There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors.

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. I've even talked to people who didn't necessarily go into teaching thinking they wanted to work at a charter school or even may have been considered critics of the charter school movement, and found that it was the only way for them to get their foot in the door. So young people just have much more familiarity with the concept.

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.

Teaching is been seen as kind of a moral calling and not as an intellectual job.

[Nineteenth century American educator] Catharine Beecher is really associated with the idea that a mother works with children in the home and a teacher works with children at school, and that therefore women are almost biologically predisposed to do this job.

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?"

What happens from about 1954 to the late 1980s, is that we see a huge wave of optimism that school desegregation is going to be the way to improve educational outcomes for poor children of color. And we see a consensus build on the left and in the center that this is going to be a transformative education movement like none other we've seen in American history.