[smutticus]

Something happened in the past 10-20 years where teachers became the scape goats of the failing American education system. It might be related to the attacks on their unions and the privitization of education. I'm not totally sure. But regardless of your opinions on education privitization teachers are not regarded with the same reverence in American society that they once were.

[tokenadult]

People generally respect professionals more when they have the choice of shopping for the professionals who fit their needs. You would respect plumbers less if every time you needed a pipe fixed, you were assigned a plumber by your "plumbing district" and the plumbing district received revenues from your taxes whether your pipes leak or not. Teachers should take advantage of the opportunity to be treated like real professionals by supporting education reforms that give learners (and the adult guardians of minor learners) more power to shop for providers of education.

(By the way, I can tell that I am a good bit older than you are by the short time frame of your comment. Commentary about government-operated oligopoly schools not being staffed by teachers who are able to do their best for the learners in their care goes back many more decades than you guess.)

Something that HAS changed about teaching, as an occupation, in the United States in my longer lifetime is that now women have many more employment opportunities besides schoolteaching. When a woman can become a medical doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, she may decide to take her talents into other labor markets besides the labor market for staffing schools.

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cupton/Senior%20Seminar/Papers...

Again, I think if schools were more client-responsive, because learners had more power to shop, that would change management practices of schools and allow schools to reward better the teachers who do the best work. A teacher who does a good job is worth her weight or his weight in gold.

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality

But the incentives in the current system, in which most schools get the bulk of their revenues from taxes, results or not, don't set up incentives for schools to value teachers who do well as schools should.

[oneandoneis2]

Every teacher I know (and that's quite a few) shared this cartoon on FB recently:

http://www.coreyshepherd.com/wp-content/uploads/Grades_Carto...

Sad but true..

[talmand]

I can see both of those being true in previous years and today if one cares to look at what's going on. I can even provide an example.

My older daughter has problems with math. She doesn't like it and doesn't want to do it. Therefore, most of the problems she has with it I relate to her more than her teacher. I view it as a problem for both us as parents and her teacher to figure out ways to motivate her to try harder and to discover what problems she may have that we can work on.

On the other hand, she's a really good reader. She loves to read books and often does so without any outside motivation. When we moved to our current school district my daughter was tested for reading on a computer using software she had never seen before and was rated as a poor reader. We disagreed with this result and told the teacher that likely the problem lay with the system that she had never seen before. In her previous year in another school and at home she's a self-motivated reader that is slightly above average for her age group. The teacher stuck with the results and placed her in a lower reading group, where she quickly outpaced the other students in the group. Thankfully, after a few months, she was moved up into an appropriate group for her reading level. In that case I fully fault the teacher in that because she went with an automated system telling her what to do, didn't do an informal test of her own, and ignored her parents on the matter. Later the teacher even suggested that the sudden and large improvement in her reading was due to their reading programs at the school. The conspiracy theory part of me thinks it was intentional so that her reading scores would show a huge improvement through the school year.

You do have to keep that cartoon in mind as a general kind of thing because otherwise it suggests that there is no such thing as a bad teacher.

[yummyfajitas]

Something happened in the past 10-20 years where teachers became the scape goats of the failing American education system.

The reason for this is simple deduction. If you believe teacher quality is the primary drivers of educational outcomes and outcomes are not as you desire, it must be caused by low teacher quality.

(Personally I don't accept the premise that teacher quality affects educational outcomes much, but my views are way outside the mainstream...)

[flyinRyan]

Your views are likely outside the mainstream in the same way Alex Jones' views are outside the mainstream. Your "simple deduction" would better be labeled "uneducated guessing based on nothing".

The reasons behind the dramatic decline in the American education system are obvious and known very well to any public school teacher: "No child left behind".

[betterunix]

Education was on the decline as far back as I can remember. In the 90s, New York City's public school system was embroiled in scandals -- overcrowding, converting bathrooms into classrooms, illiterate teaching assistants, illiterate high school graduates, etc. This was long before No Child Left Behind (and in fact, NCLB was meant to address the concerns people had about American education), and it was not unique to New York.

NCLB is a bad law, but it is not the cause of our education problems. Teachers like to point to it because it is an easy scapegoat and it allows them to evade all responsibility.

[flyinRyan]

Teachers like to point to it because it's destroyed any chance we had of fixing the issue.

And the issues previous to the law were appallingly bad salaries. There are some people who love teaching so much they would do it even though they earn probably 40% of what they could be doing with their credentials. But not as many as we need.

Sprinkle in the problem of parents blaming teachers for bad grades instead of kids and it all gets worse.

[yummyfajitas]

I'm confused - which part of my deduction is a guess?

I'll ignore your ad hominem attacks.

[flyinRyan]

> If you believe teacher quality is the primary drivers of educational outcomes and outcomes are not as you desire, it must be caused by low teacher quality.

Wrong. If you believe teacher quality is the primary driver of educational outcome then anything effecting teacher performance could effect those outcomes. It does not follow that only teacher quality plays the only role unless the teachers are completely empowered.

[fmstephe]

Yeah, I have the impression this is true in a number of places. It does appear to be particularly pronounced in the US (from the view from my bubble).

I worry that reducing the respect given to teachers will result in fewer outstanding people choosing teaching as a career path.

From the smattering of events I noted above I do get the impression that teachers are operating scared. That they perceive that they are reluctant to make judgement calls that involve any kind of bureaucratic risk (as in the Kiera case). That zero tolerance approach seems to be a symptom of this fear and I have a lot of sympathy for both the teachers and the students. Its seems like a real shame :(

[jessaustin]

Perhaps we're supposed to revere them ("reverence", really, like for the Baby Jesus?), but I'm not so sure we ever did. The 19th- & early 20th-C fiction I read as a child that included teachers, seemed full of examples of "one-room schoolhouse" teachers who were routinely physically attacked by students and parents, widely derided by less-violent community members, and frequently paid late or not in full. (I'm sorry I don't have access to my childhood book collection at this time so I don't have any cites.)

I can see how respect would contribute to the goal of education at younger ages, but in high school the successful teacher will have more resources upon which to draw than just "reverence".

[talmand]

It varies from district to district though. In most districts I would assume things move along just fine and has been that way for years. In some districts teachers resign in protest because of the constraints placed on them due to emphasis on standardized tests which forces them to alter their teaching plans to the detriment of the students. In other districts teachers go to jail for allowing students to cheat on standardized tests or skip the middle-man to do the cheating themselves.

Much like most things in life, sometimes teachers deserve the criticisms they receive and sometimes they don't.

Personally, I feel the most likely culprit is a combination of the government and education administrators.

[Jare]

It's not an American phenomenon, most people who care about education (parents, students and educators alike) in Spain believe exactly the same thing. We haven't (yet) undergone a massive privatization of our education system, so privatization is not the core issue.

(I think this is the result of many factors conspiring to undermine the ability, energy and willpower of parents to be truly engaged with their kids' education, but that's material for an entire book)