Healthcare has its critics, but few of them are calling for doctors to be replaced. Education is different-and as a new book reveals, it has been throughout U.S. history. 

America hates teachers.   That's not exactly the thesis of Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, but her account of 200 years of education policy provides plenty of evidence for it. "The history of education reform," she notes, "shows ... recurring attacks on veteran educators." In the early 1800s, reformer Catharine Beecher argued that young women with a missionary calling should replace male teachers who were "intemperate ... coarse, hard, unfeeling men, too lazy or stupid" to teach; she suggested those men should be sent into the mills instead. Two centuries later, Goldstein notes, programs like Teach for America are promoted as a kind of missionary calling, in which young fresh-faced college graduates replace lazy, stubborn, unionized teachers.

 

It's not (always) the teacher's fault: What 'no excuses' reformers get wrong about education  by Joel Dodge in The Week

What if we've got education reform all backward? That's the question posed by Dana Goldstein's fantastic new book, The Teacher Wars, which traces the history of education in America over the past 200 years.

Recounting our perpetual angst over the makeup and quality of the teaching profession, Goldstein suggests that we've put too much weight on top-down reform at the expense of grassroots-level empowerment of excellent teachers. She wants to move beyond education reform as we've known it and provides some important lessons for today's reformers along the way.

As schools open up across the country, a new educational non-profit has opened its doors as well.   Education Post is headed by former Obama administration member Peter Cunningham and backed by $12 million from the Walton Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Broad Foundation, as well as an anonymous donor.

The group's top goals are to promote high standards in schools, providing both support and accountability for teachers and principals, and to promote the use of school choice and charter schools as a means for increasing student achievement.

Local View: No Child rules unfairly give schools black eye  by Steven Webb in the Vancouver  Columbian

Outdated and widely criticized, NCLB punishes and publicly shames schools and districts, especially those that serve large numbers of struggling students. For the past two years, the U.S. Department of Education granted the state of Washington a conditional waiver from NCLB requirements for schools receiving Title I funds, which help schools serve economically disadvantaged children. Recently, that changed. The Department of Education declined to renew Washington's waiver for Title I schools. And now, school districts in Washington are subject to the requirements of NCLB.

 Manufactured Emergency: The Neoliberal Assault on Michigan  by Jane Slaughter in the Truthout blog 

A central goal of the neoliberal project is to weaken unions, and state legislation is one method. Unions are anathema in the free-market ideology, since they constrain employers' liberty to operate exactly as they please. Unions also bargain higher wages and benefits and give employees some workplace rights not to be ordered about like indentured servants-thus cutting into potential profits, in the private sector.