Menu
Teachers should be allowed to do their job
To the editor:
While looking over a recent edition of the Courier News, I noticed an article which reported on the annual meeting a local school district had the previous night.
I noticed where the assistant superintendent had informed those in attendance that their school district had made enough academic progress that the district wouldn't need to hire "educational consultants" for the school year.
That statement gave me pause for reflection. I wondered just what an educational consultant was if not a teacher.
As I continued to read through the article, I ran across other, equally perplexing statements. "The district has developed a powerful sense of community and belonging which permeates all levels of the organization. The district and staff have fostered effective relationships and two-way communication with all stakeholders."
Those in attendance were told that some esoteric commission, which had yet to be identified, in the article was requiring the district to take action to "evaluate the district's current process for horizontal and vertical teaming of all grade levels."
In the words of the late Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist, Lewis Grizzard, "DO WHAT?"
That's the kind of gobbledegook you would expect to hear from a government bureaucrat, but not a teacher.
I have never met a bad teacher. I'm sure there are some, but I'm equally sure they are only a small minority of our public school teachers.
I believe that people become teachers because they have a passion to teach. They understand that each child is an individual, and as such, they must be taught individually. It takes time and effort.
Teachers can't teach if they are forced to become bureaucratic automatons that do nothing more than populate a classroom and spend the vast majority of their time being bureaucrats and not teachers.
If we are to fix our communities, we must start with the schools. We need to get government regulators our of our schools and return control of our community's schools to their citizens and to the school's administrators. Federal judges are not educators. They don't know beans about running a school.
We need to provide a disciplined and controlled environment in which teachers can teach and students can learn without disruption.
Parents shouldn't have to worry about the physical well being of their children each morning when they board the bus for school, and this applies to teachers as well.
It's shameful that so many of our schools now need a police officer, not a teacher, pulling hall duty to ensure the safety of the students and staff.
It has been said that a nation based on democratic values is dependent on an enlightened citizenry. If so, then our teachers must lead the way. To do so, they must be given the latitude and the tools they need to teach and they must not be burdened with endless bureaucracy.
Teachers don't need some remote, faceless commission to tell them how to do their job.
Teachers must simply be allowed to ply their passion. They alone must be the ultimate education consultants within our public school systems.