ReThink History: Who Taught the Teachers

Let's ReThink History
Let's ReThink History
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For roughly 150 years, America ran its schools on an invisible subsidy: the captive talent of educated women barred from nearly every other profession, and Catholic teaching sisters who worked for room, board, and vows. This twelve-part series follows the profession behind every classroom — from the colonial schoolmaster who boarded family to family and was examined by the town minister, through the invention of the normal school (a French idea, a Prussian model, and three students in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1839), the deliberate feminization of teaching at a fraction of a man's wage, and the century-long journey from a Saturday county examination to a state teaching license. It follows the normal schools as they climbed into state universities and abandoned the mission they were built for; the marriage bars, loyalty oaths, and purges that policed who was allowed to stand at the front of a room; the parochial empire that peaked at 5.6 million children and collapsed when Vatican II emptied the convents; and the hinge of the whole story — the years between 1963 and 1980 when law, medicine, and business finally opened to women and the classroom lost the talent it had never had to compete for. Then the reckoning: a single salary schedule that rewards longevity but never scarcity, a teacher pay penalty that hit a record 26.9% in 2024, fifty years of trying to measure whether teachers matter, the collapse of teacher preparation, and what it would actually cost to staff American classrooms honestly in the age of AI. Sourced from federal education data, economic scholarship, court opinions, and archival records; contested history is presented as contested. AI-narrated from a fully cited research dossier for every episode.

  1. Episode 1

    Ep 1 — Boarding Round

    For two hundred years, America ran its schools without training a single teacher. The schoolmaster boarded family to family, was examined by the town minister, and taught because he knew the material — not because anyone had taught him how. This first episode of Who Taught the Teachers goes back to the dame schools, the town schoolmasters, and the district schools of colonial and early-republic America. Teaching was a young man's stopgap between college and the pulpit or the bar; "boarding round" meant the teacher lodged in his pupils' homes as part of his pay. Massachusetts law required grammar masters to be approved by the town minister and the ministers of two adjacent towns. Nobody trained them, because everyone assumed that knowing a subject qualified you to teach it — the assumption the next two centuries would slowly dismantle.

  2. Episode 2

    Ep 2 — Normal

    On July 3, 1839, in Lexington, Massachusetts, Cyrus Peirce opened the first state normal school in America. Three students showed up. That room is the ancestor of every education school in the country. This episode traces the invention of teacher training: Jean-Baptiste de La Salle's 1685 seminary for schoolmasters at Reims, the Prussian teacher seminaries American reformers crossed an ocean to see, Samuel Read Hall's 1823 school at Concord, Vermont and his Lectures on School-Keeping, and Horace Mann's campaign — funded by Edmund Dwight's $10,000 and a matching legislative appropriation. We handle the etymology honestly: "normal" comes from the French école normale, a model school setting the norm for the profession, and the "first normal school" label attached to La Salle is a retrospective one.

  3. Episode 3

    Ep 3 — A Woman's True Profession

    American teaching did not drift toward women by accident. It was engineered — and the engineering argument was cost. School boards could hire a woman for a fraction of a man's wage, and reformers said so out loud. This episode follows the feminization of the American classroom from Catharine Beecher's campaign to make teaching an extension of the woman's sphere, through Horace Mann's blunt arithmetic, the Civil War's acceleration, and the Board of National Popular Education sending several hundred women west. Women were 70% of public-school teachers by 1900 and nearly 86% by 1920; today the figure is roughly 77%. The episode holds both edges of the fact at once — the widest professional door open to nineteenth-century women, and a discount the nation quietly banked for a century and a half.

  4. Episode 4

    Ep 4 — The Certificate

    In 1876 a seventeen-year-old named Ella Pullman sat a Saturday examination in an Iowa county courthouse — orthography, arithmetic, geography, physiology, and the theory and practice of teaching — and walked out licensed to teach for six months. That was the American teaching credential. This episode tracks the license from the county-examination era through the long state takeover: New York authorized statewide certificates in 1843, Indiana in 1852, and by 1937 forty-one states issued them exclusively at the state level. Then the system cracked — wartime emergency certificates went from 2,305 in 1940-41 to 69,423 by 1943-44 — and rebuilt itself into today's strata of provisional and professional tiers, National Board certification, Praxis, and edTPA. Underneath runs the question the whole century never settled: does the certificate certify anything that shows up in a classroom?

  5. Episode 5

    Ep 5 — Normal School U

    UCLA began as the Los Angeles State Normal School. So did San José State, Eastern Michigan, and dozens of others. Every one of them climbed the same ladder — and most stopped caring about training teachers on the way up. This episode follows the four-rung climb: normal school to state teachers college in the renaming wave of the 1920s and 30s, to state college in the 50s and 60s, to comprehensive university by the 80s. Eighty-eight normal schools converted to teachers colleges between 1911 and 1930 alone. The incentives were rational at every step — status, the GI Bill flood, the pull of research prestige — and the casualties were the model schools, the practice-teaching core, and the single-purpose identity. Jurgen Herbst's charge gives the episode its spine: the institutions built to dignify teaching abandoned it to chase prestige.

  6. Episode 6

    Ep 6 — Conduct Unbecoming

    By the early 1930s, roughly three-quarters of surveyed urban school districts refused to hire a married woman, and about half fired any woman teacher who married. This was not folklore. It was documented policy. This episode examines the moral surveillance of the American teacher — and separates the record from the internet's favorite fakes. The viral "1923 teacher contract" lists circulating online are unverifiable or outright fabricated; the real evidence is the contract Willard Waller reproduced in 1932 and the district surveys Claudia Goldin analyzed. From there: the marriage bars and their collapse in the 1940s and 50s when the teacher shortage made them unaffordable, Section 213 of the 1932 Economy Act, McCarthy-era loyalty oaths and the New York purges, Florida's Johns Committee revoking 71 teaching certificates, and the 1978 defeat of California's Briggs Initiative. Real people lost their livelihoods in each of these; the episode treats them that way.

  7. Episode 7

    Ep 7 — The Competitors

    In 1965, American Catholic schools taught about 5.6 million children, and their faculty rested on more than 100,000 teaching sisters working for stipends near a third of lay pay. Within a generation the sisters were gone, tuition spiraled, and enrollment fell by roughly 70%. This episode covers the schools that competed with the public system for America's children and its teachers. The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore ordered a school in every parish in 1884, and "contributed services" — the sisters' below-market labor — became the second hidden subsidy in this series, deeper than the first. Vatican II's aftermath removed it, and economists have used that shock as a natural experiment ever since. Alongside runs the private and boarding lane, largely exempt from state certification then and now — plus Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which guaranteed these schools the right to exist at all.

  8. Episode 8

    Ep 8 — The Great Escape

    In 1964, more than half of all working female college graduates in America were teachers. By 1996 it was under 15%. The doors to law, medicine, and business opened — and the classroom lost the talent it had never had to compete for. This is the hinge of the series. Women's share of law degrees went from 2.5% in 1959-60 to 45.9% by 2000; medical degrees from 5.5% to 42.7%. Corcoran, Evans and Schwab measured the effect on teaching: the share of new female teachers drawn from the top decile of their high-school class fell from about 20% of the 1964 cohort to about 11% by 2000. Hoxby and Leigh argue pay compression inside teaching did most of the pushing — a genuine dispute presented as one. Running alongside, with its own distinct cause, is the destruction of the Black teaching corps as the South desegregated: tens of thousands of Black teachers and principals lost their jobs. A triumph and a crisis in the same twenty years.

  9. Episode 9

    Ep 9 — The Paycheck

    In 2024, American public school teachers earned 26.9% less in weekly wages than comparably educated workers — the widest gap ever recorded. In 1996 it was about 6%. This episode explains how a profession gets priced. It follows the money from room-and-board barter to the single salary schedule that Denver and Des Moines pioneered in 1921 — a genuine civil-rights instrument, since it paid the same for the same credentials regardless of sex or race, and a flattening one, since it rewards longevity and course credits but never scarcity or excellence. Then unionization: the NEA as genteel association versus the AFT as union, the 1960 New York City walkout that forced collective bargaining, and the wave that followed. Counting benefits, the total-compensation penalty still runs about 17%, and OECD data put U.S. teachers at 54-57% of comparably educated workers' earnings — the lowest relative teacher pay in the developed world.

  10. Episode 10

    Ep 10 — Judging the Teacher

    The 1966 Coleman Report was read as proof that schools barely matter. Fifty years later, Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff put a number on a single teacher: replacing one in the bottom 5% is worth about $250,000 in lifetime earnings to one classroom of students. This is the measurement story — and the whiplash that followed it. From Coleman, through A Nation at Risk in 1983 and its charge that teachers came from the bottom quarter of graduates, into the value-added revolution and the policy stampede it triggered: No Child Left Behind's highly qualified teacher mandate, Race to the Top, D.C.'s IMPACT, and merit-pay experiments like Nashville's POINT that mostly disappointed. Then the retreat: states requiring student-growth measures in evaluation went from 15 in 2009 to 44 in 2015 and back down to 34 by 2019. The honest synthesis is uncomfortable for both camps — teacher effects are real and large, and our tools for identifying and rewarding individual teachers remain crude.

  11. Episode 11

    Ep 11 — Empty Pipelines

    Enrollment in traditional teacher preparation fell from about 880,000 in 2010-11 to about 591,000 a decade later. Roughly one in eight teaching positions is now unfilled or held by someone not fully certified. This is what a pipeline collapse looks like. This episode covers the critique, the collapse, and the scramble. The ed-school critique canon runs from Koerner in 1963 to Arthur Levine in 2006 to today's NCTQ report cards. Teach For America arrived in 1990 out of Wendy Kopp's Princeton thesis, peaked near 6,000 corps members in 2013, and has shrunk hard since. Alternative routes now supply roughly three in ten new credentials — in Texas, only 28% of first-time hires in 2021-22 held a standard certificate. Against that: teacher residencies, grow-your-own programs, registered apprenticeships now in 45 states, and the science-of-reading laws forcing ed schools to change what they teach. Shortages are real but badly reported — specific to subject and place, not uniform.

  12. Episode 12

    Ep 12 — Repricing the Job

    Twelfth-grade math scores are the lowest since that assessment began in 2005; reading the lowest since 1992. The subsidy that staffed American classrooms for 150 years is gone and is not coming back. So what would it actually take to staff them honestly? The finale puts the pieces together. Did teachers cause the decline? The honest answer: individual teacher effects are real, but the aggregate slide tracks the pandemic, absenteeism, phones and policy churn far more than teacher quality — though a thinning talent pool compounds everything. We look at the countries that run the anti-subsidy model — Finland, Singapore, South Korea, where selective entry, professional pay and public status travel together — at what repricing would cost, and at live experiments in career ladders and differentiated pay. And we take up AI from the teacher's side rather than the student's: real workload relief against a real deskilling risk, and districts' human-in-the-loop rules as the profession's first negotiated boundary with the technology.

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About

For roughly 150 years, America ran its schools on an invisible subsidy: the captive talent of educated women barred from nearly every other profession, and Catholic teaching sisters who worked for room, board, and vows. This twelve-part series follows the profession behind every classroom — from the colonial schoolmaster who boarded family to family and was examined by the town minister, through the invention of the normal school (a French idea, a Prussian model, and three students in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1839), the deliberate feminization of teaching at a fraction of a man's wage, and the century-long journey from a Saturday county examination to a state teaching license. It follows the normal schools as they climbed into state universities and abandoned the mission they were built for; the marriage bars, loyalty oaths, and purges that policed who was allowed to stand at the front of a room; the parochial empire that peaked at 5.6 million children and collapsed when Vatican II emptied the convents; and the hinge of the whole story — the years between 1963 and 1980 when law, medicine, and business finally opened to women and the classroom lost the talent it had never had to compete for. Then the reckoning: a single salary schedule that rewards longevity but never scarcity, a teacher pay penalty that hit a record 26.9% in 2024, fifty years of trying to measure whether teachers matter, the collapse of teacher preparation, and what it would actually cost to staff American classrooms honestly in the age of AI. Sourced from federal education data, economic scholarship, court opinions, and archival records; contested history is presented as contested. AI-narrated from a fully cited research dossier for every episode.

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