The Exhaustion of the American Teacher

Dear Politician,

I just came across this article, and had to comment on it:

http://theeducatorsroom.com/2012/09/the-exhaustion-of-the-american-teacher/

This article is dead on. I always thought it was just me that was exhausted but come to find out I’m not the only one! And the problem lies with the parents more than the kids. I’ve had many parents tell me how worried they are about their kid – if he’s cutting up in school, or she’s not really focused on her studies. I just say, as long as you care, your kid will be fine. If you’re friends with me on facebook, that put you in a different category – you have enough money to have internet access and enough literacy skills to read and write. It’s the parents that let their child skip school every day, allow them to drink in the morning, don’t give them boundaries or rules, and yell at me when I call home because they don’t have the skills to deal with their child that are the problem. And here lies the problem: How do I teach when they don’t come to school? I call home and Dad yells at me, stating that he doesn’t have time to keep track of his kid, about to drop out of high school. Mom makes excuses, even when I catch her in a lie. There is no accountibility to parents! I think they should allow us, as teachers, to only be held accountable for the kids that show up. It’s like if you are a manager of 125 workers, and your assessment is based on how well they do in sales, but you have 25 workers that are absent from work more than 70% of the time. In the real world, you fire them, and move on. In teaching, we can’t do that. Until they have some way of dealing with the parents who don’t care, our education system will be messed up.