Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.
I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.
I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.
:Continued below:
Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
Admin churn and policy changes have a direct and deleterious impact on teacher, student, and school performance. I can't focus on teaching academics if I am supposed to reteach classroom policy changes at random times throughout the year. Policy changes can take weeks to months to integrate into a classroom. Teachers who are whipped back and forth between admin and policy changes don't have a moment to settle in and focus on what they were hired for. Instead they juggle the ever changing classroom culture, incorporating morphing policy decisions about how their classroom should be run, and socially adjusting to staffing and admin changes. There is no time to settle in and so burn out and nihilistic expectations take shape in many teachers. This description is only a small part of the problem with admin and policy churn in school systems.
Parents and parenting styles are other pernicious issues that are extremely controversial. These issues directly affect students and indirectly affect teachers. Whether it hurts or not to admit, parents have power over the school system. Many people outside of the school system focus on teacher unions and large scale public school administration as a main pain point.
Yet when teachers and school administration are under threat from being sued due to happenings in class because parents don't like what occurrs, the school system adjusts to accommodate those parents' wishes. At some point the school system begins to become an inane policy labyrinth to avoid lawsuits. There are plenty of lawsuit examples if searched on any search engine. These lawsuits set precedents in our county for how policy will look in coming years. As for parenting styles, these are varied and diverse. Every household has their way of rearing children. Yet when you take diverse children and put them into a class of 20+ students and typically one teacher the varied rearing styles become a pain point when applying teaching standards. In one highschool class you can have students reading on a college level, while others are emerging eighth grade. Has the system failed them? Sure, the system didn't catch them in time before they moved on and moving them now would take months due to admin churn and County backlogs on the other hundreds of thousands of students issues weighing down a bloated inept system. Or maybe the previous school was worried that funding would be cut causing admin to push through many students that should have been retained because if not the "greater good" of hundreds of other students would be impacted by funding cuts. But it isn't just the school systems that have failed students, so have the parents. Sometimes students aren't held back because of parental intervention. These interventions can be lawsuits or putting up enough of a fight that the county relents and allows the student to progress. The latter has happened four times in my classes and many more times to my other teaching peers. When teachers hold students back and parents put up a fight by bringing in the county, the school's admin and teacher have to follow the county dictates, which almost always fall on the parents' side. A cause for this is teachers are not considered experts when it comes to education. There are a myriad of reasons for this ranging from poorly funded college education degree programs, to society's mistrust of experts, to a belief parents know their children the best. As exemplified by the recent pandemic and social media post hating "lazy teachers who want to get out work" , mistrust in teachers and their teaching abilities are pretty apparent.
The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.
It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.
I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.
The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.
But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?
The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.
The public school system goes behind education because it's the only state service where most children can be reached. They're crucially important for providing food security and shelter to millions of children whose parents can't or won't.
The contrary is also true. When we don't effectively use schools as these crucial public services, we wind up with the "school to prison pipeline" as it's called.
In my opinion the notion of "no child left behind" shouldn't equate to every kid going to college or becoming a doctor. We can design schooling metrics better than test scores and academic outcome. Like criminal justice outcomes, health outcomes like obesity, voting or civic participation, or even social outcomes. The goals of schooling shouldn't be wholly academic. That is why secondary education exists.
As far as I can tell, in most of the world and for a long time, school has been a place for academic education. Those that could not be educated for whatever reason were dismissed.
The idea that school should be a general social service for children seems popular among politicians and school administrators, but less accepted among parents and teachers. Furthermore, there was no explicit decision to move away from a focus on academics, it just kind of happened. That's not a recipe for good results.
Right now we are in limbo. The meaning of "school" is drifting and that obviously creates confusion and arguments, as well as bad results.
Families getting fed at school like getting fed. They aren't opposed to eating.
Goals are unclear right now. That, by itself, is bad. We need an explicit decision here, and that needs to be communicated to everyone involved.
As the child of a public grade school teacher (early childhood), I would suggest you go visit some Title I schools and ask lower income parents there what they expect from the school with respect to their children.
What you're being told in this thread: they will say they're happy to have a place that will take care of their kids while they're working, keep them reasonably safe, provide them food, keep them busy, and educate them
What you seem to think they would say: education their kids to the highest level possible
When there aren't consistent meals, access to health care, or clothing at home, and when home is a place of violence and/or substance abuse, priorities look a lot different.
All of these are things that were not uncommon, year after year. That's the reality public school teachers and administrators have to deal with.
You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
More likely, segregation happens because parents don't always want the best for their kids. A lot of it is simply self-segregation, driven by varying parental attitudes to education and the like.
In my view, there's a degree to which such lopsided admissions represent a greater Asian American cultural emphasis on education (good) coupled with a marginal standardized test score advantage produced by many hours of after-school test prep (bad). As repeated studies have shown, the advantage of e.g. SAT test prep courses is consistently relatively small, but enough of an edge to matter when you're looking at a ~10% admissions rate [2][4]. Not all applicants have parents who can afford or are aware of the value of such test prep, so it represents an uneven advantage. Crucially, this advantage is not inherently racial, but rather an artifact of culture, parental choice, and socioeconomic background. To mitigate this uneven advantage without completely eliminating merit-based admissions, a blurring filter e.g. random lottery might be applied to the top X% of test scorers.
And there is absolutely value in merit-based admissions. It makes these magnet schools what they are [5]. Despite their distorted demographics, it's what enables schools like Stuyvesant to still function as effective ladders out of poverty for many students:
>What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But what’s come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other.
>Nearly all of these kids went to college, often selective ones, and most went on to do well professionally. The poorer students became middle or upper-middle class, and the middle-class students often did better than their parents. And they were happy—most (though not all) felt that Stuyvesant had had a big effect on their lives. For instance, Elizabeth Reid Yee, a white 1985 graduate who grew up poor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fully credits Stuyvesant with keeping her from a life of poverty.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
[4] https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos...
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-yo...
To paraphrase MLK "judged not on the colour of their skin but on the size of their parents' bank accounts". So many doors magically open to you when your parents have money.
To a significant extent, Asian American parents and students have shown that merit-based admissions _do_ work as a socioeconomic equalizer (see above Atlantic article). The problem as I see it is how to replicate this success among other demographics, including white Americans of middle and working-class backgrounds. Another part of the solution in my view is just making more magnet schools.
Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.
Schools need resources for both kinds of students, and if they have to choose who gets the attention they are simply underfunded.
That's a genuinely curious question. I haven't researched any specifics about those schools or how they use their money.
It's possible for a vicious cycle to develop between waste/corruption in a school system and poor academic performance, wherein additional money doesn't help improve outcomes. That doesn't mean that withholding resources is the solution; rather, it means that a more fundamental restructuring than American municipal governments may be comfortable with is in order.
If the function of education is to provide an even starting point for kids regardless of their personal environment, it stands to reason that in places where those personal environments are worse you'd need brutal amounts of resources, since you'll indirectly be covering for parents' neglect, psychological issues, and other factors that should have been handled somewhere else but are being stuck in the education budget. If you see it under that scope, absolute numbers might not tell you much.
One kid has access to books and parents who read with them at home every night.
Another kid has no books at home and no learning support after they leave school.
How much is it going to cost to teach each child to read at the same proficiency level?
A school can only do so much to offset the negative impacts of poor home-life. Learned helplessness is real and debilitating and it is often learned at home at a young age. I empathize with the tax payers in this area who see above-average taxes for below-average results.
The point is that even if you get those kids even 10% of the way of others, that might be what buys you one less person between bars. Or suffering from substance abuse. Or fueling Ponzi schemes, MLM or cults as a victim. Or living in the streets. Or voting irrationally for the next populist policy maker (in any part of the political spectrum, not being political here).
The moment you renounce to killing all of those who misbehave, you have to accept that these people are going to be your neighbors for the foreseeable future, and so it really pays to take care of the problem as early as possible, because frankly, you'll be spending resources either way.
They either have learning disabilities or difficult family/social situations that lead them to either not try or not care about school.
To say that teachers should put less effort into these kids due to "low ROI" is frankly very privileged.
Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that "this segment is by its nature low ROI". It's not 'natural', it's pure dysfunction.)
Much of that money and effort is simply wasted if teachers aren't going to adopt effective approaches towards teaching and helping these kids.
The problem is that performance is exponential. That same 1-on-1 instruction will take a well performing kid to "surgeon".
It will take the incorrigible ... maybe ... to only quit school at 10th grade. Which does directly translate to money for the school these days.
What teachers/schools also effectively like about the incorrigible is that any (lowest wage) idiot that sticks to it will help the incorrigible. Not to surgeon levels, but better than before, sure. For obvious reasons you don't need much math. Some, yes, but not much. Whereas it takes a capable teacher to get good performers even higher.
Teachers are protecting the incompetent among them by doing this.
At my school of ~2,000 I'd say at any given moment there would be at least 30 of these kids (they didn't last long). They were violent. They hit teachers. They were regularly dragged out of classes by police officers. After a few of these interactions, they would be transferred to the problem child school. Our school actually had some great teachers that really cared about the students, but many of these kids were broken. Their home lives were just horrid. Most ended up in juvie and later jail.
Those were the worst of the bunch, but a good 20% of the school was beyond help. Daily fights, constant police presence, tons of kids brought weapons to school, lots of theft, vandalism every day, I could go on... That school was a nightmare, and it wasn't even the worst one in the city.
Point is, there is nowhere near enough teachers and resources to fix these broken kids. Their broken homes are what need to be fixed.
The problem with that is if you can't fix their environment for 8 hours a day (most schools are more like 6 these days but for argument's sake), and you propose fixing their environments 24 hours a day ...
This is not going to work for those kids.
So it depends who you want to help. You want to help disadvantaged kids? This will, certainly in the short term, make it worse for them and make life better for advantaged kids.
No one is saying you can’t fix it for 8 hours a day, its saying that fixing the 8 hours a day environment doesn’t address the problem because that’s not the environment that’s brokenness is causing the problems.
1) it's double or quadruple the time (8/6 vs 24h) vs school
2) kids aren't arranged per 20 (or 40 these days). You really need someone in a location per 2/3 kids.
(e.g. https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820... )
Which leads to:
a) we can't "fix the home situation", beyond providing some education on how kids should be raised
(seriously, someone in government make a fucking youtube series about it ... talk about useful spending of CPS budget!)
b) current attempts to do just that anyway make the situation worse for everyone involved (toxicity + crime + lack of opportunities), and don't improve things for those kids.
c) I don't see b changing.
d) we *still* do want to "fix" those kids
And not helping those kids do better is not acceptable. Even aside from the obvious observation that homelessness, drugs and crime don't just impact the people directly involved.
It's important to distinguish kids who just do not care at all from kids who are struggling, but it's also important to recognize that the former really do exist.
We should definitely take care of them as a society built on solidarity, but we can be efficient about it too.
It sounds like you want to just pay people to stay alive without helping them to gain the skills necessary to make that life worthwhile to themselves.
Before we try to be efficient we need to agree on what we are being efficient about.
The idea that we can push water uphill, and bring the most struggling students up above an ever-rising bar, is becoming a controversial one these days. There is a small but growing chorus of voices saying “enough already”, on both [1] sides [2] of the spectrum.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36319077-the-case-agains...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51087394-the-cult-of-sma...
For the record, I did not even try to dehumanize. I just applied the language of technology adoption to adoption of knowledge. It seemed applicable.
https://ondigitalmarketing.com/learn/odm/foundations/5-custo...
I agree that words have meaning, but IMO we want to focus the narrative on people who may have been unfortunate through no fault of their own. We want to treat them with compassion and take the time to find the right words for them. Words that they might describe themselves with. ...But they might say "I'm dumb" and think nothing of it.
The goal is to remove friction from the path to policy change, because we desire an outcome of improved efficiency. We may have to be creative with language to do it.
This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? I know that was the attitude of the schools of yesteryear - but they were wrong.
There are lots of reasons for remedial classes: Dyslexia, for example. A kid might have anxiety issues that make finishing homework near impossible: ADHD is a real thing that folks struggle with. All of these can be worked through - but back in history, they would be sent away to rot. Lots of them are bright kids, and a fair number of them can be a future surgeon or researcher.
You injected the words "learning disability". That's not that OP said.
I haven’t read all the replies yet but I’m surprised at the lack of reactions to OP classifying some children as losers because of their performance at school.
That's not true, some kids are just shitheads and don't feel like listening to anyone or doing what they're told. Personal responsibility has to come into play at some point, you can't just blame every problem on external factors.
I had some good friends in high school (a large, below-average public school in CA) who were solidly middle class or better, had supportive parents, and were just shitheads when it came to education. They were disruptive in class, didn't do homework and just generally didn't care.
I'm all for giving kids who are struggling the benefit of the doubt and trying to help them, but if they don't want that help, at some point you have to weigh the cost of trying to force it on them against the cost of wasting the time of the students who are actually there to learn.
It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.
Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now.
Let me guess, your kids definitely fall into the future researcher category, don't they? Just imagine, these other kids have parents too!
Teachers are not parents. They have limited time and resources to devote to a specified area of instruction divided amongst a number of students. Some parents are extreme failures in their responsibility which performs the greatest disservice to a child. This is how I ended up with a foster child with emotional trauma. Teachers must not be expected to perform the job of a parent just because some parents are so horribly bad at being parents.
Higher educated parents have it easier helping their children with homework. They have the money and time for extra tutoring. Lower education equals less capabilities to support with homework, most often less time and certainly less money for extra tutoring. If a system is such you only succeed when you fall in the first group, it sucks. Supporting such a system, wholeheartedly as some on here seem to, is just cold hearted.
Quality foster homes are in extreme low suppply.
Children need care, and schools are whar we have. We need more therapists and parental substitutes, not fewer.
Dedicating resources equally has never been how government works in any area. If that's how government works, why have government at all? Just let people handle themselves.
Obviously, social dynamics will be different in lower tier schools. I do have the impression that we are not discussing those here.
Also, being bullied is a poor excuse of becoming a bully yourself.
Results?
The kids who were failing still failed because no matter how much teachers do, it's still up to them to study.
The US attracts talent whether they were educated here or not. The US got to that place with poor schools while only heterosexual cisgender men were working. While the rest of the marginalized population was a drag on society and its security as they fought for scraps. The US becoming more inclusive in all facets amplifies its society much more, it doesnt mean turning any troubled youth into a surgeon or researcher. It means giving them a baseline to be productive at all.
If you want your child to be doing something else, look elsewhere.
Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.