Former high school honors student who says she can’t read, write sues district where she graduated

Valletta said:

You don't need fancy equipment for a good education. My wife went to grade school in the country, one room and one teacher for all grades until high school. I think it averaged about 3 kids in each grade. For my high school there would be different versions of say, a math book each year, and the teacher would try and give homework that was in all of the versions (he'd call out different numbers for different versions) because a number of us had used books.

Click to expand...

You don't "need" fancy equipment, but having some more modernization helps when you're dealing with high student:teacher ratios.
(which a lot of the poor struggling schools are)

The kind of individualization you describe isn't feasible with 30 kids per classroom.

There's data we can refer to that shows the patterns pretty clearly.

Given that schools are funded with property taxes, the public schools in the higher-income areas have:

• Better facilities and technology
• More experienced teachers (which require higher salaries to be paid)
• Smaller class sizes
• More extracurricular activities and advanced courses

The nostalgic tales of "a teacher who's willing to work for peanuts in drab conditions because they just want form a deep bond with students and are truly passionate about making a connection with students and educating them" happens more in the movies than it does in the real world.


For the record, I'm totally sympathetic to the arguments about the mismanagement, undue influence, and all of the other ways the teachers' unions have bungled things (prioritizing the wrong things, insulating bad teachers from repercussions, etc...). But I'm also not so naive as to think that teachers should be the ONLY ones who society expects to do their job out of the goodness of their own heart with no financial motivation (just like any other profession would have a financial interest)