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Notes -
Only tangentially related, but this paragraph made it occur to me the sad irony of the situation with respect to how much teachers are believed to be able to influence kids. This attitude of blaming the teachers for students' poor performance caused by students' poor decisions obviously stems from the belief that teachers have the responsibility to influence students to make better decisions, and implicit in that is the belief that teachers have the ability to significantly influence students into making better decisions. It seems to me that the people who both buy into and push forward this belief also tend to be the ones who are most supportive of teachers, the biggest proponents of rearranging society such that more money and resources flow to teachers. This makes some sense, since if teacher quality matters a great deal for student performance, then incentivizing the best and brightest to go into teaching by giving them more money is likely to pay dividends in the form of better students. And yet it's the prominence of this very same belief that's responsible for this phenomenon of teachers being blamed for their students' poor performance and eventually deciding to leave this "soul-sucking" profession.
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