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WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries (via lawsonry)

EXACTLY. YES.

(editorial by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari! (of 826 National))

Everyone makes the teachers and the teachers union scapegoats but if the schools and government and parents and media would stop blaming the teachers for every “failing” school and take a good look at the system that got us here, maybe the teachers would stop clinging to the teachers union as a life boat.  You want to know why tenure is so important to a teacher?  Because the government uses us as a tool to get more money (firing and re-hiring us when they get the money the want), because the schools use us as a tool to get more money (firing administrators to prove that there was “institutional change” to get more money, even if the administrators were doing a good job), because the schools and parents blame us when their kids don’t do well (ignoring centuries of institutional problems and school district problems in favor of saying MY KID IS FAILING MATH THIS IS CERTAINLY NOT BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN TAUGHT TO CARE ABOUT SCHOOL BY A FAILING SYSTEM NOR HAVE THEY BEEN TAUGHT THE BASIC TOOLS NECESSARY TO SURVIVE IN SAID SYSTEM and for that matter, they don’t have a good enough background in the subject area to keep up in class) they just…blame the teachers.

There are bad teachers, yes.  There are also amazing teachers and okay teachers and teachers doing it for the money and teachers doing it for love and not everything is the teachers faults.

(via whoistorule)

(via brightedelweiss)