"I apologize because they made me do a lousy job." Well, why didn't you leave earlier, to go somewhere and do a better job? Because you would have made less money and gotten less retirement.
Now the OP sounds like someone who _deserves_ more money. But this is impossible in the current education regime, the teachers' unions are adamantly opposed to this sort of thing. And not entirely without reason, public schools are political institutions with political accountability. It's only a matter of time before discretion over compensation is used not for institutional purposes but political ones. Because whether a public school does well or poorly, it will continue to have students and budget to pay salaries.
Salaries are currently politically controlled, by unions, to subsidize a large-proportion of subpar workers. Currently the alternative is administrative political control, where principals and superintendents will vary salaries for who knows what purpose.
No Child Left Behind was an effort to improve obviously sub-optimal results by imposing some kind of "standards", a regulation of the quality provided by these centrally planned institutions. It's no surprise that these regulations proved as brain-dead and counter-productive as any other management by regulation.
But if we remove the standardized testing, we'll be right back at trusting the discretion of _some_ political entity for the management and control of the schools. The miserable track records of these entities is what lead to standardized testing in the first place.
The root problem in the schools' governance the public schools' effective monopoly on education. Schools are accountable to _politicians_, not parents, because they get budget from politicians. Giving parents control of the politicians only changes the politics. Only when parents control where their children go, and the budget with them, will we move towards governance that actually cares what parents think, and thus acquire a focus on educating kids. Because only then can administrations have the necessary discretion to pursue real qualities, within a check on the usage of that discretion for its intended purposes.
Until we fix that, all the complaints about education and its obvious problems will be so much water under the bridge. The schools are lousy because no effective actor has an interest in making them good. Give the parents effective power to hold schools accountable and things will change. And not before.
In the meantime we'll have pious complaints from the politically indoctrinated about how they were forced to do a bad job. No, sir, not so. You chose to do that job, and you chose it for the money. You were free to do better, albeit at a price, and you chose not to. The responsibility for that is yours.
You're going to blame him for not quitting to devote himself to some quixotic, unpaid battle against testing? Of course he's going to finish his years and get his pension. He's not any more obligated to die on a cross than you are.
RE: unions, they have a lot of problems, most of them centered around protecting bad teachers and pensions at the cost of good teachers and young teachers. But the funding problem for teacher salaries is about 80% healthcare-driven, it's not the unions' fault that healthcare has had 2 decades of >10% annual cost inflation (do the math on that).
Now the OP sounds like someone who _deserves_ more money. But this is impossible in the current education regime, the teachers' unions are adamantly opposed to this sort of thing. And not entirely without reason, public schools are political institutions with political accountability. It's only a matter of time before discretion over compensation is used not for institutional purposes but political ones. Because whether a public school does well or poorly, it will continue to have students and budget to pay salaries.
Salaries are currently politically controlled, by unions, to subsidize a large-proportion of subpar workers. Currently the alternative is administrative political control, where principals and superintendents will vary salaries for who knows what purpose.
No Child Left Behind was an effort to improve obviously sub-optimal results by imposing some kind of "standards", a regulation of the quality provided by these centrally planned institutions. It's no surprise that these regulations proved as brain-dead and counter-productive as any other management by regulation.
But if we remove the standardized testing, we'll be right back at trusting the discretion of _some_ political entity for the management and control of the schools. The miserable track records of these entities is what lead to standardized testing in the first place.
The root problem in the schools' governance the public schools' effective monopoly on education. Schools are accountable to _politicians_, not parents, because they get budget from politicians. Giving parents control of the politicians only changes the politics. Only when parents control where their children go, and the budget with them, will we move towards governance that actually cares what parents think, and thus acquire a focus on educating kids. Because only then can administrations have the necessary discretion to pursue real qualities, within a check on the usage of that discretion for its intended purposes.
Until we fix that, all the complaints about education and its obvious problems will be so much water under the bridge. The schools are lousy because no effective actor has an interest in making them good. Give the parents effective power to hold schools accountable and things will change. And not before.
In the meantime we'll have pious complaints from the politically indoctrinated about how they were forced to do a bad job. No, sir, not so. You chose to do that job, and you chose it for the money. You were free to do better, albeit at a price, and you chose not to. The responsibility for that is yours.