ReThink History: Who Taught the Teachers
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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Episodes
Ep 1 — Boarding Round
For two hundred years, America ran its schools without training a single teacher.
Ep 2 — Normal
On July 3, 1839, in Lexington, Massachusetts, Cyrus Peirce opened the first state normal school in America.
Ep 3 — A Woman's True Profession
American teaching did not drift toward women by accident.
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.
Ep 5 — Normal School U
UCLA began as the Los Angeles State Normal School.
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.
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.
Ep 8 — The Great Escape
In 1964, more than half of all working female college graduates in America were teachers.
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.
Ep 10 — Judging the Teacher
The 1966 Coleman Report was read as proof that schools barely matter.
Ep 11 — Empty Pipelines
Enrollment in traditional teacher preparation fell from about 880,000 in 2010-11 to about 591,000 a decade later.
Ep 12 — Repricing the Job
Twelfth-grade math scores are the lowest since that assessment began in 2005; reading the lowest since 1992.
Explore further
Part of the listening path Women's Lives, Women's Rights (stop 2 of 5) — next: Title IX.
Scouting America
The Way We Learn
Title IX
Best Supporting Actress