Posted on 03/15/2011 9:30:00 PM PDT by TheConservativeCitizen
I’m gonna be upfront here. Don’t read this if you are faint of heart or can’t handle true things. There are gonna be things called facts strewn about and they may hurt.
I’m just sayin’.
I remember awhile back tellin’ my wife that I thought she was one of the reasons that our education system isn’t doing as well as we would like.
She looked at me and asked “Why?”
I said, “Because you are a woman.”
I had to walk home, but I have my reasons.
You see, in the “old days” women really were discriminated against in the workplace. Many occupations and jobs simply weren’t available to women.
But one was. Teaching.
And so it was that our best young women who wanted to enter the job market, as it were, entered it as a teacher. And they were great.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to work…women achieved more and more gender equality until…whammo! The whole of the working world was open to them. And guess what happened?
" Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.
These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers – …"
And the world was right! Women were able to compete for, and win, some of the best jobs in America. We had achieved our goal, equality at last! Except for one small detail:
"… 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores)."
Blink. Blink.
47% come from the bottom 1/3. Jeepers!
As women were more and more able to compete in the market place for excellent jobs, they left teaching. And with men, and now women, working to land that “dream job”, the role of filling the job of teacher fell to the …. well, it fell to the lowest performers.
Now, to be sure, this is a general statement. Certainly top students enter the teaching profession. I, personally, have many friends and family that are fantastically smart and have become teachers.
God bless ‘em.
But the fact is that we’re losing our best and brightest to other professions. And no matter what happens in Wisconsin or Ohio or Illinois or wherever, we need our best. And our brightest. To want to become teachers.
Sooo... those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
Wanna know REAL FACTS? White men used to be in total control of America, and while they were, America went straight to the top. When minorities and women started to help run America, we stopped and have now been on a downward trajectory.
You are missing the point and conflating concepts.
The main point is - the equivalent gal who was my teacher in 1975 is a Dr. in the modern world, or a lawyer, or a marketing department manager. My “math teacher” would be an engineer now. They were top 10-20% of society intellectually. Now - teaching is for the bottom third of college grads, with tremendously greater % of society graduating college. In other words - mid 50%er of society.
The change in student demographics is - for the most part - independant of this - although it would help to push even more capable teachers out of the business.
Did I guess your age?
So minorities and women don’t belong in the conservative movement? Do the names Allen West, Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin mean anything at all?
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