Does America saddle its educators with too much responsibility for American youth?

[Rail Tracer]

When did this disrespect for teachers become prevelant? It seems like a hellava stressful job these days. The cooperate mentality is pretty pervasive, unfortuantely you can't treat kid's learning like a commodity.

And some higher ups actually have, considering some of them(Chancellors) try to match their pays to a CEO while lowering the standards of the institutions they are suppose to represent. And for gods-sake... some (college) coaches make more than two or three deans in the college combined.

I think it has been prevalent for quite a while now. I'm quite sure most people that become teachers don't become teachers for the sake of money, but you really can't survive too well when your start-out pay is about the same as that of a lower-end construction worker. Yet, most of the new teachers quit by their ~2nd year (being able to get tenure takes more than 2 years.) To even see a reasonable amount of increase, you'll need to get a masters and lots and lots of hours of teaching both inside and outside of school and hope that you don't get put into a permanent substitute teacher position (even lower pay and not as much benefits as a regular teacher.)

Having a small pay compared to most B.A/Masters degree and compounding the amount of work needed to become a "good" teacher, the only worth to it all is being able to raise the next generation.

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The tenure system is also part of the problem. It was originally a college system because their protection was pretty low relative to a teacher in the k-12. The college had the ability to kick a great professor for a low cost one just to balance the budget. If you were to kick a professor back in the day, it was generally considered "oh well" by the people doing the kicking, but in the case of k-12... the tenure system is a mass of chaos. Once tenure was brought into k-12... things got really iffy, as yes, some people do abuse the tenure system.

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Quite frankly, a disrespect to the professors/teachers is a disrespect to the students. And I much rather value a professor over a businessman that rams the economy down the drain for their money.

 

[fripping]

absolutely, it's all a product of too much guns and not enough butter (social services) and what's more is it's actually mostly out of the hands of voters. school budgets simply need to be way larger but they're among the first things to get cut.

taxpayers never voted to give 7 trillion to the pentagon or whatever the hell. it all originates with congress, corporate campaign financing and corruption.

 

[DisneyFanGirl]

While it's completely irresponsible not to get involved with the kids and try to break things up, this is on the parents, not the educators. Parents aren't teaching their kids to use their words, not their fists (I know that sounds so juvenile but no one seems to understand this concept). Kids learn their most important lessons outside the classrooms. While I think the educators and school officials could be to blame for not cracking down hard enough, better parenting skills and social skills are needed to truly prevent these sorts of things from happening. Everyone's a little bit to blame but no one is completely to blame.

Not sure if that helps (or if that makes sense) but that's my view on this.