Teachers are not the bad guys here. You tell society that we have three months off in the summer and get off at 3:30 in the afternoon. Well, I can tell you for a fact that we work at least 10 months a year. What about all the teachers that either get to school early or stay late? We give up a lot of time for our school children- sometimes our students are getting more time than our families. What about all of us who still after 25 or more years, are working all day and then are working more hours at night? What about all the hours we volunteer to coach, chaperone dances, plan field trips, and sponsor clubs? We stay late after school for meetings and programs, and we are constantly grading papers, at night, on weekends, and even on vacations. We attend in-services for either no or minimal pay in the summer or on weekends. Not to mention all of our OWN MONEY we spend on students. I can’t tell you how many THOUSANDS of dollars I have spent over the years for science and social studies supplies for my classroom alone.

In his speech on the night of his re-election, President Obama promised to find common ground with opposition leaders in Congress. Yet when it comes to education reform, it’s the common ground between Democrats and Republicans that has been the problem.

For the past three decades, one administration after another has sought to fix America’s troubled schools by making them compete with one another. Mr. Obama has put up billions of dollars for his Race to the Top program, a federal sweepstakes where state educational systems are judged head-to-head largely on the basis of test scores. Even here in Texas, nobody’s model for educational excellence, the state has long used complex algorithms to assign grades of Exemplary, Recognized, Acceptable or Unacceptable to its schools.

I see this first hand. My wife is a third grade teacher, a testing grade, and her ability to properly teach the children is hampered by the fact that she has to now “teach to the test”. A test that is contradictory and largely unsupported by the strictly assigned curriculum.

A two-year investigation found that for-profit colleges, while receiving $32 billion in federal student aid and other taxpayer funds in the most recent year, also boast the highest dropout rates at 54 percent across all programs, according to a major report the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee released on Sunday.

A reminder that the free market is never quite “free”.

I’m sick and tired about how “bad teachers can’t get fired” yet good ones are easily laid-off.