[twindman]

My comment about new teachers not working as hard - evidence - Used to be when driving by a local junior high (20 years ago), there were many cars in the lot until 5 pm and some on weekends. Now there are 3 or 4 at most. I suppose they could be taking work home but doubt it.

Other problems are the no child left behind crap. As a speech therapist, my wife used to pull kids out of the class room to evaluate and work with. Now that would 'stigmatize' the poor child. So she went to classrooms and gave general help but to the whole class. Wouldn't want other kids to know who maybe had a speech problem or language problem would we! And all the kids know anyway. And in order to get medicaid (?) money from feds, you had to document the schedule and results of every session with kids. And she had to do it for every kid she saw, when only a few were getting medicaid. So her workload doubled. But kids only got less therapy.