by Bobby B. Paul

Created on: September 20, 2008   Last Updated: September 25, 2008

We claim teaching to be the most extolled profession in society. Yet teachers rank among the lowest paid professionals. We trust our children to them and yet we lock them into a system that breeds mediocrity. All the while children dropout of American schools at an alarming rate. Each year our children fall further behind other countries in globally hyper-competitive economy. Our efforts to find answers results in blame-storming sessions with everybody pointing the finger of illiteracy at everyone else. All of them have a point.

The problem doesn't come from a single group. It's a complex issue of underpaid teachers and over-powerful lobbies. It comes from criminal cultures among the impoverished and spoiled brat attitudes among the upper and middle class. It includes mom and dad being too busy with their careers to notice their child isn't doing geometry homework. It is broken families, broke teachers, and bankrupted standards mixing together in a cacophony of ignorance and apathy.

How can we possibly hold teachers responsible for this? Then answer is simpler than you think.

We can and should hold teachers responsible for one simple reason: they demanded that we give it to them.

I have no doubt that those teachers reading this far have just taken off the gloves. I am in for a beating. I know the teachers are ready to fight. I have seen them fight. Teachers fight hard, fight mean, and fight well. More often than not, they win.

I watched them fight when a certain state proposed legislation for a voucher system. I saw it go to referendum vote. I watched proponents of the vouchers lose this battle with a ballot box whipping that would make any UFC champion run from the cage crying. I watch the teachers, the union, and the PTA declare war on this legislation. When the vote came, it was a bloodbath.

My beating is just around the corner.

But before they take me out to the woodshed, and accuse me of hating education; before they try to convince me that their hands are tied, that they have limited resources, that schools are overcrowded, that parents don't get involved unless they bring a lawyer; before they pound into my head all the myriad of reasons why it is not their fault: I am already convinced that they are right. It is definitely not their fault. That is not the question.

Fault does not always equal responsibility. That's why my car insurance has a no-fault clause. Any idiot regardless of how much he has been drinking can walk straight in front of my car, get hit

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