As employee of a local school system i take offense Dale in the order in which you put the decline in the educational system. The downward spiral started in the homes, where parents are too busy obtaining their materialistic goals and abdicate their roles as parents and allow the child to do as they please. You take 26 of these kids who have been told their sh*t doesn't smell and that they are owed put them in a classroom and you have mayhem. The teachers are very restricted in how they can cause kids to conform to the rules, because we might offend the parents. Yes NEA has extremely liberal views which I don't agree with, but they do work to get the schools funding, limit classroom sizes and try to maintain the integrity of the profession.
I'll give you the parents share a good deal of responsibility. However, schools in general perform poorly when it comes to the real world. Kids today might know when the war of 1812 was fought or who's buried in Grants tomb, but as far as real world teachings, they're missing out. Running a business, I've seen a sad decline in the quality of today's youth. I seriously have kids filling out applications for employment that literally can't spell the name of their school! My daughter's school won't let her even bring a aspirin to school. Their reply to me was "She might give one to a kid that is allergic and cause a health risk." Seriously? These are high school juniors. I think by now they'd know their allergies. But no, the school won't allow that. Kids today can't balance a check book. I learned that in school. In some schools teachers don't grade papers with red ink, because it's an "angry" color and hurts students self esteem. Well guess what, so does the real world! There's a teacher in Arkansas that's suing her school because she was told not to fail any students because it would reflect poorly on their SOL grades.
I'm on Poquoson High Schools Career and Technical Education committee. Some of the thoughts I hear make me wonder if they're talking about high school students or elementary students. I'm also on the advisory committee for New Horizons Regional Education Center on the peninsula. They are at least giving these kids the basics to help make them employable. That's a far cry from what I see coming out of the public schools and that's taking the instance that all schools are the same. Sadly they are not. Just like anything, there are good schools and bad schools. If you go to a bad restaurant you can leave. If you kid goes to a bad school, they're trapped there. They can't transfer to a better performing school nor get a voucher to a private school. Talk about a captive audience.
As for the NEA, with all the government funding they get, which by the way is OUR money the government gets from US, you know unequivocally they're going to press their liberal agenda upon the kids. They are, after all government schools.
Take exception with me if you like. While parents need to be proactive with their little cherubs education, it still falls upon the government/administration/teachers to give our kids a real world education that will prepare them for the real world. A world in which they'll be yelled at, given difficult tasks and face rejection and even worse in the work place. The real world is damn tough. I really don't think majority of teachers have enough real world experience to draw upon. I know some try hard and I know you well enough to think you're one of them. However, many, many don't.
One experience I had back in my senior year, I wasn't feeling well and came to school late. I was told since it was my 5th tardy I'd have to stay after school. I asked how many absences I had. I was told only one. So I told them I'd see them tomorrow. The secretary was perplexed. I was only 20 minutes late and they wanted me to stay after school for an hour. But if I went back home, since I wasn't feeling well anyway, I'd come back tomorrow and just do some make up work. So as I walked out she was still scratching her head. She knew what I was doing made sense in the real world, but in the academic scheme of things it just didn't make sense.
I don't really want to hijack Erika's thread, but I do have significant feelings about today's education system. Maybe we need to start a new thread. It could be interesting.
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