The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 always make the point that teachers are people too, and that they don't just want to be in front of kids all day and have children be their only feedback loop.

The 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.