OK, I'm a former teacher and was a fairly good one. At least my students did well and I got teaching award, but I think I was probably a born teacher anyway because I was raised by parents who were teachers.

I do believe there are bad teachers out there. I've seen them myself. I was lucky enough to teach in an upper-middle-class suburban public school district where the kids were all well fed, well housed and well taken care of, and IQ scores correspond directly with income levels. So that district had the money and the power to hire only good teachers with good grades and the kids did exceptionally well, 95% of them gaining entrance into good universities. The inner-city public school districts here in Texas and throughout the south have two problems. First, they are where the poorest families live, meaning those districts educate the poorest students. Again, IQ scores across the country correspond directly with socioeconomic status. That's not fair, but it's a fact. IQ has a lot more to do other things besides family income, however. Educated parents make more money but they also approach the educations of their children differently, too, doing things like regularly reading to their kids, limiting their TV, overseeing homework, staying in close touch with schools and teachers, providing better food (for better brain development). So the poverty factor is one strike against urban public school districts.

Strike two is that those inner-city districts also don't have the luxury of extra stipend money to pay differential (increased) teacher salaries since the property taxes that support those districts aren't as high as in the more affluent suburbs. So the inner-city districts get the teachers who didn't do so well in college and who can't get hired in other places. It's heartbreaking that the kids who can least afford to get an inferior education inevitably end up getting just that. In the wealthier districts with the more involved parents, kids would be better equipped to overcome a bad teacher, but, with only rare exceptions, the better teachers gravitate to the better, wealthier districts. What's the most important contributor to helping people climb out of poverty and change their socioeconomic status? It's education. So the low-income/inferior educational quality problem is part of a vicious cycle.

I am convinced that, even with quality differences in teachers, it's still far too easy to blame the school systems and the teachers. The truth is that kids only spend 7 or so hours at school for 9 months a year, whereas parents have them the rest of the time. Parents are the make-or-break factor when it comes to educational success. Supervision. Reading. Insistence on homework and educationally stimulating activities. Limits on TV. Early childhood development. Emotional and family stability. Nutrition. Those all play a tremendous role in educational success--far more than teachers or school districts.

We don't have a culture in the United States that values education, children or families. It values business. The sad thing is that if we don't pay more heed to education (and here I don't so much mean money but making it a priority as, say, Japan and other countries who're beating our socks off in math and science do), we'll continue to fall behind in business as well. It's already happening.