Priviledge

I was talking to a teacher at another high school. 
I teach at a high school on the south side of coors and I-40.  He teaches at a school on the north side of coors and I-40.  They are a five minute drive from each other.  They are both high schools.  That is where the similarity ends.
I teach at a title I school with the majority of the student body being of color.  He teaches at a private school with the majority of students being white.
My school is public.  His school is private.  The students who go there spend more on one year of schooling than I spent on my first degree in college.  Should they decide to stay in the state to go to college, they will pay less for tuition than they did in high school.   Sorry, their parents will pay less for tuition.

In the discussion, I told the other teacher where I worked....he then did that thing where you suck air through your teeth (this is the same response you get when you tell people the time a billy goat rammed you in the nuts or you tell someone from Santa Fe that you live anywhere else in the state of New Mexico). 
It was a reaction of sympathy, pain, and whatever...overall it was offensive.  I am not a violent person, but it made me want to hurt him.  He may have thought he was telling me that he understood. To me it was a reaction of superiority.  He apparently had heard "how bad" things were over there. 

To me it was just the general dissapproval that the haves give to the have nots.  As if something the have nots have done put them into the position that they are in.  More than anything I was not pleased with the way he somehow made me a part of his team.  Somehow, he failed to see that I was no different than my students.  I come from the same background, I earn about the same as their parents do.  Am I supposed to nod my head and say "yeah, it's rough.  They speak Spanish and stuff..." 

I think this is also a problem with our educational system.  People in charge are the haves.  They somehow blame the have nots with laziness, lower intelligence, inability to organize and continue to contemplate the problems of their own.
Yes, I am a little angry.

The books and superman

The blame game is interesting.
It seems that the only thing people can agree on is that our educational system is broken.

Waiting for superman blames the teachers unions.  Teachers are being rewarded for basically not leaving.  They get seniority they get paid more.   I see this.  I have two bachelor's degrees, A terminal Master's degree, and have take extra classes after that.  I currently earn four dollars more a year than someone with one bachelor's degree.

Some teachers blame parents.  They don't get involved.

Some teachers blame their own education which has left them clueless as to how to deal with actual human beings.

Some teacher's blame the system that won't just let them teach the way they want to teach.

Now, I do know that some complaints are coming from people who really don't want an education system at all.  They think that all schools should be private schools.  I know that they will come up with any excuse ever to blame everyone.  The only excuse they won't use is that we need to dump more money into the system.  Other than that, they are open to the blame game.

I also know that just because people have different motives that it doesn't negate their assessments.

I am just wondering what this all means.  Is the system like my old ford tempo that was just done for?  There were too many things wrong with it to just fix.  Should we just scrap the whole system and start over?
Or is the answer in the charter school system where not everything is set by some governing body?

I have no idea.  I'm tired.

Parents

Parental involvement is brought up again and again in school.
How can we do anything with a student when there is no partnership at home?  What happens when parents don't care?  Or seems like they don't care?
This isn't actually a fair assessment, because some parents still don't know that they can participate.  I mean that some parents come from times and places where they were taught that they didn't have a say in establishments like educational systems.  Some parents are working several jobs and have no time to check in on their kids when they get home at one AM.
I work at a school where this is a problem.  Some parents don't or can't participate in the education of their kids.
This might be part of the reason that kids don't feel like school is important.  Or they don't feel like there are any repercussions for their behavior.
On the other side of the spectrum are parents who participate too much.
I have a friend who works at another school where parents don't work or can take time out of any day to call in or come to school.  Sure, he has a better classroom, but I am not sure if he has a better situation.
A student gets an A minus on a report card, and before the grades have even been printed on paper, he has a phone call and several emails.  It is not that the parents are wondering why their kids earned an A minus, they're wondering why the teacher isn't giving their kid an A plus.
There is never a question in these parents' minds that the kid could actually be at fault.  It has to be the teacher.
In this case, the parents don't respect the teacher enough to give him authority over their kid.
They also can't see that their kid could make a mistake.  The kid, therefore, learns to not respect the system and thinks they can get away with anything.

I know, when I point out the two antitheses like this that the answer is somewhere in the middle.  I don't think, however, that this is the point.  The real point is that parents can do just as much damage by being over involved as they can be not involved.