21 Years Ago In Time

By Melissa August, Amanda Bower, Rhett Butler, Daren Fonda, Sora Song, Heather Won Tesoriero, Victoria Rainert, Joel Stein

The growing popularity of home schooling is the latest sign of parental frustration with the schools their kids attend--and, as TIME noted in a 1980 cover story, with the beleaguered TEACHERS trying to educate them:

Many teachers have come to see themselves as casualties in a losing battle for learning and order in an indulgent age. Society does not support them, though it expects them to compensate in the classroom for racial prejudice, economic inequality and parental indifference. Says American School Board Journal managing editor Jerome Cramer: "Schools are now asked to do what people asked God to do." The steady increase in the number of working mothers (35% work full time now) has sharply reduced family supervision of children and thrown many personal problems into the teacher's lap, while weakening support for the teacher's efforts. Says Thomas Anderson, 31, who plans to quit this month after teaching social studies for seven years in Clearwater, Fla.: "I know more about some of my kids than their mothers and fathers do."

--TIME, June 16, 1980