[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.