Teachers leaving the profession

Today's Kansas City Star features an interesting article concerning the number of teachers who are leaving the profession.
Some of these are retiring, but according to the article, 36 percent of new teachers are leaving before they have taught for five years. Of course, the people who are most affected by these departures are the students.
Some teachers leave because of the low pay or because they feel they are not receiving any respect from administrators, parents, or pupils. Part of the problem is the mindset behind programs such as No Child Left Behind.
Is it no secret that I am extremely skeptical of this program and not because of any lack of funding or any of the other reasons given by opponents. I felt when this program was first proposed and I still feel that its name is a slap in the face to educators across the United States.
President Bush gave the impression during his initial speeches on the program that "No Child Left Behind" was some dramatic new approach to education. It is not.
I can't think of a single teacher who ever said, "Well, we're going to have to leave some children behind. Mary, we're leaving you behind, and Charles, I'm afraid you missed the boat, too."
The president and his supporters were leaving the impression that teachers and administrators were going blithely about their business, with no concern whatsoever about dropouts or students who were not getting the most out of their education.
I can't remember running into any educators who felt that way, either during my six-plus years as a teacher or in the 22 years in which I covered area schools as a reporter.
So how do we show that we are leaving no child behind? Standardized tests, of course. And the first thing most states have done is to water down their standards so they can meet the requirements of the new law. We have no idea whether education is improving or not.
But there is a bigger problem facing education, a much bigger problem.
For all of the effort that teachers, administrators, and support personnel put in to provide children with the best education possible, there are some things that we have no control over.
-We have no control over students' home lives, more and more of which include broken homes, drug use, alcoholism, and poverty.
-We have many students coming from homes which have few, if any, books, newspapers, or magazines to encourage reading.
-We are in the middle of a turn toward pro-business domestic policies that seem designed to sharply increase the wealth of a few, while cutting the salaries and the benefits, even the jobs, of many.
-We are seeing an undercutting of the public education system by politicians who see private schools as a cureall for everything that ails education in America. If the private schools end up having to abide by the same rules that public schools go by, they will end up having to deal with the same problems the public schools are facing.
As long as education continues to be a cheap political issue for every demagogue on both sides of the aisle, you will continue to have serious problems and you will continue to have people who decide to leave the profession.
"No Child Left Behind" has always been the goal of American educators, long before President Bush's people coined the name. It will always remain our goal.