As a series of breathless exposés in magazines and newspapers ranging from the New Yorker to the New York Post have documented, the New York City Department of Education places dozens of teachers in reassignment centers — so-called “rubber rooms’’ — while they await hearings on charges of misconduct. Teachers consigned to rubber rooms spend their days doing next to nothing yet continue to receive their full salaries, sometimes as much as $100,000 per year.

For detractors, rubber rooms have come to signify all that is wrong with American public education: teachers so bad they can’t be in a classroom avoid termination because of hidebound unions, and taxpayers have to foot the bill.

From another vantage point, rubber rooms are merely one instance of the alarmist, often anti-teacher rhetoric that has swept the US for the better part of two centuries. This is how journalist Dana Goldstein would have us think about it. One of the main purposes of her timely and well-crafted book, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, is to show that the contemporary debate about teachers — and education reform more generally — is nothing new. We’ve been here before.