I enjoyed reading the article. I don’t think a lot of it is BS.
Teaching is an easy job to do poorly, but a very difficult job to do well.
In the last thirty years there has been a tsunami of students with “special needs” that are legally recognized and impose certain behaviors upon schools and teachers...often at the expense of the non-special needs student educations. Individual teachers have had no control over the hugely expensive consequences of that demographic, which is relentlessly bused towards their classrooms every September.
To be effective in the classroom a good teacher has to present information on an appropriate level for the individual student. Good lessons are based on such a transformation of subject matter. In doing that effectively the teacher may commit the sin of making it look easy. Many students and parents have ignorantly reacted to that appearance by proclaiming that the process simply IS easy...and that teaching is therefore “easy”...
Teachers attempt to award the credit for a student’s progress just to that student...so much so that, in many cases, the student and his/her family actually seem to believe they accomplished the goal on their own. There was most likely a teacher in the kid’s success story somewhere at the beginning , but often that sub-plot is dropped as the legend endures.
Children are more poorly prepared for classroom levels appropriate for their ages now than ever before. A big reason for this is that parents are not doing their jobs at home. Every day many kids in school are spending more time with an individual teacher than with an individual parent at home. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, and now the teacher is caught in the middle of this destructive social trend.
Such developments (and many others) have radically transformed the occupation of teacher in the last 25 years. Institutionally, we are not addressing these factors with a winning plan. To a taxpayer, the “face” of educational institutions is the teacher...until that changes, teachers will continue to be a critic’s best targets of negative thoughts about schools.
Are there incompetent, lazy, poorly prepared, BS-worshipping, union-hack teachers nearby? Sure!
Are there energetic, charismatic, intelligent, creative, and humane teachers nearby? Sure!
Separating specific examples of both kinds of teachers requires putting down the broad negative brush and closely examining individual cases....the same approach we would want a good teacher to use when his/her students enter the classroom each day.
That is my favorite quote of the week.
I agree with every thing you've said, and want to underscore this last paragraph. Yes, ideally that is absolutely what we as taxpayers should want for our schools. Unfortunately, the schools that are most deeply in crisis, are precisely the same schools that have the strongest teacher's unions that make it impossible to examine the individual teacher.
This is the danger with the collective bargaining process in any public/government union. The collective protects the individual. Until the unions are reigned in, America's public education system will continue its death spiral, unabated.