There seems to be two types of stories about teachers. One, appearing regularly, tells about a teacher who puts his or her life at risk to protect students from someone else with a gun - as in Sandy Hook, CT or Sparks Elementary School in Nevada or thirteen others in 2012-13. The other type is exemplified by the ABC clips of a "profane rant" by some teacher in reaction to an unruly and indifferent class. Teachers, it seems, are somehow expected to be willing to die in defense of their students but never, ever, lose their cool in front of these same students retgardless of provocation.
It's wonderful to have over three milion people in America who are wiling and able to be confined in one room with twenty to thirty-five children from one to six hours a day one hundred eighty to one hundred ninety days a year and still try to teach them the skills they need to pass enough tests to avoid being branded incompetent. Under a system tied to constant testing, stadards are often set without regard to prior experience, home environment, language background, etc. It's left up to the teacher to get the required gains in reading and math or suffer the consequences. More unpleasant truths after the break.
Teachers in this country average about $44,000 in salary after spending between $30,000 and $110,000 for the required four to five years of college. In addition, they spend over a billion dollars a year out of their pockets for school supplies that cash-strapped school districts don't provide. Moreover, the "vacation" teachers are supposed to have in the summer is really a layoff, during which the teacher can stretch a yearly pay into ten or twelve installments, as a choice.
The assignment of teachers is another matter. According to seniority, an experienced teacher generally has a better chance of working in an upper-cass neighborhood with its smaller classes and higher quality equipment. Newer, less experienced teachers are more likely to end up in poorly-equipped classrooms with more kids from less educationally enriched homes and a higher percentage of single-parent supervision. This is one of the reasons the National Commission on Teaching and the Nation's Future reports toughly half of teachers leave the profession after five years.
A more compelling reason, to my view, is that we live in a country that genuinely has a profound distrust of education and "eggheads" who aren't "the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with." We prefer George W. Bush to Al Gore and Fox News to the Guardian.
It's no accident that, at many universities, the football coach makes more than the president of the school. It's also no accident that, despite the huge amount of money we throw into education, we rank seventeenth in the world.
This is the reason, I feel, that the decline of our country won't be reversed. The dumbing down of America has succeeded beyond the media's wildest dreams. And who's the clown at the blackboard?