The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

A New York Times Bestseller

In her groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education, Dana Goldstein finds answers in the past to the controversies that plague our public schools today.

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. The Teacher Wars upends the conversation about American education by bringing the lessons of history to bear on the dilemmas we confront today. By asking “How did we get here?” Dana Goldstein brilliantly illuminates the path forward.

• Experience And Education
• The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
• Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools
• A Teacher's Pocket Guide to School Law (3rd Edition) (Allyn & Bacon Educational Leadership)
• American Education (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education)
• Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, 3rd Edition
• Educational Foundations: An Anthology of Critical Readings
• Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform
• Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools
• Teacher Man: A Memoir