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.

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.

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

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.

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

If you're afraid to talk to the other adults in your school it is definitely throughout history the hallmark of a failing school. When I was writing about the teachers' strike in New York City in 1968, the middle school where events triggered that strike was a place where teachers were known to hide in their classrooms.