I want to start off by noting that I’m painting with a broad brush here. I had some good teachers growing up and some old friends are teachers themselves and, I think, pretty damn good ones.
But not all teachers are created equal.
I’m going to start by highlighting a comment from yesterday’s story on homeschooling.
The comment was from subscriber Michael Lutz:
I think I mentioned before on a related thread that my daughter had a misogynistic math teacher in 7th grade, who was quite blunt in saying girls often had trouble with math. She learned so little that the next year I (with a B.S. in math so I was "qualified") I had to teach her what she missed as she was trying to master algebra in parallel. End of story: She received her B.S. in Mathematics and went on to work in Information Technology.
I heard a similar story from a neighbor whose daughter had the same "teacher", had similar results in 7th grade, yet somehow managed to attain an M.S. in Physics.
Was this "teacher" ever reprimanded, or - God forbid - fired? Nope. There are few, if any, consequences for incompetence in the NYS Public Education System after three years and receipt of tenure.
Now, I think we can all agree that this is an example of a terrible teacher. In fact, we can all relate horror stories about some of our own teachers or those who taught our kids.
I mean, I have a litany of terrible ones. I’m sure you do too.
So the question is, why? Why are teachers the problem in many cases?
Let’s start with a recent piece over at The College Fix. It seems there’s a debate going on in Chicago about teacher pay. The union is making a lot of demands, and, well, let’s just read some of it.
Stacy Gates, who sends her son to a private school, was responding to criticism of her union’s latest contract demands. It includes demands for illegal immigrants, abortions, and weight loss drugs. It will cost more than $50 billion.
“Conservatives don’t even want black children to be able to read,” she said Sunday on WBBM, a local radio station.
She said further:
Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who probably would have been championing Black codes, you know, during reconstruction or thereafter. So, forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, Black children, children who live in poverty, doesn’t make my anxiety go up. That’s what they’re supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.
It was not immediately clear what the “oath” was or when conservatives take it. The latest data show only 31 percent of Chicago Public Schools students are “proficient at reading,” according to Chalkbeat.
So to start with, we have a teachers’ union that has dropped the ball so completely and totally that fewer than a third of all public school students are proficient at reading, and when they get criticized for a list of demands that are frankly bonkers, the response is to claim that conservatives don’t want black kids to be able to read?
If that were the case, they’d gladly reward teachers for their efforts. They’d give them anything they wanted just to keep the status quo unchanged.
They don’t because the claim is absolute nonsense.
Gates represents the teachers. Her job revolves around getting them as much as possible and that means pretending that the demands are reasonable and that they’re doing a good job. It sure doesn’t look like it. What’s more, since Gates sends her own kid to private school, she clearly knows they’re not.
But this is just one example of where the teachers’ unions go out of their way to defend and even reward subpar teaching without any regard for the students themselves. After all, students don’t vote. They don’t pay taxes, by and large. They’re not anyone the unions need to concern themselves with.
Moreover, they are pretty good at attacking anyone who disagrees with the status quo as anti-teacher, which can be a death sentence politically.
Meanwhile, the union exists to protect the workers. In this case, though, they go too far and protect terrible teachers, making it almost impossible to remove them in many places.
That also means protecting the educational status quo as a whole. After all, private schools generally aren’t unionized and homeschooling definitely isn’t. As a result, they work to oppose both of those, claiming to want to protect education, but it’s really just protecting teachers.
Then we have the fact that even many teachers who aren’t thrilled with this do nothing about it. Maybe they try and they’re just outvoted, but time and time again, we see the teachers’ unions do more and more of this kind of thing.
But that’s really just one side of things. Unions can suck, but if everything else works as it should, they’re not the end of the world.
The problem is that education isn’t exactly attracting our best and brightest.
I recently came across a couple of looks into the correlation between IQ versus college majors. This one, in particular, is good because it tries to control for sex—women tend to simply score lower on IQ tests than men despite showing similar levels of intelligence otherwise—so the data isn’t quite as skewed.
What you’ll see is that elementary education tends to attract students of relatively lower intelligence compared to those in other fields. We also see some majors that aren’t explicitly education but do correlate to those who teach high school—history, art, English, music, foreign languages, etc—only slightly higher on the scale, but still well behind the physics majors.
Now, it should be noted that this would still put teachers of being of at least average intelligence, but that’s not how averages work. Not everyone is at the average. In fact, relatively few are.
And that’s just one metric.
We know, for example, that the college major with the lowest average SAT score is education. This has been the norm for decades. Despite this fact, they also get the highest grades, suggesting that the classes are ridiculously easy, even for less gifted college students.
Again, there are those who pegged out the SAT and chose to go into education, but they’re balanced out by those who probably had to bribe their way into college with their scores.
So our teachers aren’t necessarily our best and brightest, but let’s also think about teacher turnover. There’s a problem with teachers leaving the profession. While I couldn’t find any data on which camp they fell into, I think it’s a pretty good guess to say the smarter ones are the ones most likely to decide to walk away and find something else to do for a living.
What we end up with are a lot of teachers who are less than intelligent and are protected by the teachers’ unions so they can’t be fired, often to the detriment of those who actually have a brain, and we’re expected to be thrilled to send our kids to them to learn.
And that’s without the indoctrination that goes on.
Gates, quoted above, is clear in her politics and she’s pushing a very vocal, anti-conservative agenda. That at least suggests she’s a liberal, even if you had no other data about her. She’s not the outlier in education by any stretch of the imagination.
There’s a reason Democrats vote for anything that will benefit public schools. Teachers vote for them and they want to keep those votes coming in.
We also know from long experience that leftists think everything should be viewed through a political lens. That means politics drives them in everything they do. How are we supposed to just assume that it’ll end at the classroom door?
We can’t.
So now we have dull, unintelligent teachers sitting in a classroom, pushing leftist indoctrination on our children, calling it education, and being protected by the teachers’ unions for doing so. Then we’re supposed to not just send our kids to these people without question, we’re supposed to pay them an insane amount of money to do so considering how much time off they get.
No, again, this isn’t every teacher. There are libertarian and conservative teachers who don’t push an agenda. There are intelligent teachers and those who take their responsibility seriously. There are wonderful educators in every school system in the nation.
The problem is that you don’t know which are which.
Is your child going to get the brilliant teacher who could have excelled at anything or the person who should probably be attending special ed classes themselves, rather than teaching students? You don’t know. You have no way of knowing. You’re supposed to just trust the system that has spent decades accomplishing nothing of note, reward that failure to improve, and then just do what you’re told with regard to your children’s education.
Sorry, that ain’t how it works.
My own experiences in public schools as far back as the ‘50s led me to conclude that - even then (though remember it was the era Max Rafferty was writing Suffer Little Children) - at least 3 out of 4 teachers were incompetent. Half of the incompetent were actually harmful to learning and children, the other half were simply stupid. Of the 25% who weren’t actually incompetent, perhaps 20% were on balance harmless - they did less harm than good - and about 5% were actually good teachers. Nothing I’ve seen in the 58 years since I graduated high school - including seeing my own children through what was supposed to be one of the best public school systems in the country, has led me to change my view significantly - though in my kids system there were probably a few more really good teachers but there were also much worse bad teachers. My own experiences were so bad that when my home state passed an open records law which enabled me to get my file, it had nothing in it because it had all been destroyed per an affidavit from a principal who was a friend of the family.
The unions have only made it worse: more money for teachers, less learning for children.
Here's a snarky comment from an engineering friend of mine who went to a large state university in the 1960s. He said that there were large numbers of EE majors in all classes from freshmen through seniors. The difference was in the freshman year the bulk were Electrical Engineering majors, while starting in the sophomore year this changed to Elementary Education.
I was fortunate to be taught in elementary school by "old school" alumni from Normal schools who took their profession seriously. But this was 70 years ago. Thank you, Mrs. Carlson (3rd grade).