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454 sats \ 16 replies \ @SimpleStacker 16 Feb \ on: Is the school system failing today’s students? AskSN
As an American educator, I have to say yes. The students being produced by the school system, even the ones going to college, are ill equipped in basic math, reading, and writing.
What can be done? I'm not 100% sure. A few thoughts.
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Teaching needs to be a high prestige profession. In America, none of the talented college students I know are interested in becoming teachers. (And I know a lot of college students; they wall want to become doctors, engineers, or businesspeople).
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Bad teachers need to be fireable. Current teacher union power in K-12 systems makes this too dififcult.
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Schools should be allowed to experiment. Top down education doesn't work since every community has different needs. I understand the desire for everyone to meet a standard, but too much top down management stifles local creativity.
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Kids who don't meet grade standards should be held back. This is tricky because performance is measured by pass-rates, and funding can be determined by performance. Funding can't be tied to a poor metric like pass rates or graduation rates or attendance. It has to be tied to learning
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And, lastly but maybe most importantly: parents need to take an active role in raising their children. Too many just hand them off to the schools and expect the schools to fix everything. That is too much burden for the school system to bear.
- Partly, this is an economic problem and many families are squeezed and require both parents to work full time, leaving little time for parenting the kid. Bitcoin fixes this? Maybe, and I hope so.
- Partly, it's also a cultural problem. Too many Americans think it's socially normal and even desirable to be bad at school or "hate math" or whatever. I think that's pathetic. If you're bad at math, fine. We can work on getting better. If you don't have the time to get better because you have other priorities... that's fine too as long as you know what you're doing and have thought carefully about your priorities. But to "hate" learning and think it boring is a very problematic attitude.
To your first point, it's not just that the best students aren't interested in teaching, it's literally the worst students who go into education.
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And I don't see that changing without massive reforms to the educational bureaucracy.
Even private school teachers don't get paid that well, I think because the government is a de facto monopsonist of teachers and therefore set the prevailing wage.
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Correct. My sister in law teaches at a private school and faces a lot of the same bullshit.
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I haven't looked into it closely, but somehow Arkansas' voucher program was coupled with raises for teachers.
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I (a bad student) definitely considered it, because I wanted summers off. I just happened to be too bad of a student to get a teaching degree.
Although I do think there are teachers who are genuinely good at their job and care, but the incentives aren't there...
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There are very good teachers, who were good students and care deeply about education. I hold them in very high esteem.
My dad was planning on making a midlife career change from construction worker to engineer. He's very bright and extremely hard working. Part way through his engineering degree, he decided that he really wanted to help disadvantaged kids and dedicated himself to that mission. So he switched to math and became an inner city math teacher.
He, and a few like-minded colleagues, made a huge difference in those kids lives. I can't go anywhere in my hometown without someone asking if I'm related to him and wanting to relay how much he helped them when they most needed it.
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Amazing father. 👏
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That's awesome. Did he ever talk to you about some of the challenges and struggles, as well as success stories, from his teaching career?
Teaching has a lot of highs and lows. You can really make a huge difference in some students' lives, but the attitude of others just makes you weep for humanity.
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He has so many really intense stories. The conditions some of those kids were living in are hard to even think about.
One of his best students was a girl who was the primary caretaker for about half a dozen younger siblings. Despite that, she managed to still compete in our local middle school math contests and participate in athletics.
Even second hand, it was an intense glimpse into the extremes of humanity.: people triumphing over impossible circumstances, as well as people sinking lower than you could imagine.
Edit: Most of his complaints are about administrators obstructing his team's efforts to help kids.
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I could tell you stories of how my wife grew up that would curl your toes. She lived in a trailer with no plumbing and an extension cord for electricity. Her mom's boyfriend was abusive. It's almost cliché
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It is truly a tremendous analysis from your perspective since you are in the classrooms and I think the same as you that the educational system has many flaws, both in the teachers (there are teachers without a vocation to teach) and in the system that has standardized education at all levels.
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I absolutely agree that teachers are underpaid. Even if you want to consider that they work %75 of a year, they still aren't making what their peers of comparable education levels are making.
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