Not all of us came from colleges of education. I personally went in to teaching later (yeah, I had to go back and pick up 12 wasted hours of teaching classes, but I don't think it had much effect on me!).
The problem is multilayered, but to lay it at the feet of teachers will not solve it, if that is the goal. If teachers are the biggest part of the problem, then you have to look at how that came to be, and I would submit that a big part of that is the system itself which does not reward good teachers over poor ones, and frustrates good teachers who frequently quit and do something else.
susie
Yes, the issue is complex and multilayered. Here's what I observed in the classes I taught:
1. Complete failure of discipline. Students were not held to ANY behavorial standard and the teachers had no authority to enforce any (and the students knew it!). For every infraction, the only solution was to send the student to the discipline dean who often did very little.
2. Students were not required to achieve any minimum standards of either appearance or academia. They knew that if they flunked a year, they would still be advanced to the next year - failure wasn't an issue.
3. Students were not motivated toward any real world career. Most of the students I encountered had career goals of either becoming music stars or pro-athletes. None of these kids had any real-world view of life outside of school.
4. The kids were woefully ignorant of the basic survival skills they would need once they graduated in 2 - 3 years. They had no comprehension of money, economics, budgeting, taxes, government, geography - anything. It was difficult for me to comprehend how these kids were spending so much time in school and learning nothing.
5. With few exceptions, the majority of the kids I encountered were unprepared to leave school. They were ignorant of business and were equally ignorant of college. Most thought they would go to college, but couldn't give a good explanation of what they would do there. The one time I actually was able to obtain and keep the students' attention, it was to teach them about college. They were in a college prep school and complained that the school hadn't told them anything about college. By the time I was done, the expressions on their faces was sheer shock. It was, perhaps, their first introduction to life in the real world and that college was not going to play games with them.
All of these are not problems caused by teachers. Some are problems created by administrators, some are created by government intervention in the schools, some are created by lack of parental involvement. But, I would say that most of the problems are caused by teachers and teachers unions. Let's face it, when the team doesn't play well, the coach gets fired. Students are not meeting any level of achievement. In FloriDUH (as you should know), everything is based on the FCAT scores. To graduate, the FCAT is fixed at the 10th grade level and the students have 5 chances to pass it with a 40%. While the students and their parents complain about the FCAT, the schools have never bothered to tell them that for virtually any career choice they make, there will be a standard test involved for certification or licensing. Since the kids think they will all be rock stars or pro-athletes, they aren't concerned about minimum standards of achievement. I would just hate to be there when reality hits their world - it is going to be a devastating impact. They deserve better than to be deceived by their teachers into believing in - nothing.
As long as teachers believe that merit raises and performance standards don't work (an odd position to take since they work exceptionally well in private business) and that competition is evil, education standards will continue to plummet. I have been, among my careers, a technical writer. When I first started working as a technical writer, we wrote to an average 10th grade education level. Today, with reading levels at all time lows (estimates are that 40% of the population are illiterate and, of the remainder, an additional 40% are functionally illiterate), the standard lexile level for technical writing has plunged to the 5th grade. Those are not statistics that support the notion that the schools (and by extension, the teachers) are doing aanything approaching what would be considered a good job.