I'm not trying to write a traditional book review here (though I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who would like a highly readable and fair-minded discussion of some of the major themes of education and education reform in the US over the past two hundred years), so I'm going to focus on what stood out to me the most in relation to Paul's article rather than the book as a whole.
I've spent the last few years studying the meeting minutes and other internal documents of the New York Women's Trade Union League from the first couple decades of the twentieth century. I was, therefore, very interested in Goldstein's discussion of the role of teacher's unions in the history of education in the US. As usual, I discovered that the answer was complicated. While I'm inclined to be fairly sympathetic to the need for collective bargaining and other protections for workers who are vulnerable due to their youth, gender, and social class, the ugly underbelly of racism and xenophobia so common in labor unions of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries is evident in Goldstein's history. This was disappointing for me to see, though not surprising.
What was surprising for me was discovering my own blindspot regarding the integration of schools following Brown v. Board of Education. Going into this book, my thoughts on the subject went something like this:
Segregation and discrimination were inherently bad, but one byproduct of the "separate but equal" system was that many of the most capable and brilliant minds in the African American community became teachers due to a lack of other opportunities. As a result, despite terrible facilities and a lack of supplies, African American children often received superior instruction. Through the Civil Rights Movement, however, opportunities opened for those teachers to choose other, more lucrative professions, leaving African American children with fewer stellar role models in the classroom.
In reading Goldstein's history, however, I realized that I only had part of that story right. Integration did lead to Black children losing wonderful teachers, but not because those teachers were off living the American dream. Far from it. When schools were combined, most of the African American teachers were fired and replaced by White teachers who were often less qualified. In addition, these White teachers brought with them into the classroom prejudices against Black children's abilities to learn and achieve at higher levels. These often became self-fulfilling prophecies as children saw that they were not valued or expected to succeed, and did not see anyone who looked like them modeling who they could become.
After reading this history, I find myself shaking my head and saying, "Of course. Of course they didn't want to integrate teachers fairly. People who would scream and curse at children for just wanting a decent education are not going to submit to a person of color having authority over their children. How could I have not considered this aspect before?!" The answer, of course, is privilege. I haven't had to wonder why there isn't anyone who looks like me at the front of my classroom because generally, my teachers did look just like me. I'm sitting here wracking my brain, trying to think if I ever had an African American teacher before I got to college, and I can't think of one. And even in college, the two professors who come to mind weren't African American but recent immigrants from Africa. But I didn't notice.
This is why Paul needs teachers like me to read these books. Because even when we mean well, we sometimes just don't notice what's going on around us.
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