Talk is cheap, but at least we're talking

I have been having a lot of conversations lately - with fellow teachers, ex-teachers, concerned citizens, friends - about the state of education in this country right now. So many people have so many suggestions about what could fix the education system, but what is the right thing to do? How can we make up for years of doing it wrong? And No Child Left Behind? And standardized testing? Will it really take, as one fellow teacher suggested, twenty years for the pendulum to swing back to a place where creativity and passion for learning reigns supreme again? I'm worried we are creating passionless, robotic students that have no internal motivation for anything. Is it the parents, the schools, our society in general? Most of the teachers I know work damn hard, and try the best they can to do a good job in a system that is often thwarting them at every turn. By the high school level, we are not going to be able to make up for bad parenting, education failures in their past, etc. We do what we can. I do what I can on a daily basis, but teachers are so overworked as it is, how can we have the time to fight for the changes that need to happen. I don't know if I want to be a teacher forever, but I can tell you one thing: I can see myself trying to fight for policy changes and trying to fix this broken system. Our kids deserve better. Even when they make us want to tear our hair out. Which is almost every day for me. But I still want them to succeed.