It is surely not the classroom teacher's fault. Most of them go above and beyond. I was one. However, their "representative" unions are much more concerned with their political relevance than with the teachers or their students. Just sit in on some of their national meetings. They do not pretend to hide that FACT. It is all about power and prestige and political clout aka relevance. More money, adjusted for exchange rates and cost of living variable, is spent on U.S. students than by any other industrialized/economically viable country on this planet. News flash: More money does NOT produce better students. That has been proven over and over and over, yet we are conditioned to believe that if more money is made available to build bigger and more beautiful schools with state of the art athletic facilities and cafeterias with fast food kiosks, that the kids will be motivated to take their class work more seriously and achieve better results. Don't hold your breath. And let us consider especially the over-sized County level and State level and National level administration edifices built evidently to glorify the ego's of that upper management and as well as the teacher unions' self serving bosses and their addiction to political clout, because all that size and power does NOTHING to help the teachers improve the quality of the product (graduates) coming out of those very classrooms.......NOTHING.
There's no reason not to feel bad for the teachers and the students. Who really represents them for their own good? Whomever claims that mantle would also have to admit that he is doing a very poor job.
