Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths about teachers and teaching out there, some of it is the usual bash anything that is a public institution, the teacher as a dimwitted bureaucrat simply putting in their time and so forth. There are legitimate beefs with teachers and some of the rules, it is very, very hard to remove bad teachers from the classroom, at least in public schools, the process to remove a teacher is so long and convoluted, no one bothers, but it isn’t as bad as some will make it to be, either, it is very different in big city districts than it is in more suburban ones. And yes, my take on the teacher’s unions is they often do seem more concerned about the teachers than the students and yes, will protect mediocrity (doesn’t just apply to teacher’s unions, my problem with almost every union is that they totally forgot what union founders like Reuther said and did, I generally am not anti union, but I am anti stupidity and protecting it).
It is okay to talk about individual bad teachers, but it is also wrong to say all are bad. My experience with public school music teachers (excuse me, ‘music educators’ ) has not been all that positive, many of them have outsize egos and are frustrated performers who ‘settled’ into being a music teacher in the schools, but there are some really good ones that I can only applaud. I had some good teachers in school, who appreciated kids with minds of their own, I also had a lot who were IMO timeservers and we angry with anything that threw a monkey wrench into their carefully laid plans, but I remember the good ones a lot more, and did go back and thank them. To me bashing is the counterpart to the NEA commercials where all teachers are these smiling, wonderful people encouraging their kids, both are complete fictions, the truth lies in between. And it also doesn’t let parents off the hook, either, the same taxpaying parents who will complain about teachers, are the same people who will pressure the school to cut G and T programs, get rid of experienced teachers to save money, and will then want to float a 20 million dollar bond issue to redo the athletic facilities and build a state of the art field house, or the parents who either are the helicopter parent wanting everything for their class of 2025 Harvard graduate to be, or the parent of a kid who is slacking off who blame the teacher when the kid doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t study, causes problems in school, but they live in the river denial…