Throughout his career, David Backer has emphasized the importance of creating engaging, student-centered learning environments and has published numerous articles in reputable journals, gaining recognition for his insightful analyses and practical approaches. Beyond academia, Backer is an advocate for educational equality, especially through equalizing school resources. As we have shared several research projects with him about school finance and inequalities, we had long discussions about interdisciplinarity, theoretical backgrounds, teaching practices and activism. This short interview emphasizes the entanglement of these different dimensions in David Backer’s career.Esther Cyna: How did you get to working on education?
David I. Backer: Well, as a student, I hated school. As a young person I found myself in a situation of just wondering why I and all these kids were in these buildings, doing what we were doing. Ultimately that led me to getting interested in philosophy, because of questioning everything, to get to the root causes of everything.
I was a high school teacher after that for five years. I taught in Washington, D.C., at a Catholic school actually. It was the years of No Child Left Behind. When I graduated, I was actually working at a public school in the D.C. area where I went to undergraduate, and they wanted to hire me, but the new federal regulations prevented me from getting hired because I needed a certification. I didn’t, because I didn’t study education – I studied philosophy – but I was a good teacher…