There's no need at this point to go into details, but I have recently had a reminder of just how bad an international high school can be. In the wake of that experience, I have read a lot of reviews here at the International Schools Review, and even allowing for the fact that the disgruntled are more likely to write reviews than the pleased are, the picture that emerges from around the world is not pretty.

Several points occur to mind. One: Although it is easy to find the administrators who represent commercial and bureaucratic values at these institutions, it is not so easy to find the administrators who represent strong educational values. I think a lot of them become frustrated and leave the schools, or perhaps the profession of education altogether.

Two: I think that whether these schools call themselves "for profit" or "not for profit," virtually all of them are actually for profit institutions and run themselves accordingly. Very few would compare favorably to your average, reasonably well-funded suburban American public high school. Yet parents pay high fees because the alternatives to the independent schools are, in most countries, much worse.

Three: Many students at these schools are pleasant, and I can't blame the ones who are jerky too badly, because they were not responsible for their own rearing. It is true that way too many of the students are academically lazy, which would matter less if they weren't enrolled in IB or honors programs that should not tolerate laziness. But overall, I would not lay the problems of the schools at the feet of the students; they are pawns in the process.

Four: I do think that many parents are culpable however, because they show a far higher concern that their children be treated with the deference due to privilege than that they be well educated. One choice tidbit from a 9th grade mother: "Even though the students were all misbehaving, the teacher shouldn't have spoken to them harshly." Oh well, excuse me.

The upshot in my case is that even though I like teaching high school (under decent circumstances, anyway) and have won accolades for my teaching, I am fleeing towards Business English classes, online English classes, private tutoring, and perhaps some university classes. None of those settings is perfect either, far from it, but it seems to me that the headaches in international high schools and K-12 schools are much worse. (I do know that things are not rosy back in the U.S. or Canada, either.)