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.

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.

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

Coming to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, we begin to have this idea that's still with us today, which is that the main purpose of public education is closing achievement gaps.

There's a small movement of teacher-led schools across the country. These are schools that don't have a traditional principal, teachers come together and actually run the school themselves. That's kind of the most radical way, but I think something that's more doable across the board is just creating career ladders for teachers that allow certain teachers after a certain number of years to inhabit new roles. Roles mentoring their peers, helping train novice teachers to be better at their jobs, roles writing the curriculum, leading on lesson planning.

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.