It’s the System That Fails the Teachers

Prof. Gregory Benford’s letter (Jan. 15) regarding the failure of the K-12 system to produce the kind of freshmen he feels are worthy of UC and the state colleges is typical of the ivory tower mentality. If the public schools in California are turning out less-than-competent graduates, it might have something to do with the conditions under which they must operate.

Unlike Dr. Benford’s situation, teachers at my school teach five classes a day with a six- minute break in between them, do not have access to teaching assistants, grade all their own papers, are never guaranteed a free lunch hour, must take whomever is sent to our class (regardless of ability or class size), have to counsel our own students (since we can no longer afford counselors), are running out of basic supplies, do not have enough textbooks for every student, must handle discipline problems quite foreign to a college classroom, and are facing a pay cut at the moment.

I’m not suggesting that college professors don’t spend a lot of time at their job, but research is not the same as teaching. I couldn’t agree more about the problems facing our public schools, but they are not a result of incompetent teaching as Benford implies. Of course there are some exceptions, as there are at the university level, but the vast majority of public school teachers are doing an amazing job under increasingly impossible demands.

CHRISTINE BARON

Fountain Valley High School