Liked Skybills comment on the other thread. I think it's fair about the "Bush sucks" stuff too. (I'll do what I can where I'm concerned...)

Curious to hear what others think about some things that impact teachers.

I've been running 4 kids through school. It's been a mixed bag. A lot of the teachers are really great, but are constrained in numerous ways. Those ways are:

-higher than practical class room sizes,

-inability to employ enough dicipline to maintain even moderate classroom order,

(My wife and I both have spent time in the school, cleaning up bad classes. Get to know the kids, work their parents, endure the death threats --freaking death threats from 6th graders!, etc...)

-having to teach to test material,

-uninvolved parents.

I guess what I am saying is that maybe these factors bias the perception of the number of great teachers there are. Most of the teachers I've worked with are good teachers. The ratio is maybe 60 percent really good, 20 percent solid, remainder all over the map.

IMHO, that's just not bad.

Maybe it's my district...

Having a 6th grader myself, I can give a report on one particular elementary school in the Newberg school district -- Mable Rush Elementary:

There's not one bad teacher in the whole school. Even the principal (now promoted elsewhere) was superb. I was a bit skeptical at first cuz Newberg is a supremely right leaning churchy town. But the teachers kept their God thoughts to themselves and really showed concern for the kids. Heck even bullies were not tolerated there and were quickly delt with.

Downside: too many white kids in the school -- not a good representation of society, or even Newberg. Most hispanics go to the another school located in a poorer part of town.

But to stay on topic, I can't say anything bad about any of the 7-odd teachers my daughter has had. (And neither can she!)

Depends on where you live, when I lived in the US Virgin Islands, which is a US territory, and the teschers are the second highest paid in the US, I would say 90% of the teachers were horrible, I can give specifics, like a teacher tqaking her shoe off and throwing it at a student, another teacher hitting students hands with a ruler for poor penmenship, classrooms that didnt even have a teacher on some days. etc.

In Chicago, the teachers were OK, I'd say about 50/50 good and bad. Here in Washougal, the teachers are great, only one I have had problems with.

But school is primarily a local issue, very little to do with the Feds.

"But school is primarily a local issue, very little to do with the Feds."

BINGO.

Thinking back about my education, I moved around a lot as a young kid. Between kindergarten and sixth grade, I was in seven schools in five states and Alberta ... and there was some good and some bad. They very much believed in corporal punishment in New Orleans area schools - even in the affluent suburbs where we lived, I would get my arse beat by the principal a couple of times a week, and our school was full of riff-raff. What I feel was the best school system I saw in my time was in Deadwood, South Dakota, where I spent my senior year in high school. Go figure.

The problem with the feds getting too involved in local schooling is what has happened with Dubya's "No Child Left Behind" act - the kids are taught to test, they aren't taught to LEARN. My kids are in the Vancouver school district and they get to take two weeks off of their curriculum for these WASL tests ... what does that exactly accomplish? My daughter got a 3.85 GPA on her last report card in sixth grade yet they are debating holding her back in some capacity because of some horseshit science blurb on the WASL?

The federal government should oversee education with a more hands-off approach IMHO, set some basic parameters and let the state and local folks determine how to best fit within those parameters. Is some pencil pusher in DC going to REALLY know what is best for my youngest and his learning problems? I think not!

Before No Child left behind, there were a lot of school systems, just cranking out graduates, many of which couldnt read.

Now there is some independent accountability.

I admit, its probably a pain for the better school systems, but it is at least forcing some of the worst systems to straighten up.

Maybe they could come upo with a system, if a school exceeds requirements for 3 years or their students average in the top 40% on the SAT, they are exempt from the extra testing.