Fed-Up Teachers Are Leaving the District

* In response to Adrienne Mack’s article (Valley Commentary, July 18), let me add some sobering thoughts to the question she asks: “Who will want to teach?”

The question might well be: “Who will be left to teach?”--in the Los Angeles Unified School District, that is.

Good teachers are already leaving in droves--retiring early, finding alternate ways of earning a living or moving to areas where they hope to teach without the hassles and pressures of a failing bureaucracy. Teachers are burned out, fed up and disenchanted with a system too remote from the actual job of teaching.

They fear the worst--vouchers and subsidies to private schools. They know, too, that more than destroying the public school system, it will accentuate the division between the haves and have-nots in other areas of social life. They fear that private schools will bleed public schools of many of its best teachers, who could be guaranteed sanitized classes and selective students--no chronic truants, no gangbangers or troublemakers.

Students will either cut it or return to the trenches, the public schools.

They won’t have to deal with an overloaded bureaucracy that knows statistics, schedules and how to create endless committees and task forces, but little about the classroom and teachers who struggle to maintain quality education despite being ruled by the regulations we teachers call “the book.”

Teachers know too well they are only numbers in the scheme of things. They’ve learned that good teachers and good programs are expendable, that numbers and schedules rule the curriculum. They’ve learned that the classroom teacher is at the bottom of the pecking order and, as such, has little clout.

I personally have learned that the teacher who is totally committed and dedicated gets little in return for endless hours of volunteering. Teachers watch in horror and helplessness as they see the system destroying itself.

ELEANOR BRALVER

Sylmar