Rick Raw: Firing Teachers will Not Solve Poor Educational Results–Quality Education Starts at Home

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

The shocking firing of 241 teachers in the Washington D.C. region by dragon lady, Chancellor Michelle Rhee exposed a lack of understanding of what really goes on in today’s classrooms by the chancellors of the school districts, many of whom have never taught in a classroom.

The truth is: In affluent school districts, test scores are traditionally high because the students come from families who encourage intellectual achievement .Conversely, in poverty stricken districts, test scores are always much lower because the students lack support from their dysfunctional families with so many problems, they are divided into subgroups.

Indeed, all social ills come from poverty, including unmotivated students, which is the real educational plague, not poor teachers. Any teacher who has worked in lower income neighborhoods will tell you the same story. There is no intellectual encouragement in their students’ homes.

Making teachers the scapegoats for underachieving schools will not solve the growing drop in educational achievement. For too long teachers have been forced to resign or been fired for poor performance, when, in fact, it’s not their fault.

The underlying problem is students who come from dysfunctional families where there is no intellectual encouragement, and the students are not motivated to do well in school.

During my wife’s long career as a teacher (she is now retired) in lower income neighborhoods, she worked hard to motivate her students. However, they received no support from their families, who lived on the edge of poverty.

Many of her students were emotionally troubled by the high stress environment in which they lived. Some of her students came form single parent homes where the mother was an alcoholic and the father was in jail. They had no incentive to learn. Just surviving the daily horror show at home took up all their energy.

I remember many times she would come home discouraged by working so hard to motivate her students and not getting any results. She had disturbed kids who refused to do anything but act-out, disrupting the class with their antics.

This was a daily occurrence for her 21 years of teaching. Most days, she would come home exhausted from dealing with behavior issues and unmotivated students instead of actually teaching.

All these high and mighty administrators like Rhee have no idea of the reality of today’s classrooms. She’s just trying to make a name for herself by ruining 241 teachers’ lives. Come on, they all can’t be bad teachers. But, teachers have always taken the heat for poor test scores and underachieving schools.

Teachers’ unions fight this unfair propaganda daily by trying to save teachers’ jobs. But, for parents who do nothing to encourage their kids to do well in school, blaming teachers is a convenient scapegoat. They don’t dare take a hard look at their own fractured lifestyles and uncaring attitude as the real reason their kid is failing.. These are the same lowlife parents who complain to the principal that their kids’ teacher is not performing up to standards.

This unmitigated teacher bashing is reaching a crescendo as she-devils like Rhee preach that incompetent teachers are to blame for poor performance. It’s complete bullshit.
George Parker, president of the Washington Teacher’s Union said that the union will appeal the firings. He has vowed to overturn Rhee’s edict.

Exposing the truth about why schools in poverty stricken neighborhoods underachieve is politically sensitive. These administrators don’t want the blowback from low-income parents by saying their poverty and dysfunctional family is causing their kids to fail. That would be admitting that our whole economic system has failed a large portion of the population that happens to be black. So they blame the teachers.

Frankly, I was thrilled when my wife retired from teaching. The stress of dealing with unmotivated and emotionally disturbed students every day was killing her. It took her a couple of years to unwind from that 21 years of high stress.
When she looks back on her career of teaching, she doesn’t know how she lasted all those years.

It was a thankless, unrelentingly frustrating job of dealing with unmotivated kids. Occasionally, she would have a bright kid who overcame his or her home life by doing well in school. But that was the exception rather than the rule.