‘The Teacher Wars’ By Dana Goldstein
This grew out of a real problem — that teachers were being pressed for political and social conformity?
That’s true, and another thing that was happening is that the profession was subjected to a lot of sexist pressures as well. In a city like Chicago at the turn of the century, 97 percent of the teachers are female. And school reformers are attempting to lower female teachers’ pay in order to pay male teachers more, because they perceive that it’s a problem that so many teachers are female. And instead of just raising salaries across the board to attract more men they really want to sort of punish female teachers and lower their salaries. So there are a lot of good reasons why teaching becomes a unionized profession. [It’s] sort of unique among white collar professions in that way.”
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