"A brilliant young scholar's history of 175 years of teaching in America shows that teachers have always borne the brunt of shifting, often impossible expectations. In other nations, public schools are one thread in a quilt that includes free universal child care, health care, and job training. Here, schools are the whole cloth. Today we look around the world at countries like Finland and South Korea, whose students consistently outscore Americans...

"This book follows the little-known story of Madeline Morgan (later Madeline Stratton Morris), a Black social studies teacher in migration era Chicago, who fought for and won the first inclusion of Black history in the curriculum of the Chicago schools a decade before the height of Civil Rights Movement educational activism"--