Good Teacher, Bad Teacher

Teachers are generally respected in other countries. In South Korea, people call teachers "nation builders." In Finland, both men and women rank teaching among the top three ideal professions for a spouse. Yet there's an old American saying: "Those who can't do, teach," reflecting the condescending attitude many Americans have toward educators. To understand how Americans view teachers, we must understand the history of American education: people have held excessively high expectations for public education, treating it as an elite system, while refusing to invest generously in the public institutions, teachers, and schools it requires. This conflict may have something to do with how Americans view teachers. Who should teach in public schools; what they should teach; how teachers should be educated, trained, and hired; how they should be paid; and how they should be evaluated and fired: Americans have argued over all these questions for two centuries, yet have largely failed to reach a consensus.

Good Teachers, Bad Teachers looks back on 175 years of American education and traces the roots of many of the problems facing public education in the United States today to lessons from the past.