Starred Review. The daughter of public school educators, reporter Goldstein used her year as a Spencer Fellow in Education Reporting conducting archival research and interviewing education experts. The result is an historical perspective on education reform that both enlightens and inspires. Each chapter explores a different facet of today's education debates (e.g., teacher unionism). While much of this history has been covered in greater detail elsewhere, Goldstein's talent is to connect past and present in memorable ways. For example, in a chapter on teachers' involvement with McCarthy-era "witch hunts," Goldstein shows how-despite thousands of left-wing educators having been hounded by investigators and driven from the profession-some of the pedagogical innovations these teachers implemented in urban schools, such as culturally relevant curricula and wraparound services for students in high-poverty neighborhoods, have since become mainstream principles of education reform. A concluding section enumerates the "lessons learned" from history by making explicit recommendations aimed at today's education reformers. Sprinkled among some rather noncontroversial policy suggestions (e.g., recruiting more men and people of color), Goldstein also suggests that classroom testing focus more on improving student learning than on punishing "bad teachers." VERDICT Alternately erudite and accessible, this book is highly recommended for parents, educators, and members of the public who wish to go beyond the headlines and delve deeper into today's pressing educational issues. [See Prepub Alert, 3/31/14.]-Seth Kershner, Northwestern Connecticut Community Coll. Lib., Winsted (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Teaching in America, which began as an informal, seasonal job heavily influenced by locale, has evolved into a highly politicized and polarizing profession, argues Goldstein in this immersive and well-researched history. Goldstein, who comes from a long line of teachers, claims that teaching has historically been viewed as a profession best staffed by women and that there's been a persistent classist (not to mention racist) undercurrent in education that continues to this day via programs that focus on test scores and ratings. Readers may be surprised to learn that hot-button issues, such as overcrowding and teaching ESL, are hardly new. The author also discusses educational fads, the battle for federal funding, the vilification of teachers' unions, and the nation's almost pathological obsession with data and statistics. Goldstein closes with recommendations for the future, including: better pay; more perspective on test scores; and the expansion of teachers' purviews in the classroom. Attacking a veritable hydra of issues, Goldstein does an admirable job, all while remaining optimistic about the future of this vital profession. Agent: Howard Yoon, Ross Yoon Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

America loves to dream an impossible dream when it comes to education. We see our public schools as the bedrock of the equal-opportunity society we wish to be, the land where a poor boy in a log cabin - or a bungalow in Honolulu - can grow up to be president. And teachers are the angel-magicians who make it all happen. But throughout the history of American public education, this dream has bumped up against some harsh realities. Teachers are, by and large, poorly trained and ill equipped to flatten social, racial and economic barriers. Their pay is pathetic (a median of $54,000 in 2012, versus $70,000 for a dental hygienist). So too are the conditions in which they often work. Notions about what constitutes good instruction have always been shockingly vague, and ideas about what to teach and how to measure learning are subject to politics and passing fads. In "The Teacher Wars," her lively account of the history of teaching, Dana Goldstein traces the numerous trends that have shaped "the most controversial profession in America." Along the way, she demonstrates that almost every idea for reforming education over the past 25 years has been tried before - and failed to make a meaningful difference. Long before Wendy Kopp dreamed up Teach for America to place Ivy Leaguers in public schools, we had the Teacher Corps. Before that, Catharine Beecher - "America's first media darling school reformer" - was recruiting proper East Coast spinsters to go west to teach the unlettered children of pioneers. Decades before we had digital databases to measure teacher performance, administrators in New York, Tennessee, Michigan and elsewhere were devising merit-pay systems based on similar ideas. And 35 years before the Gates Foundation became the 2,000-pound gorilla in American education, the Ford Foundation was throwing its weight around the classroom chasing a similar goal of closing the achievement gap between rich and poor. Goldstein, a writer for publications like Slate and The Atlantic, begins her personality-driven chronicle in the 1820 s and '30s, when the country was first establishing universal public education in the form of "common schools." She introduces two key figures, both disenchanted with religion, who viewed public education as the path to a kind of secular salvation. Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, did much to turn teaching from a profession that was 90 percent male in 1800 into one dominated by women. At a time when schoolmasters were often derided as intemperate, rod-wielding tyrants (think Ichabod Crane), Beecher argued that the job was better suited to gentle, pious, unmarried women, who could be paid a pittance since they had no families to support. Horace Mann, the Massachusetts legislator who became the country's first state secretary of education, was the idealistic proponent of establishing Prussian-style "normal schools" to train these virtuous, low-cost school marms. The mediocrity of teacher prep was baked in almost from the start. Most normal schools were undistinguished. Many eventually transitioned into state teachers colleges, requiring a high school diploma but retaining a legacy of low standards. "In many ways," Goldstein writes, "we are still living with the teacher training system the common schools movement created." The low-level training reflected an ambivalence about the purpose of the job: Was teaching a moral calling like missionary work, or a job for well-prepared professionals? And it reflected an ambivalence about whether ordinary people actually needed a liberal academic education, as opposed to acquiring rudimentary literacy and a healthy respect for authority. These conflicts emerge in chapters about teaching in black schools in the post-Civil War South where, by 1915, state spending for a black student was onethird of that for a white student, and at inner-city schools later in the 20th century, where low expectations and revolvingdoor faculty stunted learning. She brings nuance to the famous dispute between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois over whether it was more important for black teachers to prepare the masses of newly emancipated children for work or to cultivate what Du Bois called "the talented tenth" for college. One of the incidental pleasures of this book is discovering how many historic figures better known for other achievements logged time in the front of a classroom. These include Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville and Lyndon B. Johnson. Historians will doubtless quibble with Goldstein's broad-brush characterizations of major movements and personalities, but most readers will appreciate her way with the quick biographical anecdote. As we enter the modern era, Goldstein weaves in her own reporting to good effect, offering eyewitness accounts of the impact and many unintended consequences of federal forays into education, beginning with the landmark 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" and continuing with this century's ambitious reform programs: No Child Left Behind from 2001 and Race to the Top from 2009. As the modern accountability movement takes hold, she documents the explosion of standardized testing and the ever more intensive efforts to measure and rate teacher performance. We witness, for example, the sad spectacle of Sabina Trombetta, a highly regarded art teacher in Colorado Springs, having to ask her first graders to sit for seven written tests during the 2010-11 school year, instead of using that time to paint or draw. By 2011, Goldstein reports, it was becoming clear that we could not elevate the overall quality of American education just by piling on the tests, holding teachers responsible for student scores and then rewarding the good and firing the bad. "Underperforming teachers," she writes, "were not hiding some sort of amazing skill set they failed to use either because they were too lazy or were disgruntled about low pay." Nor do efforts to import supposedly higher-caliber people via alternative routes to teaching, like Teach for America, have the heft to make a difference in a profession that adds as many as 200,000 new hires a year. John Dewey was right in 1895, Goldstein observes, when he said, "Education is, and forever will be, in the hands of ordinary men and women." In a 12-page epilogue, Goldstein offers a number of sensible recommendations for shoring up those ordinary men and women and improving American schools. These include returning standardized tests to their proper, lower-stakes role: helping teachers determine what their students do and don't know and where to aim their lessons. Similarly, she suggests using "value-added" calculations - how much an individual teacher raises test scores - to target help to those who are struggling and career opportunities to those at the top. Goldstein does not directly challenge tenure, but she does call for an end to such "outdated union protections" as requiring the last teacher hired to be the first fired during layoffs. Like Amanda Ripley's "The Smartest Kids in the World" and Elizabeth Green's "Building a Better Teacher" (reviewed on Page 23), "The Teacher Wars" suggests that to improve our schools, we have to help teachers do their job the way higherachieving nations do: by providing better preservice instruction, offering newcomers more support from well-trained mentors and opening up the "black box" classroom so teachers can observe one another without fear and share ideas. Stressing accountability, with no ideas for improving teaching, Goldstein says, is "like the hope that buying a scale will result in losing weight." Such books may be sounding the closing bell on an era when the big ideas in school reform came from economists and solutions were sought in spreadsheets of test data. CLAUDIA WALLIS has covered health and education for Time magazine and other publications. She is the founding editor of Time for Kids.

Goldstein, a Spencer Foundation fellow in educational journalism, has composed a sweeping history of the politics and controversies surrounding American public school teaching. The author claims that, for nearly 200 years, public schools tried to solve various social problems, yet teachers endured constant criticism. Dividing the time period among 12 chapters, Goldstein covers the difficulties characteristic of each era. The first four chapters detail the common school movement, the feminization of teaching, and the plight of African American teachers after the Civil War. In subsequent chapters, the author traces the contemporary concerns of the growth of teacher unions, the War on Poverty, the rise of community control and Black Power, and teacher accountability. The final chapter and the epilogue explain the need for teacher empowerment. Accordingly, Goldstein concludes that sustainable reforms could come from teachers themselves, provided the public foregoes fears of bad teachers and allows educators to build on their expertise. Interested readers might also consult Daniel H. Perlstein's Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (2004) or William J. Reese and John L. Rury's Rethinking the History of American Education (2008). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. --Joseph Watras, University of Dayton

Think teachers are overpaid? Or are they dishonored and overworked? Both positions, this useful book suggests, are very oldand very tired. Public school teaching, writes education journalist Goldstein, is "the most controversial profession in America." Politicized from the beginning, teaching had an aura of do-gooder, civilizing purpose. As she writes, Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher had a lively correspondence around the creation of a "Board of National Popular Education" whose aim was to send East Coast schoolmarms to the frontier in the hope of taming it more thoroughly. It also combined that social service aspect with the trappings of professionalism and especially unionism, which in time has armed the critics and foes of public education with plenty of ammunition: It's certainly difficult to get an inept but tenured teacher fired, though probably not as hard as Chris Christie would have it. It would likely surprise Christie to learn that public school tenure has been practiced since at least 1909, long before unions were empowered to intervene in due-process matters between teachers and administrators. While looking into the origins of seemingly modern controversies, such as teaching to the test and the feminization of teaching, Goldstein shows how constant the battles have been. At the same time, she turns in points that ought to condition the discussion (but probably won't, given its shrillness), including the observation that "differences in teacher quality" have only a small bearing on test outcomes overallwhich is not to say that teachers don't matter but instead that we ought to stop relying so heavily on tests. In an epilogue, Goldstein ventures other ideas for reform, including raising teacher pay and, yes, using tests as diagnostic tools more than ends in themselves. Probably not likely to sway opponents of public education, whose numbers and influence seem to be growing, but Goldstein delivers a smart, evenhanded source of counterargument. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Education reporter Goldstein comes from a family of public school teachers. She brings a concern about the future of public education to this insightful look at how we have come to a point where the once revered profession of teaching is now so vilified. Offering a historical perspective, she begins in the first half of the nineteenth century in Massachusetts with the push for universal education and the later feminizing of the teaching profession. She traces the rising feminist movement and how women like Catharine Beecher and Susan B. Anthony contributed to the debate about teaching as a mission, not a profession, demanding respect and sustainable wages. She draws parallels between historical reformers and their movements and those of contemporaries such as Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone and Wendy Kopp's Teach for America. Goldstein chronicles heated debates about teacher evaluation and merit pay dating back to the early 1900s, the rise of teacher unions, and involvement in the civil rights movement. She cites the push for community control in urban areas in the 1960s as a precursor to many of the disputes in urban school districts today. A sweeping, insightful look at how public education and the teaching profession have evolved and where we may be headed.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist