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.

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.

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

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.

I think any sort of system that gives teachers more opportunities like teacher-led schools is a positive one that's going to lead to better retention in the profession, and it's going to be more intellectually challenging, so teachers stay engaged with their work over the many years of their career.

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?"

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.