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?"

I feel that people have asked me my age I don't actually think that thirty is particularly young for a first book to come out. And I sometimes wonder if a male author would have been asked this question so frequently.

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.

This is something that Randi Weingarten said to me when I interviewed her once, which I think I quote in chapter nine. She talks about how only 7 percent of private sector workers in the American economy are in unions. So all the protections that teachers have that are due to collective bargaining - including generous pensions, generous health plans, limits to what they can be asked to do after school and in the summers - all of those things are sources of resentment to the public. And I think that politicians have played off of that quite effectively.

I wrote a work of history, I looked at over 500 sources - I spent three-and-a-half years on the project. I think the most gratifying and wonderful thing about the reaction is that people are learning things from the history that feel relevant to today.

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.

A lot of charter schools are non-union schools that take a lot of teachers from alternative tracks, like Teach For America. They do this in part because a lot of charter schools have very strong ideologies around how they want teachers to teach. And they find that starting with a younger or more inexperienced teacher allows them to more effectively inculcate those ideas.