Dana Goldstein Quotes

#1. at the city level, support for community control didn't have much to do with teaching and learning. It was about money, political alliances, and power.

Dana Goldstein

#2. We have a lot of rhetoric today about "high rigor" and you often hear terms like that thrown about when discussing the Common Core. But the American education system historically has not embraced intellectual seriousness.

Dana Goldstein

#3. I believe everyone in the education sector should be looking at evidence, reassessing, making tweaks to figure out what works, I think it's a positive model.

Dana Goldstein

#4. I don't think school reform should be motivated by missionary zeal. I think it should be motivated by evidence of what works.

Dana Goldstein

#5. The idea that because the school day is shorter or the school year is shorter than the sort of white collar workday or work year, that does not actually capture how teachers spend their time.

Dana Goldstein

#6. [Nineteenth century American educator] Catharine Beecher is really associated with the idea that a mother works with children in the home and a teacher works with children at school, and that therefore women are almost biologically predisposed to do this job.

Dana Goldstein

#7. Men are more salary-sensitive when they're choosing a job.

Dana Goldstein

#8. Younger teachers are definitely more likely to have worked at charter schools as opposed to have just heard of them. Charter schools explicitly look, often, to hire younger people.

Dana Goldstein

#9. What's more, veteran teachers who work long-term in high-poverty schools with low test scores are actually more effective at raising student achievement than is the rotating cast of inexperienced teachers who try these jobs out but flee after one to three years.

Dana Goldstein

#10. I think a lot of people truly underestimate how much planning is involved in a teacher's work cycle.

Dana Goldstein

#11. When you see that 76 percent of teachers are female, I think you have to acknowledge that there's a cultural bias, and it does date back to this nineteenth century idea that teaching is a form of mothering.

Dana Goldstein

#12. There's definitely a tension between the way teaching is talked about and understood at the political level and how everyday average Americans think about teachers.

Dana Goldstein

#13. Teachers do work that is both personal and political.

Dana Goldstein

#14. Yet annual pay for entry-level elementary school teachers, 97 percent of whom were women, had been frozen for twenty years at $500 (about $13,300 in today's dollars).

Dana Goldstein

#15. I always make the point that teachers are people too, and that they don't just want to be in front of kids all day and have children be their only feedback loop.

Dana Goldstein

#16. Just to deliver one high-quality 45 minute lesson requires many hours of planning in advance.

Dana Goldstein

#17. There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors.

Dana Goldstein

#18. In short, teachers are more, not less, likely than many other workers to get fired.

Dana Goldstein

#19. In 1850, four-fifths of New York's eleven thousand teachers were women, yet two-thirds of the state's $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men. It was not unusual for male teachers to earn twice as much as their female coworkers.

Dana Goldstein