Thanks for providing the little heard argument from the other side of the debate. I believe that before any opinion should be made, the addition of some statistics on teacher performance and more case studies on poor cases being made against allegedly bad teachers would certainly be helpful.

Certainly, you are the exception rather than the rule and exemplify intrinsic motivation and strong support systems. The system was never designed to hold schools accountable for teaching problem solving and cognitive flexibility to ALL students. It was not required or expected during an era when there were plenty of jobs;however, technology and globalization have changed the job description for what teachers are expected to do with today's students.

A very important article by Ms. Dannin.

Briefly, just consider how long "bad" teaching has been going on. Long enough certainly for most of the present day "bad" teachers to be the products of the very same school systems we now criticize as having "bad" teachers.

Part of the problem is related to curricula at so-called teachers colleges. A long time ago when I went to college, education courses were considered as "gut" courses and one found a remarkable number of less apt students majoring in education. Part of the problem is that "education" has no core curriculum as, say, chemistry or other hard sciences, which have years, even centuries, of validating experiments upon which to base such a curriculum

Teaching and learning are far more elusive and, unlike the hard sciences, do not lend themselves easily to valid experimentation, the results of which one could build upon to generate basic principles, either about teaching techniques or about learning abilities.

So education, like psychiatry, for example, proceeds based upon various theories postulated by academics or, in the case of psychiatry, by academic/practitioners, which have scarcely been validated, mainly because of the difficulty of systematically doing so due to such great variability of the subject populations, kids in high school in one instance and mental patients in the other.

In psychiatry, going from practitioner to practitioner, one might find influences by, say Jung, Adler, Freud, etc. Treatments vary and results vary as well and there is little attempt to quantify and test the validity of any of the theories because each patient really is quite different.

In education, and here is the major point of all this, the subject population... the students... are also all uniquely different... as different from one another as are the mental patients, but are not treated as such. Generally everyone from the U.S. Commissioner of Education down through the State Commissioners, to the Superintendents of Schools to the Principals to the Teachers speak only of the STUDENTS.
Only in Special Ed are some of the differences between them recognized and those are usually gross differences. Subtle differences, those that require different teaching approaches,are never considered. The kids are all considered to be clones of the internalized view of the education people of what a "student" is. As a rose is a rose is a rose to Gertrude Stein, a brain is a brain is a brain to many, many educators.

Except that isn't reality. I've been talking about individual differences in many aspects of learning for many years. Listeners nod their heads in agreement and then keep on doing the same old things.

"some had parents who were addicts"...

This shows how monstrous drug abuse has become in our country. There is no excuse for it at all. It is destroying our society.

Unions served a purpose back in the 1930's but now have gotten totally out of hand . The original purpose was to protect the working man and to give him a fair shake . But now as is with all large organizations , their main goal is power and money . They do protect their membership , even the incompetent at the expense of industry and the taxpayer . How can they justify paying uneducated / unskilled workers about $ 80.00 an hour [ benefits included ] for example in the auto industry . Who pays for this RIP OFF , none other than you and I . The higher the wages , the higher the cost for the product you buy . Government employees in the past used to earn less than the average working man BUT had an easy job AND tremendous health and retirement benefits . Now that government employees have been unionized , their wages and benefits are far superior than industry . Our educational system has deteriorated since Lyndon Johnsons " GREAT SOCIETY." The school system has been dumbed down in order to accommodate the mental midgets in the U.S. at the expense of the average more intelligent middle class kids . It is an embarrassment for our country . We have an exchange program where students from Europe come to the U.S. for 1 year and we send U.S. kids to Europe . It is a fact that the European students are about 2 years ahead of the American students . Nothing to be proud of . Could this be part of the plan for a " New World Order ? " Unions should demand higher standards but seem to promote mediocrity .

Arminus Aurelius writes:
"Government employees in the past used to earn less than the average working man BUT had an easy job AND tremendous health and retirement benefits . Now that government employees have been unionized , their wages and benefits are far superior than industry."

The most numerous government employees, of course, are school teachers and aids, which not everyone regards as "an easy job."

He's probably too young to know, but it just didn't happen that way. My current benefits as a government employee--a good health plan and a fixed pension--are actually inferior to those I had as a non-unionized private sector employee with Raytheon, a Fortune 500 company in 1976. (Virtually free health insurance, any doctor, any hospital. My wife was a unionized public school teacher and we stayed with my health plan. It was better.).

What the unions did is help public employees keep their existing benefits, not so much gain new ones. By contrast the salaries, wages, and benefits of non-unionized private sector employees--except for executives--have declined since the 1970s. While profits soared.

Which is why, with all their flaws, we need unions. It's too bad Obama has done so little to help unionization.