I am no fan of public education here in Texas but I do my utmost to make a difference in the lives of those I teach. The system is corrupt, but I cannot make a living on what parochial schools pay. They pay half of what public schools pay and still, it is only an adequate living for a single person. The shame of school administrators is that they have lost all connections to teaching in the real world. Their agenda is testing your children and not educating them. You can thank "NCLB" for that little deal. How can you pass someone who refuses to be a success?
Frankly, I have had it with being the only person in the lives of my students who gives a d--n about the child's character. Try teaching a child to have character when the the parents are addicts or gang members who will curse you out because you care enough to discipline! In addition to that, I have students who come to school never having held a book in their hands, much less been read to. This is a travesty and it will be the undoing of our nation if O. does not bring us to destruction first.
Friends, it much worse that you think. The teacher is a baby sitter who risks assault at the hands of her students and is motivated (intimidated, actually) by an administration that is in the business of staying in business and not educating your child.
Yes, I have had young friends who set out to teach in urban public schools out of a sense of dedication, and most of them had to move on, to somewhere safer.
In contrast, I also had a former graduate student who came back part time to get his PhD with us, who was the principal of a school in the Bronx. He actually started out life as the Warlord of a Bronx Hispanic street gang, then married a good Catholic wife, and went straight. (In fact I’m not sure he ever was exactly crooked—where he came from, they needed a gang in the South Bronx simply to defend their turf.) As a result, he had enough “authority” to run that school pretty well the way it needed to be run, and the students benefited from it. But teaching is not always a cushy sort of job.
My oldest daughter is teaching school, now that her kids are old enough, and she also finds it challenging—financially necessary but also gratifying when she can get some difficult kids from troubled backgrounds reading stories, enjoying them, and writing about them.