Quotes for All
What happens from about 1954 to the late 1980s, is that we see a huge wave of optimism that school desegregation is going to be the way to improve educational outcomes for poor children of color. And we see a consensus build on the left and in the center that this is going to be … Read more
Men are more salary-sensitive when they’re choosing a job. Dana Goldstein
When you see that 76 percent of teachers are female, I think you have to acknowledge that there’s a cultural bias, and it does date back to this nineteenth century idea that teaching is a form of mothering. Dana Goldstein
A lot of charter schools are non-union schools that take a lot of teachers from alternative tracks, like Teach For America. They do this in part because a lot of charter schools have very strong ideologies around how they want teachers to teach. And they find that starting with a younger or more inexperienced teacher … Read more
There’s definitely a tension between the way teaching is talked about and understood at the political level and how everyday average Americans think about teachers. Dana Goldstein
The idea that because the school day is shorter or the school year is shorter than the sort of white collar workday or work year, that does not actually capture how teachers spend their time. Dana Goldstein
Just to deliver one high-quality 45 minute lesson requires many hours of planning in advance. Dana Goldstein
The persistence of housing discrimination and housing segregation makes it difficult at times to integrate schools. So what flows from that is disappointment and cynicism and the search for what’s next. And it’s really in the search for what’s next after that that we come upon ideas like increasing standardized testing for kids and using … Read more
The first generation of school reformers I talk about – nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann, Catharine Beecher – they are true believers in their vision for public education. They have a missionary zeal. And this to me connects them a lot to folks today, whether it’s education activist Campbell Brown or former D.C. public … Read more
I don’t think school reform should be motivated by missionary zeal. I think it should be motivated by evidence of what works. I have been critical of Teach For America in the past but I think one of the things about their model that’s interesting is that they’re constantly looking at it and whether what … Read more