Teachers do an excellent job of educating the youth in as far as they are allowed to. Unfortunately, much of what is taught in school classrooms (and this is MORE true in private schools than in public ones, mind you) is determined by administrative staff, not by those of us who are around the students all the time and know what their individual needs are. It would help if we were freed up from the ridiculously over-the-top strictures of the current standardized testing obsession in this country (we test several times as often as any other country, incidentally) and other completely unnecessary burdens (including unnecessarily large class sizes, for instance) so that we could focus on each student's individual needs. It would also help the teaching process if Oklahoma's educators didn't have to teach the next generation with textbooks in this condition:
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It would also help if Oklahoma teachers had five days a week to do so across the board, instead of 20% of the state's schools using four-day school weeks so that oil and gas companies can get unnecessary subsidies.
Teachers have to work with what we're given. This is what the teachers of Oklahoma are given to work with. And salaries that require them to take second and even third jobs to pay their bills. Let's see you do a better job under those conditions! How about it?
The best schools in America, IMO, are the ones that are run by teachers to the exclusion of administrative staff, and that's why you're seeing more of them start to crop up. That comparative quality isn't a coincidence. We're the ones who spend all day with the students. We know them. We care about them. Teachers even
lay down their lives for their students, as we've seen time and again over the last two decades! Some of us feel that maybe a little less criticism -- a little less being blamed for all the world's problems -- and a little more appreciation might be deserved.
The reason you're surprised is because Chris's version of this story is misleading. In reality, Texas, from the start of the current decade, has decided to have their public school textbooks minimize, or even eliminate, references to slavery.
For example, just a few years back there was a World Geography textbook published for use in Texas public schools by the famed McGraw-Hills that referred to African slaves brought to the United States against their will as "workers", such as to avoid painting the slave system as having been necessarily immoral or objectionable. (Perhaps that sounds more like the Texas you're familiar with, no?) There has been parental pushback against these kinds of things lately in Texas. That pushback, not the whitewashing of the state's history around the question of slavery, seems to be what Chris is objecting to here. Wouldn't want to be too PC.