Reply #20: Everybody LISTEN to the teachers [View All]

[many a good man]

As a former teacher and someone married to a public school teacher, I can say that everyone is out of touch except for the teachers themselves. No one knows better than the teachers and no one knows worse than school administrators, parents, and politicians.

It takes a village to raise a child. All the news stories and statistics you hear about in our society become flesh and blood in front of our teachers. Politics and top-down reforms routinely result in just more obstacles to doing their jobs well. Pay for performance comes down to scapegoating people who have less and less control over the situation with each passing year.

Society must work toward a stable and secure home environment for all children and give more value to education. Introduce corporate-level IT systems in the classrooms. Demand less BS from teachers and give them more time to just teach. Fewer, smaller classes and assistants in each room. Encourage charter schools where schools can design bottom-up a curriculum that works better for their students than the official school board curriculum designed by idiots. These are just SOME of the things we would do if we were REALLY concerned about education in this country.