Teachers are government. Most of them do a good job.
Ditto with police officers, fire fighters, military, etc. etc. etc.
Care to recalculate your "half decent" 25% number?
Your post was to CD, but I'll add my $0.02.
I spent 20 years in the U.S. Army and I just finished my 21st year in public education.
I'll stick with my "50% on a good day."
At least the armed forces have to demonstrate every once in a while that they can fight a war (although lately they haven't had to demonstrate that they can win one).
Public schools seldom have to demonstrate that they are doing a good job in anything other than athletics. When the voters get fed up, and statewide testing is imposed to see how the schools are doing, the public education lobby--made up of the district superintendents, school boards, teachers' unions, and the state education department--work to undermine confidence in the testing to the point that the testing regimen is soon diluted into meaninglessness.
In addition, I have never seen official letters, policies, announcements, etc., so illiterate as the ones I have seen in public education. Here's the tiniest of examples. Our school busses carry the inspirational exhortation, "GO [TEAM NAME]!" With no comma after "GO." I have pointed this out, but even the English teachers don't care, much less the administration. So our busses drive around town advertising the fact that we don't care enough to properly punctuate a simple 3-word imperative.
Of course, I must concede that Disney did something like this with
Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
For reference, I teach in a high school that is in the top 5% of public high schools in the state. Statewide, there are 100 students each year named to the Academic All-State list. We have three of those students this year, and that's a normal number for us. In my 13 years at this school, we have had between two and four every year.
