Class size still the main issue

A recent letter writer would like an explanation for the teacher’s protest around teaching conditions. I can give him that if he really wants.

Actually, there has been very little said about wages and benefits beyond COLA, which everyone has needed since any of us can remember. Without it, inflation makes everyone on a salary get poorer every year — and everybody knows that. The real issues are class size and performance evaluations.

Class sizes need to be reduced because they have been steadily rising for a very long time beyond the ability of any human to conduct an educational process, and that is one of the two main causes of poor performance by today’s students. What’s the other one?

I have been given the opportunity to be a guest speaker in many classrooms over the years. On some occasions I have found myself struggling to get through to classrooms where many students were noticeably stoned. Others appear to have succumbed to an apathy born of the futility of attempting to wring an education out of a school system that simply can’t deliver it. Sadly, even more are too debilitated by poverty, hunger, homelessness and despair to engage in a pursuit that offers no support. To blame their poor performance on bad teaching is a simplistic and uninformed cliché that smacks of a partisan platform.

It is simply not possible for that many of the nation’s teachers who have been certified with a teaching credential to be incompetent to teach.

Harold R. Pettus

Everett