Reading through these letters (I made popcorn, I knew they'd be good) it becomes dreadfully apparent where the true issues with public education lay. No one knows what the real problems in education are, but everyone has an opinion. It's the union, it's the government, it's dumb teachers, it's bad parents, it's rotten kids, it's tests... holy smokes, that's a lot of blame for a problem we haven't truly and honestly analyzed. We've politicized, polarized and sensationalized.

I am very fortunate to work in a Montessori magnet school in a large, urban school district. I work with nothing but the best and brightest in an environment where kids are not only thriving on the dagblasted tests, they're also becoming the well-rounded, thoughtful and compassionate individuals that might just change the world for the better in a few decades. Eighty percent of our students are black, five percent hispanic, ninety-five percent receive a free or reduced price lunch and book rental charge and thirty percent receive special education services. We have a developmental preschool, we've offered full day kindergarten for eight years and our average teacher experience level is twenty-five years. (I'm still a noob, with only eight under my belt) There is an instructional assistant in each classroom, along with special education assistants in classrooms with students with special needs. We actively practice full inclusion and support over twenty students with autism. (That's where I fit in, I'm a special ed teacher, I work exclusively with students with autism.) We've met or exceeded the dreaded AYP (adequate yearly progress) every year we've been accountable.

Why ramble on like this? Our school proves a couple of points about public education.

1. It can be successful, even without privatized intervention

2. Experience, adequate student:adult ratios, research-based programs with real-world road testing behind them, consistent methods and high expectations for all students are effective at acheiving not only the politcal requirements, but also our desire to simply educate and enrich this generation of children.

Our district is struggling under a very large and critical spotlight. Our local paper usually features at least one article per day outlining the latest district crisis or failed intervention. Several of our schools have been "re-structured" which is fancy talk for replacing the staff, many more are on the chopping block. It's hard to attract new or experienced teachers to a school that is in danger of relieving it's entire staff within a year or two. These are schools who have tried everything NCLB said would improve their performance and are failing anyway. Our happy little school is suceeding in spite of NCLB, not because of it.

Kozol is right. The accountability requirements of NCLB are flawed. Any teacher worth her salt would encourage anyone to hold him or her accountable for what she or he is teaching in the classroom as long as the methods are actually an effective means of improving instruction. The indicator tests Kozol speaks of are a much more practical, and thusly much less expensive, way of telling teachers right now what critical skill a child is missing. Most standardized tests measure students against all other students in their grade and/or demographic qualifier, indicator tests measure students against themselves and the skills learned. In our state, the big standardized test is given in September and covers the previous year's academic standards. Results come in around January, a full seven months after students were to have mastered the material.

As Kozol has pointed out throughout his career, teachers do not want to be given the moon. We want our job to make sense, we want the resources we need to teach our students and we'd like to be treated like the professionals we are. We'd like both politcal spectrums of the media to portray what we do accurately and fairly. We'd like for-profit companies who do not hold the best interests of our students ahead of their shareholders to find some other desperate quadrant of the population to feed on. We'd like those who are set to re-authorize NCLB to actually spend time in public schools, both effective and not, before they take on the task. We'd like our principals to be free to be the instructional leaders in our buildings instead of beaurocrats. These are not unreasonable requests.

I knew I'd have a lot to say on this....

One more point, to the individual who quoted the studies on teacher's pre-service educational performance as being sub-par. I did just fine, my school records say I'm not even a little dumb. I have all kinds of pieces of paper saying I attended this building or that building for the required amount of time and met or exceeded expectations while I was there. All that education still does not make me half as smart as the veteran teachers I know and work with every day. Our profession has it's bad apples, and yes, some are hard to fire. Let's be fair, though, every job has it's folks the workplace would be better off without, and it's hard to fire anyone in just about any job these days without the threat of serious and costly retaliation. People who don't want to do the job they're being paid to do don't need a union to be a pain in the ass. Again, as with any job, the majority of us go into the classroom dedicated, prepared and inspired.

As I sit here, making ends meet with my $40k a year salary, facing an evening of lesson planning and data analysis, rubbing my walked-all-day-long feet, I have to wonder if all this shouting about teachers with bloated salaries, palace like working conditions, general idiocy and rampant incompetence at the expense of tax dollars isn't simply a case of misplaced aggression. ;)