Why Parents Want Their Kids to Stay Out of Teaching

This year's annual PDK/Gallup Poll of public attitudes toward public education found for the first time a majority of American parents unwilling to advise their children to become teachers:

Two-thirds of Americans say teachers are underpaid, and an overwhelming 78% of public school parents say they would support teachers in their community if they went on strike for more pay, according to the 2018 PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. 

Even as most Americans continue to say they have high trust and confidence in teachers, a majority also say they don’t want their own children to become teachers, most often citing poor pay and benefits as the primary reason for their reluctance.

Here are just a few of the good reasons that the majority of parents have made the right call:

• The level of teacher demonization for student test score performance over the past twenty years turned teaching into a pressure cooker that stews teachers and students before blowing up schools entirely.  In order to increase the number of corporate charter schools and other "choice" options, politicians and corporate reformers cynically designed No Child Left Behind in 2001 to "hold accountable" schools and teachers for not reaching federally-mandated proficiency targets that were known at the time to be impossible to achieve by the vast majority of children across America.

• Over the past two decades, corporate reformers and politicians have put in place teacher evaluation schemes that are invalid, unreliable, and unfair to teachers.  Untold numbers of teachers have lost their jobs as a result, even as many other teachers fled to other career fields to escape the unrelenting pressure.  Those who have stayed now focus on producing test scores by any means necessary in order to survive evaluations, which, in turn, results in moral breakdowns, nervous breakdowns, and miseducated children.

• Targeted mass killings in schools with weapons of war threaten the safety of all school personnel and children.  Growing numbers of politicians and corporate lobbyists make the case for arming teachers in schools, and kevlar book bags are now prominent on schools' mandatory supply lists for parents.  Who can blame college students and their parents for thinking of their safety and that of their children?

• In an effort to make teaching teacher proof and to reduce the number of teachers, corporate reformers and politicians continue to deprofessionalize the field with lucrative programs that turn over significant and increasing amounts of student learning to screen time governed by computer algorithms.  

• The metastasizing of the corporate cancer known as "rigor" has turned schools into training grounds for the increasingly alienating and disaffected corporate adult workplace.  Teachers are expected to function as efficiency-driven managers who increase the bottom line (test scores), and their own creativity and ingenuity have been sacrificed on the alter of standardization and quantifiable results that ignore the sociological and psychological realities of children.  

• Teachers have continued to lose economic ground to other career fields over the past decades.  With a wage gap larger today than it was in 1980, teachers work two jobs to maintain some semblance of middle class living standards.

Bad News for the Testocracy

from the 2015 PDK/Gallup Poll on public attitudes toward the public schools:

If the Public Mattered to Arne and the Reform Schoolers, What Might They Learn?

Last week the 43rd annual PDK/Gallup Poll was published, and never in the history of the Poll has the concept of "a public" been more threatened by a virulent form of corporatism that seeks to replace democratic institutions with unregulated profiteering by educons schooled in the virtue of selfishness and the worship of wealth.

I have pulled some of the findings from the Poll and pasted them below, along with few comments (click on any chart to enlarge).

 

Notice above the makeup of the respondents: mostly conservative, mostly above 40, mostly without public school children of their own.  Where once PDK was keen on minority, urban, and rural representation in their poll, the corporate reform schoolers who now hold sway at what was once a great organization don't even bother, anymore. 

 

A couple of points here.  The American public supports public school choice, even if housing patterns will doubtless assure continued segregation unless we have an active Federal commitment to diversity in schooling, which in itself is a stopgap until such time as we have a societal commitment to end poverty in America.  With Gates, Broad, and the Waltons much more interested in segregative charters than integrative magnet schools, resegregation will continue unabated until educators and parents reclaim the public schools. 

Point 2: By increasing numbers, the American public continues to oppose school vouchers, even as the corporate antiquarians and John Birchers continue to try to impose them.

 

Despite the Business Roundtable's, i. e., Arne Duncan's fixation on making teacher evaluations and teacher pay subject to student test scores, Table 12 shows that the American public, even this conservative cross-section, sees student test scores the least important of four factors asked about. 

 

And, hey Arne, the American public in not interested in your lockdown national curriculum, whether Republican, Democratic, or Independent.  Please see above!!

 

 Despite the relentless corporate hammering of teachers in the corporate media (see below), the American public is not fooled, as the figures above indicate.  In fact, the percentage of the public giving teachers an "A" has more than doubled from 27 years ago.

 

Just above, Table 26 does not surprise, given the large percentage of respondents who don't have children in public schools, but notice in Table 28 that the grading by parents who have children in public schools continues to go up, despite the corporate reform schooler policies aimed to crush them by making schools untenable test factories.  This represents nothing less than a remarkable example of persistence and hard work by educators determined to serve the needs of children in an era when it has never been so hard to be a teacher.  

 

Money continues to be the biggest problem for schools, based on the poll results.  And despite the conservative sample, and despite the demonization of public schools and teachers, the American public continues to believe in public schools and public education.

 

Finally, Table 23 shows clearly that the American public does not support the virtual ed vultures who see the solution to educating the poor as using 21st Century technology that mimics 19th Century parrot pedagogy.