 “I lie down in sorrow”: Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 42.

  9 “a blank”: Ibid., 47.

  10 “The heart must have something”: Ibid., 50.

  11 Litchfield Female Academy: For descriptions of the school Catharine Beecher attended, see Rugoff, The Beechers, 43; M. T. Blauvelt, “Schooling the Heart: Education and Emotional Expression at Litchfield Female Academy,” in The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Chronicles of a Pioneer School from 1792 to 1833, Being the History of Miss Sarah Pierce and Her Litchfield School, ed. Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (Cambridge, MA: The University Press, 1903); and Litchfield Historical Society, To Ornament Their Minds: Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy 1792–1833 (Litchfield, CT: Litchfield Historical Society, 1993).

  12 “influence, respectability”: Milton Rugoff, The Beechers, 61.

  13 “Woman, whatever are her relations”: Catharine Beecher, “An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers,” Classics in the Education of Girls and Women (1835): 285–95.

  14 “These branches fill young Misses”: Frances Huehls, “Teaching as Philanthropy: Catharine Beecher and the Hartford Female Seminary,” in Women and Philanthropy in Education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 39.

  15 “A lady should study”: Catharine Beecher, “Female Education,” American Journal of Education 2 (1827): 219–23.

  16 Census figures … “ignorant and neglected”: Catharine Beecher, “Female Education,” American Journal of Education 2 (1827): 219–23.

  17 The French revolution, she warned: Catharine Beecher, The Duty of American Women to Their Country (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1845).

  18 “energy, discretion, and self-denying benevolence”: Beecher, “Female Education,” 123.

  19 10 percent of American women worked outside the home: Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 47.

  20 “I simply ask”: Catharine Esther Beecher, The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846).

  21 “[A] woman needs support only for herself”: Beecher, “Female Education,” 114.

  22 Melville “anxious”: W. H. Gilman, Melville’s Early Life and Redburn (New York: New York University Press, 1951), 89.

  23 Henry David Thoreau: Lawrence Wilson, “Thoreau on Education,” History of Education Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1962): 19–29.

  24 “horrible outrage” of the arson: Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 192.

  25 Phrenologists like the: George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb, 1841), 268, 415.

  26 his brother Stephen: Mann, Life of Horace Mann, 16–17.

  27 “moral reform”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 40.

  28 “the scantiness of her wardrobe”: Messerli, Horace Mann, 226.

  29 Schoolhouses were to be: Edgar W. Knight, Reports on European Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930), 124.

  30 Prussia established normal schools: Ibid., 171–73.

  31 “I believe Normal schools”: quoted in Frederick M. Hess, The Same Thing Over and Over Again: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 140.

  32 By 1840, Mann had opened three normal schools: Knight, Reports on European Education, 6–7.

  33 “Twice every day”: Cyrus Peirce quoted in Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States (New York: Science Press, 1929), 474–76.

  34 many normal schools transitioned: James W. Fraser, Preparing America’s Teachers: A History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007), 151–52.

  35 Most American teachers: C. Emily Feistritzer, Profiles of Teachers in the U.S. 2011 (National Center for Education Information, 2011).

  36 In his eleventh annual report: Redding S. Sugg, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 81.

  37 “As a teacher of schools”: Horace Mann, A Few Thoughts on the Powers and Duties of Woman: Two Lectures (Syracuse: Hall, Mills, and Company, 1853), 38.


  38 “purified my conceptions of purity”: Messerli, Horace Mann, 173.

  39 the cornerstone of “a cheap system”: A. Potter and G. B. Emerson, The School and the Schoolmaster (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1842).

  40 “Education in this country will never”: Catharine Beecher, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (New York: J. B. Ford, 1874), 49.

  41 “The teaching of A, B, C”: Horace Mann, Lectures on Education (Boston: W. B. Fowle and N. Capen, 1855), 316.

  42 “affections outward”: Messerli, Horace Mann, 443.

  43 Between 1830 and 1900: James C. Albisetti, “The Feminization of Teaching in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective,” History of Education 22, no. 3 (1993): 253–63.

  44 helped keep men in the classroom: Rebecca Rogers, “Questioning National Models: The History of Women Teachers in a Comparative Perspective” (paper delivered at the International Federation for Research in Women’s History conference, “Women’s History Revisited: Historiographical Reflections on Women and Gender in a Global Context,” Sydney, Australia, July 9, 2005).

  45 “Classical studies”: Knight, Reports on European Education, 213.

  46 “the European fallacy”: Messerli, Horace Mann, 443.

  47 “I should rather have built up the blind asylum”: Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), 402.

  48 Board of National Popular Education: Beecher, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions, 115.

  49 young women were dispatched: Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity, 179.

  50 twenty-one teachers died: Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1981), 56.

  51 recruits found that despite their best intentions: Beecher, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions, 120.

  52 “Not one can read intelligibly”: Quoted in Ibid., 127.

  53 In general, he subscribed: E. J. Power, Religion and the Public Schools in 19th Century America: The Contribution of Orestes A. Brownson (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996), 87.

  54 “Education, such as it is”: Orestes Brownson, “Review of ‘Second Annual Report of the Board of Education. Together with the Second Annual Report of the Secretary at the Board,’ ” Boston Quarterly Review, no. 2 (1839): 393–418.

  CHAPTER TWO: “REPRESSED INDIGNATION”

  1 “I should think any female”: Alma Lutz, Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 11.

  2 With her $110 annual salary: I. H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898), loc 1175.

  3 “That salary business”: The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1895–1906, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 57–58.

  4 “penance … A weariness”: Ibid., 66.

  5 “I have only to say”: Ibid., 71.

  6 In 1850, four-fifths: Ibid., 228.

  7 Anthony could no longer sit silently: Ibid., 226–29.

  8 “Whatever the schoolmasters might think”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 1848–1861 (New York: Source Book Press, 1889), 514.

  9 On the conference’s last day: Gordon, ed., In the School of Anti-Slavery, 229.

  10 Anthony wrote to Stanton: Ibid., 319–20.

  11 She had seen her father: Lutz, Susan B. Anthony, 13.

  12 “I am glad that you will represent us”: Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, loc 2754.

  13 Ernestine Rose: Carol Komerten, The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

  14 Robert Owen, the Scottish factory owner: Francis J. O’Hagan, “Robert Owen and Education,” in Robert Owen and His Legacy, ed. Noel Thomson and Chris Williams (Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2011).

  15 “I should like particular effort”: Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, loc 2694.

  16 her disdain for “schoolmarms”: Ibid., loc 2986.

  17 1880 lecture “Our Girls”: The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3, National Protection for National Citizens, 1873–1880, ed. A. D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 500.

  18 After a particularly tiring protest: Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, loc 3121.

  19 The women’s movement split into two hostile camps: Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., The Elizabeth Cady Stanton—Susan B. Anthony Reader (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981), 89–93.

  20 federal commissioner of education John Eaton: John Eaton, Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1873 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1874), 133–34.

  21 “The two types of mind”: Sugg, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Public Education, 112.

  22 cautiously addressed The Woman Question: Charles William Eliot, “Inaugural Address of Charles W. Eliot as president of Harvard College,” October 19, 1869, 50.

  23 “The average skill of the teachers in the public schools”: Charles William Eliot, Educational Reform (New York: The Century Co., 1901), 162.

  24 “It does not matter whether the trade”: Charles W. Eliot, “Wise and Unwise Economy in Our Schools,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1875.

  25 “weaker than men”: Ibid.

  26 The wealthier and more developed: William T. Harris, Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1892–1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 545.

  27 Across New England, only 10 percent: Sugg, Motherteacher, 116.

  28 When a teacher took a sick day: Harris, Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1892–1893, 546.

  29 Dr. E. Schlee, a German principal: Ibid., 534–47.

  30 Stephan Waetzoldt, a Berlin professor: Ibid., 567.

  31 the “startling heresy”: Belva A. Lockwood, “My Efforts to Become a Lawyer,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (1888): 215–29.

  32 “odious … an indignity”: Ibid., 216.

  33 H.R. 1571: Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 35–39.

  34 she launched a presidential run: Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 99.

  CHAPTER THREE: “NO SHIRKING, NO SKULKING”

  1 “All of proper age”: E. L Pierce to Salmon P. Chase, “The Negroes at Port Royal: Report to the Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury” (1862). Available at http://​faculty.​assumption.​edu/​aas/​Reports/​negroesatportroyal.​html.

  2 the Port Royal Experiment: Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964).

  3 “There are at Port Royal”: Pierce, “The Negroes at Port Royal.”

  4 a “constant, galling sense”: Charlotte Forten Grimké, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 111, 140.

  5 “that God in his goodness”: Ibid., 376.

  6 “a strange, wild dream”: Ibid., 390.

  7 “a constant delight and recreation”: Charlotte Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands, Part I,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1864.

  8 “dreadfully wearying”: Grimké, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, 399.

  9 she wrote to philanthropists in Philadelphia: Recounted in Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands, Part I”; and Charlotte Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands, Part II,” The Atlantic Monthly, May and June 1864.

  10 Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, 397–98.

  11 “Oh, none in all the world before”: From John Greenleaf Whittier, Anti-Slavery Poems: Songs of Labor and Reform (New York: Houghto
n, Mifflin & Co., 1888), 238–39.

  12 “very proud and happy”: Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands, Part II.”

  13 “Schoolhouses are burnt”: Douglas quoted in Meyer Weinberg, A Chance to Learn: The History of Race and Education in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 43.

  14 “He found … that in spite”: Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 179.

  15 “one of the happiest periods of my life”: Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1901), 38–39.

  16 In total, the Freedmen’s Bureau spent: Weinberg, A Chance to Learn, 43.

  17 southern states spent three times more: Ibid., 57.

  18 walk five miles: Ibid., 68.

  19 black teachers to receive only one-third the pay: W. E. B. Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill, “The Common School and the Negro American,” in the Atlanta University Publications, Numbers 16–20 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 132.

  20 “fractions and spelling”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South”, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1899.

  21 “touched the very shadow of slavery”: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 114.

  22 “[T]he fine faith the children had” and “their weak wings”: Du Bois, “A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South,” 102.

  23 Hampton, which taught only the equivalent: Robert J. Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 31.

  24 “One man may go into a community”: Washington, Up from Slavery, 72.

  25 Du Bois’s bitterness: see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 28; and The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 2, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 430.

 

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