Joanne Jacobs points to the story of a new teacher who won't be coming back for a second year.
A new teacher faces long odds. The kids are tough, supplies scant and morale low. The enthusiastic new hires can conceivably chip away at these obstacles, but not when problems for new teachers are ignored, if not aggravated, by the administration. When that happens, people like me, whose training isn't in education, are likely to refer to their stint teaching in the city schools as "a really interesting experience" and move on.
Instead of rebuilding the system from the core through training more teachers, paying them what they're worth, and in general supporting the education system with adequate resources, we are pursuing bandaid patches such as throwing too many uncredentialed, inexperienced teachers into the front lines.
It's a societal problem. We acquiesce to throwing billions of dollars into an ABM system because everyone can imagine the effects of a nuclear-weapon-tipped ballistic missile landing on, say, Chicago. But it's a lot harder to imagine the effects of under educating an ever-larger portion of the citizenry. National survival is problematic in this technological age when a significant proportion of the population can't read beyond grade-school level.
When bridges begin collapsing because of inadequate maintenance, a short-term, high-level effort can correct the worst cases, and a ten-year accelerated program can deal with the rest. By the time we see the crater we're causing by our short-sighted education policies, it will take generations to correct the problem ... assuming we have that long.
This is an example of where our special-interest-based political system is taking us. Without leaders who can focus on issues besides the ones that are backed by a money-bearing group, we rely on scattered attempts to solve the large problems, but there aren't enough resources available at that level.
3:05:28 PM 
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