10 Things That Prevent Teachers from Doing Their Jobs

By Fred FletchercloseAuthor: Fred Fletcher Name: Fred Fletcher
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About: In addition to law enforcement and education, Fred has dabbled in technical and creative writing; he has been published under a number of different pseudonyms. He holds a Master of Science in Public Health, collects old typewriters, invents board games, and lives on a 160-acre old farm where he spends his time writing, helping out charities, and plotting out his future adventures.See Authors Posts (2)
 

9.  Lack of accountability for student misbehavior.  Right now,
students do not face the types of punishments and administrative
actions they should be facing when they misbehave in classrooms.  Part
of it has to do with schools not wanting to report disciplinary
disruptions (so they do not lose much-needed support from the states
and Uncle Sam) or teachers not wanting to be labeled as “ineffective”
just for doing their jobs, which is difficult to do when one is not
being allowed to maintain control of one’s classes.

Students these days, who are very “street-wise” (a term that is,
coincidentally, used to refer to convicted felons and criminally-
minded teenagers), knowing that they can use to their advantage the
discrepancies and weaknesses of the system partly enumerated in this
article, are manipulating things in their favour.  Not only does this
negatively affect a teacher’ ability to do their job, but it also,
ironically, prevents the students being able to learn as easily and
efficiently as possible.  Knowing this, fixing this and other problems
should be done not only to help teachers do an “impassable mission”
job but so that students who want to learn can learn, even if this
means expelling the thousands of behavioral young hooligans presently
compromising our whole educational system.

10.  Fewer and continuously deteriorating incentives for becoming and being a teacher.  Somewhat because of the state of the economy, some incentives that had been implemented in order to attract more people into teaching are slowly being taken away; more seriously, the perks that have been put there in order to reward teachers in general (for doing one of the most difficult jobs in this country), are also being either removed or weakened.  Some counties, for example, are getting rid of substitute teachers.  This is one huge mistake.  When schools cannot call sub teachers to come in (when teachers have to miss work days), they have to cover for other teachers.  Teachers are being overworked as it is.  Other moves include reducing teacher pay, number of paid hours worked, and medical coverage.  This is only removing incentives to become a teacher; it is also motivating many good teachers to leave the profession.  This will have long-term repercussions that may take decades to fix—assuming that the system can be “fixed” at all!