Ella Ricker was sitting in her elementary school orchestra class when she first considered a career in teaching. Her orchestra teachers at Lincoln Public Schools made learning to play music so fun, she wanted to share that joy with others.
As a teacher, Ricker said, seeing her students excited to play their instruments and perform in school concerts was her favorite part of the job. But it was also only one part of a growing list of responsibilities in a profession in which she said a good work-life balance had become unattainable.
So, after nine years with LPS and 14 years into her career, Ricker left the profession last May — she would have to rely on income from pet-sitting until she could find something else. But a year later, she now watches people’s pets for a living, sometimes earning more than she did as a teacher, she said.
Ricker’s decision to quit teaching is an increasingly common one in Nebraska.
As of May 15, only 27,840 of the nearly 45,500 Nebraskans licensed to teach here have actually worked as teachers in the state this school year, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis of state Department of Education data.
That means roughly 40% of certified Nebraska teachers aren’t teaching in public or private classrooms this academic year.
That number includes the normal churn, like retirements and teachers moving out of state or up into administrative roles, the department said. But it also includes many like Ricker — teachers who have exited the profession.
The Flatwater Free Press spoke with 13 former teachers who have left teaching. Many cited unsustainable, high-stress work environments with frequent expectations for unpaid labor and limited schedule flexibility. They noted shrinking student attention spans, additional learning requirements and feeling unsupported by parents or school leaders.
The teachers who spoke to Flatwater have retired early or left teaching for a range of careers in higher education, business, therapy, self-employment, healthcare and/or nonprofit work. Most said they would not return to the profession or would need to see major changes before doing so.
“Teaching is a relatively high-quit, turnover line of work,” said Richard Ingersoll, a former high school teacher himself who is now a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
“The conventional wisdom is long that we have these shortages, that we don’t produce enough people … and then you look at the data and you find that, well, there’s actually a whole lot of people out there,” Ingersoll said. “The problem isn’t so much that we don’t produce enough (teachers), it’s that we lose too many.
“The issue is, well, can we keep them in the first place? But also, what does it take to get them to come back in?”
Ricker’s story mirrors others’ who say they had little choice but to leave the field. She frequently had to stay past school hours to attend mandatory meetings and trainings, she told Flatwater, without acknowledgment in her paycheck or from administrators for the extra time. That lack of recognition and support, she said, coupled with years of rising work demands, led her to quit after the 2025 school year.
“Every year I was teaching, they kept putting on more and more, like, things that we needed to do, more requirements we needed to meet,” Ricker said. “But we didn’t have any more time to do them.”
She knows other teachers who have left after feeling similarly burnt out. Many, she thinks, were dedicated educators who would worry about their students after school, then spend their evenings preparing for the next day’s classes.
“But there’s nothing to show for it at the end of the day, you know?” Ricker said.
***
Nebraska’s teacher shortage has shown improvement, the state reported in its most recent teacher vacancy survey. Unfilled positions, classified as any left vacant or filled by someone other than a fully qualified teacher, dropped by around 669 to 489 from last school year to this year — a marked improvement from the over 900 reported in the 2023-2024 school year. The number of fully vacant positions has also decreased annually since.
Teacher vacancies by county
But these survey reports can be imperfect indicators of how the state is actually trending, said Tim Royers, president of the state teachers union, the Nebraska State Education Association. He said the surveys are structured around posted positions that go unfilled.
“But I know that there’s districts across the state that have simply not posted a position because they know they won’t fill it, right?” Royers said. “So that doesn’t show up on that report.”
The problem is a national one. A 2025 survey from researchers at the University of Missouri found that 78% of teachers surveyed have considered or plan to leave teaching since the 2020 pandemic. Ingersoll said the profession has become more taxing as the demands on teachers have increased. “But, the time, the resources, the tools, the autonomy to meet the demands” haven’t. Teachers, he said, rarely get a say into the key decisions that impact their job.
Cindy Copich, a Nebraska educator and researcher, has been trying for years to get school administrators to recognize that the lack of available teachers is a teacher retention issue rather than a teacher shortage. She said school leaders must move past conducting annual climate and culture surveys and focus instead on reducing teacher stress and providing them greater autonomy.
Teaching became notably less enjoyable after the pandemic, said Josh West, who taught math for seven years at Lincoln and Elkhorn Public Schools. Fewer students seemed to apply themselves, he said, and there was little support from the district to hold students accountable for their own progress in school.
He constantly worried over his students’ success, to the point where it wore on his mental health. He felt he was failing as an educator.
“I felt like I wasn’t making much of a difference,” West said. “It was making me anxious. I was not happy. I was emotionally exhausted at the end of every day.”
After the 2023 school year, West quit teaching with no backup plan. It was a big risk, he said, and it wasn’t easy to leave the job for which he’d obtained a degree or his position as a track and cross-country coach.
“You feel like you’ve gave up almost a decade of your life at that point,” West said. “You’ve put in all these years, and you’re almost starting from scratch again. And it was a scary feeling, not knowing for sure where I’d even be working.”
The hardest part for West: The feeling that he was giving up on his students. Those relationships are what he misses most about teaching, he said. Everything else made it easy to leave — the pressures from parents and principals, the feeling of running on empty with little time for life beyond work.
West eventually found a job with the state Department of Health and Human Services, where he took a small pay cut. He said it was worth it. Now, West works as an analyst for an insurance company, making more money than he ever did as a teacher, he said.
Teachers will leave the profession with no guarantee of a raise, with many taking a pay cut, said Gema Zamarro, a professor in education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. They will sacrifice pay for a chance at a more manageable job, she said.
After the 2024 school year, Kate Geiger left her job as a special education teacher at a public elementary school in Omaha for an office manager position at an engineering firm. She also works at an Omaha yoga studio, something she has done since she began teaching.
The career change has improved her schedule, mental health and salary.
“I’ve never cried at work,” she said. “I get lunch every single day if I want it.”
She recalls a moment in teaching where she wondered if she would have the time to attend a family member’s funeral. “That’s silly, right? But it was just, I mean, it was so hard to be able to do that stuff,” she said, especially when many students relied on her for individualized support.
People don’t realize the extent to which teachers’ workloads have grown in the last decade, said Kathy Poehling, the president of the Omaha Education Association, a local affiliate of the state teachers union. There is greater stress on teachers, she said, especially those in special education. They have more paperwork and complex regulations to navigate.
Geiger agrees the job changed in her eight years as a special education teacher. She said she loved her school and, for the majority of her career, enjoyed going to work. But her last year of teaching was so stressful, she said, that she was literally ripping strands of hair from her head.
“I struggled moving out of education because I really felt like I was making a difference in the world,” Geiger said. “But I was just like, I think, at my breaking point.”
Special education jobs continue to be the most difficult for schools to fill, topping the list for unfilled teacher positions reported by the state since at least 2009. Other specialized areas, including foreign language, music and advanced math and science, trend high on that list — industries that seek these skills tend to offer more competitive pay and benefits than teaching.
Many of the teachers with whom Flatwater spoke said they didn’t pursue the job for the pay, but cited money as another factor in their decision to leave.
According to a National Education Association report published in April, Nebraska’s starting salary for teachers, around $40,000, ranks second to last nationwide, above only Montana.
“I knew teaching wasn’t the best-paying job going into teaching,” West said. “But when you have all this other extra stuff on top of that, it’s just one other thing to add on the list of like, ‘Wait, why am I not doing another job that’s gonna pay more and will probably be better for my mental health?’”
***
Multiple superintendents from public schools across the state said in emails and interviews with the Flatwater Free Press that they have been able to fill teacher vacancies in recent years, but that it has been challenging. The number of applicants continues to decline, they say — or there are none at all.
Royers said one of the best ways to tackle this shortfall is to focus hiring efforts on the overlooked group of people already certified to teach in Nebraska, by addressing the concerns that drove them out of the profession in the first place.
“We’re ignoring what we (as an organization) feel is a group that is job ready, has the skills, clearly, at one point, had the passion,” Royers said.
Ricker said she would have to see more support before ever considering a return to teaching orchestra. She’s still debating whether to renew her teaching certificate, which would expire in July.
It was hard to give up her health insurance as a teacher, she said, but the career switch has given her the ability to enjoy more of life. She can travel or watch events like the recent lunar flyby from home. “I’ve definitely noticed I’m happier and more calm this year,” she said.
Kael Welch, who taught for five years at Millard Public Schools and another five at Phoenix Academy in Omaha, said she thinks younger professionals have become better at prioritizing a work-life balance, whereas she never felt like she had that choice.
“I just thought it was expected of me to take all this work home and spend my own money in the classroom and spend my own free time, you know, doing things for work,” she said.
Welch’s sister, Erin Lane, taught fourth grade at Blair Community Schools for 15 years.
She retired early in 2022, a year after the school had returned to in-person learning after the coronavirus pandemic. But many of the responsibilities asked of teachers during the pandemic continued once it ended, she said, due to new technology and cleanliness requirements. Student behaviors also grew more disruptive and difficult to manage, she said.
Yet Lane said she loved when she would help a student learn something. She can still recall little details about her former students, like what they liked to read, and students whose graduation parties she’s now invited to. That was the magic in teaching, she said, when she knew she had made a lasting impact on a student.
Now, Lane said, those rewarding moments are too easily forgotten. “It feels like that’s kind of been beaten out of us,” she said. “And, if you don’t have that, then you’re really missing what teachers used to love about teaching.”
25 Comments
Years ago I saw an interview of some of Japan’s top high school students who were graduating. The reporter asked one young lady about her plans and she replied she had applied to a top teaching university. Her dream was to become a teacher. Her decision was based on the value and respect Japanese society placed on those who teach their young. Teaching was considered a highly valuable position. The reporter then asked her what her “plan B” was if she was not admitted to the teaching college. Her response: “Well, I will probably just go to medical school.” As a state and a nation, we throw insane amounts of money into sports at every level. How much value do we place on education and those responsible for teaching our children? If you want to attract and keep the brightest and best you have to compensate them for their value to our society. And, those who teach our young deserve our utmost respect. You teach your kids to respect and listen to their coach…do you do the same for their teachers?
Your argument is tempting, but in many ways sophistic and reliant on whataboutisms.
You drop one sentence in the middle of several other marginally related ideas on the subject of sports. I would agree with you to a limited degree, as I vehemently hate sports myself, but the argument is fallacious. Nothing says that the money spent on sports is being stolen from education, though teachers often try to present this narrative that any money spent on anything other than them is somehow a theft from education.
Comparing a small island nation to a world super-power is disingenuous. For whatever alleged advantages their culture may have, there are also ample disadvantages to choose from, and it’s unlikely that their attitudes would ever directly translate to our society with the same outcomes. Your anecdote isn’t really a fair comparison, though it was designed to manipulate the emotions of the reader quite well.
So to answer your question: I would prefer that my kids learn to think for themselves, not assume that a government employee is an ethical standard bearer.
You know another interesting anecdote about Japan is the discussion of the topic found in 1990s literature such as the novel Rising Sun by Michael Crichton.
After the second world war, Imperial Japan was forced to confront the reality that their ancient hierarchical culture was humiliated by a relatively young military power. Rather than accept defeat and fade into ignominy, they hired American advisors to come to their country and teach them about economics and modern industrialization methods. Japan learned from their defeat and they learned from their enemies. But after the learning was done, the foreigners were sent home and Japanese culture turned inward again. (Then they flooded the market with cheap electronics, because apparently that was part of what we taught them to do, but perhaps that is another story.)
Consider the difference between the way the Japanese treat their own teachers (as you pointed out in your comment) versus the way they treat American teachers who come to their country to teach foreign languages. They refer to their own teachers as “Sensei” and view them as both educational and moral leaders. But foreigners who come to the country to teach are not treated with the same respect, instead being seen as more of a cultural exchange student themselves.
None of which answers the question of if acting more like Japanese people would make our country a better place. Crichton died in 2008 before anyone realized that Japan was suffering from a catastrophically low birth rate and population crisis. Thats part of the problem with anecdotal arguments, as they usually miss the point entirely.
Well, we can say a few good things for this article. It covers an at least marginally relevant issue of public interest, so it might qualify as news. And the main thrust of the article is an analysis of data taken from a government agency, so the point being made isn’t entirely moot or exclusively political propaganda. (Not EXCLUSIVELY so, anyway…)
But I can see at least three major problems with the claim being made here:
#1) The article admits to a major asterisk in their data, which is that it includes “normal churn, like retirements and teachers moving out of state or up into administrative roles…” What that means is that they don’t actually know if “40%” of teachers have completely quit the profession. Some of them might have become school administrators, may have moved to another state to teach there, or may be pursuing other educational paths that exist outside the scope of government oversight.
#2) As is all too often the case with Flatwater articles, there is an immediate and heavy reliance on emotionally gripping anecdotal evidence. They desperately want us to hear about the ex-teacher who became a pet sitter and the one that does yoga now. But are these cherry picked examples actually representative of the whole “40%” the article is about?
#3) There is still an inherent presupposition here that public education is an inevitable necessity and that people walking away from it is a problem. I would argue that the exact reason why being a teacher is so horrible and why teachers are leaving is because public education is indeed a pointless exercise. Rather than asking counter-productive questions about how to lure the victims back into the machine, maybe we need to acknowledge that the victims were right to escape to something better?
For thousands of years, human civilization operated successfully without public education. Empires rose, formidable monuments were erected and books of philosophy were written. How did they do that without public school?
You suggest there something better than public education. But you don’t state what that alternative is. None? Homeschooling? Private education? Every one of those options leave kids behind and are subject to widely variable quality, if we can even get outcomes data from them. And don’t think for a minute that teachers under any of those alternative circumstances don’t face the same challenges – lack of support, poor pay, difficult working conditions, personal sacrifices. Improve those conditions and teachers will return.
Your argument is guilty of the same problems you accuse me of, in a near literal pot calling the kettle black scenario. Not only were you vague, you blatantly misrepresent the alleged advantages of public school.
Public schooling isn’t a particularly consistent system, nor does it provide good outcomes. We regularly receive news articles (not from Flatwater of course, but from various other more legitimate news sources) about how public school children can’t read at their assigned grade level. Add on top of that the bullying, teachers sleeping with their students, children being encouraged to change their gender, and many of these problems being hidden from the parents. I’m stunned (in a sarcastic manner) that anyone would try to defend a system like that.
So I suppose that I didn’t bother to specify what would be better because just about ANYTHING (or nothing, as you say) would be better. Of course, I think if a well educated person (as in, not from public school) read my post, they would find that what I was implying was fairly obvious.
I went to a private religious school, have multiple advance degrees and did quite well, yet, your argument still makes no sense. So it’s clearly not about the education a person receives in public versus private education. That’s just cover for ignorance. There a so many smart people out there who were educated in many different settings, both public and private. Being contemptuous and derogatory in an attempt to look smart is not a good look and it certainly doesn’t lend any credence to your argument.
You accuse me of being “contemptuous” and trying to “look smart” but you didn’t actually provide anything that refutes my argument other than childish insults and your own anecdotal claims. I’m not sure you know what being “contemptuous” means or if I’m the one trying to “look smart” here…
I think you downplay the benefits public school has had on our society. It’s not perfect, it’s has problems, but it was once the envy of the world and it still churns out more of our doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals than any other system, not to mention prepares kids to join the military and defend our nation.
Thats a fairly shallow take, Michael.
The reason public school appears to produce so many of those doctors, lawyers, etc, is because literally almost everyone attended public school, particularly in a place like Nebraska where there often isn’t any other available educational option other than a snooty Catholic school. But how do you know those people weren’t already intelligent enough and capable of learning on their own that they would have still become doctors or lawyers anyway? Can you prove that those individuals wouldn’t have been equally successful if they had been homeschooled or attended a privately run school of reasonable cost?
And invoking the military angle isn’t likely to sway me. I served my time in the military too, and they didn’t seem to mind that I had dropped out of school and gotten a GED. But again, I don’t like anecdotes, I like evidence.
This is a crazy statement to read as a public school teacher and I hope this is an attempt to get engagement and not your true beliefs.
“public education is indeed a pointless exercise”
“For thousands of years, human civilization operated successfully without public education. Empires rose, formidable monuments were erected and books of philosophy were written. How did they do that without public school?”
I guess there is a disconnect with what you may want in society. As a teacher I want my students to accomplish great things, but I don’t expect each of them to create a huge societal impact (maybe some). However, I do want each and every one of them to find happiness and fulfillment. In the human civilizations you talk about accomplishing great things, these were often times done by rich entitled people on the backs of enslaved people or poor people who had no way to escape being a cog in a machine. Public education is an opportunity for everyone to explore interests, improve themselves, and develop the next members of society. I will let you know that I don’t feel like a “victim trying to escape to something better” but feel lucky to have a job where I feel fulfilled and appreciated.
Overall, I found the article pretty unrelatable. Education definitely has its flaws and drawbacks but I think it is a great career path. I am only a 4th year teacher and while I don’t plan on being a teacher my entire life I enjoy it a lot right now.
Your status as a public school teacher implies a high level of bias in this matter, so I suppose it’s good that you disclosed that up front.
The allegation that I want certain things is a misrepresentation of my statement known as as Strawman fallacy.
Which I suppose leaves your only remaining argument as the suggestion that the past achievements I alluded to were simply the work of rich people who benefited from the labor of poor people unable to escape from their conditions. That may be true, but is it not also true now? And can you claim that public school has done anything to change it?
Mark Zuckerberg just fired thousands of people at his company, then transferred many others to jobs where their only role is training AI tools which will monitor their activity until the AI learns how to replace them. I wonder how many of those workers were public school educated?
They didn’t.
So the history books which they use in public school are lying about human history?
Man, that’s an ironic way to make your point.
I think this argument confuses “civilization produced impressive things” with “most people had access to education.”
Yes, empires built monuments and philosophers wrote books before modern public education. But who was actually educated? Mostly elites, clergy, scribes, and ruling classes. The average poor person often received little formal education, if any.
A society can produce great architecture and philosophy while still excluding most people from education and civic participation. Monuments and famous books are not proof that education was widely accessible. They often reflect the achievements of a small educated class.
Before mass public education, literacy rates were extremely low. Around 1820, only about 12% of the world could read. Today global literacy is around 87%, largely because education became accessible beyond the wealthy elite.
To me, the real question isn’t whether civilization can exist without public education. Of course it can. The question is who gets access to knowledge and opportunity without it.
A few philosophers writing books does not prove the system worked for everyone. It proves a select few had access to education. Public education, despite its flaws, is an attempt to make education less dependent on being born wealthy.
I would simply respond that your argument confuses what I said in the same way you accused me of confusing two things. I didn’t mean to say what you apparently wanted to respond to, I said exactly what I meant to say. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what a Strawman Fallacy is.
Furthermore, I find it quite presumptuous to assume that the mere existence of public school makes education available, and even more presumptuous to assert that is even a net benefit to society. Public school suffers from terrible outcomes, because even if the students aren’t bullied, sexually assaulted or killed in a mass shooting, a surprising number graduate without being able to read or do basic math at an adult level.
Plus, this article itself is a further item of evidence that public school fails in many ways. These teachers complain about the ever increasing demands of the government bureaucracy, yet they saw so few rewards that they decided to quit their jobs. That is the system you seem determined to defend, which is mystifying.
And at the end, your argument is basically the same as one made above, suggesting that the mere existence of public school is a matter of social justice to help the poor finally get a cut of the pie from the wealthy. But can you really say that goal has been accomplished? Do wealthy people not continue to live in gated communities and send their kids to private schools? And meanwhile your kid is lucky if he learns to read before someone does something horrible to him in public school.
Thank you for your article. Ahhh, I hope your respondents volunteer at their local public school, too. The students love it!
What if the volunteers are treated as poorly as the teachers?
According to Mark Twain there are three kinds of lies and one of those is statistics. Descriptive statistics are frequently bent to support a causation narrative when they are clearly not sufficient to do so. In this article, a descriptive statistic, the percentage of certified teachers who are actually teaching, is used to imply that there must be a systemic reason that teachers are not participating in the profession. The article then uses anecdotal experiences from an insufficient sample size to claim the reasons provided in these anecdotal experiences are the cause of the descriptive statistic. This is not good social science and is unlikely to lead to rational conclusions that are capable of finding real solutions.
If the descriptive statistics cited in this article are looked at more closely, we see that nearly half of all current vacancies are in Douglas County. The question the article should ask is why nearly half of all teaching vacancies occur in Douglas County. Most counties in Nebraska experienced a mere handful of vacancies.
The title of the article gives a false impression of a statewide issue, that vacancies are caused by teachers actually quitting teaching, and that the cause is currently known.
While this is only one of several problems with the article, I agree completely.
However, I think we should also point out that deceiving the reader about the meaning of a statistic, intentionally omitting essential contextual information and then relying on limited anecdotal accounts to spin an emotionally gripping tale are basically the key tenets of the Flatwater style guide. Nearly every article they publish does this to one degree or another. This just happens to be one of the few cases that someone other than me has taken notice.
There was a recent article published by Flatwater talking about voting rights. Even though Congress has not passed the changes that Trump is asking for and the upcoming election is basically unaffected at this point in time, Flatwater still desperately wanted to write a scare piece on how everyone is going to lose their right to vote. So after a brief cursory admission that nothing was happening, the author wrote an entire article of anecdotal stories about how he talked to college students at UNL who hate Trump and that this proves voting rights are in danger.
I really encourage people to take notice of how often Flatwater pulls this kind of stunt. Very little of their “news” is anything other than cleverly disguised opinion pieces.
“I really encourage people to take notice of how often Flatwater pulls this kind of stunt. Very little of their “news” is anything other than cleverly disguised opinion pieces.”
I’ve noticed this slant from the very beginning. And, it’s getting less & less clever and less and less disguised as one learns to dissect FFP pieces.
Yeah it would be more helpful to provide YoY context. If the number was climbing from 30% to 40% or whatever it may be more compelling. We don’t even know what the national rates are, let alone if this is a growing or shrinking problem here in NE.
“She knows other teachers who have left after feeling similarly burnt out”
Being “burned out” requires that there was an antecedent fire. Too many public school teachers never had the fire for the profession to begin with.
This is just another “the sky is falling” alarmism for which the FFP is becoming well known .
What percentage of educators are needed in private vs public schools? The last 8 years , at least, have seen our state attack public school education which relates to the educators and families, especially in rural Nebraska. It has been discouraging to have leaders stereotype all our schools as failures, especially when we welcome all our Nebraska children and end a career with A leader would look at the big picture for all our kids, not just the mom and dad want choice. This platform is destroying education across our nation.
I find it difficult to respond to this post, because it was difficult to even follow your line of thinking. What you wrote was very disjointed and it isn’t clear how your ideas and claims fit together, nor if any evidence exists to support them.
“What percentage of educators are needed in private vs public schools?”
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I also do not know how the answer would be relevant to your argument if I did know it. Your post provides no context for what this means or how it is connected to the other ideas cited in your post.
“The last 8 years , at least, have seen our state attack public school education…”
How do you define “attack” in this context? Public education receives an enormous quantity of funding from public tax dollars and between the teacher’s unions, political activist groups and people like yourself who treat public education as sacrosanct, many political figures are terrified to take on the public education system. In my eyes the public education system is a behemoth force in politics and virtually impossible to challenge, so I doubt any “attack” you are referring to actually poses much of a threat.
“…especially in rural Nebraska.”
As user Charles Chamberlin pointed out in his comments above, many of the doom and gloom facts cited in this article are heavily slanted toward urban counties like Douglas. So how does your concern about rural areas fit into the discussion?
“…we welcome all our Nebraska children…”
I could provide the rebuttal that one reason that public schools welcome “all” children is that public school funding levels are often directly tied to enrollment numbers, meaning that every child is viewed as another paycheck (or conversely, every child that chooses an alternative option is viewed as “stealing” funding from public school). Or alternatively I could point out that one of the criticisms of public schools is that they frequently refuse transfer requests because they view certain students as requiring too many special needs services that the school claims to be unable to provide. Does that still qualify as welcoming “all” students when some are intentionally turned away because they are too much work?
“A leader would look at the big picture for all our kids, not just the mom and dad want choice.”
Why would “a leader” do what you say? Merely stating your opinion out loud does not make it true, without some sort of supporting arguments or facts to support the claim you are making. I would also refute your argument by pointing out that parents are the first and foremost caregivers of their children, parents have a responsibility to make the best choices that result in the best outcomes for children, and parents have been making such choices for thousands of years before public education existed. Why should the opinion of public sector employees override the long-standing responsibility of the parents? The exact opposite appears to be true according to recent supreme court rulings such as Mahmoud v. Taylor, which respected the rights of parents to opt-out of classes deemed mandatory by public educators.
“This platform is destroying education across our nation.”
What “platform” is doing this and how is it doing it? Nothing you said supported such a sweeping conclusion (or even provided much clarity as to what conclusion is being reached here).
In a summary response to your post, I feel strongly that I must reassert my previously stated position that public school education is of poor quality and results in graduates who lack both critical thinking skills and basic written communication abilities.