german military commander and presented him with a sheet of paper, the list that the german military commander was after. this were just two names -- there were just two names on that piece of paper, the bishop and the mayor. they told the german military commander that it was the entire jewish community of the island. it was the spirit that was behind both of those acts, and it is that precise spirit that has encouraged me to answer what i consider the greatest moral calling of our time, the defense of the united states of america. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> next, booktv speaks with dana goldstein about her recent back "the teacher wars: a history of america's most embattled profession," at the

31st annual miami book fair. >> host: we want to introduce you to dana goldstein. this is her book, "the teacher wars: a history of america's most embattled profession." ms. goldstein, when did the concept of public education come into being mt. states -- in the states? >> guest: you know previously to 1830 we did not have public schools in the united states as we would conceive of them today. it was up to individual groups of neighbors perhaps churches to come together and start schools if that was something that they wanted to do. all that changes in the 1830s with the common schools movement, the group of reformers or that went state to state and made the argument we need to raise taxes at the state level we need to tell parents it's not your choice, you have to send your kids to school. and between about 1830 and the years after civil war each state embraced the idea of a universal public education which was new at the time. >> host: was there resistance to

that idea? >> guest: yes, there was. an unsurprisingly, a lot of the resistance was because this was expensive. and one of the early compromises that was made in order to make this affordable, which is one of the stories i tell in the book was bringing female teachers into the classroom. in 1800 90% of schoolteachers were male. and by 1900, 76% were female. and, of course, you know today over three-quarters remain female. so one of the big reasons why this was done was because folks were saying we don't want to pay that much for public education. at the time, discrimination was not against the law, and you could pay female teachers half as much as a male teacher or. >>st how many public school educators are there in the united states? >> guest: 3.4 million. >> host: and what's their average salary? >> guest: the median salary is $54,000 per year. >> host: and they -- where do

they start? does it range from state to state? give us some specifics. >> guest: it ranges a lot. in new york city where i live a teacher with 30 years of experience can make a six-figure salary. the secret is how long it takes to get there. teachers, they don't get to have big salaries over the course of their 20s and 30s. most of them have to wait a very long time. in north carolina, for example, the starting salary for a teacher is $30,000. to advance to $40,000 one has to work for 15 years. so we're talking about being in your mid to late 30s before you would even make $40,000 in the great state of north carolina. so there's big variations across the country. urban areas, suburban areas often big variations. but overall it's not commensurate with other jobs that often require a master's degree like high school teaching does in most cases. >> host: are private schools on a different scale? >> guest: private schools

actually tend to pay less in many reasons. part of the reason why is because in many cases the job may be a little easier. there are fewer kids living in poverty and not as many social challenges that public schools face. >> host: when you look at the figures, how much are we spending on public education in the u.s.? >> guest: i don't have that ballpark figure off the top of my head. what i do know is we spend more on average than competitor nations. so we often hear a lot about the schools in south korea japan finland. we actually send -- spend a little more than they do and our outcomes are mediocre. our kids are average in reading they're below average in math. so i often get the question where does the money go to in our system? you know, we have quite generous pensions and health plans. one of the reasons why is we don't have a big social safety net that provides for health care provided by government in this country so teachers have fought for that to offset the

relatively low pay that we were talking about. and the history of how teachers' unions have achieved some of that is a story i tell in the book. extracurricular activities, sports, transportation and international schools do so while we're spending more it might not necessarily be focused toward achievement or students' academics. >> host: so how much of it dose toward the teachers' pensions? and is there an average of what we spend per-pupil in the public schools nationwide? about 12,000 10,000? >> guest: yeah, i was going to say between 8-12 depending on the state, the city. a small amount of that overall goes to teacher pensions in particular, but human resources costs are the main costs of our school system. and so a lot of times that's one reason in a time of austerity budgeting in many states that you see finger pointing i believe often times a little bit unfairly, at teachers as being expensive. so and that's, that's a

rhetorical, that's a rhetorical argument that's made from the 19th century til today. there's always been resentment about the cost of the teaching profession. although overall when you see what teachers bring home at the end of the year, it is not all that much. >> dana goldstein, in your view has the nea and the american teachers' federation, have they been positive steps for teachers? >> guest: i think historically their role changes over time. if you go back to the early 1960s before teachers had collective bargaining rights, new york city at the time teachers were making $66 per week. that was the same as a car washer. so we see as teachers' unions gain collective bargaining rights, they come to the table to fight for teachers. we see the middle class standard when it had been conceived in the 19th century as almost a working class type of job. that young women would do this job for a few years it wasn't a career. we didn't have that to pay them

that much because they were going to do it before marriage. the idea was they didn't have family before it and i really took the empowerment of the teachers' unions historically to move away from that. and we see that in states with collective bargaining teachers make an average of about 10% more. so i think there were some positive changes that we needed to do as a country for our teachers, but the teachers' unions did push for it successfully. i think as the teachers' unions gained more power they became less popular. and one of the reasons why was because they seemed so powerful in the process they were sitting with mayors and with governors arguing for their way of looking at goals and often times people ask where are students at the table? is there as strong of a voice for students and i really trace the critique in the late 1960s with the black power community control movement which were a group of african-american parents that started to raise this issue. although it was quite a radical

critique in the late 1960s it has become much more mainstream to the point where there's been a bipartisan consensus over the past 20 or 30 years that teachers' unions are too powerful, something that a lot of centrist democrats and republicans actually seem to agree about including president obama. and that we need to hold them accountable. and that's why we have the standards and accountability school of -- [inaudible] >> host: do you agree with that? >> guest: i think there's a lot that the movement has done that's been positive. for example, before no child left behind, the law that president george w. bush pushed, we did not have student achievement numbers in every single state broke withen down by -- broken down by race, by english language learner status by students living in poverty, by disability status. so now because of some of these accountability and testing measures that have become law, we can actually see how our children are doing in a very detailed way and we know that we're not doing l well in that.

we know that we're not closing gaps the way that we want to be closing them. >> host: okay. that's nclb which was supported also by the democrats -- >> guest: yes. ted kennedy was a big supporter. >> host: we've hat common core we've had race to the top. are there subtle differences between these programs or are there significant differences? >> guest: that's a really wonderful and important question because no child left behind, president bush's law, it really looked at schools as the most important organizing principle in education. the idea that if you collect all these students' scores and you would judging whether the school was failing or succeeding. now, that has changed since president obama has come into office in 2009. he looked at a lot of research, and his administration decided it was not the school that was the most important thing, it was the individual teacher and his or her individual classroom. and what president obama's policies have done such as race to the top, the way that his administration has changed no child left behind is to require states if they want federal

money to judge and evaluate every single teacher no matter what grade they teach, no matter what subject they teach based on kids' test scores. and this has led to a lot of changes that i trace in the latter chapters of this book. everything from -- [inaudible] testing in kindergarten, should we do standardized testing in art class, in music, in gym class? because if we're going to judge every teacher based on kids' test scores, guess what? a lot of the subjects currently are not tested. >> host: dana goldstein, what's a your day job, and what did "the teacher wars" come from? >> guest: i've been a journalist for about ten years. i was covering the presidential primary between barack obama and hillary clinton, and one of the things i noticed was education policy was one of their dividing lines. president obama went in front of the teachers' unions in 2007 and said he supported merit pay the idea of paying teachers based on how well they're doing with kids and he was booed.

and he did not get the teachers' unions endorsements. hillary clinton got those endorsements. this is fascinating to me. the democratic party so entwined with the teachers unions movement. we've seen the president embrace a lot of policies that teachers unions are not happy about. >> host: how much control at the federal level today as opposed to the state and local level? >> guest: only 12% of the funding for public schools does come from the federal government, so the funding mechanisms are largely at the municipal and state level. however, since the recession hit, this 12% that comes from washington is very important to schools, especially high poverty schools that have less money to begin with. so when the federal government says they'll give you more money if you evaluate teachers using students' test scores they said yes, we want to do that and they pass laws that weaken teacher tenure, that change

testing policies in response to president obama's priorities. >> host: when you talk about the teacher wars, what are you talking about? just the fact that people have criticized public education for a long time? >> guest: yeah. i was interested in this question that was raised after the recession hit in late 2008, what job or role can teachers play in -- [inaudible] and the united states has had a relatively weak safety net outside of our schools. we have a fifth of our children live anything poverty -- living in poverty, and i was curious where does this uniquely american idea come from? i found it does go back to the 19th century between english speakers and new immigrants, between black and white -- [inaudible] or today we talk about these gaps mostly in terms of income inequality. we've always been fighting about whether teachers are doing a good enough job of closing these gaps. we have often been disappointed

with teachers, and those are the teacher wars as i conceive them. >> host: if we went three blocks from here we'd be in a not-so-nice neighborhood from where we are in miami. if we went three blocks the other way, we'd be in a quite nice neighborhood. can you measure performance by socioeconomic standards? is i mean do they correlate? >> guest: they do correlate very closely, and three young economists have done some -- [inaudible] with exactly this. they have found that only 7%, 7% of the achievement gap between poor and middle class kids is driven by teachers. that means that 93% is due to things like parents' income neighborhood poverty like you were just mentioning. so we do know that that class and achievement are very closely linked to one another. that doesn't mean that teachers don't have a role to play in closing these gaps. if we can do a better job as a nation in moving our

most-skilled, pest teachers to our -- [inaudible] we could help close those gaps and we are not doing that as a country. we have not made that a priority. >> host: at the same time, though, often you're just kind of managing kids for a day when you're going into a rough rougher neighborhood? >> guest: unfortunately, i think that has often been the idea of what teachers in poor children's schools do. we know now because we've got a great group of successful schools teaching poor children that it doesn't have to be that way. that when teachers come into those schools with rigor, with high expectations, with a strong set of schools around classroom management and student discipline, that they can do a lot more than just manage they really can focus on the academic curriculum, and that's the standard that we need to be holding those teachers in our school to, absolutely. >> host: dana goldstein, are charter schools a new concept and have in your view, been successful? >> guest: it dates back to the '80s and originally it was the idea of teachers starting

their own schools as laboratories of innovation, and it was something that the president of one of the teachers' unions loved the idea. he thought it was going to empower teachers. it didn't take long for conservative lawmakers to realize that charter school laws could be -- [inaudible] to exempt them from being unionized schools. and there we have the war we have been having since the early '90s around charter schools. .. charter school movement as a whole they're on the same quality curve as the traditional public schools. about the same number of them are very good, the same number are average, and the same number are very poor. but what i will say is among the most successful charter schools we often talk about the knowledge is power schools, those are some of the most successful schools we have in the united states at teaching poor children, and so we can win a lot from them. >> host: your