(I wrote this on an online forum in response to this really shitty article about teachers and the public school system.)

	http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338
	I think we can acknowledge that there's a problem with the educational system here, but it's not just one thing, and that's what pisses me off. It's not JUST the teachers, or the curriculum, or the funding, or the administration...it's just not so cut and dry. It makes me livid when I hear people bashing the teachers- as IF we have any control over what we can and cannot teach- or do. As if we can force a student to sit down or stop acting up or stop cursing. You hear people talk about home-schooling being the answer to the problem (how many times have you heard about home-schooled children success stories?) but hell- what teacher wouldn't want to work one-n-one or in a small group, right? If I could do that all the time, I'd be ecstatic and the students I had would be advanced. Then we're told that it doesn't matter how big the class is...it's the teacher. The problems are so deeply embedded and no one seems willing to understand that. Part of the article mentions a teenager who could barely read on a first grade level, right? Then he went to Sylvan (private tutoring) and went up two grade levels in 72 hours. I wonder why his mother didn't notice something was wrong? I wonder how many times a teacher might've tried to have him evaluated only to be deflected by an administrator who thought that it was a bad idea (has happened to me at least 6 times), a parent who didn't think anything was wrong ("My son does not need 'special help'!"- COUNTLESS times), or a principal who refused to hold the child back (supposedly there's no social promotion in NYC, but in my school, we were told to  promote kids up to the third grade. I had the third grade for three years and wondered why 1/4 of my kids didn't receive services or get  held back). I find it difficult to believe that through all that time there was not one teacher who didn't care enough to try to get that child help. I don't believe it at all. I'm at school every day by 7:00 am. I go from downtown to uptown every day to an "at risk"school where the kids run in the halls all day long and call teachers "b*tches" if they tell them to go back to their class. I was famously referred to as a "no-necked black b*tch"by a 9 year old. My 2nd graders try to learn as they listen to the 3rd graders in the class above them throwing tables, screaming and doing Lord knows what. Let's not forget the howling and yelling and screaming going on in the hallways throughout the school day. Oh- and did I mention the student who runs through the halls all day who has hit the principal twice and knocked a co-worker of mine unconcious? He's still there, of course... It's all our fault, isn't it? Articles like that make me sick.