this will be a hot issue in our local house race.

supplementing my inadequate adjunct's income by serving as a substitute teacher in the elementary schools in our city.
"The Inmates Are Running the Asylum": http://www.teacherblue.homestead.com/inmates.html

There really is something wrong with the way our kids are being educated, but except in rare cases it is not the fault of the teachers, but rather of the parents, the adminstrators, the politicians, the testing mania, and the entire social milieu and our general value system in this country.

Teachers are pressured by parents and administrators to dumb down course material while inflating grades, and their authority to control what happens in their classrooms is undermined constantly (hence the title of the article from my site that I link above).

It doesn't help to pretend that our educational system is just fine without reform, because it isn't. The problem is that the current methods of "reform" ignore what really needs to be fixed and deliberately create even worse problems.

One of my kids made one month's growth this year. ONE MONTH in a school year of 9 months. He's a 2nd grader repeating 2nd grade. So I asked him after i scored his test how often he reads at home. Blank look. So I asked what was the last book he read at home. He says "I don't read at home". So I tell him he needs to read every night, he should work harder at becoming a good reader. And he says "Well, I CAN"T read at home". I ask him why not and he says "We don't have any books at my house" and he laughs like that's the funniest thing he's ever heard, books in a house and people actually reading them.

Now tell me what you would do about this. Our kids get library books, we give them books for free, they can buy books at book sales and through book clubs. All day long at school we're all about books, books and more books. But this kid goes home to a family that doesn't value reading. I suspect his parents are illiterate. Dad works 2 jobs and Mom works odd hours. He rarely does his homework because he can't read it and there's no one at home who can help him.

I realize you are wise enough not to blame the school or the teacher but the fact remains this kid is seriously at risk for never learning to read and eventually dropping out of school.

Yes, I called his parents to discuss this with them. The phone has been disconnected.

Reforming our education system won't do a thing to help this child. He needs a new family.

Any ideas?

unequal structures, its pervasively anti-intellectual culture, and its values.

If the parents were not economically oppressed, they might have more time to spend seeking intellecutal stimulation for themselves and theirkid, and if our society's culture and values were not of the sort displayed in the movie Idiocracy, they might actually see some reason to want to learn to read and to spend some time reading.

That kid is doesn't have much chance at a decent life. He will either have to work constantly, at multiple jobs, just to scrape by, usually just one step ahead of the bill collectors, or he will slide into a life of drug and alcohol abuse and petty (or even not so petty) crime.

In this country the poor and the children of the poor are considered disposable.

Sure, we who teach don't feel that way about them, but we also know that we cannot empty the ocean with a teaspoon or hold back the tide, no matter how hard we work and how desperately we want to help the kids.

The worst part, of course, is that the kids themselves are coopted by these false values, so that they honestly believe that "It's Stupid to Be Smart": http://www.teacherblue.homestead.com/stupidsmart.html

(Yep, another one of my articles on my Teacher,Teacher website.)