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.
Dana GoldsteinThe persistence of housing discrimination and housing segregation makes it difficult at times to integrate schools. So what flows from that is disappointment and cynicism and the search for what's next. And it's really in the search for what's next after that that we come upon ideas like increasing standardized testing for kids and using those tests scores to hold teachers accountable.
Dana GoldsteinA 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.
Dana GoldsteinWhat 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.
Dana GoldsteinThe first generation of school reformers I talk about - nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann, Catharine Beecher - they are true believers in their vision for public education. They have a missionary zeal. And this to me connects them a lot to folks today, whether it's education activist Campbell Brown or former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. It's a righteous sense, a reform push that's driven by a strong belief in a particular set of solutions.
Dana Goldstein