[RavenATB]

"Do you degrade people's chosen profession and belittle it?"

I may have missed the context of the comment, but I haven't seen many people actually belittle and degrade teaching, as a profession. I think even the most ardent opponent of government schools would say that making the choice to teach children is an honorable and admirable thing.

It's the teachers, as individuals, and largely as a group, who invite negative assessment and comment. They allow their union to speak for them, and the PR has been horrible. The NEA has made the larger group of teachers look to be little more than mindless thugs, bent on maintaining the bureaucracy and their perks with little to no concern for the actual welfare of the kids they're supposed to be dedicated to teaching.

As I've said before, and most people would agree, there are certainly good quality teachers in the P/S system. The problem is that they are so vastly outnumbered and apparently silenced by the greater mass of lousy, incompetent and corrupt teachers that they have virtually no positive effect on the process outside their own classrooms.

[SoftballMominVA]

You are correct that not many people belittle teaching, but this one poster certainly does. Unless you need specific links, I'll not waste the bandwidth to post them.

I agree 100% with you that the NEA does nothing to help the reputation of teachers and in fact hurts it. I am not a member of the NEA, and hopefully never will be. My membership in the NEA may be forced upon me if VA turned into an 'at will' state, or if my husband and I move to another state before I retire from teaching. Virginia is a 'right to work' state and I cannot be forced into a union.

All that being said....IMO the public schools are largely a reflection of the community - and of the most liberal part of the community. That would explain why those posters in red counties and districts have fewer complaints about their schools and those in blue counties refuse to allow their kids to attend. My SIL's husband is a Lutheran minister in inner city LA and they live on the outskirts of the city. She never considered sending her kids to the public school system and I was relieved when she said she was going to home-school them. Her oldest now is a rising 9th grader and he will be attending a boarding school in Minnesota.

There is no 'one size fits all' answer. I completely support anyone's decision to home school or to use private or Christian schools or to use public schools. There are very few parents out there that are incapable of making a good choice. So when someone tells me that their public school is good/bad choice, I take them at their word and don't try to change their minds and force them to do what I say when I am not living their lives.