I’m sure there are many admirable individual teachers among the millions of them spread across the country. But on the whole, many of them are on par with DMV employees in terms of effort and commitment – at least in the diverse areas of metro Atlanta where I attended.
Why wouldn’t the teachers’ union be rotten as well and its corrupt leader the most rotten of them all?
In all fairness, it’s not all the teachers’ fault that most of them are checked out. They are small and expendable pawns in deeply impersonal bureaucracies that are primarily concerned with churning as many of their little charges through the system as possible with as few snags in the meat grinder as possible. That is their main incentive.
There are three kinds of teachers in public school, probably divided roughly into thirds: the ones who never really cared but like the benefits the union negotiates for them, the burned-out idealists, and the burned-out idealists in training. Read more…