Bad teachers, bad schools, bad grades, bad, bad, bad, bad.........

The problem with education is complex. It isn't irreducible to one factor such as teachers. It makes it easier to say so because that is an easier factor to control. Then people can righteously say that they took steps to fix the problem. If every 'bad' teacher were to disappear from schools tomorrow, the whole system would still be a mess.

Look at all the factors that influence education of a child for good and bad:
Parents
Standard of living
Teachers
Peers
TV, the internet and other forms of communication from many places
School boards and other entities that control the educational system
Unions
There are many more that I have unintentionally left out.

I believe the real battle in all of this now is control. Who gets a say in educating the children? The federal government is now making a big play and they have the money. With states cutting education left and right, that leaves them with a big opening. It seems to come down to the beliefs of one person, Arne Duncan. Gawd would have a hard time untangling the mess, and Arne isn't Gawd.

Unions are a bugaboo and scapegoat. There are real questions to be asked of them. However, if they disappeared tomorrow, the system would remain a mess. Teachers would also be left out in the cold. There would be little or no protection for them from the powers that be.

I shudder to think of teachers left to the whims of administrators, school boards, and whoever else. I am not advocating for bad teachers, and those processes should be carefully considered by the unions. Do they protect too many poor teachers? The worst stories are the ones you hear. You rarely hear of the cases where the unions have saved teachers from injustice.

I have spent time on teachers and unions because they are now squarely in the sights of a lot of people. It now seems to be taken by gospel that they are the problem and if only that one factor could be fixed, all would be well across the land. Meh!

Unless and until the people involved really make an effort to work TOGETHER, nothing will ever be accomplished. Every group needs to be heard from and taken seriously. It won't be easy, but real reform never is.

The other very important group that is never asked are the kids. If they are asked, it is usually a token gesture which is really nothing but a pat on the head. If you want to know what is really going on, ask the kids. When I wanted to find out about something rumbling around in the school, I asked them or the secretaries. They always knew, and they usually knew a lot of the backstory to some events that never got publicized.

Of course, you will get extremes when you ask. You get those that are content and those that are down on everything. There are nuggets even in their views if you look. The majority will be straight and brutal in a lot of cases. Just try an anonymous survey of your teaching if you don't believe it. OUCH! They will give roses, but they will give the thorns too. People don't listen to them, and they are directly involved in all of the factors in a school.

I miss the kids, but I don't miss the politics. Unfortunately, that is what is taking over more and more. If they asked me to teach another 'theory' along with evolution, I'd ask them if they knew they walked upright. Case closed and I'd be gone one way or another.

are expected to work miracles. The student population is transient and stability is a factor in the annual report on progress required by many BOE's. To the public it would seem that those teachers are not doing their jobs. That is not true. You do have a lot of teachers who gravitate to these schools because they know that there is little oversight until annual reports are given. However, there are many who bust heir butts trying to make a difference. In the proposed charter school conversions proposed by Arne Duncan, little of this is taken into consideration. Everybody is dumped into one pool and if your students don't meet standards, your pay is connected to it. Haitian and cuban immigrants in Miami often arrive with little command of the English language. In their own language, many of these students are proficient. However, the District dismantled the English Center which served a sort of clearing house to allow the new arrivals classes and an opportunity to learn English before sending them out to individual schools. Instead, they use the failing educational method of mainstreaming and paring them in regular classes with English speaking students in the hopes that they will improve through assimilation. They even include them as a part of the testing population on the State required exam to determine a school's annual grade (a remnant of Jeb Bush). It is so frustrating and the teacher is blamed when the results are not what the District and the State want. This is one example of circumstances in the educational system that does not recognize the array of things with student performance.

the Spanish teacher to help communicate with some of her students. She and the Spanish teacher already have very heavy workloads, and I guess I resent this because it takes time away from instructing my daughter. In addition to our taxes (our state has high property, sales, and income taxes), we give alot back to the schools as well (volunteering to help out in the classroom, contrbutions to special funds). I know our teachers are underpaid and understaffed for what we ask of them, and, many of them our excellent. Some our disasters though, and I plan to homeschool my younger daughter in some subjects because of my experience with my older daughter.

That is what a kid said to me just yesterday when I spoke to him about his attendance and noticed he was absent every Monday.

I talked to the principal and she will call his mom.

But beyond that there isn't much we can do. He just doesn't like Mondays. Poor thing.

lacking high property tax revenues?

Education was the OBVIOUS third target for conservative take-over (after the media and elections). The only surprise to me -- and it's a horrible one -- is how quickly the take-over of education is happening.

A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking.
– U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, On the Poverty of Student Life (1966), http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4

its a damn coup d'etat...Thanks for the article, this country wants servers (slaves) and cannon fodder in large numbers, how much education do they need?
Have you read JT Gatto? I'm not with him on all his personal politics but he's right on the history...

Many poorly performing school districts are some of the highest funded. Kansas City was an example of no matter how much funding is available, outcomes cannot be assured. D.C. at almost $13K/yr is another example. Imagine that $260K/yr (20 students per classroom) cannot achieve positive results. Would $25K/yr make a difference, and who pays the difference? My own school system spends about $8K/yr and it gets excellent results. Our neighboring school system spends more, but it gets poorer results. A big difference is that we have a higher percentage of parents who are engaged in their children's education when compared to the neighboring school district. Part of it is having more money in our families, but an even bigger part, in my opinion, is a willingness to sacrifice for our children. I would much prefer spending time doing Math, Science, or Social Studies with my children than watching the boob tube. Many of things that I do with my children do not cost any money (taking them to museums and libraries, talking with them like adults, putting good books into their hands at an early age, challenging them to excel academically, etc).

Now you can argue that the state has an obligation to ensure everyone has a fair equal footing in education (you should expend extra resources in the troubled school districts to ensure they have as fair a go as those from less troubled districts), but, you are taking more resources from my family to accomplish this. I am already averaging over 50 hrs/week. How much more time do you want me to take away from my family to meet this egalitarian dream? Our per capita income in my family is less than the state average already.

1. They've said that they are. Pay them more, give them tenure, give them new buildings and research money and new technology, and voila--Johnny will read. Politicians have agreed. "Elect me, I'll give more money to the schools and success is guaranteed. I'll even pass a law guaranteeing it. Elect me and you won't have to do a thing." Idiots.

2. Nobody else wants to take responsibility, teachers say, often correctly. Blame the parents? How dare you! Blame the students? But the students are the victims.

Well, sometimes the students are victims--of parents, teachers, schools. Often enough they're self-victimizers. Sometimes we empower their self-victimization.

Sometimes the parents are victims. Often they could do a better job, but have some feeble excuse not to.

In fact, (1) and (2) are common refrains in rather widespread dysfunctional portions of US society, and the mechanisms are the same. (They also pop up all over the world.)