Who Decides Who Becomes a Teacher?

‘This book is about and beyond many things: corporate-driven teacher evaluation models, the history of schools, and the fact that learning and teaching have existed before and will outlast racist and colonial approaches to school. Here, you have up-close details of refusal and bumps along the path that is made by walking it. As essentially, we learn from a sorely needed history of how schools of education came to a place where they, as potentially nimble, liberatory dogs, are instead wagged by tails of mediocrity, thinly veiled racism, and femininity rather than feminism. If you had to administer, justify your syllabi against, or, most disturbingly, ‘take’ the EdTPA, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. Read, teach, learn. As your birthright.’

—Leigh Patel, Associate Dean of Equity and Justice, School of Education, University of Pittsburgh

‘Gorlweski and Tuck’s Who Decides Who Becomes a Teacher? is a major accomplishment and a critically important contribution in the fight to save teacher education in the U.S. It shows us that schools of education have the potential to be sites of radical resistance to inequality and white supremacy, but only if we decide to make them that way.’

—Wayne Au, Professor, School of Educational Studies, University of Washington Bothell