It is heart-wrenching to watch the noble citadel which used to protect public education crumble beneath the weight of inept government intervention. As a 15-year high school English teacher, I watch helplessly as my once-proud profession is slowly, painfully degrading. During my first decade as an educator, teaching was a respectable, solidly-middle class career, the poster job for fulfilling an admittedly humble American dream. These days, teaching is a second-rate starter job guaranteeing poverty for those foolish enough to seek a “career” in education. Governments at all levels, allocating more tax dollars to private prisons than public schools, have focused intensifying vitriol against both teachers and public schools in every way imaginable, from deep and dangerous pay cuts that actually put our nation’s youth at risk not only for failure, but for physical harm, to the eradication of collective bargaining rights so that teaching pays little more than a “career” in fast food prep. When the blame for pervasive student failure in penury-ridden cities shifted from the home to the school, as the political climate devalued the individual in favor of the collective, teachers bore the brunt of the backlash. While a direct and solid correlation shows that single parenthood, age and education of parents, and substance abuse in families are unfortunate but accurate predictors of students success, somehow those stunting factors take a back seat to the failure of a well-educated, talented teacher to instantly propel each of 150 students to college readiness with no supplies or support in 50 minutes per school day.

 Thank  Arizona Superintendent John Huppenthal when your voucher-wielding private school student professes that earth is 4,000 years old, that dinosaurs were an elaborate hoax, and that the sun revolves around the earth. After all, isn’t private education simply better? Freed from constitutional constraints separating church and state, private and charter schools excel in paddling unruly miscreants, applauding conformity, engaging in sweetheart deals with contractors with no taxpayer accountability, and denying services to exceptional education students. Freed from the yoke of intelligent restraint, private and charter schools do not require teachers to have advanced degrees or experience. They are free to pay teachers at day care scales, and it shouldn’t be surprising to see charter schools pop up in abandoned buildings and taxpayer dollars disappear into black holes.

Also thank Barack Obama and his misguided cronie, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who tapped East Coast businessmen to create the new, universal “common” standards for all American students and tied state-needed federal dollars to their implementation. No educators were consulted as, obviously, McDonald’s doesn’t ask its line cooks for input on the Big Mac. American students are now officially products to be exploited like any other. These core “standards” are designed to produce Brave New World-style clones who do not possess the skills to form original opinions or the tools to question authority.

Kudos, too, to Bill Gates and his cronies for ensuring that fewer and fewer bright young college grads will choose teaching as a career because they will be unable to pay back student loans or afford to survive above poverty level. Not to worry, as the bright-eyed Teach For America (TFA) crew will pick up the slack. Touted as the new Peace Corps, TFA is a one-percenter endorsed program that transplants East Coast Ivy Leaguers on a journey of cultural tourism into some of the most “challenging” (i.e., low-income zip codes) teaching environments in America to “save” the darker races from themselves by providing the only quality education these poor, unfortunate wretches will ever know. Such noblesse oblige is truly admirable, given that few TFA “teachers,” with their two-week boot camp on excellent teaching methods will succeed in anything other than fostering resentment and alienating the veteran staff at those schools, most of whom have sacrificed down to the bone to actually make a difference in their home towns while the Teach For America martyrs will return debt-free to their far away trust fund palaces where their appalling experiences bumping elbows with the downtrodden will fuel dinner party conversation for decades.

It’s time to stop divesting in education simply because kids can’t vote. Defunding public education does not have the same effect as pulling one’s investment dollars from a struggling market. Americans will continue to produce progeny in need of increasingly scarce quality public education. Families committed to their children will migrate to states which have fought against teachers-union-busting – coincidentally, the same states with highest student achievement levels – and desert the states which strangle our youth at all of our expense.