Dentists beware, your next

[Al Agnew]

Interesting discussion...

Once upon a time long long ago I was a teacher. I have an education degree with a major in art and minor in English. I taught art, K-12, in a small rural school district for 7 years--long enough to obtain tenure, so I could have kept teaching for 30 years without fear of being fired, and retired this year, in fact. What I saw back then, the problems with public education, I have watched get worse. Poor teachers? You bet! Poorly prepared teachers? Absolutely. NONE of the education courses I was taught in college did ANYTHING to help me actually know how to teach, how to control a classroom, discipline students, work with parents, communicate with kids, etc. In that, most colleges fail. We all know good teachers, but I think they are good because they have the all-important experience and passion for teaching, not because they are educated in teaching. Educated in subject matter--of course. But there are lots of bad teachers that know their subject matter; they just can't put it across to their students.

BUT...the public schools really started going downhill with the changes in society. Those changes haven't been all bad. Used to be, the low IQ, learning disabled, psychological problem students were pretty much left by the wayside of education, dropped out, went to work in some kind of manual labor where they didn't need an education. The "average" students got the basics, enough to read and write and figure their checkbook balance, and went to work in blue collar jobs. The better students were the ones going to college. This is, of course, painting with a broad brush, with LOTS of exceptions. But today, EVERYBODY is considered to be entitled to a free public education of 12-13 years, and to be developed to their full potential, whatever it is. Wonderful sentiment and admirable goal. But what it means is, more and more of the public education resource goes to teaching the students that are the toughest to teach. I'm not saying that's wrong. What I'm saying is that the biggest difference between public and private schools is in their students. The private schools, as a rule, don't have to devote so much time and resources to teaching the students that are the most difficult and time consuming to teach. In the public school classroom, what that means is that there is a built-in mechanism that almost insures teaching to the lowest common denominator, since that classroom is likely to have learning disabled and behaviorally disabled students that the teacher must spend the extra time to work with.

And oh, those behaviorally disabled students...either they are on drugs to make them more tractable, or they are suffering from disfunctional family life, or both. Which is the other thing--the public schools, because they take all comers, are a pretty good reflection of society today. Far, far too many absent, incompetent, uncaring, drug-addicted, or "entitled to everything and so's my kid" parents. Leads to a whole lot of VERY difficult to teach students. And all those students (except some of the "entitled") go to public schools, practically none to private schools.

And then there's funding...gee, using mostly property taxes to fund schools, now THERE'S a great way of insuring that all students get an equal chance at an education. Poor districts (read rural and inner city) have less resources, worse facilities, and of course probably a poorer grade of teacher, because if you're a hotshot teacher, chances are you're gonna go where the money is. My last year of teaching, I made $12,400 in my small, poor rural school district, at the same time a good friend who was teaching in suburban St. Louis was making $35,000. Does anyone seriously expect that the rural and inner city school can do as well in a standardized test as the wealthy suburban one?

It ain't one thing wrong with public schools, it's a myriad of things, most of which won't be fixed until society changes, funding sources change, and everybody from parents to politicians REALLY appreciates the value of education.