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Textbooks and Paperwork. Teachers are consulted about textbooks but rarely decide what books are finally bought. The textbook business is a $1.3 billion a year industry. Books are ordered by editorial committees and updated at the pleasure of the publisher to sell in as many school systems as possible. Since the late 1960s, according to Reading Expert Copperman, publishers have found that if a textbook is to sell really well, it must be written at a level "two years below the grade for which it is intended."
Paperwork done by teachers and administrators for district, state and national agencies proliferates geometrically. Though it all may be necessary to some distant bureaucrat—a most unlikely circumstance—when teachers comply they tend to feel like spindling, folding and mutilating all the forms. Paperwork wastes an enormous amount of teaching time. In Atlanta, for example, fourth-and fifth-grade teachers must evaluate their students on 60 separate skills. The children must be rated on everything from whether they can express "written ideas clearly" to whether they can apply "scarcity, opportunity cost and resource allocation to local, national and global situations."
Administrative Hassles. School procedures, the size and quality of classes, the textbooks and time allotted to study are all affected by government demands, including desegregation of classes, integration of faculty, even federal food programs. One way or another, teachers are bureaucratically hammered at by public health officials (about vaccinations, ringworm, cavities, malnutrition), by social workers and insurance companies (about driver education and broken windows), by juvenile police, civil liberties lawyers, Justice Department lawyers, even divorce lawyers (about child custody).
Mainstreaming as Nightmare. Since the passage of Public Law 94-142 in 1975, it has been federal policy that all handicapped children, insofar as possible, be "mainstreamed," i.e., educated in the same class with everyone else. The law is theoretically useful and just, as a means of avoiding unwarranted discrimination. But in practice it often puts an overwhelming strain on the teacher. "Mainstreaming is ludicrous," says Detroit Counselor Jeanne Latcham. "We have children whose needs are complicated: a child in the third grade who has already been in 16 schools, children who need love and attention and disrupt the classroom to get it. Ten percent of the students in Detroit's classrooms can't conform and can't learn. These children need a disproportionate amount of the teacher's time. It's a teacher's nightmare—she can't help them, but she never forgets them."