Wrong again. If your wife was a teacher for that long she should understand that teachers can help poor students become good students. She should also know that good students will thrive more with good teachers.
I never said anything about bad teachers. I never had 1 in the years I went to public schools in the US. Mine were great.
I see both sides of this issue. You're both right to an extent.
Teachers
are able to help poor students become good students- it all depends on how persistent a teacher is and how inspired a student is to make an effort.
Even so, students who have parents that take an active role in their education will almost always perform fairly well
regardless of what goes on in the classroom (and no matter how good or bad their school is rated). Anyone who puts the onus for educating children solely on the public schools (or any school) is doing their offspring a huge disservice.
I used to offer my time after school to tutor struggling students, only for very few to ever take me up on it. Very few parents of such students truly care, and I witnessed that over and over again. Plenty of administrators changed failing grades to passing ones during the summer. The kids know it is all a joke, so why
should they care? Why bother if you know you'll get passed on no matter what? The concept of expulsion doesn't exist anymore and suspension is just a break from school.
Yes, there ARE bad teachers out there and they get loads of press. However, there are also a lot of great teachers out there who are fighting a losing battle against a culture that is apathetic and doesn't value learning.
I taught in three different schools. One was considered good, one was considered bad, and one was truly in-between. What makes a school good or bad actually isn't the teachers, because teachers can and do transfer to various schools often. I guarantee you that a child's teachers in the good schools have likely also taught at bad schools. I've also taught with many teachers in public schools that had also taught in private schools. Good and bad teachers exist in all schools.
When you start examining the underlying factors of what makes a school good or bad, you will eventually discover that it is entirely dependent on the demographics of its population. The in-between school where I taught was considered a school in crisis because of test scores. However, this school had a
very high percentage of ESL students that were forced to take standardized tests in a language they didn't even understand. The bad school had administrators that didn't know how to tackle the issue of having a student body that was almost all low-income, from broken homes, in gangs, surrounded by drugs, et cetera. The good school had a high percentage of students from families that were middle class with involved parents. Most schools tend to have students from various backgrounds, just in varying percentages.
Here's the answer to a parent's dilemma. In my observation, no matter the school,
the deciding factor of a child's success was
always the parents. Parents must care, parents must be involved, and parents must not depend on any school (public or private) to cover all of the bases. It is not fair, but the way public education in this nation was originally set up and really hasn't deviated from since the beginning, is that it is
assumed that parents are doing certain things
outside of school with how they raise their children.
I've mentioned this in other threads over the years but, some sociologists have pinpointed that there are certain things middle and upper class families tend to do in child-rearing that lower and working class families do not and, the public education system in the US assumes that everyone is doing (or should be). Unfortunately, the lower social classes don't tend to realize this or understand that a lack of what is termed 'concerted cultivation' and direct parental involvement educationally (outside of school) is essential to social mobility for their children. The result is that educational achievement (which is directly correlated to social status in the US) is not realized.
