I worked in LA, not San Diego, but I can assure you that San Diego’s poorest schools see similar problems to what I’m describing. The “small villages” are usually in Latin American countries. The students come in mid-year as their families move across the border. Where I taught in L.A., over 90% of our students were Spanish speaking, almost 100% were very poor, and many of them immigrated when they were already school-aged, but had never had never been inside a classroom, or had only attended off-and-on over the years. In many cases, their parents had only 3-5 years’ worth of education. As a teacher, you not only have to teach the children, but you have to teach the parents how to teach the children at home, usually with very limited resources (no books at home…ZERO!).
BTW, where did I say we need to throw extra money at it? For one thing, I HATE the fact that school districts wasted money on the iPad debacle. That was a very stupid move, and just one example of how **private companies** are entrenched in the public education world, sucking up precious and scarce resources, while providing little to no benefit to the students.
I DO believe that smaller class sizes help. No, I know that it helps — I’ve been in classrooms both before and after class size reduction went into effect. It’s one of the many reasons we homeschool our kids…can’t get any smaller than that! 😉
As for teacher raises, raises aren’t particularly necessary given the current economic problems, but I do favor cost-of-living increases. Raises would be nice from time to time in order to reward good teachers (I have no problem with merit pay above a baseline salary). The truth is that teaching has a very high attrition rate, and it would be nice to be able to retain some of the better teachers.
“Ingersoll extrapolated and then later confirmed that anywhere between 40 and 50 percent of teachers will leave the classroom within their first five years (that includes the nine and a half percent that leave before the end of their first year.) Certainly, all professions have turnover, and some shuffling out the door is good for bringing in young blood and fresh faces. But, turnover in teaching is about four percent higher than other professions.”
As to your assertion that we get nothing out of our public education system, nothing could be further from the truth. Can you imagine what things would be like if we didn’t educate these kids? While we might not be able to get them to a Harvard-level education, they (and we, as a society) are still far, far better off because of the education that we do provide.
