How Did Writing My Book Change My Own Opinions?
Thanks to Nona Willis Aronowitz for a perceptive interview at NBC.com about The Teacher Wars:
Did any of your opinions change over the course of your research?
I started the project with the assumption that teachers are somewhat unfairly maligned and attacked in our public discourse. And I didn’t necessarily change my mind about that, but I did start to think more deeply about whether some of the attacks on teachers are in fact fair. This really came home to me when I was researching how teachers historically treat children of different races. We see that they often treat them differently, whether it’s the rigor of the curriculum that’s presented to kids or the expectations teachers have of how well a specific student will do, or how a teacher will discipline two children of different races for the same infraction.
I came to understand that this whole reform discussion about having high expectations for all students is very powerful. The teacher who has high expectations is going to see higher performance, especially from students of color and poor students. And that requires teachers to come to terms with their own biases and be aware of the cultural stereotypes that affect every single one of us.
How Teachers Became Both Idealized and ResentedCheck out my interview about The Teacher Wars with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air: “One of the things I noticed, especially after the recession hit in 2008 and coming into President Obama’s administration, was we were having a big national conversation about inequality,” Goldstein tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “And teaching was something that was discussed again and again as a potential fix — a f
