I have a handful of friends who are
teachers. Gathering with them over the weekend and hearing about
their experiences was eye-opening.
One of my friends teaches at a traditional public school in an
impoverished area. He makes a better than average salary but is
completely disenchanted by the experience and plans to quit the profession
altogether after this school year. He has raised his students' proficiency
rate to 90 percent – a remarkable accomplishment made possible by his
dedication and hard work. Yet he receives little support from his
principal and barely any backup from the students' parents, and his day is so
consumed by paperwork and bureaucratic nonsense that he's overwhelmed,
frazzled, and exhausted much of the time.
Another friend teaches at a private Catholic
school. Though he teaches almost twice as many classes as the public
school teacher I know and earns about half his salary, the private school
teacher enjoys his work much more. His principal is supportive, his
fellow teachers are enthusiastic, and the parents and students are engaged in
the educational process. It's a positive, rewarding workplace
environment.
Then there are the charter schools. My Catholic
schoolteacher friend told me many people he knows prefer to send their children
to their local parochial schools for a religious education, but since quality
charter schools are available in the area, they go with the free option
instead.
The private school-charter school debate is complex, but it's
obvious that the traditional government school system is broken. The
very way it has been set up makes its demise inevitable. Its doom is
a matter of not "if," but "when." How many
students have to suffer and fail before its ultimate downfall becomes reality?
My friend who teaches at the public told me about a truly
heartbreaking situation in his classroom. A 13-year-old he instructs
in the 5th grade (5th-graders are usually 10 or 11 years old) can't read a
single word. He was held back one year, then passed out of protocol
and on through to higher grades, despite having to sign his name with an
"X" because he is almost completely illiterate. My friend
told me that failing a student once is all that's allowed at his government-run
school. And as the boy's teacher, he'll have to give the student a
70 grade and pass him, even though the student does none of the class or
homework assignments.
What will become of this student? I shudder to
think. His life, at best, will likely be made up of minimum-wage
jobs. At worst, homelessness and crime. My teacher friend
doesn't know what to do about such an extreme case, and the school district
doesn't care.
This circumstance is just one of thousands of similar cases taking
place all across the country every day. The "pass 'em
through" mentality of many education administrators who care more about
getting funding for their own interest than they do about students results in
illiterate 13-year-olds in the 5th grade, many of whom then end up perpetuating
a cycle of poverty and crime. The disheartened, frustrated teachers
see their efforts to make a difference fail at the hands of a defective system,
and fewer
qualified people are attracted to the profession. What
we're left with is the dregs
of the education community, who don't care about teaching, do a poor
job at it, and continue producing generations of uneducated children who often
contribute little, if anything, to their communities.
It can't continue. Sooner or later, the public school
teaching profession will be empty. No one will be crazy enough to
want to step into a classroom environment that is effectively set up for
failure. So few students will be armed with the knowledge and skills
they need to succeed in the real world that the future taxpayer base will dry
up, and there will be no one left to fund the welfare state on which they'll
all depend. Or perhaps parents will become so fed up with the
current dysfunctional system that lawmakers will have no choice but to hear and
respond to families' cries for education freedom.
I pray it's the latter.
Teresa Mull (tmull@heartland.org) is
a research fellow in education policy at the Heartland Institute.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/why_government_schools_are_unsustainable.html