there are always going to be bad teachers...

WCGreen

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Mon Sep-20-10 11:55 PM
Original message

there are always going to be bad teachers...

But that doesn't mean you should paint the majority of teachers with broad brush.

My family is full of teachers, teachers going back all the way to the 1800's.

My Mom was a teacher, both her parents taught, and her grandmother was also a teacher.

Two of her brothers taught.

Several cousins are also teachers.

On my dad's side, several people were teachers. But one, my Aunt, because of her alcoholism, was a poor teacher toward the end of her career.

So, using the Oprah/Arne/Barack/Bill template, all of them should be tarnished because of my Aunt's deteriorated work ethic toward the end of her long career as a teacher.

I'm shocked that such a prominent African American such as Oprah would be willing to use the same wide brush used against her race as a tool to taint a profession.

It boggles my mind.

The problem isn't the teachers. The problem is the deteriorating tax base in the inner cities, the dumping ground we who live in the burbs have allowed to fester while we sit tens of miles away from the problem and wonder why those kids can't just be like our kids.

This isn't to say that there aren't bad teachers who have attained tenure, but it also doesn't give anyone on the outside carte blanche to criticize and extrapolate a problem to crisis proportion.

I found a book I bought back in the middle 90's called Manufactured Crisis. It was about the uproar over public education.

One thing they always point to, these people who believe that the public schools are failing, is the test scores of other industrial countries compared to ours. But many of the countries we compete with have tracking. Students are tracked at an early age toward academic or vocational. Here in the US, we at least try to allow people to be in charge of their futures.

Take my brother, for instance. He was a poor student in High School. Worked as an auto mechanic. He still took all of the standardized test and so his score was folded into the ones of the smart kids. The overall score for that class was impacted by his low grade.

But here in the US, he decided to turn his life around, went to the Community College and worked himself into a Masters Degree in Accounting and is now a partner in a CPA firm. I wonder if in Japan people have that same opportunity to reinvent themselves.

I'm rambling, of course, but it just really gets to me that the, mostly self-appointed, leadership in this country suddenly all agree that the teachers are the reason we don't have higher standardized test scores than Denmark or Japan or Germany.

If you are going to standardize education, then take the funding away from property tax. Simple as that. Also, take it away from gambling profits. Most state Lotteries are sold to the public because they will help our schools. How fucking cynical is that....

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.