Hess,
I don’t think any body is attacking you personally; you just struck a cord with the education issue as it relates to a lack of accountability by the government. The issue is complex, however, the NEA is a major source of the problem.
The NEA is setup to guard teachers’ rights and therefore frankly does not care about performance no more than the pilot’s union cares about the airlines profits. Sure they give lip service to it, but the real goal is to make sure no teacher can be fired and that the salaries rise as fast as possible.
Now before you become defensive please understand that we all know that a large portion of the teachers are hard working people in a noble profession. However, the NEA position on this has lead to years of waste and horrible performance. Until we have meaningful performance goals and teachers are held accountable, this sad state of affairs will continue.
As one involved in higher education I would agree that not all professors are great teachers, however, they all earned a Ph.D. This is a very high bar that would not be expected or perhaps even desirable in elementary education, however some standard must be in place.
The bottom line is we need a system that lets performance work and eliminates systemic mediocrity.
Again none of these comments are targeted at you personnel they just represent a general frustration that many share towards the sad dollar to performance ratio exhibited by many of the public schools in this country.
Phred
