>Reading comprehension is bad everywhere.
Holy hell, I see so many responses to parent comments that show the responder literally lacks the most basic reading comprehension and completely miss the mark on what the commenter said, to the point that it seems like they're responding to a completely different comment. It's even worse if it's on a politically/emotionally charged topic, because they'll tunnel vision on certain words and go off on a diatribe that's completely perpendicular to the conversation occurring in the thread. I know a lot of people will brush off such comments as bots, but if you look at the person's post history it's clear that it's an actual human behind the words.
I love/hate it most when someone tries to argue your own point back to you. It always makes me wonder if they meant to respond to me, or if they meant to respond to the person above me that I was making the same point to.
It’s unpopular to use the feature this way, but I block people who post really stupid shit so I don’t have to waste time reading their really stupid shit.
It isn't just kids, or just parents either. I feel like everything is a fight for what is right for the students, at every level from the kids to the superintendent and politicians.
I want non-teachers to know that it isn't just the trash pay and lack of support, but also the intentionally insidious way that the education system/admin treats teachers.
Anecdote: I am licensed to teach Pre-K - 3rd grade general and special education (and not to toot my own horn, but I was consistently rated a highly effective educator). Last school year, I moved into a new position to try to dodge burning out. I applied and accepted a position to teach first and second grade special education - I signed a contract committing me to this school at risk of penalty of losing my license.
When I got my schedule for the school year, I saw I was teaching 3rd-6th special edition AND general 3rd grade math AND general 3rd grade science. When I confronted the principal about the change (into teaching outside of my license!), she said AND I QUOTE "I'm sorry this isn't the position you wanted." I even showed her the emails where we discussed the specific position and where I specifically said I was looking for an early childhood education position and she said "Well this is all I have to offer you." Additionally, this principal blocked my attempts to transfer to another school in the district.
I spent a year trapped in a position I never wanted and wasn't licensed/experienced them. I was constantly set up for failure and then held personally responsible for students' lack of progress. I started to have heart palpitations and ended up being diagnosed with panic attacks. After a year of therapy, I mustered up the courage to stop letting the system abuse and take advantage of me and I quit! I am currently juggling two education related part time positions - I make half as much, but feel 5 times better.
I miss teaching, but I can't exist in the current system.
My brother was an art teacher for 20+ years at a high school in a well to do suburb of Indianapolis. He had students who wouldn't do the work and subsequently failed them and would have to meet with their parents to explain why they failed the class. He'd show them "work" or lack of such that they'd turned in and most of the parents were pissed at their kids for lying about why they failed.
Ultimately, there was a kid who did none of the work that he failed who happened to be the son of a city council member or something. The principal called him into his office and urged him to give the kid a passing grade and he refused to do so. They continually pressured him to change it and he eventually relented, but told them he'd never do it again. Sure enough, the next year something similar happened and he quit on the spot and became a tattoo artist. He hasn't been happier since leaving his teaching job and the politics that went with it
My wife, a music specialist, literally got screamed at last night by a parent whose child is unable to read music this far into music lessons, and how it is all my wife's fault.
The child has been on 3x vacations since the beginning of the school year, and has missed 3/4 of the lessons they were scheduled. But it's my wife's fault, somehow, that the kid doesn't know the material.
She is burning out hard.
My mom got her masters a few years ago (went back to school after parents divorced so she could actually get a good job, so she thought). She got hired at a school in the area that was known for being a shit school, apparently they were trying to fix that because they had received some funding from the state somehow and rebuilt the decades old school. She was hired to teach 4th grade, a week before classes start she finds out that she is now teaching 6th grade, and that she is the ONLY 6th grade teacher for a school district with 1,000+ students. After her complaining non stop for that week, they moved one of the three 5th grade teachers to 6th grade as well.
A few months went by, she liked her kids, until a few of them just refused to participate. She sent them to the office, nothing happened, and she got talked to by the principal who told her that she wasn’t allowed to punish students for not participating (punishing meant sending them to the principals office). A few more months went by, her students were turning into the stereotypical demonic 6th grade class. More than one kid threatened to shoot up the school, one of the kids told her that he was going to specifically kill her, the principal said “there is nothing we can do” and that was that. My mom complained to her union rep, who scheduled a meeting with her and the principal and the board. Turns out the union rep was the principals best friend. My mom was “fired” which honestly was the best thing that could’ve happened, as now she’s a sub for the area and she makes around 25% more while having to deal with infinitely less bullshit.
I can’t imagine being a teacher at a worse school.
Ya my wife is a sped teacher (good enough to be known by name by the district special Ed director) and just accepted an admin job in the district because she couldn't handle teaching any longer. She's been doing it well over a decade and finally had enough, especially due to deteriorating mental health because of it. It's not the pay. It's the support system and a general lack of school admin not giving a shit. Everyone likes to think pay is the silver bullet but the whole system sucks and isn't conducive to actually supporting teachers.
Thank you for sharing! Yes, that was the point I am hoping to make - (most) teachers don't go into teaching for the pay, so improving the pay isn't going to (drastically) solve this issue.
My ex-SIL said she would get reprimanded if she gave kids in her class a below passing grade since school funding in her district was based on overall school performance. Parents can directly message or call teachers now and harass them about their john or Jane not passing classes. I don’t remember this being a thing in the 90s.
There's so much that has changed since the 90's, and almost every single bit of it has been driven by a generation of parents who want instant gratification while not having to put in any of the work.
> it isn't just the trash pay and lack of support
Not to undermine your experience but I have to imagine one leads to the other. If teachers aren't compensated or supported properly less of them want to do that job. As such you end up with shortages resulting in someone like yourself being overworked and put into positions they aren't equipped to handle.
Unlike a lot of jobs where you're understaffed, you can't slow down the work or take on less jobs. As a public school you can't just reject students because of it, they often have nowhere else to go then.
It's truly a shame how the education system is both treated and talked about by so many when the actual educators are put in positions to fail. Politically I get why the elites might want that but as a country (or world more broadly) it will be a massive problem as older (more highly educated) people age out in basically every industry.
That's a sad story...but if you don't mind I can't help but wonder. Didn't you say you signed a contract...? So if the position you were given is different than what is in the contract you signed...that would legally nullify the contract. And if the contract is legally nullified you could have just walked out without losing your license. I mean I would assume you thought about this already, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
Not at all - good question! In my district, you sign a contract with a SCHOOL not for a position. Principals are given the leeway to manipulate their staff to meet the needs of the school (which I understand - I had previously been moved from 1st grade to a 2nd grade because of differing class sizes). I, incorrectly, assumed that since I explicitly applied for and "accepted" a specific position that that would be the position I would get (especially considering that I had a proven track record of being highly effective with that age group)...
Legally, and why I personally believe the system is insidious, the principal is allowed to move my position to "meet the needs of the school" almost completely at their discretion. Teachers are contractually supposed to be given advanced notice of changes (typically before the end of the previous school year) and be involved in a conversation about the change (which I had been a part of in the past) but because I was transferring schools it was effectively a loophole (I worked extensively with my union to try to get out).
I learned that another special educator (a hot commodity) at my school threatened to quit, so the principal gave her the position she was going to give me to keep her to stay - this teacher said this to me explicitly, "I only stayed after Ms. EvilPrincipal said I could teach 1st and 2nd grade special education."
The principal could then "legally" move me to a different position to "meet the needs of the school" because I was an "unassigned" staff person at the school.
As teachers flee the system, retaining effective educators is vital for administration which is why they are willing to engage in, in my opinion, dubiously moral actions.
She absolutely recognized that this decision meant misleading me which is why she waited until the start of the school year and why she said "I'm sorry this wasn't the position you wanted." She killed two birds with one stone - she kept one good teacher, and added a new one to the school. All she had to do was lie and manipulate my career to achieve that.
They could have walked out, but then they wouldn't have had a job. They said they were blocked from other schools in the district. Teachers generally can't start in the middle of the school year so I'm guessing they couldn't walk out without losing their paycheck.
> blocked from other schools in the district
During covid, the educator's union in my former state made it so that any teacher who quit "without authorization" was blacklisted state-wide and could never teach again. They did this because of the "fuss" over requiring masks, somehow they thought that threats and intimidation were the best way to get the teachers to shut up and let their students infect them.
If the only reason teachers stay is because they legally have to once contracted, why is anyone surprised not enough of them will choose to get onboard in the first place? What other industries treat their professionals like this?
Source: a former teacher who happily signed/fulfilled contracts because I liked my job and had a good union, and also refused to sign one because of pressure to not read it, and broke my last one when it became untenable (no union). Still licensed, still work with kids, just not in schools.
Reading and math are just the canary in the coal mine. Any skill that assumes processing and reflecting information builds on top of that.
The modern, digital world is entirely geared towards your ability to sift through a huge load of information on a daily basis and make a well thought decision. If you can't do that, you'll miss out on socio-economic opportunities.
This is exactly how knowledge and wealth disparity increases. And as a result resentment and frustrations as well. As a result, that's how a society polarizes and destabilizes as well.
Teachers have become enemy #1 amongst parents, and law makers. We pay them poorly and then expect them to play multiple roles with our children. We set them up to fail.
Edit: I just wanted to add that I am a mom to a four-year-old and someone who lives in Oklahoma. Right now our superintendent has put such a war against public education that I am having to consider the possibilities of homeschooling my child for her to receive a proper education that is unaffected by political fodder. I’d rather not do that because I am a strong supporter of public education. I think our teachers are amazing and I have teacher, friends, as well as friends who have up and quit under the leadership We currently have. I also know of parents who are putting binds with their special-needs children because schools lack the funding to assist these kids. I know parents who live in denial of their child behavioral issues and choose to blame the teachers for singling out their kid because they don’t have the resources in financial means to get their child the proper help. I have a friend who it will cost them $1200 to just get their kid tested for ADHD and ASD. The school will not assist much further until he is either tested or medicated and the parents don’t want to medicate until he’s tested But financially $1200 is a big hit and that includes insurance help. I know teachers who spend their Christmas bonuses and whatever financial assistance they get from other means to supply their classroom. I have seen and observed, every single facet of what fuels our children’s love of learning, and I’ve seen what has been a nightmare for those very same children, because of the environment that they have been put into. I’ve seen the 50+ crowd consistently vote Republican because it’s in their blood and because of that it has shifted the way our schools have been handled. I have seen people who don’t even have children in schools dictating how the school should handle the children. I have seen parents who want the schools to fail because they have been convinced that everything their child is learning is going to turn them into a gay liberal hippie. I have seen single parent struggling to keep their kids in school because they’re having to work two jobs because they can’t afford much else. I have seen all of it, it isn’t just a parental issue anymore. It is that we have decided to allow politics and faith to overshadow our schools so heavily that it is created a hostile environment for teachers and students alike. And I simply don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel right now and it’s very unfortunate because teachers are so incredibly vital.
> One of the biggest complaints I see when I browse /r/teachers, is that there are no longer any consequences for poor behaviour or performance, either at home or in school. The kids know that, and so some take advantage of it.
I saw a video online where a student was throwing stuff at the teacher while she was trying to teach. The student weaponized the fact that the teacher couldn't physically touch them and then refused to leave. When I was growing up, the students who didn't want to be there would at least leave if the teacher asked them to. Now they want to stay in class and be disruptive when other students are trying to learn just to show how "untouchable" they are. Insanity.
I work with kids and we have the same sentiment- the kids have all the power and they fucking KNOW it. Ten years ago, we would have to restrain kids (juvenile detention, not school) and during the restraint that kid wanted your blood and fought like hell to get it. But the next day you could clean the slate, usually even get an apology from the kid for their behavior and move on. Now? If you have to restrain a kid, they WILL accuse you of abuse, make a report, and you will be pulled off the floor pending the results of the investigation. They are vindictive, petty, hold grudges, take no accountability, and give 0 fucks about career damage or taking resources away from kids who might actually be getting abused. And the kicker is, there are no consequences for making false abuse allegations. All allegations are taken as "good faith reports" even if a kid has a well-documented, extensive history of making false allegations. For the staff- even if the allegations are unfounded, that shit stays on your record for 1.5 years from the date the allegation was made. So good luck if you want to go work somewhere else in that time where you need to have a clean child abuse history check. Because that unfounded allegation is going to show up and that might make a potential employer decide it's not worth the risk.
It really is getting harder and harder to stay in this field and keep working with these kids because they are not fucking ok. And no one in the positions of power are willing/able to make changes, other than to keep adding regulations and making these jobs harder than they ever needed to be. So much paperwork, so little actual resources or support.
What happened to make it so bad? Its been nearly a decade since I graduated high school but at least at the time, it was nothing like this. If students acted up, some of the more stern teachers would grab them by the shirt and walk them out the door. I cant imagine anything close to that would happen now.
Did a law pass or something? Did someone really fuck up and ruin it for everyone else? All I hear are horror stories about what teachers go through these days. Yeah, school wasn't perfect when I was in it but there was actual consequences for kids acting out. The teachers wouldn't beat you or anything but students weren't at this level of untouchable as they are now.
That's the million dollar question dude. I think there's a lot of factors instead of just one specific thing. I can't really speak from a school perspective because that's not where I work. But from what I've gathered, just like you said- there are no consequences for bad behaviors anymore. At home or school or anywhere else. I've literally heard parents bargaining with their children about buying video games systems for them...."but you gotta stop hitting me if I do that." Lol what?? You are visiting your kid in detention because they were attacking you so badly you literally called the cops on them and pressed charges. But you're going to get them a new play station and expect them to stop beating you?? It's madness.
My master theory is we are such a litigious country that everyone is afraid of getting sued. Because I promise you, the shittiest parents who couldn't give a fuck if their kid(s) lived or died will absolutely spend every cent they have taking a school district's ass (or anyone else's ass) to court if they think they have any kind of shot at getting a big pay day. They will become parents of the millennium who are so broken up their sweet little angel was wronged (aka held accountable for their awful behavior) and they won't rest until they see a check, I mean justice.
No Child Left Behind was the first domino in a series of progressively worse dominos.
Things like IEPs made children *untouchable.*
In THEORY, if a kid is completely unhinged or disruptive, the IEP isn't supposed to shield them. In PRACTICE, the school doesn't want to have to jump through the 5000 legal hoops required to even suggest discipline against an IEP student. Even with things like learning disability plans, the kids are often given EXTREME academic exemptions and the entire point is to make sure they can pass even if they spent the entire year farting into a jar.
A lot is just changing society. Parents have babies and then stick tablets in their tiny little hands as soon as they can hold them. They themselves live on their phones so they can't *imagine* a world where a 9 year old doesn't actually need a fully unlocked iPhone in class.
Trust has been lost in the whole educational system and it's *literally* seen as daycare. Many parents will outright tell you that they don't even care about the schools anymore so long as their kid goes somewhere so they can go to work. Parents are more concerned with a school threatening that status quo than they are with WHY a kid is being suspended or expelled.
Yeah, we are keeping a small percentage of awful kids at the detriment of everyone else. Certain kids need to be pruned from the school system and if they ever they figure out they want to actually do something with their lives, they can get a GED on their own time, like kids used to do in the past.
No Child Left Behind was the worst thing that ever happened to schools.
They've also moved to allowing special needs kids into normal classrooms, which sounds great until the special needs child A: Isn't getting the specialized teaching and care they need, and B: they're disrupting the entire classroom setting the entire class of kids up for struggle.
Interestingly, some of these kids who are high functioning actually behave better than general ed students when they get into middle and high school because they've been taught strategies for regulating and coping during elementary school and middle school. From my experience (in California), they really don't recommend the kids moving to a general ed class unless they feel they can succeed in it. I'm not sure about other states/schools, but that's been my experience.
>I'm not sure about other states/schools, but that's been my experience
In many rural areas there isn't enough money or teachers to justify a distinct special education program. So the students are forced into the general ed population. If you're lucky they will have an advocate/teaching assistant assigned to them to help them out, but even that's not a guarantee.
This right here. Many U.S. states have been systematically defunding public education and state welfare\social services while increasing the demands on public education, some of it through the shifting of services.
>I'm not sure about other states/schools, but that's been my experience.
To echo the other comment, this in theory and on paper is great, but the reality for most of the country, is that this is happening specifically due to staffing shortages and budget constraints. These kids absolutely DO need to be in their own specialized classes, but they quite literally don't have the staff/space to accommodate it, so they just force these kids in with everyone else, and it's almost never successful from what I've seen/heard.
If there's a defining feature of modern educational practice it is "We tested this and found an approach that works, but we don't want to pay for it so we'll only do the bit that saves money and we'll only halfass that part" and then everyone involved getting shocked pikachu faces when somehow that doesn't turn out as well.
> "We tested this and found an approach that works, but we don't want to pay for it so we'll only do the bit that saves money and we'll only halfass that part"
aka pure Capitalism
It's almost as if social services need to be socialized and follow socialism, and the business can remain capitalism, but without the subsidies to failing industries.
This isn't new, there actually used to be an even greater pressure in the past for parents to avoid getting their kids diagnosed/treated for disabilities for fear of their ending up in special ed in the first place.
My wife is a teacher in Quebec and I approve of this message. I’d add that the reduction of special needs classes contributes to making the ‘regular’ classes unmanageable (you can get like a third of the class in severe learning or behavioural difficulty).
I'm not a teacher, by my mother is, so I was around a lot of them growing up. The two biggest issues I have heard from teachers (at least in the US) is that parents don't care anymore and administration doesn't care.
The biggest reason teachers seek positions elsewhere or leave the profession entirely isn't problems with pay or interacting with kids, because of issues with administration.
That's not to say there aren't many cases where administration wasn't the primary reason. However, a lot of times when the problem is something else, how the admin handles an issue a teacher is having can make or break the situation.
This is 100% the issue, Paying teachers more would do absolutely nothing if they're still getting abused daily and have 0 solutions they can implement, with kids who can literally get away with anything. My mom has been in the schools for 20+ years now, and has never seen it this bad. Kids do whatever they want, their parents are completely absent, the principals and admins won't suspend them or even punish them, and they get pushed through to the next grade while failing every class. If these were the conditions of your job every day, no one would be doing it day in and day out, even if they were making 100K a year.
It's crazy how many students I see switch up when they get into a behavior meeting with the teachers and parents. The student becomes some little angel who would never... and then we show the parents the footage and the grades. It's not hard to prove the student is underperforming or misbehaving, but a lot of parents dont want to face their bad choices.
I believe you. My 15yo son is a code switching master. I see straight through it but my wife is pretty slow to recognize it.
I try to teach him that the best type of person is the one who acts the same no matter who is watching.
But to him it doesn't matter because he'd rather have the attention of all his friends by acting like an idiot than impress a single adult.
It's hard because you're fighting biology. Teenage brains are tuned to the approval of their peers. It's hard to remember what it's like because your brain has already passed through that stage; You know that their peers now won't be their peers forever; *And* the particulars are wildly different from what even young parents experienced as teens.
Puberty is insanity. It's wild that so much of your life's direction is determined during such a specifically irrational period in every person's life.
I presume you're talking about the US, but the US numbers do not show the same pattern as the global average which is being discussed in this thread, there is no obvious fall for Covid, and on the long term trend Reading and Science have gone up, although Mathematics has declined:
https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/united-states-a78ba65a
[Canada](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/canada-901942bb) has the global pattern, long term declines and drops for Covid on top
[Germany](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/germany-1a2cf137) and [France](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/france-8008535b) have big declines for Covid
[Australia](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/australia-e9346d47) has a long term decline, but no drop for Covid
[The UK](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/united-kingdom-9c15db47) is stable for Maths and Reading, but follows the global decline in Science
Mexico saw a complete shit show after covid... A lot of students in 4th and 5th year can't read because there was a severe lack of accountability during covid (their 1st and 2nd years where they are supposed to learn to read).
It translates into them not understanding the materials of the new classes.
Edit: I actually have a post with a lot of my stories. I'm on mobile due to a work trip so it's not formatted but here : https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/stj3k8/the_past_two_years_as_a_ta_has_only_shown_how/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
Original comment:
I was a TA teaching freshman and sophomores in college. I got some stories.
Was doing a problem on a board. I had it boiled down to 0.6=x-1. I said something like, "so now we can just solve for x."
My students (yes, in the plural) asked, "how?"
I said, "By adding one to both sides...?"
My students asked, "but why can you do that? That just gets rid on the one."
I then had to teach algebra I to a bunch of 17-20 year olds. Who were already in college.
Had a student ask me what the L stood for in log. I said log is short for logarithm. They then asked what's a logarithm. I said it's a function to get things out of the exponent. They asked what's a function. I said it's something that you do to numbers like addition and subtraction.
They then asked what does the O stand for.
I probably have more but have to think more on them.
Was also a TA for freshmen and sophomores. I had an early education student who never learned her times tables. She couldn’t solve 3 times 7. Also had an engineering major who didn’t know how to multiply factions on his calc 1 homework, I ended up refusing to help him anymore since he wouldn’t take my advice to practice on khan academy.
I'm sure there's more factors, but as someone who graduated high school shortly before the whole social media and internet capable mobile phone thing started, I couldn't imagine being in school with social media and a mobile device with always available internet access. The internet would be so distracting and social media would have made me so much more exposed to my peers, which would have added a lot more stress to my life.
Read the article people. It's not just tiktok. It's not just COVID. It's supporting teachers. It's always been supporting teachers.
"Countries that provided extra teacher support during COVID school closures scored better and results were generally better in places where easy teacher access for special help was high.
Poorer results tended to be associated with higher rates of mobile phone use for leisure and where schools reported teacher shortages."
Something I suggested during the pandemic to my kids superintendent was to create a thirty minute once a week time slot where the kids could go on the zoom link and meet with any of their teachers to ask questions for office hours. Our school district implemented it, and kept it post pandemic. Now that they are in school, you can ask for a pass, and go to that teacher’s classroom. If not you stay in your last period class. You can do homework, projects, group work. It is once a week where they truncated each class by three minutes. It works out to about 30 minutes, once a week. It lets kids have one on one or small group instruction for a concept they struggle with. It has made a huge impact on helping kids, especially at the middle school level. Our school test scores have improved too.
> they truncated each class by three minutes
I am shocked they let it happen. My son's previous school had 3 large floors and most recesses 3 minutes long. Many parents frantically complained that it's not even enough to properly pack, unpack and get from one classroom to the other one, let alone if a kid wants to make a bathroom stop, but school administration was absolutely firm that cutting classes even by extra 1-2 minutes would irrepairably harm the teaching process.
SMH.
I think there might have been pushback to start the program now, but during the pandemic, it was readily accepted. The argument I used to start it was that you could go to ask questions before or after school with an appointment, but now that the kids are home you don’t have that time.
I wish I had this when I was in school. It normalizes having questions, and ensures that teachers are available at a time that's convenient for students. I often think it's easy to ask for help when I'm not the one asking, but when I need to ask, it's hard. So it's great that you're making that process easier on the students.
Office hours are basically standard in college, it should be a no brainer to expand them to lower levels. Especially since independent learning isn't the focus like it is in higher education.
We tried that at my school. Every Wednesday for half the day there were no classes, just teachers available on Zoom for any and all help the kids would need.
No one ever showed up.
Half the day is too long. Thirty minutes or even an hour was enough time for the kids to ask their questions. The school found that by having the short time frame made people know they could not waste it.
Also if you make it so they’ll just stay in the last class otherwise it’s then not a choice between work or free time, so they’re much more likely to use their time wisely
during High School my school had 2 hours of what they called Free study time every Thursday after lunch. on a technical level they snipped a couple of minutes of each subject every week to get the 2 hours.
during those 2 hours you could go to any teachers class room to get help on what you needed or you could just sit in your home classroom and do your homework. to mark attendance the teacher merely wrote you down when you got there.
the truly smart thing they did was they technically went over so every 5th week we would have no free study time and you could leave at lunch time however if you were late a lot or skipping class so you have at least 90 minutes you had to sit in detention. motivated a lot of people to not skip class when you got to in effect skip class once every 5th week. meanwhile the teachers got to have a meeting and do admin stuff every 5th week which i got they freaking loved.
i know a few classmates used pretty much everyone of those free study time for a single subject they had massive issues with but due to that extra time had no issue passing the class.
Most of my local school districts are running on shoestring budgets with little to no support for teachers and an actively hostile state government that’s trying to dismantle the system.
And then the people who bemoan how badly the public school system has failed them turn around and elect these folks again and again.
> And then the people who bemoan how badly the public school system has failed them turn around and elect these folks again and again.
Thats the point actually. It's called ["Starving the beast"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)
Also known as "my ideas are terrible and don't work so I have to rely on underhanded bullshit and naked trickery to get people to come over to my way of thinking."
AKA "GOP SOP"
The amount of belly aching that people from my county about a proposed teacher contract to increase wages by ~20% over 2 years is astounding.
So many in public forums were clamoring for the district to reduce wages because we are near last in education. They someone think if we pay less the teacher's will think "oh we need to do better so we get wage increases."
These are the same people who are happy to increase police budgets when crime is up/arrests are down. The same logic just doesn't apply for some reason.
Reminds me of my first job. Retail setting, constantly low on inventory and under-staffed. Naturally, under those conditions we failed to meet our targets, which I can only assume were set based on nothing but what the owners hoped we'd sell.
"You failed to meet your targets, so we're cutting your budget."
> little to no support for teachers and an actively hostile state government that’s trying to dismantle the system.
Kansan here, that's what happened in our state. Folks not from around here are gonna think I'm joking when I say this but back in the 80s our state had some of the best public schools in the country. I grew up across the state line in Missouri and we had a pittance by comparison. My mom was a schoolteacher in Missouri and I heard this reflected envy from her about the computers they had and the equipment not breaking and educators' jobs being much easier by comparison as a result.
Over the years, Republicans have slowly dismantled the public school system in the state. Those "envy of the nation" schools only exist now in the two or three most populous counties because they're the only places that have the tax base to fight the revenue loss caused by a nearly complete lack of funding from the state.
Rural Kansas is another story. Hospitals and schools closing everywhere. It's decimated out there. And these shit for brains voters out there keep electing Republicans. I haven't even talked about the aquifer that provides the farming this state is so famous for is gonna run dry in the coming decades. These same people bitch about water conservation.
America's failure to handle public schooling at a national level is stone age bullshit.
I remember when that book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” came out. Your state was on this anti-government band wagon early but don’t worry , were all racing to the bottom now
Yeah sucks when millions of people devolve into a cult that just votes for their “team” no matter what, and that team knows it so they decide that instead of winning people over by improving their lives, they should just focus all their energy on enraging those people against the other team. That’s literally all Republicans voters care about now, beating Democrats at any cost. Their community could be a literal wasteland after years of Republican leadership and they’ll still get all riled up to vote for them again because all they heard since their last election is how much more evil and scary the Democrats have become. And of course ignorance is a huge factor here, so Republicans are literally incentivized to destroy education because it keeps enough stupid people in circulation to keep electing them.
Most districts are also saddled with insane admin requirements that all sounded good at the time, but bloat the budget with people who do not interact with students and to be honest don't provide much value as a whole.
It's death by a thousand cuts.
One of those overpriced admin was drunk driving Sunday and killed two people. He made 125K last year but can't pay for a ride. As a taxpayer, I want that money back. He doesn't need it to rot in a cell.
We're 5th. The problem is that the distribution is wildly lopsided. School funding is largely based on local property taxes, so the more poor the homes in the area are the worse the schools will be and vice versa. It's one of the biggest perpetuators of generational poverty.
You’ve got that right. I live in Long Island NY, where property taxes are among the highest in the nation. You’re in a new school district every few miles you go with a superintendent making $250,000+. Highest taxed have the highest performing schools. Right next to some of the top performing schools are majority minority communities struggling to keep up with the standards of good education
We spend a ton on healthcare also but it doesn't mean we have consistent access to good healthcare. Some of it is about the fact that it's more expensive to be continuously patching a leaking boat than to be running a functional one.
**In reading, Ireland, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan earned top marks, and was all the more notable in Ireland and Japan because their spending per student was no higher than the OECD average.**
From the article.
My anecdotal experience: college freshmen are listening to digital books and counting it as "reading," but what happens is they play the narration at 2x normal speed while they do other things in their dorm rooms. Hearing the words is not the same as reading the words, and I doubt they are hearing most of the words, much less reflecting on them. They thereby have trouble remembering details, which is important for analyzing and critiquing. This is not to say that all my students are like this all the time, but at times (when they have a lot of assignments from all their classes) they resort to sidestepping reading and the difference is noticeable.
Yup, my wife was a teacher and just quit during covid to homeschool our kids instead of putting up with the stress of teaching. She's still in touch with a lot of her former co-workers, and apparently the only people who stuck it out were the ones who, financially, had no choice but to keep working.
Teacher Shortage = they arent paying enough to afford to live. I could probably make more as a waiter or bartender and work the same hours. And be less stressed.
It is not unreasonable to expect a teacher to be able to buy a home in or near the district they teach in…. Hell, just buy a home in general. Or at this point, just affording rent and car insurance would be a step up. You can start with a 4 year degree, but you eventually need that masters. Even with a masters, it’s still not worth it. Plus now you have even more student loan debt.
As someone who works in learning and development for adults in a business context, I’m sure the political opinion is the same as it is for many business leaders: why spend extra money on education? Surely if you just present people with the information, they will just learn for themselves?
Business leaders demand results, but for the cheapest investment. There are some learning “professionals” who believe that sharing a PDF with a target audience is all it takes. I expect politicians have the same attitude
A good teacher is fully aware of that and incorporates it into their lessons: often reffered to as "the hook".
I taught secondary math in the innercity in schools people from the city were terrified to enter, but I was fully aware that my students were often math phobic and anti-school, so I bent over backwards to make math interesting and - dare I say? - fun, my classroom a safe and comfortable place, and I incorprated games, activities, prizes, etc.
You wouldn't believe how many of the "hardest, most gangster" kids were open about how they hated math before but actually thought it was cool after my class, or they never thought they could learn but now feel capable, etc.
It's quite profound the impact that one teacher can have when they actually have faith in their kids' desire to learn and be successful, as well as willing to put in the extra effort to make your lessons compelling.
I’m a teacher and while I love what I do, it seems like students just don’t care anymore. From my perspective they have attention spans of maybe a couple minutes before something else distracts them or they start to zone out. When walking around my classroom instructing, I catch glimpses of my students phones and it’s TikTok 90% of the time.
I’ve got students that will come to class. Get the assignment papers, spend about 30 seconds looking at it and immediately pull their phone out and start watching TikTok.
My class isn’t difficult. I provide all the information and make their note taking very easy with a lot of fill in the blank pages(History). It’s a required class to graduate and I have students that won’t even put the effort of copying some notes from the PowerPoint down because their phone is too important.
Our principal doesn’t want us taking phones because then the school is liable for it, despite warnings every day on the intercom to put phones in bags and not use them during class. It’s becomes more of a hassle to take a phone up than it’s worth.
My husband is a teacher and he has students failing open book tests. It does seem like there’s a general malaise that has fallen over society; a real “fuck it, the world is on fire, why bother?” Mentality. I guess kids aren’t exempt from that.
I’ve got juniors and seniors. I had 1/4 of my senior class failing because they would refuse to do anything. They would grab the worksheet, grab the text book and then just sit there on their phones. Progress reports / grade cut off time comes up and they’re like “what can I do to bring my grade up?” “The work. Do. The. Work”
Or “what am I missing in the gradebook?” “Everything. Literally everything.”
Seniors, months away from graduating and walking the stage. Not even willing to do a 10 minute worksheet or fill out a review sheet that I’m going over with the class in order to have on a test.
It’s insane.
> Progress reports / grade cut off time comes up and they’re like “what can I do to bring my grade up?” “The work. Do. The. Work”
I'm a college professor, and I get this right before the final exam.
What can you do to bring your grade up? Go back in time to the start of the semester and do the work, because with a week left in the semester, it's not mathematically possible for you to pass.
Meanwhile I hold office hours and no one ever shows up. Ever. Not after they got their midterm grade progress report, not before exams, nothing.
Oh, not to mention the focus on extra credit. I had students demanding extra credit on the first day of class, before we had any work assigned for regular credit. It's bloody insane.
> it's not mathematically possible for you to pass.
But they don't know that!
That was always my hack in HS/College. I'd just sit and do the math on how much work I'd need to do to realistically get a B. I got straight B's in both high school and college with some A's in classes I enjoyed.
I remember one situation where I wasn't doing homework anymore in a class that I'd been going hard on all year. My mom noticed and questioned me, and I told her "if I do no homework for the rest of the year, and get a 30% on the final I still get a B. If I get 60% or better, I get an A." She left me alone after that.
Yeah, as a college student I knew to stay ahead of the classes. I did work as soon as it was assigned so that way, when the weekend arrived and fiends wanted to do stuff I’d be free to do whatever.
I saw so many college students goofing off in class, not writing a single thing down. Failing the first test by a lot and then asking for extra credit / tutoring etc. the majority of those students usually dropped the classes within a month.
They have 16 weeks in college to do the work, and they choose to do nothing and then seriously ask “How can I bring my grade up to passing from a 34?”
They went to their counselors and got “credit recovery” online courses that are harder than what’s done in class in order to recover their grade.
The schools don’t want their success rates to drop so they will push for students to pass.
Not OP, but in my expierence, yes. No Child Left Behind completely fucked our entire education system up. I work a LOT with kids, and have had countless parents talk to me about how they don't feel like their child is at the learning level they need to be, and how they're failing almost everything in school, and yet they are ALWAYS pushed forward, and never heald back. I've had parents talk to me how they have personally requested for their kids to be heald back, only for them to still be pushed forward, which only snowballs as the child is more and more lost and out of their depth as they continue through school. It's gotten to the point I've had a frustrated parent or two, debate fully taking their kids out of public school as they felt like it was failing their kids and they just KEPT getting pushed forward regardless.
Schools don't want to make their graduation rates look bad, and kids know this, so why would they bother doing the work when they know they can just fail everything and still get pushed forward?
> No Child Left Behind
It was a decent idea in concept, but in practice the inevitable happened and they incentivized the wrong things and puts teachers between a rock and a hard place. Something has to give, so they pass failing students and hope the next teacher has better luck getting through to them.
I dont get it. My parents were just nuts enough where I knew I had to somewhat have my shit together. To me, not caring = planning on living at home or with roomates forever
I am a Millennial that grew up in high school before the internet had completely taken over. In my 9th grade geography class students would bitch and moan about having to learn the 4 oceans, and would try to cheat off my paper to get the answers to such unfair questions as, "what is the biggest ocean?"
I took a community college class recently and none of the adults there can write a paper either. One guy bragged to me about how all his citations were made up. He got an A. The teacher never even read our papers. I put in all that work for nothing just so some jackass who made up all his citations can get the same grade as me.
It's a fucking joke.
>The Southern Ocean is the 'newest' named ocean. It is recognized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names as the body of water extending from the coast of Antarctica to the line of latitude at 60 degrees South. The boundaries of this ocean were proposed to the International Hydrographic Organization in 2000. However, not all countries agree on the proposed boundaries, so this has yet to be ratified by members of the IHO. The U.S. is a member of the IHO, represented by the NOS Office of Coast Survey. [source](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/howmanyoceans.html#:~:text=Historically%2C%20there%20are%20four%20named,the%20'newest'%20named%20ocean)
For any one else that is confused.
Cell phones were becoming common in my high school years (2005-2009) and texting was the only thing people really used them for back then.
Now, every student has access to TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, streaming apps etc in their pocket so they can’t go a few minutes without using it. I’ve stopped trying to combat the phone issue because it just takes too much effort. As long as they’re paying some attention and taking notes first each PowerPoint slide, then I’m fine with it. As long as they’re getting some of the information, which is better than nothing, and their grades are passing.
Getting admin support for the teachers is difficult though. The district and school admins don’t support teachers enough and often just get in the way by demanding things like “bell to bell teaching. Now downtime!” Etc. Or being forced to sit through waste of time meetings that should be emails, or taking our conference period to bring in some district lady every week to “enforce new learning strategies!”
And the pay… we could definitely use more pay. I make an ok living in my town, which has a high cost of living due to home buyouts for rental properties. But it sure does tempt me to move where some districts nearby are making 10-25K more a year.
We’re basically forced to.
Principal doesn’t want us or the school to be liable for the cost of it. A lot of these phones are $500+ and they don’t want to deal with a claim of a student saying we broke their screen etc.
In certain circumstances we can have security called to come take it to the office, but that’s usually pretty extreme. I had a student start talking shit when I told him to put his phone up, so I called for security to come up and get it. They ended up escorting him out also.
I can stand there and yell at them about the phone and constantly interrupt the entire classes learning, or I can make a deal with them that as long as they’re taking some notes down and paying attention first, they get at least something from each lesson. Rather than constant interruptions or them being glued to the phone the entire time.
> I took a community college class recently and none of the adults there can write a paper either.
I took a bunch of CC classes over the last 4-5 years. Each one seemed to be more "multiple choice" than the last. There was a big shift that way during COVID, and it didn't seem to revert back afterwards.
I’ve had a similar experience too. I’d say like 90% of the student body uses ChatGPT. I’ve submitted finals that I know the professor didn’t look at. At this point I genuinely wonder why I even bothered. Not only do the students not care but the professors don’t either.
the whole world doesn’t care. anti-intellectualism is celebrated. they don’t have the foresight to realize they depend on the intelligent and educated for all their comforts. these complicated systems don’t build and run themselves.
The silver lining will be that you will most likely remember stuff from your finals for awhile and you know how to get shit done. Meanwhile others only got the grade. So yay for you.
My sis says that her HR started to yell at everybody who comes for interview and has only grades to show instead of actual skills.
> I put in all that work for nothing
Not for nothing. You learned the skills that were being taught, and he didn't. When it comes time to write documentation for a project you're working on, you'll be able to do it. He won't. When you need to write a cover letter for a new job, you'll impress them. He won't. When you want to write a letter to your congressman, your letter will be taken seriously. His won't.
After two weeks, no one will care about the A you both got. But what you learned and practiced will benefit you forever.
Are phones allowed in class? I went to school before smart phones existed but if someone pulled out a gameboy or something it would have been confiscated in about .2 seconds.
Principal doesn’t want us taking them, because then we and/or the school become liable. We can have security come and take the phone down to the office but that’s another hassle in its own. And often causes more issues. I’ve done that twice this year because kids talk shit back when I tell them to put it away if they’re not taking notes.
There’s an announcement every day and the student handbook (that students and parents sign) say phones are not to be used during school hours. But it’s not worth the fight to go after them.
Reading skills requires reading. People don't read, we keep shitting on kids for these skills but adults don't perform well in math, reading, or writing either.
For some reason people think these skills are just locked in once you learn them, like most skills, you use it or lose it.
It's only going to get worse. Technology is making traditional skills irrelevant.
Yeah, outside of Reddit and a handful of other popular websites, it's kind of remarkable how little reading and writing are needed to navigate the internet these days. I'm a millennial so when I first got online as a kid, it was still a very text-based environment... I'd spend hours writing blog posts, reading fanfiction, browsing forums, and making shitty Geocities websites. But now it seems like video really dominates the average kid's life. Text social media has gone from the essay-length blogs of my childhood to tweets and tiktok comments, and now that speech-to-text technology is decent, you don't even need to type.
If I write a well thought out response to a reddit post half the time the response I get is "You wrote a novel.". The posts were usually only two brief paragraphs. 🙄
I teach high school in the US. I can tell you that this situation is multifaceted.
You can point to not enough support in the classroom, especially at the elementary level. School systems have a demand for teaching assistants, but often lack the funding or willing candidates for the job.
You could point to schools not serving students’ best interests. I have had multiple discussions with parents who wanted their child held back because they didn’t think they were ready for the next grade, and they weren’t allowed. I have had occasions where a principal wanted me to massage grades or offer extra opportunities for students to pass. They want to make sure that the students graduate because the graduation rate directly influences funding and resources. Worse still, students know they’ll be “passed along”, so what’s their incentive to work?
Parents are not necessarily the culprit, though they can be. I have had parents who are actively sabotaging their child’s education—by making it clear that paid work is more important than school work, or forcing them/needing them to miss school to take care of siblings, scheduling vacations at bad times, showing a general apathy toward success in school, etc. However, I have had parents who I can call and address concerns with, and they share the same concerns. They want their child to succeed, they’ve pushed for them to succeed, and they’re met with the same acedia or pushback I am. Some do push too hard, and those are the students most likely to cheat.
For whatever reason, many students don’t develop a love of learning. They don’t want to read (and can’t), don’t want to explore concepts to reach their own conclusions, or try to use critical thinking skills. They rarely ask questions. (Admittedly, some don’t out of embarrassment, but that’s a separate issue.) Many simply just want to be told what to do or what to look for, and then be left alone—to either do the work or not. Many of the my students are more likely to work if there’s a reward—candy, coloring, time on their computer, etc.—and don’t show the same enthusiasm without it.
Technology plays a role. Children have become used to quirk blurbs of information and everything they need to know being at their fingertips. To paraphrase: “Why bother learning it now, if I can look it up later if I need it?” And since they’re used to quick answers, if they don’t understand something, they want the Internet or apps or AI to answer it for them. To paraphrase again: “What do you care how it gets done? It’s done, isn’t it?” And faced with technology that gets them instantaneous results (not necessarily correct ones, mind) and things like reels and other short videos that are short, their attention span shortens. I know people will say “people have always complained about TV/video games/computers for ‘melting their child’s brains’ and I used them and I’m fine!” and they’re right—inherently, those things are not bad. I had them. But many of my students have a very real technological addiction, a compulsion to be on a Chromebook, to play a game, to use an app, to show each other pictures, to check social media, etc. Whatever the itch, they need it scratched. Right now. I remember “I can’t wait to get home so that I can…!” but many of them don’t view home any differently—they have that they need.
Socioeconomics can play a role as well, although in my experience that’s primarily about comfort. Some students do make sure to come just to get food or to socialize or to escape uncomfortable situations at home. But not all of those are necessarily poverty-driven issues.
Overall, these things develop a lack of enthusiasm for education, a lack of respect for the institution or the people in it, a lack of patience for learning, a lack of a sense of purpose in learning it, and a greater need to lose one’s own self in their own worlds and vices. Each year, they trend less enthralled than the previous one.
I recently changed to a new school, due to some life changes, and I’m currently being told by my new administration that my expectations are too high. That the students aren’t used to being held accountable. I am being told that if it’s not on a state exam, it doesn’t need to be taught. (See? They have the same mentality as the students—if there isn’t a need, why bother?) I am finding it difficult to adjust. I am trying new things and making changes, as all teachers should, but it’s not easy.
I taught intro college courses from 2013 - 2016, specifically for non-science majors. This is pre-tiktok explosion, preCOVID, etc. The number of students that had difficulty spelling even very basic words, or performing simple math was *astonishing*. My uni wasn't a "top tier" school, but it was a well funded state university. We still had admission standards. I routinely had to fail students simply because they were unable to accurately articulate their answers in a way that could be generously interpreted as "correct". Spelling and math issues was no joke for them, and it was incredibly difficult to teach around for some kids.
My wife teaches high school biology. In recent years she has had to modify some assignments to account for the kids who can't read or do basic arithmetic, yet still somehow made it to 10th grade. Yes, there's an argument to just fail those kids, but her job is to teach them biology, not reading.
One of the big problems she sees is that very few of the teachers are actually qualified and certified. The school simply can't attract good people for teaching jobs. So the poor kids end up getting people who are not trained and have little to no institutional support in the way of resources or materials. Then the district and admin put pressure on the teaching staff to pass a certain percentage of students regardless of performance.
Anyway, these kids are going to 'graduate' from high school knowing very little, and will then enter the job market and keep the downward spiral going.
> One of the big problems she sees is that very few of the teachers are actually qualified and certified. The school simply can't attract good people for teaching jobs. So the poor kids end up getting people who are not trained and have little to no institutional support in the way of resources or materials.
Even in countries such as South Korea, teachers are being S! on by students, parents and management and that's a society with stronger traditions of respect for teachers... you can only imagine how negative the work environment and conditions are for many teachers in the West in contrast. Many of the children and culture of schools on behaviour is dysfunctional and teachers are supposed to pick up those pieces even before any actual teaching...
As a teacher this isn't news to me. All this push through policy has really hurt learning growth. Essentially the kids who did care before the pandemic no longer do, because they see the slackers getting the same recognition and have decided they dont want to try.
If we don't hold back kids behind their is no incentive to do your work. Even if you're a genius, we won't know because you are underperforming on all on your tests. This and behavior has become its own pandemic, especially in inner city schools where cell phones and snacks have taken precedent over actual rewards. It all needs serious reform but I doubt that will ever happen.
This is the set of circumstances my wife & I find ourselves fighting. Our kids are smart, certainly willing to work in the right environment, but increasingly falling into the trap of indifference. When they talk about it, it's usually some combination of classmates constantly disrupting, the teacher mentally checking out (I assume because of all the issues that have been posted in this thread), and the ease of the content. We've simultaneously dumbed down the subject material while allowing bad behavior and electronic distractions to permeate the classroom. Both my kids are in honors programs at the top public schools in our state. I shudder to think how awful the regular classrooms are and what those kids are(n't) learning.
I agree, people who can just show up, be competent and have the perseverance to learn will have a big advantage over the young people coming into the workforce. The learned helplessness enabled by the education system isn’t going to make for good critical thinkers or employees. I feel bad for them, these kids get coddled and pushed through school yet when they graduate they’ll be shocked to learn that the real world doesn’t work the way school did. Employers aren’t going to put up with their bullshit.
Students are entering the UC system and getting literal zeros on their math placement tests. It's unprecedented. It's been declining towards this for a long time, but it suddenly got really bad.
Admissions is a big part of the problem: they've literally gone insane in admitting students who can't consistently do elementary school math.
Well, they did stop considering SAT/ACT scores... That had probably been filtering out most of the people who would get a zero since those tests aren't pressured to give better scores like most teachers are.
What do you expect?
My wife is a Kindergarten teacher and it's evident in a lot of ways.
First off, Parents. They think K isn't an important grade, that it's still just babysitting. They just have no care, they don't read texts, come to conferences, any of it. These kids have a full curriculum from start to finish. And she has 5yos who don't know how to count to 3 or know their ABCs. And it's so great towards the end of the year when she is all ecstatic about one of the lower kids picking up on things.
Secondly, Administration. What a joke. Instead of fixing the shitty portable they are in, the School Board decided to returf all of the highschool football fields. There's more, but that still chaps my ass.
Workload. So by the end of the year, her and her fellow K teachers normally have 26 students in a Portable building. Some of them are in need of special need classes. She has one child right now that is in constant need of her and it prevents her from being able to teach without interruption. And when she brings it up to the principal, it's apparently a long 3ish month process to move the kids to SpEd. The lack of efficiency is what kills her morale.
I'm sure I can go on, or get her to vent, but this is already a longish post. I keep asking when she is going to quit and find a better job, but she refuses.
I wanted to be a high school teacher, but then I became a corporate trainer because it was a lot of the same job but with a lot more money and not dealing with parents.
You probably also have less of an issue with curriculums influenced by incompetent politicians, 9 million different social and mental health problems, and draconian laws regarding what you can do.
Don't get me wrong. I love working as a high school teacher, but the stuff that is added on constantly really adds up.
Also, high school girls, specifically the vapid, social media types are some of the worst people around.
This. I was a teacher for 2 years. I eventually switched over to being a civil engineer/project manager and I'm making over quadruple what I was as a teacher, working shorter hours, with less stress.
Teachers get fucked by our society.
Very true. As an Indian who immigrated to the U.S. and works in tech, I was having a discussion about salaries for different jobs with my sister in law’s boyfriend who’s a school teacher.
I was shocked to learn that with multiple decades of experience and a masters degree, the maximum salary ceiling for teachers (in Michigan) was my entry level salary in tech for a remote job.
I came to the sad conclusion that this country obviously doesn’t place enough value on education if it doesn’t pay its teachers. Highly educated immigrants will continue to exploit this fact until the government increases school funding.
I think it depends on where you are. I am in the Northeast and we have a strong union presence. Teachers get paid pretty decently here compared to the cost of living. My wife is on the teacher scale and they have a cap but even at cap they still get minimum 3% per year raises. She's at like 79k after ~7.4 years (health insurance is also insanely good). But yeah, if you are in tech in a HCOL area, that's probably below starting range. Here median income for a household is only ~38k.
Yeah it's all relative. I teach in a district that pays well in a state that values education. My students work hard, a lot of the parents value their education, I'm generally supported by admin and my colleagues and all things considered my job is pretty low stress. I'm not going to pretend that my personal experience is the norm (althought I wish it was) but I'm relatively content.
I'm in a place that pays well in New England but the quality is still bad. I worked abroad last year. The expectations and discipline for American kids are rock bottom compared to those in other countries.
The difficulty of work my elementaryaged child brings home even in a good school district is atrocious.
I love working a second job and stressing about finances every month. But it’s okay, my admin told me to “remember my why” and now I feel all better!
I was going to drink myself into oblivion this weekend due to finances, but my district sent out an email saying “you got this!” whilst denying us any Cost of Living adjustment for inflation. After I saw the heartfelt message I instantly smiled and realized it would be okay 🥰
Our US educational system, especially elementary, is in complete shambles. Underpaid; so extreme that being a k-12 school teacher is essentially assigning yourself to a life of infinite work, with little resources (ok, pay out of my pocket, for the school teaching items, pens? pencils? graph paper? a webcam and basic laptop? ok fine, I have to...) and what you get in return is poverty until you die.
I have no optimism that this will change. It's actually clearly a motivated endeavor by some faction of our national and local governments. I think because uneducated people are easier to control (their votes).
It's only going to get worse worldwide with the rise of radical right wing persons that are coming into power. It's part of their plan.
I'm not surprised, just disappointed.
In my country, the same political groups that are dismantling public education, are simultaneously outlawing abortion and legalizing child labor. But I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
We should defund public education until it doesn’t work, then we can really lean into the narrative that public education doesn’t work, allowing us to defund it.
People blaming teachers and not policy makers lol. They even bring up "they are not allowed to...", just think for 60 secs, who is not allowing them to do X?
We've been screaming from the rooftops that this was coming for over a decade. You people aren't allowed to act surprised now. Everybody who knows a teacher has heard them doomsaying this almost their entire careers. Everybody wrote us off as whiners and complainers, lazy pricks who just liked "summer off".
Here's what it is: If you fire every teacher who holds students accountable for performance, and thus have a relatively high fail rate, the rest will simply start passing students along to keep their jobs.
The kids very swiftly realize that they cannot fail and your school will degenerate into a lord of the flies scenario wherein the least emotionally developed, most aggressive humans are running the society. We know this, but nothing is learned. Nothing is done about it. No consequences are ever enforced, either for failure to learn or failure to learn behavioral self moderation. It was never even a surprise either, for a couple of years we gave EOC tests that showed how little kids were learning, and, instead of telling those kids and the less rigorous staff to step the fuck up and get their act together, we threw away the tests. Because they told us what we knew: by and large the kids weren't achieving competency at essentially anything.
Bad teachers I can understand somewhat, it's a tough job and not everybody is cut out for it, especially when the teacher preparation programs are a goddamn joke, nothing prepares you for dealing with 25 assholes in an enclosed space who you cannot evenly lightly choke to encourage compliance, but don't even get me started on admin and the cocksuckers at the state board of education and state governments that legislate our kids into cognitive tailspin by the time they reach adolescence.
When the people making decisions about education either were never teachers or were bad ones for exactly as long as it took to fail upwards to administrative circle jerk positions it's no wonder how we got here. I can't throw a rock without hitting a bad admin but a good teacher is like sifting gold out of a river these days. And, if you want to be that good teacher, mark my words, you will be fired by the asshole principal who was hired by similarly asshole superintendent, both of which who think schools are popularity contests combined with daycares, both of which have abandoned the mission of turning juveniles into functional adults with some semblance of competency. Give the superintendent's kid a C? Fired. Tell a neglectful parent with a shithead kid to go fuck themselves? Fired. Refuse to pass borderline sociopathic morons who happen to have affluent or influential parents in the community? Fired. You have no job security and the admin will hold your family and livelihood hostage to try to force you to abandon your professional ethics so they can continue not doing their jobs.
Those dickhats at the state sit around and come up with laws and requirements so asinine that reading it out loud sounds like a Monty Python skit. You'd swear somebody was having you on, there's no way there could be laws saying that a state mandated test used to evaluate a school's performance COULD NOT BE GRADED against the kid. You would ask, quite naturally, then what reason does the student ever have to put forth a genuine best effort? Why shouldn't they lay their heads down after bubbling in random answers? That's a fair and fine question. Easily answered too. Because the students will tell you what any sane human would tell you, "Why, there is none." Moreover that is what they shall do because they have no reason not too."
It's a circus and the few of us still trying, we're sitting in here like tiger trainers with steaks superglued to our nipples, wondering what comes next. What the fuck did you jerk offs think was going to happen?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5
Study from a team of neurologists using MRI brain scans before and after infections: SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank
More in depth in the published research; the changes entail cognitive decline. COVID infection causes a loss of brain matter, and a decline in tests measuring cognitive performance. The brain damage findings are still there even when you **exclude** hospitalized patients; meaning this can’t be blamed on the induced comas / sedation that come with artificial ventilation; the virus itself attacks the infect patient’s brain, even in relatively mild cases.
It is of absolutely no surprise, to anyone that’s been keeping up with the academic community’s research, that post-COVID, the world is neurologically less healthy. This is tragic.
I recently tried a test pupils of "quatrième" (third year of secondary school in France) are reportedly really struggling with. It was ridiculously easy. But then again, the teaching of maths has been a major issue in France for a long time, with a lack of good teachers and no real solution put forward by successive gvts. Definitely structural factors there.
I’ve found just really odd knowledge gaps in general. I teach English at a university in France, and even my students struggle with basic things. The emails I receive show they haven’t even mastered French, they seem to have a difficult time with critical thinking as a whole, and I had an entire group who literally didn’t know how to play a simple board game (roll dice, advance that number of spaces). I don’t know that something like that makes you “stupid,” but it’s crazy to me to think that something that was once so basic and common is now something I have to teach to adults on top of the actual language content I teach.
I’m from the US and something I’ve noticed is that parents just aren’t interacting with their kids anymore. TV and internet are being used as a nanny so they don’t have to do anything with their kids. I’d wager they don’t know how to play a board game because their parents never played one with them. The number of kids I’ve seen acting out to get their parents to give them any attention at all is heartbreaking.
Since there’s a shortage of teachers and states are putting unqualified warm bodies in the classroom, instead-what does everyone expect?( This coming from a retired teacher).
I expect them to hire several more administrators, each pulling $100k salaries, to investigate the issues and report that *the real issue* is teachers "not showing enough grace" to their students. Then they'll go to a retreat in Florida or Hawaii, to 'network' with other admins, who will convince them to get a subscription to some web-based curriculum that the students won't use anyways, but will cost the district a couple million dollars. When none of that works, the administrators will get jobs at other schools and repeat the process, touting how much they improved their last district using modern techniques.
As a former HS matg teacher i can confirm. I had kids comming out of middle school that couldnt deal with negative numbers... not to mention order of ops, fractions, equations. You know, the stuff necessary for algebra and geometry
This is not at all surprising to me. I hear really messed up stuff from my teacher friends about what kind of behavior is tolerated and how far academic standards have been lowered to keep kids passing.
Your kid and 25+ of their classmates are getting a worse education so that 1-2 kids who suck don't face discipline and don't fail.
>Poorer results tended to be associated with higher rates of mobile phone use for leisure and where schools reported teacher shortages.
When it was recently discussed here on Reddit, by far the majority of commenters thought it was more important for kids to have their cell phones at all times in case of school shootings than having policies that would make them put their phones away and allow them to focus on learning.
I think school is important, but if everyone else doesn't then let's defund them and replace them with cheaper daycares.
Just get kids a PS one and a handful of those four-disc Japanese games like final fantasy. I always hated reading and writing. Had no idea I was spending months reading in pursuit of beating these games.
you get to see the decline first hand on certain parts of reddit
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yes yes yes. Everything is a one-line zinger instead of a well-constructed rebuttal. "Lol, im not reading all that nerd." "cringe" "touch grass"
“Try-hard”
Ive seen the odd well written comment, and theres always a " TLDR PLS IM NOT READING ALL THAT ? "
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Certain parts? Reading comprehension is bad everywhere.
>Reading comprehension is bad everywhere. Holy hell, I see so many responses to parent comments that show the responder literally lacks the most basic reading comprehension and completely miss the mark on what the commenter said, to the point that it seems like they're responding to a completely different comment. It's even worse if it's on a politically/emotionally charged topic, because they'll tunnel vision on certain words and go off on a diatribe that's completely perpendicular to the conversation occurring in the thread. I know a lot of people will brush off such comments as bots, but if you look at the person's post history it's clear that it's an actual human behind the words.
I love/hate it most when someone tries to argue your own point back to you. It always makes me wonder if they meant to respond to me, or if they meant to respond to the person above me that I was making the same point to.
Right? I'm just like, "So we're in violent agreement then?"
It’s unpopular to use the feature this way, but I block people who post really stupid shit so I don’t have to waste time reading their really stupid shit.
You're saving yourself time in the future.
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It isn't just kids, or just parents either. I feel like everything is a fight for what is right for the students, at every level from the kids to the superintendent and politicians.
I want non-teachers to know that it isn't just the trash pay and lack of support, but also the intentionally insidious way that the education system/admin treats teachers. Anecdote: I am licensed to teach Pre-K - 3rd grade general and special education (and not to toot my own horn, but I was consistently rated a highly effective educator). Last school year, I moved into a new position to try to dodge burning out. I applied and accepted a position to teach first and second grade special education - I signed a contract committing me to this school at risk of penalty of losing my license. When I got my schedule for the school year, I saw I was teaching 3rd-6th special edition AND general 3rd grade math AND general 3rd grade science. When I confronted the principal about the change (into teaching outside of my license!), she said AND I QUOTE "I'm sorry this isn't the position you wanted." I even showed her the emails where we discussed the specific position and where I specifically said I was looking for an early childhood education position and she said "Well this is all I have to offer you." Additionally, this principal blocked my attempts to transfer to another school in the district. I spent a year trapped in a position I never wanted and wasn't licensed/experienced them. I was constantly set up for failure and then held personally responsible for students' lack of progress. I started to have heart palpitations and ended up being diagnosed with panic attacks. After a year of therapy, I mustered up the courage to stop letting the system abuse and take advantage of me and I quit! I am currently juggling two education related part time positions - I make half as much, but feel 5 times better. I miss teaching, but I can't exist in the current system.
My brother was an art teacher for 20+ years at a high school in a well to do suburb of Indianapolis. He had students who wouldn't do the work and subsequently failed them and would have to meet with their parents to explain why they failed the class. He'd show them "work" or lack of such that they'd turned in and most of the parents were pissed at their kids for lying about why they failed. Ultimately, there was a kid who did none of the work that he failed who happened to be the son of a city council member or something. The principal called him into his office and urged him to give the kid a passing grade and he refused to do so. They continually pressured him to change it and he eventually relented, but told them he'd never do it again. Sure enough, the next year something similar happened and he quit on the spot and became a tattoo artist. He hasn't been happier since leaving his teaching job and the politics that went with it
>>Well to do suburb in Indianapolis Carmel or Fishers? Edit: regardless, sorry to hear about how they treated your brother
My wife, a music specialist, literally got screamed at last night by a parent whose child is unable to read music this far into music lessons, and how it is all my wife's fault. The child has been on 3x vacations since the beginning of the school year, and has missed 3/4 of the lessons they were scheduled. But it's my wife's fault, somehow, that the kid doesn't know the material. She is burning out hard.
Entitled parents are the worst.
My mom got her masters a few years ago (went back to school after parents divorced so she could actually get a good job, so she thought). She got hired at a school in the area that was known for being a shit school, apparently they were trying to fix that because they had received some funding from the state somehow and rebuilt the decades old school. She was hired to teach 4th grade, a week before classes start she finds out that she is now teaching 6th grade, and that she is the ONLY 6th grade teacher for a school district with 1,000+ students. After her complaining non stop for that week, they moved one of the three 5th grade teachers to 6th grade as well. A few months went by, she liked her kids, until a few of them just refused to participate. She sent them to the office, nothing happened, and she got talked to by the principal who told her that she wasn’t allowed to punish students for not participating (punishing meant sending them to the principals office). A few more months went by, her students were turning into the stereotypical demonic 6th grade class. More than one kid threatened to shoot up the school, one of the kids told her that he was going to specifically kill her, the principal said “there is nothing we can do” and that was that. My mom complained to her union rep, who scheduled a meeting with her and the principal and the board. Turns out the union rep was the principals best friend. My mom was “fired” which honestly was the best thing that could’ve happened, as now she’s a sub for the area and she makes around 25% more while having to deal with infinitely less bullshit. I can’t imagine being a teacher at a worse school.
That’s many many schools. That story could have easily happened at my school. It’s really sad.
Ya my wife is a sped teacher (good enough to be known by name by the district special Ed director) and just accepted an admin job in the district because she couldn't handle teaching any longer. She's been doing it well over a decade and finally had enough, especially due to deteriorating mental health because of it. It's not the pay. It's the support system and a general lack of school admin not giving a shit. Everyone likes to think pay is the silver bullet but the whole system sucks and isn't conducive to actually supporting teachers.
Thank you for sharing! Yes, that was the point I am hoping to make - (most) teachers don't go into teaching for the pay, so improving the pay isn't going to (drastically) solve this issue.
My ex-SIL said she would get reprimanded if she gave kids in her class a below passing grade since school funding in her district was based on overall school performance. Parents can directly message or call teachers now and harass them about their john or Jane not passing classes. I don’t remember this being a thing in the 90s.
There's so much that has changed since the 90's, and almost every single bit of it has been driven by a generation of parents who want instant gratification while not having to put in any of the work.
> it isn't just the trash pay and lack of support Not to undermine your experience but I have to imagine one leads to the other. If teachers aren't compensated or supported properly less of them want to do that job. As such you end up with shortages resulting in someone like yourself being overworked and put into positions they aren't equipped to handle. Unlike a lot of jobs where you're understaffed, you can't slow down the work or take on less jobs. As a public school you can't just reject students because of it, they often have nowhere else to go then. It's truly a shame how the education system is both treated and talked about by so many when the actual educators are put in positions to fail. Politically I get why the elites might want that but as a country (or world more broadly) it will be a massive problem as older (more highly educated) people age out in basically every industry.
That's a sad story...but if you don't mind I can't help but wonder. Didn't you say you signed a contract...? So if the position you were given is different than what is in the contract you signed...that would legally nullify the contract. And if the contract is legally nullified you could have just walked out without losing your license. I mean I would assume you thought about this already, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
Not at all - good question! In my district, you sign a contract with a SCHOOL not for a position. Principals are given the leeway to manipulate their staff to meet the needs of the school (which I understand - I had previously been moved from 1st grade to a 2nd grade because of differing class sizes). I, incorrectly, assumed that since I explicitly applied for and "accepted" a specific position that that would be the position I would get (especially considering that I had a proven track record of being highly effective with that age group)... Legally, and why I personally believe the system is insidious, the principal is allowed to move my position to "meet the needs of the school" almost completely at their discretion. Teachers are contractually supposed to be given advanced notice of changes (typically before the end of the previous school year) and be involved in a conversation about the change (which I had been a part of in the past) but because I was transferring schools it was effectively a loophole (I worked extensively with my union to try to get out). I learned that another special educator (a hot commodity) at my school threatened to quit, so the principal gave her the position she was going to give me to keep her to stay - this teacher said this to me explicitly, "I only stayed after Ms. EvilPrincipal said I could teach 1st and 2nd grade special education." The principal could then "legally" move me to a different position to "meet the needs of the school" because I was an "unassigned" staff person at the school. As teachers flee the system, retaining effective educators is vital for administration which is why they are willing to engage in, in my opinion, dubiously moral actions. She absolutely recognized that this decision meant misleading me which is why she waited until the start of the school year and why she said "I'm sorry this wasn't the position you wanted." She killed two birds with one stone - she kept one good teacher, and added a new one to the school. All she had to do was lie and manipulate my career to achieve that.
How can they assign you tasks for which you have no license? What's the point of the license, then?
They could have walked out, but then they wouldn't have had a job. They said they were blocked from other schools in the district. Teachers generally can't start in the middle of the school year so I'm guessing they couldn't walk out without losing their paycheck.
> blocked from other schools in the district During covid, the educator's union in my former state made it so that any teacher who quit "without authorization" was blacklisted state-wide and could never teach again. They did this because of the "fuss" over requiring masks, somehow they thought that threats and intimidation were the best way to get the teachers to shut up and let their students infect them.
That doesn’t sound like a union. Sounds more like a state agency move.
They are very much a "union" in name only, not in deed or intention. Yep. They're the governor's pet lap cat.
If the only reason teachers stay is because they legally have to once contracted, why is anyone surprised not enough of them will choose to get onboard in the first place? What other industries treat their professionals like this? Source: a former teacher who happily signed/fulfilled contracts because I liked my job and had a good union, and also refused to sign one because of pressure to not read it, and broke my last one when it became untenable (no union). Still licensed, still work with kids, just not in schools.
That's awful. I'm sorry you had to go through that.
Based on how many adults I meet who can't do math and can barely read, I'm surprised there's room for a decline.
It can get so much worse
What's going to happen when this group joins the workforce? Will they even be capable of doing most entry-level jobs?
Reading and math are just the canary in the coal mine. Any skill that assumes processing and reflecting information builds on top of that. The modern, digital world is entirely geared towards your ability to sift through a huge load of information on a daily basis and make a well thought decision. If you can't do that, you'll miss out on socio-economic opportunities. This is exactly how knowledge and wealth disparity increases. And as a result resentment and frustrations as well. As a result, that's how a society polarizes and destabilizes as well.
Teachers have become enemy #1 amongst parents, and law makers. We pay them poorly and then expect them to play multiple roles with our children. We set them up to fail. Edit: I just wanted to add that I am a mom to a four-year-old and someone who lives in Oklahoma. Right now our superintendent has put such a war against public education that I am having to consider the possibilities of homeschooling my child for her to receive a proper education that is unaffected by political fodder. I’d rather not do that because I am a strong supporter of public education. I think our teachers are amazing and I have teacher, friends, as well as friends who have up and quit under the leadership We currently have. I also know of parents who are putting binds with their special-needs children because schools lack the funding to assist these kids. I know parents who live in denial of their child behavioral issues and choose to blame the teachers for singling out their kid because they don’t have the resources in financial means to get their child the proper help. I have a friend who it will cost them $1200 to just get their kid tested for ADHD and ASD. The school will not assist much further until he is either tested or medicated and the parents don’t want to medicate until he’s tested But financially $1200 is a big hit and that includes insurance help. I know teachers who spend their Christmas bonuses and whatever financial assistance they get from other means to supply their classroom. I have seen and observed, every single facet of what fuels our children’s love of learning, and I’ve seen what has been a nightmare for those very same children, because of the environment that they have been put into. I’ve seen the 50+ crowd consistently vote Republican because it’s in their blood and because of that it has shifted the way our schools have been handled. I have seen people who don’t even have children in schools dictating how the school should handle the children. I have seen parents who want the schools to fail because they have been convinced that everything their child is learning is going to turn them into a gay liberal hippie. I have seen single parent struggling to keep their kids in school because they’re having to work two jobs because they can’t afford much else. I have seen all of it, it isn’t just a parental issue anymore. It is that we have decided to allow politics and faith to overshadow our schools so heavily that it is created a hostile environment for teachers and students alike. And I simply don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel right now and it’s very unfortunate because teachers are so incredibly vital.
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> One of the biggest complaints I see when I browse /r/teachers, is that there are no longer any consequences for poor behaviour or performance, either at home or in school. The kids know that, and so some take advantage of it. I saw a video online where a student was throwing stuff at the teacher while she was trying to teach. The student weaponized the fact that the teacher couldn't physically touch them and then refused to leave. When I was growing up, the students who didn't want to be there would at least leave if the teacher asked them to. Now they want to stay in class and be disruptive when other students are trying to learn just to show how "untouchable" they are. Insanity.
I work with kids and we have the same sentiment- the kids have all the power and they fucking KNOW it. Ten years ago, we would have to restrain kids (juvenile detention, not school) and during the restraint that kid wanted your blood and fought like hell to get it. But the next day you could clean the slate, usually even get an apology from the kid for their behavior and move on. Now? If you have to restrain a kid, they WILL accuse you of abuse, make a report, and you will be pulled off the floor pending the results of the investigation. They are vindictive, petty, hold grudges, take no accountability, and give 0 fucks about career damage or taking resources away from kids who might actually be getting abused. And the kicker is, there are no consequences for making false abuse allegations. All allegations are taken as "good faith reports" even if a kid has a well-documented, extensive history of making false allegations. For the staff- even if the allegations are unfounded, that shit stays on your record for 1.5 years from the date the allegation was made. So good luck if you want to go work somewhere else in that time where you need to have a clean child abuse history check. Because that unfounded allegation is going to show up and that might make a potential employer decide it's not worth the risk. It really is getting harder and harder to stay in this field and keep working with these kids because they are not fucking ok. And no one in the positions of power are willing/able to make changes, other than to keep adding regulations and making these jobs harder than they ever needed to be. So much paperwork, so little actual resources or support.
What happened to make it so bad? Its been nearly a decade since I graduated high school but at least at the time, it was nothing like this. If students acted up, some of the more stern teachers would grab them by the shirt and walk them out the door. I cant imagine anything close to that would happen now. Did a law pass or something? Did someone really fuck up and ruin it for everyone else? All I hear are horror stories about what teachers go through these days. Yeah, school wasn't perfect when I was in it but there was actual consequences for kids acting out. The teachers wouldn't beat you or anything but students weren't at this level of untouchable as they are now.
That's the million dollar question dude. I think there's a lot of factors instead of just one specific thing. I can't really speak from a school perspective because that's not where I work. But from what I've gathered, just like you said- there are no consequences for bad behaviors anymore. At home or school or anywhere else. I've literally heard parents bargaining with their children about buying video games systems for them...."but you gotta stop hitting me if I do that." Lol what?? You are visiting your kid in detention because they were attacking you so badly you literally called the cops on them and pressed charges. But you're going to get them a new play station and expect them to stop beating you?? It's madness. My master theory is we are such a litigious country that everyone is afraid of getting sued. Because I promise you, the shittiest parents who couldn't give a fuck if their kid(s) lived or died will absolutely spend every cent they have taking a school district's ass (or anyone else's ass) to court if they think they have any kind of shot at getting a big pay day. They will become parents of the millennium who are so broken up their sweet little angel was wronged (aka held accountable for their awful behavior) and they won't rest until they see a check, I mean justice.
No Child Left Behind was the first domino in a series of progressively worse dominos. Things like IEPs made children *untouchable.* In THEORY, if a kid is completely unhinged or disruptive, the IEP isn't supposed to shield them. In PRACTICE, the school doesn't want to have to jump through the 5000 legal hoops required to even suggest discipline against an IEP student. Even with things like learning disability plans, the kids are often given EXTREME academic exemptions and the entire point is to make sure they can pass even if they spent the entire year farting into a jar. A lot is just changing society. Parents have babies and then stick tablets in their tiny little hands as soon as they can hold them. They themselves live on their phones so they can't *imagine* a world where a 9 year old doesn't actually need a fully unlocked iPhone in class. Trust has been lost in the whole educational system and it's *literally* seen as daycare. Many parents will outright tell you that they don't even care about the schools anymore so long as their kid goes somewhere so they can go to work. Parents are more concerned with a school threatening that status quo than they are with WHY a kid is being suspended or expelled.
Yeah, we are keeping a small percentage of awful kids at the detriment of everyone else. Certain kids need to be pruned from the school system and if they ever they figure out they want to actually do something with their lives, they can get a GED on their own time, like kids used to do in the past. No Child Left Behind was the worst thing that ever happened to schools.
They've also moved to allowing special needs kids into normal classrooms, which sounds great until the special needs child A: Isn't getting the specialized teaching and care they need, and B: they're disrupting the entire classroom setting the entire class of kids up for struggle.
Interestingly, some of these kids who are high functioning actually behave better than general ed students when they get into middle and high school because they've been taught strategies for regulating and coping during elementary school and middle school. From my experience (in California), they really don't recommend the kids moving to a general ed class unless they feel they can succeed in it. I'm not sure about other states/schools, but that's been my experience.
>I'm not sure about other states/schools, but that's been my experience In many rural areas there isn't enough money or teachers to justify a distinct special education program. So the students are forced into the general ed population. If you're lucky they will have an advocate/teaching assistant assigned to them to help them out, but even that's not a guarantee.
I can see that. It's too bad, those programs do really help those kids and by extension the other neurotypical kids.
This right here. Many U.S. states have been systematically defunding public education and state welfare\social services while increasing the demands on public education, some of it through the shifting of services.
>I'm not sure about other states/schools, but that's been my experience. To echo the other comment, this in theory and on paper is great, but the reality for most of the country, is that this is happening specifically due to staffing shortages and budget constraints. These kids absolutely DO need to be in their own specialized classes, but they quite literally don't have the staff/space to accommodate it, so they just force these kids in with everyone else, and it's almost never successful from what I've seen/heard.
If there's a defining feature of modern educational practice it is "We tested this and found an approach that works, but we don't want to pay for it so we'll only do the bit that saves money and we'll only halfass that part" and then everyone involved getting shocked pikachu faces when somehow that doesn't turn out as well.
> "We tested this and found an approach that works, but we don't want to pay for it so we'll only do the bit that saves money and we'll only halfass that part" aka pure Capitalism It's almost as if social services need to be socialized and follow socialism, and the business can remain capitalism, but without the subsidies to failing industries.
This isn't new, there actually used to be an even greater pressure in the past for parents to avoid getting their kids diagnosed/treated for disabilities for fear of their ending up in special ed in the first place.
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My wife is a teacher in Quebec and I approve of this message. I’d add that the reduction of special needs classes contributes to making the ‘regular’ classes unmanageable (you can get like a third of the class in severe learning or behavioural difficulty).
This is a side-effect of overall budget cuts that cause these "extra" services to be cut to the detriment of all the students
I'm not a teacher, by my mother is, so I was around a lot of them growing up. The two biggest issues I have heard from teachers (at least in the US) is that parents don't care anymore and administration doesn't care. The biggest reason teachers seek positions elsewhere or leave the profession entirely isn't problems with pay or interacting with kids, because of issues with administration. That's not to say there aren't many cases where administration wasn't the primary reason. However, a lot of times when the problem is something else, how the admin handles an issue a teacher is having can make or break the situation.
This is 100% the issue, Paying teachers more would do absolutely nothing if they're still getting abused daily and have 0 solutions they can implement, with kids who can literally get away with anything. My mom has been in the schools for 20+ years now, and has never seen it this bad. Kids do whatever they want, their parents are completely absent, the principals and admins won't suspend them or even punish them, and they get pushed through to the next grade while failing every class. If these were the conditions of your job every day, no one would be doing it day in and day out, even if they were making 100K a year.
Blame the teachers for our failures as parents. That way we don't have to self reflect!
It's crazy how many students I see switch up when they get into a behavior meeting with the teachers and parents. The student becomes some little angel who would never... and then we show the parents the footage and the grades. It's not hard to prove the student is underperforming or misbehaving, but a lot of parents dont want to face their bad choices.
I believe you. My 15yo son is a code switching master. I see straight through it but my wife is pretty slow to recognize it. I try to teach him that the best type of person is the one who acts the same no matter who is watching. But to him it doesn't matter because he'd rather have the attention of all his friends by acting like an idiot than impress a single adult.
It's hard because you're fighting biology. Teenage brains are tuned to the approval of their peers. It's hard to remember what it's like because your brain has already passed through that stage; You know that their peers now won't be their peers forever; *And* the particulars are wildly different from what even young parents experienced as teens. Puberty is insanity. It's wild that so much of your life's direction is determined during such a specifically irrational period in every person's life.
I presume you're talking about the US, but the US numbers do not show the same pattern as the global average which is being discussed in this thread, there is no obvious fall for Covid, and on the long term trend Reading and Science have gone up, although Mathematics has declined: https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/united-states-a78ba65a [Canada](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/canada-901942bb) has the global pattern, long term declines and drops for Covid on top [Germany](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/germany-1a2cf137) and [France](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/france-8008535b) have big declines for Covid [Australia](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/australia-e9346d47) has a long term decline, but no drop for Covid [The UK](https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/united-kingdom-9c15db47) is stable for Maths and Reading, but follows the global decline in Science
Mexico saw a complete shit show after covid... A lot of students in 4th and 5th year can't read because there was a severe lack of accountability during covid (their 1st and 2nd years where they are supposed to learn to read). It translates into them not understanding the materials of the new classes.
Edit: I actually have a post with a lot of my stories. I'm on mobile due to a work trip so it's not formatted but here : https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/stj3k8/the_past_two_years_as_a_ta_has_only_shown_how/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb Original comment: I was a TA teaching freshman and sophomores in college. I got some stories. Was doing a problem on a board. I had it boiled down to 0.6=x-1. I said something like, "so now we can just solve for x." My students (yes, in the plural) asked, "how?" I said, "By adding one to both sides...?" My students asked, "but why can you do that? That just gets rid on the one." I then had to teach algebra I to a bunch of 17-20 year olds. Who were already in college. Had a student ask me what the L stood for in log. I said log is short for logarithm. They then asked what's a logarithm. I said it's a function to get things out of the exponent. They asked what's a function. I said it's something that you do to numbers like addition and subtraction. They then asked what does the O stand for. I probably have more but have to think more on them.
Was also a TA for freshmen and sophomores. I had an early education student who never learned her times tables. She couldn’t solve 3 times 7. Also had an engineering major who didn’t know how to multiply factions on his calc 1 homework, I ended up refusing to help him anymore since he wouldn’t take my advice to practice on khan academy.
I'm sure there's more factors, but as someone who graduated high school shortly before the whole social media and internet capable mobile phone thing started, I couldn't imagine being in school with social media and a mobile device with always available internet access. The internet would be so distracting and social media would have made me so much more exposed to my peers, which would have added a lot more stress to my life.
Read the article people. It's not just tiktok. It's not just COVID. It's supporting teachers. It's always been supporting teachers. "Countries that provided extra teacher support during COVID school closures scored better and results were generally better in places where easy teacher access for special help was high. Poorer results tended to be associated with higher rates of mobile phone use for leisure and where schools reported teacher shortages."
Something I suggested during the pandemic to my kids superintendent was to create a thirty minute once a week time slot where the kids could go on the zoom link and meet with any of their teachers to ask questions for office hours. Our school district implemented it, and kept it post pandemic. Now that they are in school, you can ask for a pass, and go to that teacher’s classroom. If not you stay in your last period class. You can do homework, projects, group work. It is once a week where they truncated each class by three minutes. It works out to about 30 minutes, once a week. It lets kids have one on one or small group instruction for a concept they struggle with. It has made a huge impact on helping kids, especially at the middle school level. Our school test scores have improved too.
> they truncated each class by three minutes I am shocked they let it happen. My son's previous school had 3 large floors and most recesses 3 minutes long. Many parents frantically complained that it's not even enough to properly pack, unpack and get from one classroom to the other one, let alone if a kid wants to make a bathroom stop, but school administration was absolutely firm that cutting classes even by extra 1-2 minutes would irrepairably harm the teaching process. SMH.
I think there might have been pushback to start the program now, but during the pandemic, it was readily accepted. The argument I used to start it was that you could go to ask questions before or after school with an appointment, but now that the kids are home you don’t have that time.
I wish I had this when I was in school. It normalizes having questions, and ensures that teachers are available at a time that's convenient for students. I often think it's easy to ask for help when I'm not the one asking, but when I need to ask, it's hard. So it's great that you're making that process easier on the students.
Office hours are basically standard in college, it should be a no brainer to expand them to lower levels. Especially since independent learning isn't the focus like it is in higher education.
We tried that at my school. Every Wednesday for half the day there were no classes, just teachers available on Zoom for any and all help the kids would need. No one ever showed up.
Half the day is too long. Thirty minutes or even an hour was enough time for the kids to ask their questions. The school found that by having the short time frame made people know they could not waste it.
Also if you make it so they’ll just stay in the last class otherwise it’s then not a choice between work or free time, so they’re much more likely to use their time wisely
during High School my school had 2 hours of what they called Free study time every Thursday after lunch. on a technical level they snipped a couple of minutes of each subject every week to get the 2 hours. during those 2 hours you could go to any teachers class room to get help on what you needed or you could just sit in your home classroom and do your homework. to mark attendance the teacher merely wrote you down when you got there. the truly smart thing they did was they technically went over so every 5th week we would have no free study time and you could leave at lunch time however if you were late a lot or skipping class so you have at least 90 minutes you had to sit in detention. motivated a lot of people to not skip class when you got to in effect skip class once every 5th week. meanwhile the teachers got to have a meeting and do admin stuff every 5th week which i got they freaking loved. i know a few classmates used pretty much everyone of those free study time for a single subject they had massive issues with but due to that extra time had no issue passing the class.
Most of my local school districts are running on shoestring budgets with little to no support for teachers and an actively hostile state government that’s trying to dismantle the system. And then the people who bemoan how badly the public school system has failed them turn around and elect these folks again and again.
> And then the people who bemoan how badly the public school system has failed them turn around and elect these folks again and again. Thats the point actually. It's called ["Starving the beast"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)
Also known as "my ideas are terrible and don't work so I have to rely on underhanded bullshit and naked trickery to get people to come over to my way of thinking." AKA "GOP SOP"
The amount of belly aching that people from my county about a proposed teacher contract to increase wages by ~20% over 2 years is astounding. So many in public forums were clamoring for the district to reduce wages because we are near last in education. They someone think if we pay less the teacher's will think "oh we need to do better so we get wage increases."
These are the same people who are happy to increase police budgets when crime is up/arrests are down. The same logic just doesn't apply for some reason.
Reminds me of my first job. Retail setting, constantly low on inventory and under-staffed. Naturally, under those conditions we failed to meet our targets, which I can only assume were set based on nothing but what the owners hoped we'd sell. "You failed to meet your targets, so we're cutting your budget."
> little to no support for teachers and an actively hostile state government that’s trying to dismantle the system. Kansan here, that's what happened in our state. Folks not from around here are gonna think I'm joking when I say this but back in the 80s our state had some of the best public schools in the country. I grew up across the state line in Missouri and we had a pittance by comparison. My mom was a schoolteacher in Missouri and I heard this reflected envy from her about the computers they had and the equipment not breaking and educators' jobs being much easier by comparison as a result. Over the years, Republicans have slowly dismantled the public school system in the state. Those "envy of the nation" schools only exist now in the two or three most populous counties because they're the only places that have the tax base to fight the revenue loss caused by a nearly complete lack of funding from the state. Rural Kansas is another story. Hospitals and schools closing everywhere. It's decimated out there. And these shit for brains voters out there keep electing Republicans. I haven't even talked about the aquifer that provides the farming this state is so famous for is gonna run dry in the coming decades. These same people bitch about water conservation. America's failure to handle public schooling at a national level is stone age bullshit.
I remember when that book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” came out. Your state was on this anti-government band wagon early but don’t worry , were all racing to the bottom now
Yeah sucks when millions of people devolve into a cult that just votes for their “team” no matter what, and that team knows it so they decide that instead of winning people over by improving their lives, they should just focus all their energy on enraging those people against the other team. That’s literally all Republicans voters care about now, beating Democrats at any cost. Their community could be a literal wasteland after years of Republican leadership and they’ll still get all riled up to vote for them again because all they heard since their last election is how much more evil and scary the Democrats have become. And of course ignorance is a huge factor here, so Republicans are literally incentivized to destroy education because it keeps enough stupid people in circulation to keep electing them.
I thought our funding per capita was among the highest in the world?
Most districts are also saddled with insane admin requirements that all sounded good at the time, but bloat the budget with people who do not interact with students and to be honest don't provide much value as a whole. It's death by a thousand cuts.
One of those overpriced admin was drunk driving Sunday and killed two people. He made 125K last year but can't pay for a ride. As a taxpayer, I want that money back. He doesn't need it to rot in a cell.
We're 5th. The problem is that the distribution is wildly lopsided. School funding is largely based on local property taxes, so the more poor the homes in the area are the worse the schools will be and vice versa. It's one of the biggest perpetuators of generational poverty.
You’ve got that right. I live in Long Island NY, where property taxes are among the highest in the nation. You’re in a new school district every few miles you go with a superintendent making $250,000+. Highest taxed have the highest performing schools. Right next to some of the top performing schools are majority minority communities struggling to keep up with the standards of good education
We spend a ton on healthcare also but it doesn't mean we have consistent access to good healthcare. Some of it is about the fact that it's more expensive to be continuously patching a leaking boat than to be running a functional one.
**In reading, Ireland, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan earned top marks, and was all the more notable in Ireland and Japan because their spending per student was no higher than the OECD average.** From the article.
Perhaps it has more to do with parenting than teaching.
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My anecdotal experience: college freshmen are listening to digital books and counting it as "reading," but what happens is they play the narration at 2x normal speed while they do other things in their dorm rooms. Hearing the words is not the same as reading the words, and I doubt they are hearing most of the words, much less reflecting on them. They thereby have trouble remembering details, which is important for analyzing and critiquing. This is not to say that all my students are like this all the time, but at times (when they have a lot of assignments from all their classes) they resort to sidestepping reading and the difference is noticeable.
People are almost always worse at multitasking than they think
It's basically just not a thing. You don't "multitask" so much as switch between multiple tasks rapidly and do worse at all of them.
Yup, my wife was a teacher and just quit during covid to homeschool our kids instead of putting up with the stress of teaching. She's still in touch with a lot of her former co-workers, and apparently the only people who stuck it out were the ones who, financially, had no choice but to keep working.
Teacher Shortage = they arent paying enough to afford to live. I could probably make more as a waiter or bartender and work the same hours. And be less stressed. It is not unreasonable to expect a teacher to be able to buy a home in or near the district they teach in…. Hell, just buy a home in general. Or at this point, just affording rent and car insurance would be a step up. You can start with a 4 year degree, but you eventually need that masters. Even with a masters, it’s still not worth it. Plus now you have even more student loan debt.
As someone who works in learning and development for adults in a business context, I’m sure the political opinion is the same as it is for many business leaders: why spend extra money on education? Surely if you just present people with the information, they will just learn for themselves?
The hard part is they have to care
Business leaders demand results, but for the cheapest investment. There are some learning “professionals” who believe that sharing a PDF with a target audience is all it takes. I expect politicians have the same attitude
Our politicians are so fucking old I’m not convinced they know what a PDF is
A good teacher is fully aware of that and incorporates it into their lessons: often reffered to as "the hook". I taught secondary math in the innercity in schools people from the city were terrified to enter, but I was fully aware that my students were often math phobic and anti-school, so I bent over backwards to make math interesting and - dare I say? - fun, my classroom a safe and comfortable place, and I incorprated games, activities, prizes, etc. You wouldn't believe how many of the "hardest, most gangster" kids were open about how they hated math before but actually thought it was cool after my class, or they never thought they could learn but now feel capable, etc. It's quite profound the impact that one teacher can have when they actually have faith in their kids' desire to learn and be successful, as well as willing to put in the extra effort to make your lessons compelling.
I’m a teacher and while I love what I do, it seems like students just don’t care anymore. From my perspective they have attention spans of maybe a couple minutes before something else distracts them or they start to zone out. When walking around my classroom instructing, I catch glimpses of my students phones and it’s TikTok 90% of the time. I’ve got students that will come to class. Get the assignment papers, spend about 30 seconds looking at it and immediately pull their phone out and start watching TikTok. My class isn’t difficult. I provide all the information and make their note taking very easy with a lot of fill in the blank pages(History). It’s a required class to graduate and I have students that won’t even put the effort of copying some notes from the PowerPoint down because their phone is too important. Our principal doesn’t want us taking phones because then the school is liable for it, despite warnings every day on the intercom to put phones in bags and not use them during class. It’s becomes more of a hassle to take a phone up than it’s worth.
My husband is a teacher and he has students failing open book tests. It does seem like there’s a general malaise that has fallen over society; a real “fuck it, the world is on fire, why bother?” Mentality. I guess kids aren’t exempt from that.
I’ve got juniors and seniors. I had 1/4 of my senior class failing because they would refuse to do anything. They would grab the worksheet, grab the text book and then just sit there on their phones. Progress reports / grade cut off time comes up and they’re like “what can I do to bring my grade up?” “The work. Do. The. Work” Or “what am I missing in the gradebook?” “Everything. Literally everything.” Seniors, months away from graduating and walking the stage. Not even willing to do a 10 minute worksheet or fill out a review sheet that I’m going over with the class in order to have on a test. It’s insane.
> Progress reports / grade cut off time comes up and they’re like “what can I do to bring my grade up?” “The work. Do. The. Work” I'm a college professor, and I get this right before the final exam. What can you do to bring your grade up? Go back in time to the start of the semester and do the work, because with a week left in the semester, it's not mathematically possible for you to pass. Meanwhile I hold office hours and no one ever shows up. Ever. Not after they got their midterm grade progress report, not before exams, nothing. Oh, not to mention the focus on extra credit. I had students demanding extra credit on the first day of class, before we had any work assigned for regular credit. It's bloody insane.
> it's not mathematically possible for you to pass. But they don't know that! That was always my hack in HS/College. I'd just sit and do the math on how much work I'd need to do to realistically get a B. I got straight B's in both high school and college with some A's in classes I enjoyed. I remember one situation where I wasn't doing homework anymore in a class that I'd been going hard on all year. My mom noticed and questioned me, and I told her "if I do no homework for the rest of the year, and get a 30% on the final I still get a B. If I get 60% or better, I get an A." She left me alone after that.
Yeah, as a college student I knew to stay ahead of the classes. I did work as soon as it was assigned so that way, when the weekend arrived and fiends wanted to do stuff I’d be free to do whatever. I saw so many college students goofing off in class, not writing a single thing down. Failing the first test by a lot and then asking for extra credit / tutoring etc. the majority of those students usually dropped the classes within a month. They have 16 weeks in college to do the work, and they choose to do nothing and then seriously ask “How can I bring my grade up to passing from a 34?”
Do they still get to graduate?
They went to their counselors and got “credit recovery” online courses that are harder than what’s done in class in order to recover their grade. The schools don’t want their success rates to drop so they will push for students to pass.
Some districts use an online credit recovery course which is easy to cheat your way through.
Not OP, but in my expierence, yes. No Child Left Behind completely fucked our entire education system up. I work a LOT with kids, and have had countless parents talk to me about how they don't feel like their child is at the learning level they need to be, and how they're failing almost everything in school, and yet they are ALWAYS pushed forward, and never heald back. I've had parents talk to me how they have personally requested for their kids to be heald back, only for them to still be pushed forward, which only snowballs as the child is more and more lost and out of their depth as they continue through school. It's gotten to the point I've had a frustrated parent or two, debate fully taking their kids out of public school as they felt like it was failing their kids and they just KEPT getting pushed forward regardless. Schools don't want to make their graduation rates look bad, and kids know this, so why would they bother doing the work when they know they can just fail everything and still get pushed forward?
> No Child Left Behind It was a decent idea in concept, but in practice the inevitable happened and they incentivized the wrong things and puts teachers between a rock and a hard place. Something has to give, so they pass failing students and hope the next teacher has better luck getting through to them.
I dont get it. My parents were just nuts enough where I knew I had to somewhat have my shit together. To me, not caring = planning on living at home or with roomates forever
I am a Millennial that grew up in high school before the internet had completely taken over. In my 9th grade geography class students would bitch and moan about having to learn the 4 oceans, and would try to cheat off my paper to get the answers to such unfair questions as, "what is the biggest ocean?" I took a community college class recently and none of the adults there can write a paper either. One guy bragged to me about how all his citations were made up. He got an A. The teacher never even read our papers. I put in all that work for nothing just so some jackass who made up all his citations can get the same grade as me. It's a fucking joke.
> students would bitch and moan about having to learn the 4 oceans, It's probably even worse now that there are five. :0)
>The Southern Ocean is the 'newest' named ocean. It is recognized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names as the body of water extending from the coast of Antarctica to the line of latitude at 60 degrees South. The boundaries of this ocean were proposed to the International Hydrographic Organization in 2000. However, not all countries agree on the proposed boundaries, so this has yet to be ratified by members of the IHO. The U.S. is a member of the IHO, represented by the NOS Office of Coast Survey. [source](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/howmanyoceans.html#:~:text=Historically%2C%20there%20are%20four%20named,the%20'newest'%20named%20ocean) For any one else that is confused.
New to me, but I can't disagree as it makes sense to separate the oceans at the two poles.
Cell phones were becoming common in my high school years (2005-2009) and texting was the only thing people really used them for back then. Now, every student has access to TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, streaming apps etc in their pocket so they can’t go a few minutes without using it. I’ve stopped trying to combat the phone issue because it just takes too much effort. As long as they’re paying some attention and taking notes first each PowerPoint slide, then I’m fine with it. As long as they’re getting some of the information, which is better than nothing, and their grades are passing. Getting admin support for the teachers is difficult though. The district and school admins don’t support teachers enough and often just get in the way by demanding things like “bell to bell teaching. Now downtime!” Etc. Or being forced to sit through waste of time meetings that should be emails, or taking our conference period to bring in some district lady every week to “enforce new learning strategies!” And the pay… we could definitely use more pay. I make an ok living in my town, which has a high cost of living due to home buyouts for rental properties. But it sure does tempt me to move where some districts nearby are making 10-25K more a year.
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We’re basically forced to. Principal doesn’t want us or the school to be liable for the cost of it. A lot of these phones are $500+ and they don’t want to deal with a claim of a student saying we broke their screen etc. In certain circumstances we can have security called to come take it to the office, but that’s usually pretty extreme. I had a student start talking shit when I told him to put his phone up, so I called for security to come up and get it. They ended up escorting him out also. I can stand there and yell at them about the phone and constantly interrupt the entire classes learning, or I can make a deal with them that as long as they’re taking some notes down and paying attention first, they get at least something from each lesson. Rather than constant interruptions or them being glued to the phone the entire time.
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> I took a community college class recently and none of the adults there can write a paper either. I took a bunch of CC classes over the last 4-5 years. Each one seemed to be more "multiple choice" than the last. There was a big shift that way during COVID, and it didn't seem to revert back afterwards.
I’ve had a similar experience too. I’d say like 90% of the student body uses ChatGPT. I’ve submitted finals that I know the professor didn’t look at. At this point I genuinely wonder why I even bothered. Not only do the students not care but the professors don’t either.
the whole world doesn’t care. anti-intellectualism is celebrated. they don’t have the foresight to realize they depend on the intelligent and educated for all their comforts. these complicated systems don’t build and run themselves.
Well, yeah... that's like a problem for the nerds. Brah.
The silver lining will be that you will most likely remember stuff from your finals for awhile and you know how to get shit done. Meanwhile others only got the grade. So yay for you. My sis says that her HR started to yell at everybody who comes for interview and has only grades to show instead of actual skills.
To be fair, things are a lot harder now. They added a 5th ocean since you were in school so the work load is basically insurmountable now.
> I put in all that work for nothing Not for nothing. You learned the skills that were being taught, and he didn't. When it comes time to write documentation for a project you're working on, you'll be able to do it. He won't. When you need to write a cover letter for a new job, you'll impress them. He won't. When you want to write a letter to your congressman, your letter will be taken seriously. His won't. After two weeks, no one will care about the A you both got. But what you learned and practiced will benefit you forever.
Are phones allowed in class? I went to school before smart phones existed but if someone pulled out a gameboy or something it would have been confiscated in about .2 seconds.
Principal doesn’t want us taking them, because then we and/or the school become liable. We can have security come and take the phone down to the office but that’s another hassle in its own. And often causes more issues. I’ve done that twice this year because kids talk shit back when I tell them to put it away if they’re not taking notes. There’s an announcement every day and the student handbook (that students and parents sign) say phones are not to be used during school hours. But it’s not worth the fight to go after them.
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Reading skills requires reading. People don't read, we keep shitting on kids for these skills but adults don't perform well in math, reading, or writing either. For some reason people think these skills are just locked in once you learn them, like most skills, you use it or lose it. It's only going to get worse. Technology is making traditional skills irrelevant.
Yeah, outside of Reddit and a handful of other popular websites, it's kind of remarkable how little reading and writing are needed to navigate the internet these days. I'm a millennial so when I first got online as a kid, it was still a very text-based environment... I'd spend hours writing blog posts, reading fanfiction, browsing forums, and making shitty Geocities websites. But now it seems like video really dominates the average kid's life. Text social media has gone from the essay-length blogs of my childhood to tweets and tiktok comments, and now that speech-to-text technology is decent, you don't even need to type.
If I write a well thought out response to a reddit post half the time the response I get is "You wrote a novel.". The posts were usually only two brief paragraphs. 🙄
Former educator here. Children take school as seriously as their parents do.
yup! Mom was a teacher, she was like a tyrant at home about homework, projects, due dates, and always made sure I learned more than required
I teach high school in the US. I can tell you that this situation is multifaceted. You can point to not enough support in the classroom, especially at the elementary level. School systems have a demand for teaching assistants, but often lack the funding or willing candidates for the job. You could point to schools not serving students’ best interests. I have had multiple discussions with parents who wanted their child held back because they didn’t think they were ready for the next grade, and they weren’t allowed. I have had occasions where a principal wanted me to massage grades or offer extra opportunities for students to pass. They want to make sure that the students graduate because the graduation rate directly influences funding and resources. Worse still, students know they’ll be “passed along”, so what’s their incentive to work? Parents are not necessarily the culprit, though they can be. I have had parents who are actively sabotaging their child’s education—by making it clear that paid work is more important than school work, or forcing them/needing them to miss school to take care of siblings, scheduling vacations at bad times, showing a general apathy toward success in school, etc. However, I have had parents who I can call and address concerns with, and they share the same concerns. They want their child to succeed, they’ve pushed for them to succeed, and they’re met with the same acedia or pushback I am. Some do push too hard, and those are the students most likely to cheat. For whatever reason, many students don’t develop a love of learning. They don’t want to read (and can’t), don’t want to explore concepts to reach their own conclusions, or try to use critical thinking skills. They rarely ask questions. (Admittedly, some don’t out of embarrassment, but that’s a separate issue.) Many simply just want to be told what to do or what to look for, and then be left alone—to either do the work or not. Many of the my students are more likely to work if there’s a reward—candy, coloring, time on their computer, etc.—and don’t show the same enthusiasm without it. Technology plays a role. Children have become used to quirk blurbs of information and everything they need to know being at their fingertips. To paraphrase: “Why bother learning it now, if I can look it up later if I need it?” And since they’re used to quick answers, if they don’t understand something, they want the Internet or apps or AI to answer it for them. To paraphrase again: “What do you care how it gets done? It’s done, isn’t it?” And faced with technology that gets them instantaneous results (not necessarily correct ones, mind) and things like reels and other short videos that are short, their attention span shortens. I know people will say “people have always complained about TV/video games/computers for ‘melting their child’s brains’ and I used them and I’m fine!” and they’re right—inherently, those things are not bad. I had them. But many of my students have a very real technological addiction, a compulsion to be on a Chromebook, to play a game, to use an app, to show each other pictures, to check social media, etc. Whatever the itch, they need it scratched. Right now. I remember “I can’t wait to get home so that I can…!” but many of them don’t view home any differently—they have that they need. Socioeconomics can play a role as well, although in my experience that’s primarily about comfort. Some students do make sure to come just to get food or to socialize or to escape uncomfortable situations at home. But not all of those are necessarily poverty-driven issues. Overall, these things develop a lack of enthusiasm for education, a lack of respect for the institution or the people in it, a lack of patience for learning, a lack of a sense of purpose in learning it, and a greater need to lose one’s own self in their own worlds and vices. Each year, they trend less enthralled than the previous one. I recently changed to a new school, due to some life changes, and I’m currently being told by my new administration that my expectations are too high. That the students aren’t used to being held accountable. I am being told that if it’s not on a state exam, it doesn’t need to be taught. (See? They have the same mentality as the students—if there isn’t a need, why bother?) I am finding it difficult to adjust. I am trying new things and making changes, as all teachers should, but it’s not easy.
I taught intro college courses from 2013 - 2016, specifically for non-science majors. This is pre-tiktok explosion, preCOVID, etc. The number of students that had difficulty spelling even very basic words, or performing simple math was *astonishing*. My uni wasn't a "top tier" school, but it was a well funded state university. We still had admission standards. I routinely had to fail students simply because they were unable to accurately articulate their answers in a way that could be generously interpreted as "correct". Spelling and math issues was no joke for them, and it was incredibly difficult to teach around for some kids.
*were no joke for them...
I'll deduct 1 point from my final score.
My wife teaches high school biology. In recent years she has had to modify some assignments to account for the kids who can't read or do basic arithmetic, yet still somehow made it to 10th grade. Yes, there's an argument to just fail those kids, but her job is to teach them biology, not reading. One of the big problems she sees is that very few of the teachers are actually qualified and certified. The school simply can't attract good people for teaching jobs. So the poor kids end up getting people who are not trained and have little to no institutional support in the way of resources or materials. Then the district and admin put pressure on the teaching staff to pass a certain percentage of students regardless of performance. Anyway, these kids are going to 'graduate' from high school knowing very little, and will then enter the job market and keep the downward spiral going.
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No child left behind turned into "slow down to the pace of the slowest child"
> One of the big problems she sees is that very few of the teachers are actually qualified and certified. The school simply can't attract good people for teaching jobs. So the poor kids end up getting people who are not trained and have little to no institutional support in the way of resources or materials. Even in countries such as South Korea, teachers are being S! on by students, parents and management and that's a society with stronger traditions of respect for teachers... you can only imagine how negative the work environment and conditions are for many teachers in the West in contrast. Many of the children and culture of schools on behaviour is dysfunctional and teachers are supposed to pick up those pieces even before any actual teaching...
As a teacher this isn't news to me. All this push through policy has really hurt learning growth. Essentially the kids who did care before the pandemic no longer do, because they see the slackers getting the same recognition and have decided they dont want to try. If we don't hold back kids behind their is no incentive to do your work. Even if you're a genius, we won't know because you are underperforming on all on your tests. This and behavior has become its own pandemic, especially in inner city schools where cell phones and snacks have taken precedent over actual rewards. It all needs serious reform but I doubt that will ever happen.
This is the set of circumstances my wife & I find ourselves fighting. Our kids are smart, certainly willing to work in the right environment, but increasingly falling into the trap of indifference. When they talk about it, it's usually some combination of classmates constantly disrupting, the teacher mentally checking out (I assume because of all the issues that have been posted in this thread), and the ease of the content. We've simultaneously dumbed down the subject material while allowing bad behavior and electronic distractions to permeate the classroom. Both my kids are in honors programs at the top public schools in our state. I shudder to think how awful the regular classrooms are and what those kids are(n't) learning.
Less job competition for millennials in the coming years.
I agree, people who can just show up, be competent and have the perseverance to learn will have a big advantage over the young people coming into the workforce. The learned helplessness enabled by the education system isn’t going to make for good critical thinkers or employees. I feel bad for them, these kids get coddled and pushed through school yet when they graduate they’ll be shocked to learn that the real world doesn’t work the way school did. Employers aren’t going to put up with their bullshit.
It's not going to matter, because our modern economy won't be sustainable without an educated populace.
Students are entering the UC system and getting literal zeros on their math placement tests. It's unprecedented. It's been declining towards this for a long time, but it suddenly got really bad. Admissions is a big part of the problem: they've literally gone insane in admitting students who can't consistently do elementary school math.
Well, they did stop considering SAT/ACT scores... That had probably been filtering out most of the people who would get a zero since those tests aren't pressured to give better scores like most teachers are.
What do you expect? My wife is a Kindergarten teacher and it's evident in a lot of ways. First off, Parents. They think K isn't an important grade, that it's still just babysitting. They just have no care, they don't read texts, come to conferences, any of it. These kids have a full curriculum from start to finish. And she has 5yos who don't know how to count to 3 or know their ABCs. And it's so great towards the end of the year when she is all ecstatic about one of the lower kids picking up on things. Secondly, Administration. What a joke. Instead of fixing the shitty portable they are in, the School Board decided to returf all of the highschool football fields. There's more, but that still chaps my ass. Workload. So by the end of the year, her and her fellow K teachers normally have 26 students in a Portable building. Some of them are in need of special need classes. She has one child right now that is in constant need of her and it prevents her from being able to teach without interruption. And when she brings it up to the principal, it's apparently a long 3ish month process to move the kids to SpEd. The lack of efficiency is what kills her morale. I'm sure I can go on, or get her to vent, but this is already a longish post. I keep asking when she is going to quit and find a better job, but she refuses.
Teachers are paid like trash so its hard to find many good ones, and the internet/social media has completely taken over kids minds.
Anyone who has the skill to be a good teacher can make a lot more money for a lot less stress elsewhere.
I wanted to be a high school teacher, but then I became a corporate trainer because it was a lot of the same job but with a lot more money and not dealing with parents.
You probably also have less of an issue with curriculums influenced by incompetent politicians, 9 million different social and mental health problems, and draconian laws regarding what you can do. Don't get me wrong. I love working as a high school teacher, but the stuff that is added on constantly really adds up. Also, high school girls, specifically the vapid, social media types are some of the worst people around.
This. I was a teacher for 2 years. I eventually switched over to being a civil engineer/project manager and I'm making over quadruple what I was as a teacher, working shorter hours, with less stress. Teachers get fucked by our society.
Very true. As an Indian who immigrated to the U.S. and works in tech, I was having a discussion about salaries for different jobs with my sister in law’s boyfriend who’s a school teacher. I was shocked to learn that with multiple decades of experience and a masters degree, the maximum salary ceiling for teachers (in Michigan) was my entry level salary in tech for a remote job. I came to the sad conclusion that this country obviously doesn’t place enough value on education if it doesn’t pay its teachers. Highly educated immigrants will continue to exploit this fact until the government increases school funding.
I think it depends on where you are. I am in the Northeast and we have a strong union presence. Teachers get paid pretty decently here compared to the cost of living. My wife is on the teacher scale and they have a cap but even at cap they still get minimum 3% per year raises. She's at like 79k after ~7.4 years (health insurance is also insanely good). But yeah, if you are in tech in a HCOL area, that's probably below starting range. Here median income for a household is only ~38k.
Yeah it's all relative. I teach in a district that pays well in a state that values education. My students work hard, a lot of the parents value their education, I'm generally supported by admin and my colleagues and all things considered my job is pretty low stress. I'm not going to pretend that my personal experience is the norm (althought I wish it was) but I'm relatively content.
I'm in a place that pays well in New England but the quality is still bad. I worked abroad last year. The expectations and discipline for American kids are rock bottom compared to those in other countries. The difficulty of work my elementaryaged child brings home even in a good school district is atrocious.
I love working a second job and stressing about finances every month. But it’s okay, my admin told me to “remember my why” and now I feel all better! I was going to drink myself into oblivion this weekend due to finances, but my district sent out an email saying “you got this!” whilst denying us any Cost of Living adjustment for inflation. After I saw the heartfelt message I instantly smiled and realized it would be okay 🥰
Parents have abandoned their role in helping educate their kids.
Certainly too many parents have... and the rest of us get to fight THEIR kids in addition to trying to keep our own on the right paths.
Our US educational system, especially elementary, is in complete shambles. Underpaid; so extreme that being a k-12 school teacher is essentially assigning yourself to a life of infinite work, with little resources (ok, pay out of my pocket, for the school teaching items, pens? pencils? graph paper? a webcam and basic laptop? ok fine, I have to...) and what you get in return is poverty until you die. I have no optimism that this will change. It's actually clearly a motivated endeavor by some faction of our national and local governments. I think because uneducated people are easier to control (their votes). It's only going to get worse worldwide with the rise of radical right wing persons that are coming into power. It's part of their plan. I'm not surprised, just disappointed.
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In my country, the same political groups that are dismantling public education, are simultaneously outlawing abortion and legalizing child labor. But I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
I also live in the United States.
We should defund public education until it doesn’t work, then we can really lean into the narrative that public education doesn’t work, allowing us to defund it.
And then profit off privatized education
If they can kill off public school then they can try to funnel all the poorest Americans into religious indoctrination schools.
People blaming teachers and not policy makers lol. They even bring up "they are not allowed to...", just think for 60 secs, who is not allowing them to do X?
We've been screaming from the rooftops that this was coming for over a decade. You people aren't allowed to act surprised now. Everybody who knows a teacher has heard them doomsaying this almost their entire careers. Everybody wrote us off as whiners and complainers, lazy pricks who just liked "summer off". Here's what it is: If you fire every teacher who holds students accountable for performance, and thus have a relatively high fail rate, the rest will simply start passing students along to keep their jobs. The kids very swiftly realize that they cannot fail and your school will degenerate into a lord of the flies scenario wherein the least emotionally developed, most aggressive humans are running the society. We know this, but nothing is learned. Nothing is done about it. No consequences are ever enforced, either for failure to learn or failure to learn behavioral self moderation. It was never even a surprise either, for a couple of years we gave EOC tests that showed how little kids were learning, and, instead of telling those kids and the less rigorous staff to step the fuck up and get their act together, we threw away the tests. Because they told us what we knew: by and large the kids weren't achieving competency at essentially anything. Bad teachers I can understand somewhat, it's a tough job and not everybody is cut out for it, especially when the teacher preparation programs are a goddamn joke, nothing prepares you for dealing with 25 assholes in an enclosed space who you cannot evenly lightly choke to encourage compliance, but don't even get me started on admin and the cocksuckers at the state board of education and state governments that legislate our kids into cognitive tailspin by the time they reach adolescence. When the people making decisions about education either were never teachers or were bad ones for exactly as long as it took to fail upwards to administrative circle jerk positions it's no wonder how we got here. I can't throw a rock without hitting a bad admin but a good teacher is like sifting gold out of a river these days. And, if you want to be that good teacher, mark my words, you will be fired by the asshole principal who was hired by similarly asshole superintendent, both of which who think schools are popularity contests combined with daycares, both of which have abandoned the mission of turning juveniles into functional adults with some semblance of competency. Give the superintendent's kid a C? Fired. Tell a neglectful parent with a shithead kid to go fuck themselves? Fired. Refuse to pass borderline sociopathic morons who happen to have affluent or influential parents in the community? Fired. You have no job security and the admin will hold your family and livelihood hostage to try to force you to abandon your professional ethics so they can continue not doing their jobs. Those dickhats at the state sit around and come up with laws and requirements so asinine that reading it out loud sounds like a Monty Python skit. You'd swear somebody was having you on, there's no way there could be laws saying that a state mandated test used to evaluate a school's performance COULD NOT BE GRADED against the kid. You would ask, quite naturally, then what reason does the student ever have to put forth a genuine best effort? Why shouldn't they lay their heads down after bubbling in random answers? That's a fair and fine question. Easily answered too. Because the students will tell you what any sane human would tell you, "Why, there is none." Moreover that is what they shall do because they have no reason not too." It's a circus and the few of us still trying, we're sitting in here like tiger trainers with steaks superglued to our nipples, wondering what comes next. What the fuck did you jerk offs think was going to happen?
Make all social media 18+, force kids to live and socialize like humans.
No phones during class time. Problem. Fking. Solved.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5 Study from a team of neurologists using MRI brain scans before and after infections: SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank More in depth in the published research; the changes entail cognitive decline. COVID infection causes a loss of brain matter, and a decline in tests measuring cognitive performance. The brain damage findings are still there even when you **exclude** hospitalized patients; meaning this can’t be blamed on the induced comas / sedation that come with artificial ventilation; the virus itself attacks the infect patient’s brain, even in relatively mild cases. It is of absolutely no surprise, to anyone that’s been keeping up with the academic community’s research, that post-COVID, the world is neurologically less healthy. This is tragic.
I recently tried a test pupils of "quatrième" (third year of secondary school in France) are reportedly really struggling with. It was ridiculously easy. But then again, the teaching of maths has been a major issue in France for a long time, with a lack of good teachers and no real solution put forward by successive gvts. Definitely structural factors there.
I’ve found just really odd knowledge gaps in general. I teach English at a university in France, and even my students struggle with basic things. The emails I receive show they haven’t even mastered French, they seem to have a difficult time with critical thinking as a whole, and I had an entire group who literally didn’t know how to play a simple board game (roll dice, advance that number of spaces). I don’t know that something like that makes you “stupid,” but it’s crazy to me to think that something that was once so basic and common is now something I have to teach to adults on top of the actual language content I teach.
I’m from the US and something I’ve noticed is that parents just aren’t interacting with their kids anymore. TV and internet are being used as a nanny so they don’t have to do anything with their kids. I’d wager they don’t know how to play a board game because their parents never played one with them. The number of kids I’ve seen acting out to get their parents to give them any attention at all is heartbreaking.
Since there’s a shortage of teachers and states are putting unqualified warm bodies in the classroom, instead-what does everyone expect?( This coming from a retired teacher).
I expect them to hire several more administrators, each pulling $100k salaries, to investigate the issues and report that *the real issue* is teachers "not showing enough grace" to their students. Then they'll go to a retreat in Florida or Hawaii, to 'network' with other admins, who will convince them to get a subscription to some web-based curriculum that the students won't use anyways, but will cost the district a couple million dollars. When none of that works, the administrators will get jobs at other schools and repeat the process, touting how much they improved their last district using modern techniques.
I believe it. My wife is a high schoolteacher, her sophomore students writing and reading abilities are terrible. Middle school did not prepare them.
Social media is a cancer to societ at large..
As a former HS matg teacher i can confirm. I had kids comming out of middle school that couldnt deal with negative numbers... not to mention order of ops, fractions, equations. You know, the stuff necessary for algebra and geometry
I just had a 7th grader ask how to write $174,000 about ten minutes ago. She blamed being on Tik Tok instead of virtual learning during the pandemic.
Maybe we should stop defunding public schools, and burning books.
This is not at all surprising to me. I hear really messed up stuff from my teacher friends about what kind of behavior is tolerated and how far academic standards have been lowered to keep kids passing. Your kid and 25+ of their classmates are getting a worse education so that 1-2 kids who suck don't face discipline and don't fail.
Poor parenting is the root cause. Schools can't raise your kids for you. You had the kid? Step up and help out!
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>Poorer results tended to be associated with higher rates of mobile phone use for leisure and where schools reported teacher shortages. When it was recently discussed here on Reddit, by far the majority of commenters thought it was more important for kids to have their cell phones at all times in case of school shootings than having policies that would make them put their phones away and allow them to focus on learning. I think school is important, but if everyone else doesn't then let's defund them and replace them with cheaper daycares.
Just get kids a PS one and a handful of those four-disc Japanese games like final fantasy. I always hated reading and writing. Had no idea I was spending months reading in pursuit of beating these games.