Garrett and Markus are both pillow-headed, book-larnin’ intellectuals too cerebral to realize what’s up, and should have their respective italics and bold privileges suspended. Just kidding. They are two of my very favorite people, and they have both made excellent points. Though I hesitate to step onto this field of battle at all for fear of getting nerd shrapnel embedded in my skull, it seems I am going to do it anyway.

For the sake of full disclosure, I am a teacher-in-training through Harvard’s UTEP program and am currently assisting a teacher in a Cambridge public elementary school, where I will be student-teaching in the spring. I have also been tutoring elementary and middle school-aged children as well as adult high school drop-outs living in the South Boston housing projects since my freshman year of high school, so the following comes as much from first-hand impressions and discussions with veteran educators as it does from charts and graphs. (I did sit beside Markus in The Politics of American Education and I can tell you that we made hardly any jokes in lecture.)

I firmly believe that teacher quality is exactly as important as Markus says it is and in my experience, teachers are generally as decent as Garrett says they are–but the fact remains that many teachers, especially in urban schools, are also underpaid, over-extended, and under-qualified. Underpaid is glaringly obvious. Teachers’ salaries are sickeningly low, and I have seldom heard anyone deny it. Over-extended is intuitive. Most people in a position to worry about such things agree that average class-sizes would ideally be smaller, but what many don’t take into account is that in most urban public school classrooms there at least one or two students with behavioral problems who are blatantly disruptive, let alone underachieving. Tack onto that maybe three more students with mild to severe learning disabilities plus an English Language Learner or two, and a teacher who would otherwise be quite competent is now able to accomplish little more than crowd-control and basic coverage of her daily syllabus.

Under-qualified is not meant as an insult, but to describe the reality that most teachers are not equipped to deal with the intense stratification in skill level present in most urban classrooms (where ADD is inescapable and is only the tip of the iceberg). Lucky schools have an adequate number of specialists who work one-on-one with children who need the support, but there is seldom the budget to focus on every child who should probably qualify (If you’re ever in the mood to be truly disgusted by the complete lack of correspondence between an American job’s importance and its pay rate, ask one of these teachers how much she makes). There is also limited funding available for students who need after-school tutoring. In Massachusetts, only those who fail the MCAS are eligible to have their tutoring funded. Many teachers consequently volunteer their personal time, tutoring students before and after school even though they may have to hold down a second job just to live in reasonable comfort.

Factor back into all of this Garrett’s “certain types of children,” those children the current system most consistently fails to serve. We all know who they are. They come from low-income households, extremely likely to be headed by single parents desperately trying to make ends meet in urban areas with increasingly ridiculous costs of living. They are all too often minorities, immigrants, or the children of immigrants. They are the kids who are likely to be sitting in homeroom not having had a decent breakfast, and maybe no decent dinner before that. They may be homeless, or effectively so. Their parents may be in and out of jail. They may be basically responsible for caring for their younger siblings. There may be no adult in their home who speaks English well enough to help them with homework. The problem is not that these students grow up feeling that the education system is antithetical to their cultural values, the problem is that their lives are in chaos and their educational experiences only vaguely less so.

Schools need to be level playing fields that neutralize rather than compound whatever turmoil students are facing at home. In my opinion, the single best way to achieve that end is to ensure that teachers and counselors are more numerous and better equipped to meet the needs of every student. While I hardly consider the TEP program to be a silver bullet, public education is clearly a problem at which an enormous amount of money needs to be thrown. Teachers should be paid vastly more across the boards, and those willing to spend additional time tutoring and developing individualized learning plans for struggling students should be compensated for that highly-skilled work. Teachers should also be able to obtain funding to constantly continue their own education in their field so that they can effectively teach to each child. Counselors and specialists should be more widely available to the students who need their assistance, school breakfast programs should be expanded, quality preschool programs should be more widely available, and the list goes on and on.

The moral of the story is that massive change is necessary, and that it is going to be massively expensive. I doubt that putting thwarted prospective i-bankers in classrooms will change the system overnight, but I’ve heard worse ideas than increasing pay in order to make the teaching profession more competitive, and I know that there is no more important service a young adult can render her country than making more than a flimsy two-year commitment to education.