Free The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

introducedH.R. 1571, “A bill to do justice to the female employees of the Government.”
    Lockwood launched a national petition drive to support the legislation, which Congress debated that spring. The Senate version of the bill would have prohibited federal agencies from sex discrimination in both hiring and pay, but in the end a weaker House version became law, guaranteeing women equal pay in the lowest federal clerk positions, but doing nothing to help them gain access to higher-level government jobs. Nevertheless, H.R. 1571 was the United States’ first equal-pay law for women. After it was enacted, the number of female Treasury Department workers earning more than $900 annually increased from 4 to 20 percent—which meant some female clerks could make more than three times as much as a female teacher or even a female principal.
    Lockwood eventually enrolled in the National University Law School, and in 1879 became the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar. In 1884she launched a presidential run as the standard-bearer of the National Equal Rights Party, founded by feminists fed up with the Republican Party’s sidelining of women’s issues. She ran for president again four years later. Lockwood’s rapid ascent from country schoolteacher to congressional lobbyist to trailblazing attorney provided early evidence of the complicated relationship between feminism and the teaching profession. It was through teaching that many women became aware of their talents and began to hunger for a role in the wider world. Yet when ambitious women left the underfunded, often maligned teaching profession to better their lives, public education lost powerful advocates for both teachers’ and students’ needs.
    In the African American community, even greater barriers to employment outside education worked to keep more of the most talented black women—and men—in the classroom. There they developed a set of high ideals about the political and social power of educators, which anticipated later hopes that all teachers, regardless of their own race, would understand themselves as agents for racial justice.
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    * It is impossible to resist comparing this comment to that of another Harvard president, Larry Summers, who in 2005 expressed confusion about why there were not more women scholars in the sciences: “There are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude … those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.”

• Chapter Three •
“No Shirking, No Skulking”
    BLACK TEACHERS AND RACIAL UPLIFT AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
    On November 7, 1861, the Union army captured the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. White plantation owners fled, abandoning homes, cotton fields, and ten thousand slaves. When word of the Yankee takeover reached the mainland, more slaves arrived, runaways from parts south. By February, twelve thousand black people had gathered on the islands, at Hilton Head, St. Helena, and Port Royal. There was a lot of potential labor, and a lot of cotton, too, of a finer, more valuable quality than the cotton grown on the mainland.
    The U.S. Treasury Department dispatched Edward Pierce, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts lawyer, to the islands to assess how they might be used in the war effort. He reported back that he was more impressed with the character of the former slaves than he thought he’d be; they harvested the cotton in their masters’ absence, and were committed Christians, honest and industrious. Those who had escaped slavery had a “courage … worthy of heroes.” What they really needed,