That’s not my point. My point is the lack of facts in this article. It comes across more as a rant than a legitimate argument against teacher complaints.
There is a lot of ranting on both sides (Market Ticker is driven by the blog host, who vents his spleen).
But I have seen, even on this thread, comments on how much overtime a teacher works.
My wife is a teacher. She works less hours and less out of “normal” hours than I do. She also has to deal with people saying math is to white, and not good to POC, complaints from parents that their little angel needs an excused absence for the fifth day that month for another vacation, and sports teams who will pull students out of the last two periods of the day for practice (funny, grades don’t matter).
I can fire people at times. She can not.
But he (the blog author) did have some rather stark facts. The stats on the reading and math level of graduating high school students is true. Or rather, at best true. The pressure on the school districts to “fake” the numbers is so high that I don’t believe anything from my area anymore. Public education is a spectacular failure by any measure. Kids are getting a diploma that they can’t read and entering into a workplace that will either just use illegal immigrants (because there are many remedial ESL classes paid for by the state to teach them basic skills) or train them on the company dime.
Most companies would rather hire the illegal.
Teachers hate those stats, and will (like my wife) say that standardized test don’t measure everything. But if the tests say that Johnny and Jane can’t read or do basic math, I would bet a bagel they can’t! I have to deal with that now in the workforce.
Right now, most of public education is daycare with sports. Learning actual basic skills is not on the radar for most schools. Oh, they will try to help those students who WANT to learn, as long as they don’t pull to far ahead in the class. But that isn’t the goal anymore. Many teachers just want to get through the year with a functional liver, not be physically assaulted, and no lawsuits.
The system is broken. We need a radical change.