Dana Goldstein Quotes

Dana Goldstein is an American journalist and the author of The Teacher Wars, published by Doubleday and a New York Times best seller. She is currently a domestic correspondent at The New York Times and has worked as a staff writer at The Marshall Project and as an associate editor at The Daily Beast. She received a Bernard L. Schwartz fellowship from the New America Foundation, a Spencer Foundation Fellowship in Education Journalism from Columbia University, and a Puffin Fellowship from The Nation Institute. Her work on politics, education, and women's issues has appeared in national publications including The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, and Politico.

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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.

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

Dana Goldstein

Just in general, when we look at our school system, there is so much overlap with our criminal justice system in terms of our low-income youth.

Dana Goldstein
- School
- Justice
- Youth
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.

Dana Goldstein
- School
- Today
- Strong
I feel that people have asked me my age I don't actually think that thirty is particularly young for a first book to come out. And I sometimes wonder if a male author would have been asked this question so frequently.

Dana Goldstein
- People
- Thinking
- Book
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.

Dana Goldstein
- Children
- Kind
- Care
Just to deliver one high-quality 45 minute lesson requires many hours of planning in advance.

Dana Goldstein
- Quality
- Planning
- Hours
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.

Dana Goldstein
- Thinking
- Opinion
- Teacher

Coming to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, we begin to have this idea that's still with us today, which is that the main purpose of public education is closing achievement gaps.

Dana Goldstein