The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

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Thomas Chancellor
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The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

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Originally proposed by Thomas Chancellor » Wed Sep 30, 2015 1:57 pm - 48 views before being transplanted here

I propose that we read The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein ($10.00 paperback + shipping or $11.99 Kindle from Amazon.com - 384 pages).

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Author Bio

Dana Goldstein is a journalist, a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Fellow at The Nation Institute. She is a former associate editor at The Daily Beast and in 2010 won the Spencer Fellowship in education journalism at Columbia University. Her work on politics, education, and women's issues has appeared in national publications including The American Prospect, Slate, TIME, BusinessWeek, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Nation, The Washington Post, and In These Times. She is the author of The Teacher Wars, published by Doubleday and a New York Times best seller. She graduated from Brown University, where she studied European intellectual and cultural history with a focus on gender.

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Excerpts From Book Reviews

“Ms. Goldstein’s book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic ... The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. If I were still teaching, I’d leave my tattered copy by the sputtering Xerox machine. I’d also recommend it to the average citizen who wants to know why Robert can’t read, and Allison can’t add." —New York Times

“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 . . . thorough and nuanced.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars is the product of just what the teaching corps needs more of: open-minded, well-informed, sympathetic scrutiny that doesn’t shrink from exposing systemic problems and doesn’t peddle faddish solutions either.” —The Atlantic

“Engaging. . . . Goldstein ably sketches reformers past and present, asserting that the common force behind each new wave of school reforms is evangelical conviction, and that new movements often seem based more on faith than on factual evidence . . . her ability to illuminate each new wave’s ‘hype-disillusionment cycle’ is a welcome treatment of a fraught subject.” —The New Yorker

“A colorful, immensely readable account that helps make sense of the heated debates around teaching and school reform. The Teacher Wars is the kind of smart, timely narrative that parents, educators, and policy makers have sorely needed.” —Frederick M. Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute

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