Stop Blaming Teachers for Everything Wrong in Education

Dear American People,
Stop blaming teachers for the decline in the education system of this country.
Start blaming the unrealistic expectations placed on teachers by state governments and, yes, parents. Start blaming the introduction of bullshit like the Common Core (which, for the record, I've never met a teacher or teacher education student who likes Common Core). Start blaming the rise of standardized testing, forcing teachers to teach to a test if they want to keep their jobs.
Start blaming your own inability to do anything about it. Stop saying, oh must be the teacher's fault, or "my kid couldn't possibly fail so the teacher must be failing him on purpose"!

Start looking at yourself. Start looking at your student. And yes, continue to look at the teacher.
But the responsibility to make education work does not rest solely on the distributor of education, the teacher.
Principals have a set of expectations.
School boards have a set of expectations.
And above that, state education departments have a set of expectations.

Blaming teachers for the rise in difficult to understand problems passed down from the near-country wide accepted Common Core (voted on by groups of individuals that run schools systems but are not themselves teachers)

Do teachers hold some of the blame? Of course, there are really bad teachers out there. But the systems in place prevent the good ones from doing much more than explaining the bullshit as best they can. And there are systems in place that prevent these bored teachers, the teachers who don't really care anymore, from being replaced by teachers who want to make a difference.

And then there's the whole concept of grades. Life doesn't hand down grades to tell you when you've done a good job, an ok job, or outright failed. There's too much emphasis on "making good grades" and "making a 4 on the test" and "getting a 3.0 or higher GPA" or even on "My IQ is over 100..."

Numbers can give us a reference by which we need to adjust what a student is learning, and how they're learning it. But they aren't an end all be all to how smart someone is, or even how well they're learning the material. Some students do really well with tests and some freeze up the moment someone says quiz. Some students can write excellent papers and some struggle to get the required page amount.

Can a teacher be reasonably expected to teach to every student? Of course not. But she can do her best. But that best can't be reached when you have to play the numbers game. End of grade standardized tests put a tremendous amount of pressure on both students and teachers. Pressures that shouldn't be there.

Common Core standards are bullshit, and the way they're taught are bullshit. If teachers don't even understand it how the hell are we supposed to get students to understand it?

And then there's the pressure from parents.

I run into so many parents, JUST IN AFTERSCHOOL, I'm not even a full teacher, just a counselor for afterschool, that think their child(ren) are perfect. Nothing you can say to the contrary could possibly change their minds. In fact, if something goes wrong it's YOUR fault, as the teacher/counselor/tutor. Or it's another kid's fault. Never their child. Their child is an angel.
Do parents naturally want to protect their own kid? Of course they do. That's parental instinct. Even the worst parent is quick to defend their kid. But refusing to accept that your child is human and as such capable of mistakes is idiotic and harmful to your kid, and even more harmful to the teacher/counselor who's doing his best to help your child succeed.


There is NOTHING more important, beyond the basic necessities like food, water, and shelter, than education. A SOLID education does more to prevent human rights violations than any law. Ignorance may be bliss, but only for the ignorant. Those to whom they subject their ignorance may not be as blissful.
The US federal government has established that every student has a right to an adequate education.  Not an excellent education, not even a GOOD education. An ADEQUATE education is good enough for our children.
TEACHERS SHOULD NOT STAND FOR THIS AND NEITHER SHOULD PARENTS

ADEQUATE is not good enough. WE NEED TO STRIVE FOR EXCELLENCE. This does not mean your child should be always getting As and Bs. In fact, why do we stress such things? They make a good measuring tool, and a decent way to let the kid know what he's struggling with. But AN EXCELLENT education should do more than measure. An excellent education should teach children how to THINK and how to LEARN. Not just how to take tests. Not just how to get good grades.

The bureaucracy that is the public education system needs tests to function. Otherwise how can they prove that schools deserve money?

Schools should ALWAYS be first on the list to receive public assistance, followed by public safety. The better our schools, the more intelligent our people.

No student learns in the same way. Some students can bullshit their way through a test and make an A, even without having studied the material. This is how I took tests in high school. When I hit college this messed me up big time. I could bullshit a paper and make at least a B, but I couldn't do that on tests. Tests in college aren't standardized. Even when teachers write their own tests in the K-12 public education sphere they are still formatted to be similar to the final test. If the final wasn't a state mandated standardized test? You could be EXEMPT from it just by coming to school and making decent grades. If you had perfect attendance and Cs, you could still be exempt.
College, not so.


I had some excellent teachers growing up and some extremely bad ones, throughout my entire school career. The excellent ones put me on the path to becoming an educator, the bad ones made me even more determined to get there, so that I could be better.

Teachers don't make much money. The benefits are decent and you get summers off. A starting teacher's salary is livable, but not fantastic. The main reason teachers teach is because they care. At least that better be the reason.  Any other reason is ridiculous.

There are many WAYS a teacher cares. Some teachers want to help children become better people. Some teachers try to change the world, one student at a time. Some teachers love a subject and just want to pass it on to young people. Some want to be a resource for kids at the most difficult points in their life: middle school.
But every teacher should teach because he or she cares.

And as such blaming teachers for the decline in the education system is a band-aid. Most teachers I know, and most wannabe teachers I know, want to do good in the world, but the system might block them. We blame teachers because it's easier than admitting that a whole system is flawed, because that would require us to fix it.