Dana Goldstein Quote

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.

Dana Goldstein

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.

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About Dana Goldstein

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.
Goldstein grew up in Ossining, New York. She graduated from Brown University, where she studied European intellectual and cultural history with a focus on gender, in 2006. She lived and worked in Paris during 2004.