Fight the Fights That Need Fighting

I was speaking to one of my teachers the other day and she shared a conversation she had with a parent of one her students. The parent’s child was failing the class and was seeking out ways in which her son could pass. When the teacher could not provide a quick fix for her, she insisted that she was going to call the principal and the superintendent. She told her that there was a law called No Child Left Behind and that this particular teacher was indeed leaving this child behind.

This made me laugh. Not because she was a little over the top but because I realized how little people know about the state of my profession. No Child Left Behind has a catchy title indeed, but the law is more about testing than teaching. People do not understand what people in my line of work put up with. Not be selfish I began thinking about what other professions deal with.
I know we have all watched the news and became frustrated when a criminal only gets probation for a crime we all know they committed. What about the story I heard the other night about the number of unnecessary medical tests that doctors seem to be performing. The answers to these questions almost always falls on the law or lawsuits.

The fact is that law is written by mostly professional politicians that are not even close to the issues of what many professionals face. They generally have no perspective on what happens “on the ground”. I often tell people that school law is usually written by people who have haven’t been in a school since they went to school and sometimes that was a private school. I’m sure doctors and police officers feel the same way.

Case law (lawsuits) causes people to not act or overact in fear of being sued. This has a tremendous chilling effect on any profession. Nobody wants to invite the possibility of huge financial loss when they could have taken an approach that was more aggressive for the situation. Don’t get me wrong, case law provides a set of rules that help protect the individual but you cant just fight the fights you can win. Fight the fights that need fighting.