Getting schooled
When he was only 18, Herman Melville taught for a winter in a crowded and underfunded one-room schoolhouse in rural Massachusetts. He made as much as a farm laborer, just $11 per month, and lived with a local family. He didn’t enjoy the experience, but the conditions were typical for early 19th century America. Since school was not yet compulsory, many kids didn’t go. A majority of those who did attended a one-room schoolhouse for a 12-week school year. Up to 70 children ranging from ages 5 to 16 were crammed into a room where a teacher, often male, taught lessons based largely on rote memorization.
Teaching in America has progressed far beyond its origins, but the legacies of the profession’s history continue to shape the experience of teachers and perceptions about public education. Dana Goldstein’s new book, “The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession,” is an engaging cultural history of public schools and teachers. It traces the many influences that have shaped the profession over the past two centuries, revealing that few features of American public education, whether good or bad, lack earlier precedents.
By the early 1840s, just a few years after Melville’s bleak winter, female teachers outnumbered male teachers in Massachusetts. Several forces promoted the feminization of the profession. Early reformers like Catherine Beecher and Horace Mann saw teaching as the feminine equivalent to the ministry. Teaching was a spiritual vocation, they argued, and it demanded moral fiber rather than intellectual capacity. The job of a teacher was to do the missionary work of improving her students’ characters.
This rhetoric conveniently aligned with economic and political realities. Mann helped implement compulsory schooling for all children, but he realized this was an enormously costly proposition. Antitax sentiment could have easily killed the drive for compulsory schooling if teachers were going to be paid decent wages. The solution was to encourage women to become teachers. It was easy to justify paying them far less than men, and 19th century cliches about the virtues of the fairer sex nicely complemented a vision of teachers as missionaries. By 1850, 4 out of 5 teachers in New York were women, but two-thirds of the state’s total teacher salaries were paid to men.
Even though they were paid more than women, many men were reluctant to enter a profession perceived as quintessentially feminine. And since the purpose of school was to instill proper morals, there was no need to waste too much money educating teachers in academic subjects. The idea that public school teaching is a bastion for incompetence derives partly from the legacy of gendered pay discrimination implemented to save money.
Other forms of discrimination also affected school funding. In the decades after the Civil War, black students attended segregated schools with abysmal funding. In urban and rural schools across the nation, studying a foreign language or advanced mathematics was often considered an expensive frill for poor students of various races.
Even some prominent reformers, like Booker T. Washington, argued for a primarily vocational vision of school. Unions and activists lobbied for higher teacher pay and broader curricula for students of all classes and races, but progress was incremental.
The early 20th century brought many innovations that remain fashionable today: data-driven analysis of teacher effectiveness, merit pay for teachers and tests of dubious validity to determine the quality of teachers and the aptitude of students. Goldstein presents detailed case studies from different periods that should give pause to any contemporary reformer who claims to know exactly how to fix public schools in America.
Her careful historical analysis reveals certain lessons useful to anyone shaping policy, from principals to legislators. Merit pay and school closures, for instance, tend not to work very well. Desegregation of schools and the use of tests as diagnostic tools rather than determinants of funding show more promise.
A fundamental theme in the history of American teaching is the overwhelming expectation that teachers will single-handedly transform society. Lyndon Johnson once called education the only valid passport out of poverty, and many people remain convinced that effective teachers can right the wrongs of sexism, poverty, racism, poor nutrition and any other obstacles children might face.
Goldstein’s thorough and nuanced book shows that teachers can have extraordinary impacts, but she also is right to remind us that most other developed nations think of teachers as only one thread in a broader social safety net that includes access to health care, livingwage employment, affordable housing, decent nutrition and many other elements.