Accepting Less

I am aware that it is easy to generalize and make 'blanket' statements. I will therefore carefully construct the following: More often than not public school administrators are overpaid for under-performance while public school teachers are underpaid for over-performance.

Recently, I spoke with a secondary public school teacher who claims that high school test scores would improve nationwide if all schools implemented a no nonsense cell-phone policy. In his particular high school the administration has the following cell-phone policy, which is a rather prevalent policy>> 'Its left up to individual classroom teachers.' In other words, the school district, which has rules addressing athletic code violations, smoking and drugs, theft, bullying, fighting and academics leaves cell phone usage up to the individual classroom teacher. Those teachers who have strict rules are thus disliked by students and parents while teachers who permit cell phone use (checking out social media) are liked by students and parents. The administrators take a page out of Pontius Pilate play book.

Years ago, I asked a high school administrator why we no longer had sport pep assemblies when playoffs began. He said "Pep assemblies are problematic due to the disruptive trouble-making students." I said, "In other words we deprive the good, well-behaved students from fun things to accommodate the jerks?" Those were the years we were giving McDonald's free meal coupons to repeated truant students if they came to school for a week. My two daughters never got a McDonald's meal coupon...they had too good attendance records to qualify.