On Friday, Steinn was playing dictator of the universe, and presented a modest proposal to reform US public education. It's a mix of pretty good idea and cosmetic changes to make things more like Europe, and I agree with a good deal of it. I do want to highlight one thing, though:
Teachers could probably do with being paid better, and they could also probably do with being quality controlled a little better. Teachers in middle and high schools ought to have BA/BSc degrees in their fields, with MEds or equivalent for pedagogy.
This is particularly interesting, in light of Sunday's New York Times, which included a long article about whiny lawyers and doctors:
At the Chicago office of Perkins Coie, partners recently unveiled a "happiness committee," offering candy apples and milkshakes to brighten the long and wearying days of its lawyers. Perhaps this will serve as an example to other firms, which studies show lose, on average, nearly a fifth of their associates in any given year, in an industry in which about 20 percent of lawyers over all will suffer depression at some point in their careers.
Last year, Cravath, Swaine & Moore tried a more direct approach, offering associates an added bonus of as much as $50,000, on top of regular annual bonuses that range from $35,000 to $60,000.
The article goes on to include a bunch of complaints about how the law has lost its "allure" and "status" as a profession, and "it isn't [just] about money."
Yeah, cry me a freakin' river. Those extra holiday bonuses needed to keep young lawyers from leaving? That's more than a new teacher makes in a year.
And it should be noted that teachers do not have a great deal less education than lawyers. A law degree takes three years, a master's in education is generally two, though some programs pack it into one. Then there's the requirement of student teaching, probationary periods, and the like. Law school is more work, but not by all that much.
And "status" and "allure?" Forget it. I doubt there's a less glamorous profession with similar educational requirements than teaching.
Teachers "could probably do with being paid better?" Yeah, probably.
Of course, it's not just a matter of money-- starting salaries for high-school science teachers are not all that different from assistant professor salaries at small colleges, but I never once considered teaching high school. The reason? Because my father was a public-school teacher, and I know what they have to put up with.
It's not as bad for high-school teachers, as the better students are at least recognizably human by that point, but middle school teachers have to put up with a whole raft of shit that you couldn't pay me enough to do. Hall duty, lunchroom duty, study halls-- all the features that come with the fact that we use schools as baby-sitting services. There's a daily grind of disrespect that I know I couldn't take. And that's even before the parents come in and upbraid teachers for having the temerity to flunk their little special flower, or discipline him for acting up.
If you want to get better people into teaching, there are two things that need to happen: one is simply to pay them more, but the other is to treat them with the respect due to educated professionals. Both socially and institutionally-- it's not just a matter of being polite during parent-teacher conferences and the like, it's a matter of institutional support. My father took early retirement the minute he became eligble, because he'd spent the last ten years or more not getting the support he needed from the school administration.
Good kids who break minor rules get slammed, while incorrigible discipline cases continue to clog up the school system because their parents make a stink whenever they get in trouble. Litigation-shy school administrators cave in to any parent willing to make noise, and kids who have no business being in the classroom are allowed to bully and intimidate students who have an interest in education. It's a mess.
If you want to get better people into teaching, this needs to change. And, really, lots of schools would become a whole lot better overnight if you just started expelling troublemakers, and stuck to it. This is sort of the extreme version of Steinn's "streaming" suggestion-- take the troublemaker stream, and put them in a different building altogether.
The attraction of college teaching isn't that the money is all that much better, but that the kids I deal with actually want to be here, or at least do a good job of faking it. And in college, I'm insulated from the discipline side-- I have more idea of what goes on in the Student Life sector than some, because of some of the commitees I've been on, but I'm not expected to rein in unruly frat boys, or sit in judgement of them when they throw illicit keg parties. And, frankly, you couldn't pay me enough to do that.
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I'm not sure expelling is the proper answer. I agree that schools need to take a stronger stance when it comes to punishment but given how those parents are, will forcing kids out of the school cause them to shape up or simply make the parents and child resentful of the system? I hate to pull the "this needs to be solved at home" since families don't seem able to even recognize that there is a problem at home but at the same time what happens if these kids get booted from every public school do the private and charter schools start picking them up a bit cheaper to make money off them? It seems like booting the trouble makers out is going to cause a niche that someone can profit from, but at the same time maybe that's just what needs to happen?
Well, Actuaries are even less glamorous than teachers, and require more training. OTOH, they get paid a WHOLE LOT more, so I think that this helps your point...
Actually, apy, that is exactly what happened in the school district where I grew up. Weapons and drugs were, basically, the only ways to get expelled. One of the Catholic high schools admitted, at least, the druggies. I'm sure it is one of the ways they kept their doors open.
Raising teacher pay is a difficult subject. Comparing a 10 month per year employee to a 12 month per year employee is difficult enough. In addition, the data shows that content knowledge (probably somewhat associated with degrees earned) is not a strong indicator of teaching ability. So, many of the typical argument for raising teacher pay don't make sense.
I do agree that teachers must be treated as professionals. However, part of that is eliminating a union. How many professional groups have unions? It seems to me that gives the impression of a non-professional class of employees.
I work for a charter school where we've implemented differentiated pay to reward the value a teacher gives to the organization. This is largely unrelated to number of degrees and highly related to teaching ability, willingness to participate in curriculum development and teaching in subject areas that are difficult to fill. I've put a summary on my blog at www.charterinsights.blogspot.com
Something that I've been thinking for a while now is that a big part of our problem is that the teachers are responsible for both teaching, and discipline, and it is hard to be good at/have the time for both. Maybe it would work better if each class had a "teacher" for instruction, and a "wrangler" to keep the kids in order. Kind of like in the military, where the captain or lieutenant gives the orders, while the sergeant makes sure they are carried out.
It's not as bad for high-school teachers, as the better students are at least recognizably human by that point
hehe.
But seriously. It takes a saint to teach middle school. I'm surprised that it's not being done by illegal immigrants yet, because I'm pretty sure I'd rather pick fruit.
Way to make me depressed about my kid going to school next year...
I do agree that teachers must be treated as professionals. However, part of that is eliminating a union. How many professional groups have unions?
You seem to acknowledge that teachers are not treated professionally, and yet you want to remove their strongest protection from all of the crap they have to deal with. This is exactly the kind of argument concern trolls use - 'I am really concerned about you, but you bring all this on yourself.' Give me a effin' break.
As far as professional groups having unions, let's see how many I can think of just off the top of my head -
University professors
Airline Pilots
Air traffic controllers
Major league baseball players
NFL players
TV writers
Firefighters
Police
Actors
and there are probably many more.
If you really are concerned about teachers, you should support their right to unionize.
Teaching isn't really a 10 month job. Sure they're only PAID for 10 months, but it's not like they can then just go and take a 2 month long vacation or anything. Preparing for the next year, reading books, designing a curriculum, all of these things take a lot of time. Time that teachers aren't actually paid for.
When thinking about alternate careers to being stuck at a soul-killing research University, high school teaching was one that I thought about a lot.
But I never considered public high school teaching. If I were to teach high school (and I would one day), it would be at a private high school. One where, you know, students really could be kicked out.
Doug : re 10-month vs. 12-month jobs. I've known enough high school teachers to realize that the have 12-months jobs... it's just that the only have 10 months in which to do it.
Teachers are paid much less than lawyers, for working at least as hard, based on about the same amount of schooling, IMHO. Unless a teacher has 20+ years of seniority and at least a M.Ed., it equates to a vow of poverty, at least in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, or other expensive real estate cities.
I thus agree with Chad, based on three generations of employment in my own family with multiple people in each generation in teaching, in engineering, in law, and in book publishing.
Teachers sometimes burned out, but the unions had fought to allow burnouts to stay in place, with low productivity, drawing paychecks, doing the minimum required work that benefits students, and awaiting retirement.
Engineers didn't burn out, though I've seen them drop dead from heart attacks when, for instance, employers don't count travel time as part of the 8-hour day, and send the engineer flying between Los Angeles and the NASA Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center several times a week for de facto 100 hour work weeks nonstop.
Book people bemoaned the slide from Literature to "product." But they kept on the job, with very low annual turnover. Entry level bool and magazine editors in New York City have to share apartments which they can't afford on their own.
Lawyers burn out, with the burnout and turnover related to which of these reasons they entered the Law:
(1) Because they love Justice;
(2) Because they hate Injustice;
(3) Because they want to make a lot of money.
What I've seen also in 15+ years of paralegal work on the side (numbers approximate):
(1) 10-15 years if they entered because they love Justice, as they see how hard it is and how rarely Justice is achieved for the client;
(2) 5-10 years if they entered because they hate Injustice, because they see so much of it;
(3) When Hell freezes over, because they want to make a lot of money; the day after tomorrow my wife and I are subpoenaed eyewitnesses in a sentencingt hearing against a City Manager/City Attorney who smashed 3 [parked cars and was caught fleeing the scene of the crime; said lawyer being 82 years old. He told the city council where he's a $250,000/year triple dipper (also on a "juice" commission) that he probably didn't have another 10 years of service to his city.
I know I've written this here before: my wife and I have been professors (she still is, 7 years Physics faculty at the current university, 5 at the previous one), but my son earned his double B.S. in Math and Computer Science, and is now in Law School.
Last night my son admitted that he expects to retire from active practice of Law within 5-10 years of his getting his JD (2010) and passing the California Bar. By the way, although I've boasted that he's in a top-10 law school at age eighteen, he pointed out that he went to school with a young lady who just passed the California bar at age eighteen. Probably a record.
Anyone know of an eighteen-year-old full-time certified public school teacher with a M.Ed.?
It is hard to directly compare the length, cost, and difficulty of earning degrees in English, Engineering, Physics, Education, Law, as these are all distributions in which Your Mileage May Vary.
However, my impressions are: Education degrees are the easiest to get (I'm in a College of Ed right now). English degrees happen in a pre-determinable time. Law degrees take 3 years, but they are very intense, surpassed only perhaps by Physics, and are typically very expensive. Physics PhDs take longer than almost any other degree, with 7 years being at or near the peak of the curve and 10 years not being unknown.
"How many professional groups have unions?"
I've been in: the union of engineers at Boeing; the union of Adjunct Professors in Orange County; the National Writers Union. So I have experience with unions for professional engineers, professors, and authors. I've also picketed with the Writers Guild of America last month, not precisely a union as you think, but currently appealing to the National Labor Relations Board against the Producers having violated Federal law by failing to bargain in good faith.
My wife is a 7th grade science teacher right outside of Baltimore (in Balt County, not the city). Yes, she's only paid for 10 months, but because of the ridiculous "continuing education" requirements placed on teachers, she essentially uses summers to teach some summer school to pay for the classes she has to take the rest of the year. Sometimes these classes are subsidized, sometimes they aren't. And those 10 months are easily the equivalent of the 12 months of engineering work that I do for my job. The only time in my life I've ever spent more time in a day working during the school year than my wife does while school is in session is when I was working 11 hour weekdays and half-days on weekends to support a proposal. That's it. My wife "works" from 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM, then again from 7:30 PM when the kids go to bed until we go to bed, whenever that is. This is every night. Weekends only include the second half of the previous statement, and usually only one night a weekend unless it's project or end-of-quarter time, but even that's more than most people do. We figured out once that though she makes $48k per year (which is more than many teachers her age, but about even based on our area's cost of living and the fact that she's a team leader and gets extra pay) she really makes only slightly better than minimum wage when you count all the time she puts in. Add in all the extra classes she's had to take to maintain her certification, and that devalues her wage even more. Yes, education degrees are somewhat easier to get (I worked far harder getting my engineering degree), but the job itself, for those who have some personal pride in their job performance, is far harder. Dealing with parents of 140-160 kids per year is enough that I think it should come with a 30% salary premium just for the ridiculous hassle. I always told her that an engineering degree would get her an easier job in the long run (my extended family includes 5 other teachers), but she didn't believe me at the time...
Overall, an excellent post, and I agree with most of it.
I doubt there's a less glamorous profession with similar educational requirements than teaching.
Try librarianship. Masters degree required, lower pay than starting teachers with bachelors, library funds are the first to get cut in public budgets.
"Law school is more work, but not by all that much."
I'll chime in with post #11.
The type of associate positions being talked about are extremely competitive: the companies offering bonuses like that are recruiting for the top 2-3% percent of law students at most. Students gunning for those positions know that a shift in their class rank by just one position may determine not only what they will make when they graduate, but more immediately whether they will get summer jobs paying 10-20K a month while they are still in school. With that kind of incentive, you can guess how much harder the winners of that zero sum game had to work.
Culture shock!
Is it really that easy -- and cheap -- to sue in the USA? That's hard to imagine.
Next culture shock!
Over here, all professional groups have at least two unions as far as I know (a conservative-Christian-social one and a social-democratic one).
They seem to have this in Finland, which has very good PISA results...
...where it has to be kept in mind that even the highest minimum wages in the USA are rather ridiculous for a 1st-World country.
It seems to me that teacher unions haven't done much to improve teachers' lots, yet I know of cases where they've done harm by keeping incompetent/unqualified teachers in their positions.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can offer examples of TUs being beneficial?
"Is it really that easy -- and cheap -- to sue in the USA? That's hard to imagine."
(1) It is intentionally easy, as a matter of state and federal policy, for anyone to sue anyone about anything in the USA.
(2) It takes small fees to file the requisite documents. This must be done correctly to get past the clerks, who at this point are gatekeepers and money collectors. Clerks often misfile documents, for which there is ultimately no recourse.
(3) One can represent oneself in court, once you get to a judge. This is often called "in pro per." For Small Claims Court (below $10,000 in California) this is standard. Above that, it is intentionally HARD for in pro per citizens in state courts. Federal courts lean over backwards to make sense of even clumsy or incomplete arguments by in pro pers.
(4) I am a rare (far less than 1%) of litigation-experienced Americans who has been in pro per in Superior Court (over $10,000) and won.
(5) I'm in a much rarer subgroup than that: been in pro per in Appellate Court (above Superior) and won.
(6) I have been in State Supreme Court and won a unanimous 7-0 decision from the justices [Post v Palo/Haklar].
(7) Yet I not only failed to collect a penny in that case (literally a textbook case, definitive for its type, in the textbooks now), but had the ball dropped by the Appellate court when the Supremes remanded it to Appeals (sent it back down, with instructions), and resulted in a retrial where my wife and lost and had judgments against us.
Bottom line: the USA is by far the most litigious country in the world, ever. There are (I kid you not) more lawyers in West Los Angeles alone than in all of Japan.
Bottom line: in the USA, there are 2 kinds of justice.
Justice for the Rich;
and
Justice for the Very Rich.
The rich and very rich can hire (minimum $5,000 per meeting) a retired state supreme court judge as an arbitrator, and never have to step into a courtroom.
School Districts are frightened of litigation. Because they often lose lawsuits.
The school districts make more an more absurd rules to cover their asses against lawsuits.
That adds greatly to the burdens put on teachers, the teachers asking for union help, and the students being shortchanged.
By Finnish standards, or Western European, or Australian or New Zealand or Canadian standards, THE UNITED STATES IS NOT A CIVILIZED COUNTRY.
Almost all Congressmen are white middle-aged millionaire lawyers. Guess who benefits, as a result, from most of the laws passed?
One lawyer told me, when I was suing a county sheriff (and got him fired) for arresting me, on television, in a public meeting of a Town Council, where I was an elected councilman, and I was asking questions from my contituents about the $250,000 in marked bills dug up by the FBI from the lawn of Chair of the Council, which were from a narcotics sting operation about cops taking pay from drug dealers -- "America has a great Bill of Rights. But unless you have at least $1,000,000 in the bank, you can't make use of it."
Education is only one of the essential systems in the US which has been destroyed by the legal fiasco.
All these problems are linked: education, family, drugs, gangs, courts, jobs. All are individually unsolvable. I'm an optimist, I believe that a solution to the interlocked problems exists. But nobody has found that solution.
My son carries 3 passports. After he gets his law degree, he'll strive for justice, and then leave within 5-10 years. Maybe in the USA, maybe to one of his civilized countries (UK or Australia).
The vast majority of Americans have no passport. The majority of Congress members don't travel internationally.
Imagine!
16: "yet I know of cases where they've done harm by keeping incompetent/unqualified teachers in their positions."
Do you really? or have you just heard from the media so many times that you just assume that it's true? I myself had a couple of teachers that I didn't like, and one that perhaps should have retired before she did, but none that I would call "incompetent" Certainly none that were "unqualified". Does anyone actually have unbiased data on this? Clearly there are incompetents in every field, but I don't see it as any more prevalent in education that it is in, say, medicine...
If you want to improve our educational system you will have to live with some inequalities.
Here are the facts. Teachers do not "have" to work harder than the rest of us. They do not "have" to deal with different or unique problems. Granted, some choose to work hard and some choose to deal with parents, misbehaving kids, etc. But people the world over in all jobs have the same basic issues. The difference is that in most jobs if you do additional work or do your work well you can be rewarded with promotions and most often with additional compensation. As a teacher what do you get? The basic way a teacher can earn additional money is if they "survive" another year.
It is the fault of the teacher's union that this is reality.
So, if we remove the top of the pay scale we should also be able to remove the bottom. Basic econ. risk/reward. You want more money? Great, I want to pay you more but I can't because YOUR union says that a 15 year burn out is more valuable then someone that graduated at the top of their class.
Here's the other problem. If we allow competition who wins? If you guessed "the parents with money" you are correct. That's right the parents (more specifically the communities) who are willing to spend extra dollars on education will have better teachers. Better teachers equals better education. Better education leads to more high paying jobs. High paying jobs means that their kids can have a better education. It's a viscous cycle but one that we can see even now with private colleges versus public universities.
Wow. Thanks a lot for this great explanation.
Oh, the vast majority of politicians in Europe doesn't travel either, at least not the ways normal people do. At any rate, that's the most parsimonious explanation for why stupid solutions in a country the size of New York City can stay enshrined in law when just across one or two borders intelligent solutions to the same problem have been found and implemented. Drive through Austria, then through Germany, and then through France, and be amazed...
Don't confuse "willing" and "able".
Oh, I would say that everyone is "able." Some would just choose food, clothes, gas first. Others would choose alcohol, drugs, etc.
I meant "willing."
Of course it helps you to be "willing" when you have more.
I think that's what you were getting at. I get your point.
What makes teacher compensation such a vital issue for me is that educating The People is really the only way in which one can have a positive influence and create a brighter outlook for everyone across the board. It should be hard, it should take up a lot of time. The Streaming idea sounds great, though I'm not a big fan of lumping all the trouble kids together. I is very odd to me that in the US, education is just something people have to do without needing to put forth much effort. The positive outcomes of a quality education are so great a solution to many of society's problems, it seems odd it isn't tougher on the students and better supportive of the teachers.
Here are the facts. Teachers do not "have" to work harder than the rest of us. They do not "have" to deal with different or unique problems. Granted, some choose to work hard and some choose to deal with parents, misbehaving kids, etc.
And, anyway, what are they thinking, going to a neighborhood like that dressed that way?
The anti-union crap is predictable, but I'm irritated enough at off-line stuff that I'm not going to attempt to respond in detail until I cool down.
In Germany, teachers must first get a bachelor's degree in a subject area, then pass a civil service test, then complete a master's degree, heavy on teaching research, before they are job qualified. In France there are a large number of non-graduated prospective teachers. You do not graduate until there is a job opening for you and then you are assigned to that job. Teachers are held in the highest esteem.
At my university,I've seen many semester grade distibution summaries in which no grade other than A was made in any of the Education courses. Faculty in the School of Education know how to teach, Right?
Teaching has been held in such low esteem that qualified applicants are scarce. In 1957 I received a BS in Geology (graduated on scholastic probation.) No jobs for such as me in geology. I put my name up on the education jobs board in the morning and had a job teaching physics, chemisty and biology in a 300-student high school that afternoon. Taught one year, not too bad an experience. So I have been part of the problem at that level, as well.
I think a large part of the teacher pay problem in many states has to do with insufficient adjustments in pay for location. Teachers in large cities are often paid just a little bit more than teachers in the rural parts of the same state. This means that teachers in the rural areas are doing quite well, teachers in the suburbs are doing ok, and teachers in the cities are doing badly.
Same goes for college teachers (though their situation is also worse across the board).
This is also part of how the less urban areas end up being subsidized by the more urban ones. Urban people pay considerably more in taxes, but spending is more even.
There is so much here. I guess the place to start would be a question that I have been asking myself for a while now: Why do people want to make all they can and despise others that want to do the same? I come from a union family and have tended to side with the middle class and poor. That is why I went to teach in the inner-city years ago.
What did I encounter? The exact reason that the Federal Government should have almost no say in Education. There were more programs and new things that were tried to get Federal money that did not work than I can shake a stick at. What else? That I was not paid enough for the education I already had and people thought I should get more. What else? That it was the hardest and most stressful job I have ever had. Now I did it for the love of the kids. Should I do it just for that? Well most will not including me anymore. You cannot help the poor by being poor.
One just cannot afford to be a teacher with how much college costs and the loans most have to pay back. It is economics. People have enough audacity to what more education? Pay teachers more first and then ask. I want to go now and get a graduate degree after years of traveling and doing volunteer work overseas. Why? To fundementally change the world. How? Finding ways to progress society without leaving people behind. That is the question of Marx. Right question and wrong solutions. Socialism does not work. But I would hate to see this world the last 200 years without unions. The NEA is not good. It tries to implement political change instead of representing it members more than not.
My point is that we all have to try and do what we love and make as much as possible doing it and still have a social conscience. What does that mean? I guess different things for different people. For me it means to go back into teaching, get a post-graduate degree and if the education establishment does not want to pay me what I am worth: Start my own school. Many our doing it and some work and others do not. We need fundemental change in the Schools and we need it now or the Republic that was handed to us will be gone. Pay us now or watch the end for America come in the next 10 years. Do not believe me go into a Public School here and then travel and talk to kids from India and China who take education serious and would kill to get a good one. I have done this and it scares me.
How foolish of me! Clearly the examples I was thinking of were force-fed me by a conspiring, right-wing media! Teachers' Unions must work perfectly all the time, every time, without even occasional exceptions.
Again: being a teacher sucks, and I don't obviously see the unions resulting in the job sucking less. Would anyone more familiar with the intricacies of this topic be willing to offer data?
It must be true that teaching is really difficult given the failure rate of students: Nearly half fail to graduate from high school. Of course, many of those students are poor, or speak a different language, or have learning disabilities, or are slackers, or are troubled in some other way that makes their failures understandable and acceptable in U.S. schools. But for my money, I would not go to a doctor with that kind of track record, to a lawyer who lost that many cases or an engineer whose bridges fell down half the time. No one would. Those professionals would go out of business. Professionalism is measured by success, but in education even the best fifth grade teacher in the world can't succeed with a student who has had poor teachers in third and fourth grades. However, rather than point out the adults' shortcomings we shift the blame to the students. What else can you do when there are already too few teachers, good or bad, to fill all the vacancies? I fear it's a problem of scale and very hard to remedy.
As a teacher and union member, I'm often conflicted about the good my union does for me. On the one hand, I see a few unsavory teachers in my school who benefit from union protections. But, my union does a heck of a job protecting my benefits and pension. If the union went away, school districts throughout the country would start reducing benefits and pension contributions - not because the people runnings these school are evil or incompetent - but because they would be compelled by the public who (for some bizarre reason) vote on yearly school budgets. The union is far from perfect (there are times I wish my union would take on the administration a bit more), but without it, the ability to draw the modest talent that public education does now would be significantly curtailed due to the loss of benefits. For every "bad" teacher the union covers for, it protects the benefits of thousands of hard-working, capable professionals.
These problems run deeper than unions, and they certainly exist in the absence of them.
I always find comments on these posts interesting because, while I know a good deal about what it is like to be a public school educator in the US: both of my parents have been educators for many many decades in South Carolina, but South Carolina does not have teacher unions. And so while I agree with essentially everything in Chad's post, I find that the many comments here blaming the unions for teachers being treated poorly or being allowed to stay teachers even though they are generically "bad" is simply misinformed: under the current low-pay low-respect system, you find the same problems in a union-free environment.
Re: #29. I feel compelled to respond here as you seem to have clearly made up your mind that the percentage of teachers who are incompetent or otherwise discouraging to students is large enough to explain virtually every student who does not succeed. I'm pretty sure you have no basis for this rather cynical belief, as these assumptions are simply way off in my experience.
As a caveat, I'm Canadian, and perhaps the teaching quality really is worse in your state. But based on the vast majority of others' experience that I have heard, it does seem to me like things on the whole are not as bad as you say (in terms of teacher quality in the US). It is certainly true everywhere that students fail, perhaps not 50%, but enough for us to be unhappy about it, so I think my experience is relevant.
Basically, your analogy with doctors and engineers is way off-base. You do not give an engineer insufficient materials or time and expect him to build something to physically impossible expectations. One cannot build the Golden Gate bridge out of macaroni. Similarly, you do not bring a doctor freshly exhumed corpses and ask him to save the patients.
The point I am making, if it is not clear, is that teachers cannot choose their students, and there is only so much we can do in some cases. Ultimately, when it comes right down to it, you can attempt to persuade, inspire, lead, incite, or otherwise compel a person to learn, but ultimately it is up to them. If a student absolutely refuses to put forth any effort, the teacher can't make up the difference. You simply cannot learn it for them.
This doesn't necessarily mean it is all the students' fault. There are many possible reasons for their attitude, some understandable, some less so: they may have insurmountable learning difficulties; they may have lacked an upbringing and parental support that fostered any modicum of curiosity, work ethic, whatever; they may, for any number of completely random reasons, simply have decided, quite consciously and rationally, that they just aren't interested at this point in their lives in learning Shakespeare or geometry and would rather coast until they can drop out and do whatever it is they do want to do.
Parenting alone is a pretty big thing. They have a lot more time and a lot more influence on kids than any single teacher does, or even the lot of us collectively, especially if they've been shutting us out for years and years. And sometimes concerned, involved parents also end up losing their kids' interest and attention as well, and they don't know where they went wrong, but this is less frequent, I think.
What do we do, as teachers? Our best. We put in the long hours, we try to make the personal connection, we do the extra-curriculars, and we take to heart the cliche, if I can save one more kid for all this (unpaid) overtime, it's worth it. If you have an idea how we can do better, in the face of someone else's decision to boycott learning, I'd like to hear it. Honestly, I would. But I don't think we need generic, universally-directed criticism borne out of ignorance.
Perhaps the willingness of teachers to tolerate such horrible conditions is also a causative factor. The two greatest factors in determining price are supply and demand. There's a great deal of demand for teachers, or there would be if they were suddenly unavailable. (We know the worth of water when the well is dry.)
So perhaps the problem is on the supply side. The concern and dedication shown by so many teachers may be part of the problem, as it leads them to accept a job that they wouldn't otherwise. Why pay top price for the cow when people are practically giving away the milk for rock-bottom prices?
On Christmas Day, the Houston Chronicle had an excellent column assessing the state of education in Texas (and probably lots of other places, too). One of the highlights of the essay for me was the prescription for fixing the problems. I have been saying similar things to my wife (a primary school teacher) for years, so I know this is the right approach:
"The solution begins with three actions: set the bar higher for acceptable behavior and academic achievement; protect those who impose high standards; and recruit more good teachers and principals."
Rest of the column here:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/5403585.html
Responding to #29 - I believe the current US graduation rate from high school is about 3/4, which is substantially higher than 50%.
However, more importantly, it should be noted that on average, lawyers lose 50% of their cases. This is the exact loss average for all lawyers, so if you pick a random lawyer the odds are 50% that that lawyer has a worse than 50:50 loss record.
So, someone remind me why they are paid so much?