Classroom Saints and Fiends

The ed reformers’ stance looks like a Madonna-whore complex: teachers are miracle-working saviors of poor and downtrodden children, or they are villains preventing these children from benefitting from a good education. According to Dana Goldstein in The Teacher Wars, this kind of saint-fiend split has characterized Americans’ view of teachers since universal public education first took hold in some states in the 1830s. Again and again since then, reformers of different stripes have tried to improve teaching with some of the same fixes—merit pay based on test scores, fast-track training programs, ranking teachers—with the same lack of success.