I spend a lot of time aware that if I were a public school teacher under the current regime, I would have been fired long ago, unless I had been hired under Teach for America. The reasons I say this are the following:
1-I frequently have students who do not pass their first practice tests (the test we have to give them before they can go to the local community college to take the real GED). This is pretty common among GED students and teachers, I would imagine-the purpose of the practice test is to make sure that when students take the real test, they'll pass. And usually they do. However, if my students were only given one shot, and didn't get to choose when that shot happened, the chances of them passing would be fairly slim.
2-I am not great at classroom management. I have trouble being firm, which really is a problem; luckily for me, I work in a school where my boss and the other faculty are encouraging and supportive-and they do occasionally act as heavies when it's really necessary. I'm working on getting better at this.  At a regular school? Again, as I said, I would have long been fired.
3-There are sometimes students I have a hard time teaching. .This is true of a hostile student in my class right now. A lot of it is about saving or maintaining face in a relatively large group of other students, and so I put together materials today for him to work on independently tomorrow. Maybe it'll be easier for him if he doesn't have to publicly allow it to be said that there are things in the world that he doesn't know; I hope so.  I know that in public school my inability to teach or "control" him in a classroom setting would not have gotten me good reviews.

I think about this stuff all the time, especially on days like today, when things seem to go wrong a lot. And yet-I really love teaching. It's the only thing I can see doing with my life (I can see the educational reformers sneering about my putting my job ahead of the children). I'm committed to getting better at it, and I actually believe that I'm pretty good at many parts of it. I care a lot about my students, and I'm good at thinking through how to frame things so that they get the information they need. Not always, but often, and when it goes wrong I can usually figure out why and fix it.  I'm great at making matches between students and books. And I know that I teach a reading class that students routinely want to stay in even after they've passed the reading test, because they enjoy the reading we do (although they are usually reluctant readers, and we don't tend to read easy books). I have no idea, however, how their test scores compare to those of students in other reading GED classes, or if it takes them less or more time than others to pass.That would be all Arne Duncan would need to know.

 So many teachers who are far more experienced and far more talented than I am are now labelled as "bad" teachers, because they work under No Child Left Behind, and I don't. To the reformers, there's some deep down inherent badness in those teachers, as if they were monsters in disguise. They think "everyone knows" a bad teacher when they see one. Would they recognize me if they saw me? A proto-"bad" teacher? All it would take would be a different job or a different boss for me to become "failing."

This is really the great myth of this country, and it's the most damaging one I can possibly imagine, the idea that context matters not one whit when you're talking about "achievement" either of test scores or of a living wage.In the US, poverty doesn't shape students' performance (never mind that with the kind of support most middle class kids get, lots of my students would have made the honor roll). Working conditions don't change teachers' performance (even though I can promise you that most US teachers, given the working conditions of teachers in Finland, would be great teachers even if they're not now). Nothing about the nature of economy or government or racism or anything else dictates the success of anyone unless they're rich (in which case it's assumed that anything that goes wrong is outside of the individual's control). In America, when people of average and below income run into difficulties, they've just failed. And it's all their own fault-after all, isn't this the country where anyone can make it big?  Isn't it?