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What no one is talking about here is the role of PARENTS. Parenting skills have declined enormously. The kids arrive in the classroom with absolutely NO respect for authority. They have no discipline to work hard to achieve their goals—they want instant results for minimal effort. I’ve even had students tell me that I should pass them (when you could drop a dime down their column in my gradebook and it would fall unimpeded by any checkmarks for work...) because “they were here every day”. So were the desks and chairs. In fact, the furniture was MORE deserving to pass because it actually performed some work. These same students are usually the ones disrupting the class so that kids who really want to learn can’t concentrate or are led astray into those non-productive behaviors. If a teacher attempts to discipline the students robbing the others of their education, it is THEY who are written up by their supervisors and increasingly, by the STUDENTS THEMSELVES. Yes—administrators who have it in for mostly conservative teachers who aren’t “with it” and don’t tolerate students listening to iPods or texting while they should be taking notes actively solicit statements against teachers by students. What fun! You get to “f__ up” the horrible teacher who made you put your cell phone away or who gave you a completely justified failing grade. The vast majority of these statements are completely made up stories by students and even if proven false, NOTHING happens to the students who submitted them. But teachers can lose their job from these vicious lies.

And then you have the LIBERAL POLITICIANS who want stats to look good on their watch and the hell with what comes after. They dumb down courses to the point where they are at an elementary or best, junior high school level and then wonder why “graduates” of the high schools have to spend their first year, two years, three years taking remedial courses costing taxpayers mucho moolah to acquire skills they should have gotten in high school.

Whenever I see stories like this here, I know that many people will have the knee-jerk response of “Get rid of unions!” or “Fire those teachers!” From what I’ve seen, teachers are not free to just teach what they want or how they want. They must follow curricula given to them by their supervisors, who receive the curricula from central administrators, who often receive the curricula written by leftist “educators” from the local politicians.

I would say examine the lack of discipline in the home and the horrible problems it causes in the classroom before I would simply use a buzzword like “teacher” or “union”. I know that I personally don’t dumb down anything (and therefore have the poor but honest passing stats for which I am lambasted by supervisors) and that many colleagues in various departments who also try to teach and grade honestly are slammed and threatened.