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

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.

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.

Definitely we see throughout history that American teachers are asked to be very self-abnegating. They're not supposed to be concerned with the conditions of their labor, they're not supposed to care about pay. This is the kind of vision of the ideal teacher, which is again and again brought to the fore by reformers, the ideal teacher as someone who is passionately driven to serve children. Almost to the exclusion of a more pragmatic view of what the job actually entails.

The question is rarely asked, "Why is it that so few other Americans have these protections?" The question is more often asked, "Why do teachers have it so easy?"

The persistence of housing discrimination and housing segregation makes it difficult at times to integrate schools. So what flows from that is disappointment and cynicism and the search for what's next. And it's really in the search for what's next after that that we come upon ideas like increasing standardized testing for kids and using those tests scores to hold teachers accountable.

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.