a frustrated republican school teacher...

Now let me start this by saying that I have been a “card carrying” Republican ever since I could vote (this is not to be confused with being a “Conservative” which if you listen to talk radio is somehow different than being a Republican). But one area that really bothers me is that the only stand that Republicans tend to take on public education is “school choice”. It is kind of a one-note song that my party is quick to point out examples of failures in public schools with radical social agendas and that the only answer to these problems is allowing those students who are “stuck” in those schools to chose another school to go to.

I will be the first one to admit that there are some serious issues facing public education but I do not buy into a “give up and run away” mentality but rather trying to stay and fix what is broken. If you listen to these Conservative “talking heads” you would think that every public school is run by Communist sympathizers and that ever teach has been educated by the ultra-Liberal Berkley crowd. But here is the problem, when you are dealing with such an incredible number of schools and teachers, of course you will run into a lot of wacko people.

I just did a Google search on what kind of numbers we are talking about and I found a whole slew of statistics at The Center for Educational Reform (true, this is probably not the most unbiased group but numbers are numbers). According to this data, there are 94,112 public K-12 schools with 2,997,748 public school teachers in the United States.

Sure there are a lot of horror stories out there but that is only because we are dealing with such huge numbers to begin with. Who knows what the real number is but even if only 1% of the teachers were pretty whacked out and had a radical social agenda, well that would mean we are talking about 29,977 people. And without a doubt, if all you did was shared 29,977 scary teacher stories in wow they are trying to indoctrinate their students to their social beliefs, then yeah, you would think the system has gone to hell in a hand basket and should be scrapped.

But that does not take into account the 99% of the public school teachers who are doing the job that we pay them for!!!

I challenge you to look at any group of 3 million people and NOT come up with thousands of them that should be checked for a warped sense of reality. But that does not mean that you paint with a brush the size of Texas and say that all of them should be kicked out of the club. I wholeheartedly believe that those 29,977 should get booted right away (and it kills me that the unions, which I am apart of, has made it so hard to do) but they are such a small minority of public teachers.

Of course there are tons of problems with the school system but it is totally naive to think that charter and private schools are these little islands of Nirvana where every student gets the best education and then goes on to lead these extraordinary lives. I have had many students come to my classroom FROM private/charter schools because the parents hated what they got for their money – and I teach in a pretty nice neighborhood where they can afford to go to these fancy schools.

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that there are some public schools out there that are a disaster and I have no problem with helping to fund those kids to go to a school of their choice that will give them a good education while the public one is being retooled. But simply letting some students go some place else and not do anything about changing the failing school is a true crime. And even though unfortunately some of these schools do exist, let us not forget that this is not the case with the vast majority of our public schools.

Hey, teaching is hard work. There are some really awesome teachers and there are some really horrible ones. But overall, my money lies with the public school system. Yes it is WAY too hard to fire those bad teachers but when you are looking at the sheer numbers of what we do, you have to say that the system is far from broken!