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Popular opinion holds that unions protect bad teachers at the cost of poor kids' education. If only we teachers would stop being lazy and complacent, American students would catch up to their peers abroad, graduate from high school and college, and dominate the global marketplace. Fortunately, there's a panacea for all these problems: charter schools. Unfortunately, the panacea is based on myths.

A commentary discusses the following four myths concerning education in the US: (1) the big problem with US education is the teachers; (2) charter schools are better than regular public schools; (3) unions stand in the way of all that is good in education because they keep unfit teacher in their jobs; and (4) tenure makes it so that teachers become complacent, because it's difficult to fire them and they have no motivation to improve. Adapted from the source document.

Edward wasn't doing his work. I had given the twelfth graders in my summer school class the following writing assignment: "Have you ever done something that you regretted or that made you feel guilty?" We were reading John Knowles's A Separate Peace, and I kept thinking that if ever there were a book more disconnected from my inner-city students' lives than this tale of overprivileged youngsters at a private prep school, I had yet to see it. Looking at Edward, a young, black seventeen-year-old who would remove his contraband doo-rag whenever his unfailingly accurate sixth sense told him that the deans were approaching the classroom (and put it back on as soon as they left), I knew I was in trouble. His paper was blank, his pen lay on his desk untouched. Instead of writing, he was making exaggerated yawning and stretching noises.

The author reflects on her experience as a young white teacher trying to connect with the students at a tough Bronx high school. Adapted from the source document.