I live in Wisconsin. I teach teachers and teachers in training as a university professor of history. My child goes to public school.

Special education, mainstreaming, and disciplinary limits have made teaching harder across the board. Crazy parents also hurt public schools (but have more power in private schools). Teacher education needs to be overhauled. We have tons of research showing that content knowledge and methods are the two most important things teachers need. WHy do we fund administrative teacher master degrees for re-certification? Why are elementary education teachers not required to take history or math past algebra I? WHy do they have so much child psych, and so little content?

Yet my university's school of education has the highest gpa requirement of the state for any school, including business. If you don't have a 3.5 or close, forget it. Many of them are the best students, because the GPA is unforgiving. Yet GPA is not a good indicator of teaching success.

Teach for America and KIPPs show us the way: parental and teacher expecatations are the keys to student achievement. We have huge amounts of research that show this. KIPPs teaches low income, left behind children and gets them to excel. They teach a culture of learning, they force parent to sign contracts on behavior and input, the teachers teach long days.

Are teachers unions a problem? Yes. They need massive reforms. All teachers should be forced to get content masters before having administrative (principal) or education (ed classes on methodology) reimbursed for certification.

But the public schools must be able to throw out students who don't want to learn. And I say this as the sister of a brother with Kanners (classic autism- low functioning and seen as mentally retarded): mainstreaming needs to be scaled back dramatically to simply the most high functioning. Mainstreaming some kids is cheaper, but they disrupt the classroom. I've seen this. I was in classes with this.

I attended private, public segregated magnet, public integrated poor, public surburban psycho-rich schools. The best education I had was in the segregated magnet. The teachers made it clear that we had a duty to achieve, that we needed to achieve to honor our parents and others. They pushed, guilted, and busted our chops.

We need national standards so we can compare schools. We also need to look at ourselves as parents and a culture. Some in the US have a pride in being uneducated. They attack teachers as overpaid, and deride "book learning". Several histories document this anti-intellectualism and anti-education sentiment, with the deriders calling achieving at school "elitist" or snobbery. Until we, as a society, reward educational achievement the way we do athletics and entertainment, high schieving kids will continue to be derided as nerds, geeks, eggheads, etc, and will under achieve. Until we, the parents, kill off the materialism of child culture, kids will continue to value materialism and entertainment over achievement.

I've seen the power of parental and teacher expectation. I wish more people used it, instead of worrying about "guilting" or "shaming" or "burdening" kids. Kids need more work today and less entertainment.

People say "it's racism" or "it's teaching to the test" or "it's class sizes" that are destroying US public education. I think there's a list of problems and the real question is which problem is ranked No. 1 on the list.

I think No. 1 has to be that US public education has evolved over time into a jobs program for adults. The bureaucracy is self-feeding, and education of kids is fairly low on the list of its priorities. Until that changes, there will be no focus on getting true problem solving/critical thinking back into education or insuring teachers are smart and educated adults who encourage rather than squelch intellectual curiosity in their students (that right there probably stunts more kids life-long than any other single force IMHO).

Examples to support this? Teachers unions fight tooth and nail to prevent any sort of quality-based reward system for their members. Teacher education while I was in college (the 80s; maybe a while back, but guess who dominate public education today?) encouraged the worst form of mediocrity I ever encountered. Friends in the program shared an identical ethic - achieve the absolute minimum required (a straight C grade) in the minimum number of courses possible (often only 1?!?!) in each subject that would qualify them to maximize income by teaching the maximum number of subjects. I was astonished to learn that teaching HS physics required only a single semester of non-calculus physics, far less physics that I was REQUIRED to take to get a biology degree!! Hilarious if it wasn't so depressing. Yes, those are the people entrusted to foster the mental development of your children.

People keep repeating "it's up to the parents to make it work." No, the parents' job is to support the school in such things as insuring their kids behave in school. By definition, the parents are paying so their kids can be put in the hands of "expert" educators in a disciplined environment. The failure to achieve discipline in the school environment that is apparently rampant today may be partly due to parental interference, but I don't think it's justified to believe that parents are the overall answer (here I'm speaking of middle and upper class kids, the vast majority in the US). It's my impression that strong leadership from school administrators can block parental interference and achieve discipline and order in the schools, but it's not hard for me to believe that such strong leaders in our school administration corps are uncommon. Regardless of their intentions when they started out, by the time they are administrators they are in the belly of the beast and their concerns center on the adult job holders who are permanent fixtures in their day to day world rather than kids who just pass through and disappear. Easy to understand how that might happen and it will take a lot of work to reshape the dynamic.

TrudyB,

The City of Atlanta, Georgia is, tax basis wise, among the richest school districts in Georgia and has one of the lowest academic averages in the state, if memory serves me.

Money is alway the excuse given by educatonal bureucrats, and sometimes that is true. But if we got back to basics, a decent academic program to insure the kind of education every kid should have--instead of a different program for every kid and a roomful of course choices (many of which shouldn't darken a high school doorway)--we would have plenty of money to reduce the pupil teacher racio to 20 or less kids to each teacher. We would have a much better, more realistic, less expensive public educational system.

But politics and social activism have taken over public education. It's been destroyed in much of our country. I think it's going to get worse. Pretty soon, too.