There were good and bad teachers in all of those. However, the good teachers may as well have not had existed in the inner city/ghetto schools. Their talents were 100% wasted, and those classrooms would have been far better served with a police officer in front of the classroom who was enabled to boot the dysfunctional future criminals from the classroom. With those students in class, there was no point in even calling it school. Call it daycare, or juvie, or whatever you like - learning wasn't much of the process though.
I find it hard to blame teachers when their job is primarily daycare, and they have zero tools available to them to deal with poorly performing and disruptive students who have no business being in the classroom.
tldr; Almost all the US education problems can directly be tied back to the parents. Full stop.
This goes for my private schooling as well. The college prep school I went to was probably more diverse than the inner city school - the only difference was the self-selection of the students and parents who attended. They also taught with about half the funds.
That said, there are tons of horrible teachers too. The problems go far deeper though, and until you solve the parenting problem you may as well shut the public school system down in many areas. No amount of epic-level teachers will be able to get anything done in those environments.
Well, that sounds like a way to make more future criminals. Maybe send the police officer to the parents instead. If the goal is to systematize the production of healthy, non-broken adults, we want to get those children more of a healthy environment, and less of an unhealthy one—send those police officers to watch the parents, and boot them out if they're making their child dysfunctional. (Really, if we had as many social workers as we had teachers, a lot of things about lower-class life could be fixed.)
tl:dr; Teacher's can only ever be a part of a solution to the complicated educational needs of our society. And given what we're willing to spend, they can't even be a particularly effective part in poorer parts of the country.
Ironically, Baltimore spends quite a lot ($15k/student) on schools. Apparently only NYC (among the top 100 districts) spends more.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-05-21/news/bs-md-ci-ce...
"In spite of what we're willing to spend..." would be a better phrasing.
But I'm anti-school in general (note: not anti-teacher), so the whole point of this side of the argument misses my interests.
You might be able to blame a teacher for a class to some effect. What I was referring to is blaming teacherdom for education. That's pointless. When a system consistently produces a result, that's the result being produced by the system. The teachers and students are part of that system, producing and being produced by it. It will continue, blame or no blame. It is just as pointless as blaming the students.
Following the money often works for discerning most dysfunctional systems.