Who Would Want To Become A Teacher These Days?

No one in their right mind, that's for sure.

The president cheerleads the firing of teachers in Rhode Island and puts into place policies that promote the same around the country.

Celebrities who know nothing about teaching blog about how bad teachers are at Huffington Post and other places online.

Oprah holds teacher bashing witch hunts on her show. NBC dedicates a whole week of this crap on their nightly "news" program.

Hollywood puts out pseudo-documentaries about "bad teachers," and then follows these up with so-called comedies about the same subject.

Every newspaper editorial board in New York cheerleads a new teacher evaluation system that makes test scores THE determining factor in whether a teacher keeps his or her job or not, even though the evaluation system they use has huge margins of error and wide swings in stability.

Many newspaper columnist concur with their editorial boards.

The mayor says he wants to fire 50% of teachers, says he wants to close over 100 more schools in the next few years and proceeds to go ahead on both plans.

No one stops him.

The governor says teachers are selfish scum and puts in place a system that ensures thousands will be fired each year based upon the "science" of a value-added measurement system of test scores with huge margins of error and wide swings in stability.

No stops him either.

Indeed, the unions jump on board and help him destroy teachers.

They send out deceptive emails to their members that fail to mention how test scores are now THE determining factor in teacher evaluations.

Come up "ineffective" on the part of the eval based upon test scores and you're fired in two years unless you can prove you are not "incompetent."

This is the current environment we teachers face.

I meet with all of my seniors in the early part of the fall to find out what their college plans are.

This year, whenever anybody told me they wanted to study education or become a teacher, I related just how difficult it is to be a teacher these days, then asked them to watch for anti-teacher stories in the newspapers and on the TV news over the next couple of weeks.

Inevitably every student who followed my suggestion came back and said "Oh, wow, you're right - almost everything you see in the media these days about teachers is negative."

It sure is.

I have then been quite upfront about the following points to students:

Teaching is a wonderful career and you will have some amazing moments in it that you could NEVER have working in private industry, but these moments are becoming fewer as the corporate forces complete their grip on education policy and force schools to be come all-test prep all the time. It is difficult to have human moments in a job that now requires so much dehumanizing activity.

Second, teaching is no longer a calling or a career. It is now a service job no different than fast food worker or call center operator - you will be squeezed for your labor as hard as the corporate forces running the system these days can squeeze you, then you will be tossed on the ash heap.

Third, you have to be ready to hear constant denigration about your profession in the media every time you turn on the TV news or read similar things in the newspapers or blogs when you go online.

Fourth, the so-called education reformers do NOT really want to improve education. Rather, they want to blow up the current system and put one into place that they can control and profit from. So teacher constantly have to deal with reform ideas promoted by so-called reformers that are meant to destabilize the system and scapegoat teachers and schools.

Finally I tell them if after all this, they still want to be teachers, that's great.

But they need to go into this with their eyes opened.