As we've seen, people are quick to blame teachers.

It's definitely not just when politicians want to create a union debate, either. Parents are willing to blame teachers and school districts at the drop of a hat. Non-parent adults are always a bit resentful of school districts, because they pay all this school tax to something that is seemingly irrelevant to them.

Many school districts have tons and tons of strict regulations governing teacher-student interactions- how they can communicate, if they can be in a room alone together, accepting gifts, and so on.

It's like there's this paranoia- they must have some angle to want to be teachers. Whether it's the summers off, the tenure, or maybe they're secretly a pedophile.

Added to this latent hostility is the fact that... well... how exactly do you judge a teacher? No one seems to have come up with an effective way. I have another teacher friend who teaches 4th grade. One of the things she's judged on is if her students read at a 4th grade level by the end of the school yea4. Which would be fine, if they all came in at a 3rd grade level. But she teaches in a lower-class area, and most of them are 2nd grade level, at best. (I'm generalizing, apparently the gradations of reading level are much finer at that age, who knew? But the point is the same)

What about attendance? Teachers can get graded on that, but they have absolutely no control over that. Same with homework.

Then you have the various standardized tests, which are fine in theory, but you have national tests, state tests, county tests, and they all teach different things, making it difficult to focus on any particular curriculum.

So there's all that. And then, in an amusing flip, sometimes there's NO standardization. So they'll say, "make your kids able to read. Go." And the teacher will use whatever methods he sees best, which is fine, but definitely makes grading teachers tough.



The point of this rambling post is that the teacher's unions have a lot of things like tenure, raises at certain guaranteed milestones, and the like because they know that they're often a scapegoat, and that it's tough to accurately grade them. All it takes is a new state governor to say, "Well, we're grading teachers on how well their kids speak proper English this year," and all the kids with parents who can't speak would have their teachers pay docked.

Teachers are important, but they don't have anywhere near the amount of influence and control over students that we assume they do. Parents, friends, school life outside of the classroom, all have a huge effect on education that the teacher can rarely affect.