Instead of recognizing and acting on this, however, public officials ignore problems they should be addressing while piously admonishing teachers to meet standards they usually had no say in setting. Here is a real-life example. It concern a middle school math teacher in a decaying industrial city. Persistently inadequate funding and deteriorating property values annually bring this teacher's district to the brink of bankruptcy. Our teacher's pay is less than teachers in every surrounding suburban district.
Instructional materials are scarce and out of date.
The school's one photocopy machine is broken and no one knows when it might be repaired. Her classroom ceiling has been leaking stinking water for months. Wet plaster sags ominously, waste cans fill with putrid water, but no one in administration seems interested in getting it fixed. The kids in our teacher's classes come from an economically devastated neighborhood abandoned by American industry when they sent the jobs overseas. And when they do show up a lot of them are angry and nasty.