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

In North Carolina, for example, it takes 15 years to move a teacher's salary from $30,000 to $40,000. So it's really difficult to argue that pay doesn't have something to do with the lack of prestige.

If you look at the early nineteenth century you see the idea that we educate children to be voters and to be participants in our popular democracy. And then at the turn of the century when more and more immigrants are coming into the schools, Americanization becomes a more explicit part of the agenda.

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.

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

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.

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.