Although the small public school in my town has suffered tremendous cuts in programming and staffing due to a combination of factors (lack of state funding, decreasing enrollment), it still offers an excellent (if more limited) education to students who choose to do the work asked of them.
Rather than attack teachers, Greg, why not ask these questions:
1) Who are the administrators/school board members hiring all these unqualified teachers in your area and why do THEY still have their jobs?
2) Dave, to what do you attribute the decline of your job satisfaction as a librarian? Is it simply the fault of the teaching staff, or are there other factors? The librarian at our school is a close friend and he does an amazing job with students who are researching for assignments and papers. He steers them to reference materials, higher quality Web sites (rather than getting info from "dot com" garbage), and runs an accelerated reader program for elementary students which has helped raise reading scores in standardized tests. He loves his job, but is frustrated with the loss of support staff and budgets for new books, materials, etc., due to budget cuts.
3) Greg and Dave, from a quick viewing of your profiles here, I see we are roughly the same age (I'm 49), so we all graduated within about five years of each other. I'm willing guess you were both in the top half of your graduating class and that your grades were good. Why? I'll bet your parents expected (demanded, even) you to do your work and do it well. Mine certainly did. I came home with a B- in a science class once and the hammer came down. Sadly, a lack of good parenting leads to kids not doing their work because their parents don't care, so neither do they.
And while we were (again, I'm assuming) motivated students who did well, think back on your graduating class and recall those who did poorly, academically. They often had trade skills classes (building trades, various shop classes, auto mechanics) to steer them toward good careers in those fields. Many schools---again, like the one in my town--- have been forced to cut these tech classes due to budget issues.
4) I know every educator is not a master teacher. Of course they aren't, and we all know that. I just took great offense at your wholesale dismissal of teachers and pushing the blame for everything wrong with public schools on to them. Teachers in public schools deal with issues you have no idea about unless you are in the trenches with them. Go teach in a public school for an entire school year, then tell where you think the systemic problems stem from.
5) Naturally, students at private schools---and home-schooled kids---should be excelling. They don't have to deal with students who have all the at-risk factors the public schools are FORCED to deal with. There are public school classrooms where only 30% of the students speak English as their primary language. There are as many as five or six different primary languages in a classroom. How does a single teacher deal with that? How can there possibly be high-quality learning going on? Public schools deal with vast numbers of families living well below the poverty line. Again, these are factors private schools and home-schools don't have to contend with---at least not to the same extent---as public schools.
Most parents who can afford to send their kids to private schools care greatly about education and are invested in their kids' progress. I know of very few kids from private schools who flunk out, mainly because their the products of good parenting, not because the quality of the teachers is so much greater. Public schools would shine, too, if they could turn away the bottom 50% of students. They can't, by law.
