Voici les pistes de réponse offertes dans l'article:
1. Teacher training is pathetically inadequate.
My own training was a hodgepodge of useless state-mandated courses; in two years, I took exactly one useful class. The rest of the classes were, to be blunt, bureaucratic bullshit along with some helpful hints about how to navigate the byzantine, mind-numbing credentialing system.
2. Teachers get little or no support.
Once you’re in the classroom, you’re pretty much on your own. You can beg a colleague to come observe you and comment, but colleagues are often so swamped themselves that they just don’t have time. Administrators are sometimes willing to help, but they’re also usually too busy—except when they’re evaluating you on the rubric of mandated standards, which may or may not be useful to you. (...) Teachers throughout their careers need a mentor who can remind them of why they’re teaching in the first place and help them work toward their dream.
3. Teachers do not have the resources to do a good job.
And by “resources,” I do not mean state-of-the-art technology. I mean having enough space for the kids in your room—enough desks, enough books, a library so that they can read. If they need to use a computer, the computer needs to have keys. (I am not making this up—it happens a lot, alas.) If they need to use the internet, the school needs a functional wireless connection. If you are expected to grade your students regularly and those gradebooks are online, your online gradebook needs to work. In a high-poverty community where many kids are facing day-in-day-out trauma from chaotic living conditions, we need counselors and administrators who can help traumatized students who are acting out and not able to stay in class.
You need to have paper to make photocopies of all the books you can’t afford to buy, and time to make those photocopies. Let’s face it, if we cared at all about teachers’ work, we would have teaching assistants to do the mind-numbing hour or more of photocopying per day. “Would a lawyer put up with this shit?” a former teacher recently asked me, referring to the conditions that had caused him to quit after two years. We need to start by creating conditions in which it’s even possible to do a good job as a teacher. Isn’t it insane that this idea should be up for discussion at all?