Dana Goldstein Quotes

• There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors. And yet there's this political conversation - this reform conversation - that paints a very negative picture of the effectiveness of the teaching population. So 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

  Teacher   Teaching   Thinking  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  576

• I wrote a work of history, I looked at over 500 sources - I spent three-and-a-half years on the project. I think the most gratifying and wonderful thing about the reaction is that people are learning things from the history that feel relevant to today.

  Dana Goldstein

  Thinking   People   Today  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4639

• Younger teachers are definitely more likely to have worked at charter schools as opposed to have just heard of them. Charter schools explicitly look, often, to hire younger people. I've even talked to people who didn't necessarily go into teaching thinking they wanted to work at a charter school or even may have been considered critics of the charter school movement, and found that it was the only way for them to get their foot in the door. So young people just have much more familiarity with the concept.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Teaching   School  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4417

• 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 those tests scores to hold teachers accountable.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Disappointment   School  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2795

• The question is rarely asked, "Why is it that so few other Americans have these protections?" The question is more often asked, "Why do teachers have it so easy?"

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Protection   Easy  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4788

• 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

  Teacher   School   Years  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  221

• There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Thinking   Doctors  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  1967

• Younger teachers are definitely more likely to have worked at charter schools as opposed to have just heard of them. Charter schools explicitly look, often, to hire younger people.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   School   People  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  3410

• There's a small movement of teacher-led schools across the country. These are schools that don't have a traditional principal, teachers come together and actually run the school themselves. That's kind of the most radical way, but I think something that's more doable across the board is just creating career ladders for teachers that allow certain teachers after a certain number of years to inhabit new roles. Roles mentoring their peers, helping train novice teachers to be better at their jobs, roles writing the curriculum, leading on lesson planning.

  Dana Goldstein

  Country   Running   Teacher  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  289

• Teaching is been seen as kind of a moral calling and not as an intellectual job.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teaching   Intellectual   Moral  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  959

• Men are more salary-sensitive when they're choosing a job.

  Dana Goldstein

  Jobs   Men   Salary  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  3054

• 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 allows them to more effectively inculcate those ideas.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Strong   School  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  1360

• This is something that Randi Weingarten said to me when I interviewed her once, which I think I quote in chapter nine. She talks about how only 7 percent of private sector workers in the American economy are in unions. So all the protections that teachers have that are due to collective bargaining - including generous pensions, generous health plans, limits to what they can be asked to do after school and in the summers - all of those things are sources of resentment to the public. And I think that politicians have played off of that quite effectively.

  Dana Goldstein

  Summer   Teacher   School  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2797

• I feel that people have asked me my age I don't actually think that thirty is particularly young for a first book to come out. And I sometimes wonder if a male author would have been asked this question so frequently.

  Dana Goldstein

  Book   Thinking   People  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2176

• Coming to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, we begin to have this idea that's still with us today, which is that the main purpose of public education is closing achievement gaps.

  Dana Goldstein

  Achievement   Purpose   Today  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4074

• I don't think school reform should be motivated by missionary zeal. I think it should be motivated by evidence of what works.

  Dana Goldstein

  School   Thinking   Missionary Zeal  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  1778

• I think any sort of system that gives teachers more opportunities like teacher-led schools is a positive one that's going to lead to better retention in the profession, and it's going to be more intellectually challenging, so teachers stay engaged with their work over the many years of their career.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   School   Opportunity  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  3634

• 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 they're doing works and reassessing their model, and making changes. So to the extent that I believe everyone in the education sector should be looking at evidence, reassessing, making tweaks to figure out what works, I think it's a positive model.

  Dana Goldstein

  Believe   School   Thinking  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4065

• If you look at the early nineteenth century you see the idea that we educate children to be voters and to be participants in our popular democracy. And then at the turn of the century when more and more immigrants are coming into the schools, Americanization becomes a more explicit part of the agenda.

  Dana Goldstein

  Children   School   Ideas  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  3008

• If you're afraid to talk to the other adults in your school it is definitely throughout history the hallmark of a failing school. When I was writing about the teachers' strike in New York City in 1968, the middle school where events triggered that strike was a place where teachers were known to hide in their classrooms.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Writing   School  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2104

• Just in general, when we look at our school system, there is so much overlap with our criminal justice system in terms of our low-income youth.

  Dana Goldstein

  School   Justice   Youth  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2361

• I always make the point that teachers are people too, and that they don't just want to be in front of kids all day and have children be their only feedback loop.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Children   Kids  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4666

• In North Carolina, for example, it takes 15 years to move a teacher's salary from $30,000 to $40,000. So it's really difficult to argue that pay doesn't have something to do with the lack of prestige.

  Dana Goldstein

  Moving   Arguing   Prestige  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2537

• I believe everyone in the education sector should be looking at evidence, reassessing, making tweaks to figure out what works, I think it's a positive model.

  Dana Goldstein

  Believe   Thinking   Figures  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2412

• I think a lot of people truly underestimate how much planning is involved in a teacher's work cycle.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Thinking   People  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  348

• Definitely we see throughout history that American teachers are asked to be very self-abnegating. They're not supposed to be concerned with the conditions of their labor, they're not supposed to care about pay. This is the kind of vision of the ideal teacher, which is again and again brought to the fore by reformers, the ideal teacher as someone who is passionately driven to serve children. Almost to the exclusion of a more pragmatic view of what the job actually entails.

  Dana Goldstein

  Teacher   Children   Vision  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4401

• 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 schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. It's a righteous sense, a reform push that's driven by a strong belief in a particular set of solutions.

  Dana Goldstein

  Strong   School   Vision  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2530

• 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

  Teacher   Teaching   Thinking  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  2221

• [Nineteenth century American educator] Catharine Beecher is really associated with the idea that a mother works with children in the home and a teacher works with children at school, and that therefore women are almost biologically predisposed to do this job.

  Dana Goldstein

  Mother   Teacher   Jobs  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  3729

• Just to deliver one high-quality 45 minute lesson requires many hours of planning in advance.

  Dana Goldstein

  Quality   Lessons   Planning  

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4430

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