Mandated reduction of classroom size opened up jobs in affluent neighborhoods, and good teachers gravitated to them. Emergency teaching licenses were issued to 28,500 unqualified teachers, who took less desirable jobs in ghetto schools. In the meanwhile, the performance gap on college-entrance exams between white students and minorities widened this year in California. And the seeds for further widening have been planted by politicians too cowardly to face the real problem with education in government schools. The real problem is the quality of teachers, not the quantity of them.
Schools of education draw their students from the lowest performers in the college population.
Not the best and the brightest, but the worst and the dullest, wind up as administrators and teachers in government schools. There are, of course, many exceptions to the rule, but there are tons of studies and documentation that confirm that education students are drawn from the bottom of the barrel and placed in classrooms where they are rarely held accountable. It is an insidious, self-serving system that survives and thrives because education labor unions pay off politicians for protecting them from accountability, competition and reform. The National Education Association is the most selfish and destructive special interest in America. We made a great, perhaps fatal mistake by allowing government to take control of education.