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Where in the hell do teachers work 9 to 5?
The ones at my high school, at least, worked from 6 or 7 in the morning until 4 or 5 without even taking into account grading papers or working on lesson plans. People who say that teachers are paid adequately because they get summers "off" (which is not entirely the truth) don't take into the account that no teacher works an 8-hour day. I would guess that for many of them, 12 hours is a minimum.
A lot of the teachers at my school had two jobs or took on extra responsibility at the school (coaching track, working as the night school principal) in order to make enough to support their families -- and that doesn't even take summer jobs into account.
These days you don't go into teaching unless you love it because it's a job that is underpaid, overworked, extremely frustrating and possibly dangerous.
As for standardized tests, I don't agree that they're useless -- there was a girl in Louisiana, I think, who was valedictorian of her class yet could not pass the state's exam for minimum competency in math, yet her math teachers were giving her A's anyway. That kind of thing needs to be caught so the problems can be addressed and fixed. But I'm in complete agreement that test results should not dictate funding. You cannot expect an "inner city" Chicago school to perform at the same level as New Trier. That's effin' ridiculous.
I just read Class Struggle: What's Wrong (and Right) with America's Best Public High Schools and it addressed a lot of these issues. Its main focus was how to take programs that have succeeded at places like New Trier, Scarsdale, Greeley, La Jolla, Highland Park and their ilk, and put them in place in schools that perform lower on tests. I think some of the solutions are overly simplistic and fail to address the fact that usually schools that perform lower have totally different problems and issues than schools that perform higher, but it's an interesting read even so.
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