re-posted (because people were paying more attention to my grammar than the underlying topic)
I've heard excuse after excuse over the years how the collapse of our education system is a result of bad teacher or funding. The real problem I see is that there seems to be a lack of respect for Education in America. This is manifested in our culture which oozes with examples like Al Bundy's chronic mocking of teachers in the late 80's and thru the 90's to the underlying view in American culture that teachers are somehow lazy are because they only work 9 or 10 months of the year (irrespective of the actual hours they work or extra training). As, well as numerous songs about how no knowing anything is wonderful. I'm not saying this is a new thing there has always been a general under current of being simple was a virtue but there was at one point some respect as well for being learned
This view in the culture of Education has also manifested itself in the parents and students themselves. Parents and students seem more interested in the transactional view of school rather than if the student is learning anything. What I remember from school parents and students seem to be more interested in the grading curve than if their student was actually learning anything. I remember hearing parents complain more about the grade than what the grade represented. I also saw in parents and student and still hear it in the media that school is more like publicly funded daycare than a place of learning. During the Wisconsin teachers sickout parents were more concern about what they were going to do with their child than the fact that they weren't going to learn anything that day. This views is passed onto the students in the schools as well a fair number of students simply see school as a state sponsored prison they are forced to go to till they are 18, or as a path to play sports, not as a path to self-improvement.
This is also shown in the view of people elected to school boards and parents who rather than having an interest in that their kids get ahead in a good number of cases schools are treated just as another front in the culture war. That teaching the truth and student growth is much less important than religious or cultural doctrine: as, was shown in the Dover Area school district attempt to teach creationism in the middle part of the last decade; in the severe resistance to teaching bilingual and multilingual education or even teaching Foreign languages in schools prior to middle school, at a time in which they are most able to adsorb other languages, because i the minds of some this is anti-American.
The simple fact is teachers can only teach if the child is receptive to learning and in a culture where learning is treated with such disrespect it is hard to create that environment.