I remember the good old days of the 50's. I was in elementary school then. We all sat in straight rows, with bottles of liquid ink on or in our desks, with teachers who stood in one place and gave their lessons from note cards. I started teaching in small rural elementary schools in the 1970s. The students were more talkative and outspoken then the silent days of my childhood and we had to have more colorful classrooms and had teachers manuals we paraprased from and stencils to make copies from with old mechanical type writers. We had a lot less backing from our administrators and pay was only 6000 dollars a year, more than the 1950s but less administrative support than my teachers had.

I had not realized until I taught for over thirty years what a soap opera the teaching field was. I was brought up to think that if you got an education, could get along with people, kept up with what was new, and were articulate you could teach. Thats how my high school teachers were in the 1960s. Boy, was I wrong. Teachers are judged by every body: other teachers, administrators, parents, school board members, tax payers in every aspect of their lifes. When someone sees what they don't like they come after you in small ways or large ways many times through the children by letting on that they don't have to listen or behave for you. This get worst over time, until now if some one complains you are gone and they don't even ask the teacher for his/her point of view. In small rural areas problems can come from buying a car in another town and not through your local bank.

Many teachers and administrators come from the same kind of disfunctional families that the students do and have many of the same emotional issues creating the same personal relationships among each other as students do. Except that the professional educatiors' problems are covered by the veneer of professionalism and standard process and proceedure in hiring, firing, and solving problems which many times are not protections but obstacles to get around and not protections. Control issues run wild in the system. Many teachers with problems controlling the classroom become administrators. Many times strict teachers become administrators because they see too many teachers who don't demand strict obidience from the students and wish to rid the school of them because these less strict teachers cause problems for them. Then you have teachers who wish to let the students run things become administrators because they want to get rid of the strict teachers.

School are a constant power struggle between the different forces of formal-informal atmosphere, adult centered-child centered, intolerent-tolerent to differences in ideas of race religional, sexuality, ect., religious vs humanistic-liberalism vs people centered vs business centered academic content, definitions of permissable student behavior and how to deal with it.

These are the problems with public schools. Heaven help me if I have misspelled a word or some one can't relate to my use of sentence structure or punction. But if I am attacked for this you will understand what I mean.

These are the problems