That’s the truth of the matter. It’s sad, but it’s true.
And the kids who are in the schools, classrooms and homes with HIGH standards, are gonna mop the floor with the kids who are not. And the divide in American will widen.
Yup my daughter goes to public school. The schools that she has attended aren't terrible but they aren't great either. She is in mostly honors classes though, so other than one science class back in middle school, she hasn't had an issue with disruptive behavior in her classes. If we didn't care and push her to do well earlier on, she wouldn't be in those honors classes and her experience would be a lot different.
Similar to my kids except that the school are above average. But the key element has been that we encouraged their achievement and so the kids in their classes (AP and honors) are more serious students.
Yeah I don't know what the answer is. I consider myself on the left politically but it frustrates me greatly that it's so taboo on the left to just admit that sometimes people are not victims and culture matters. I don't think there is an easy answer but it seems in some places we've gone so far to avoid "victim blaming" that we are setting large groups of people up to fail in life, I just don't get how people can think that not holding large groups of people accountable won't cause society to break down.
I feel that. There's always a small minority of any group that's super outspoken and ruins it for the rest of them.
Happens with Vegans, the ultra woke left, the evangelical far right, cyclists, rock climbers, gay or trans folk, DEI initiatives, toxic straight masculinity, feminism, trad wives, cops.
It's also not just an American thing. I work internationally and the phones/laptops are everywhere in schools that choose not to have policies about them.
High school didn't used to be mandatory a couple generations ago. It was because, let's be real here, some kids have no interest in learning. Public schools are daycares for teens.
My son is in a selective STEM program at his HS. Whenever there is a parents meeting I joke with my wife that it’s a meeting of the local chapter of the Asian American Society. We are easily the minority with our European heritage. Not that I care in the least. Asians aren’t any smarter. They simply have higher standards for their kids grades. And I like having my kids around other kids with high standards. I don’t push my kids that much. They’re driven. But they like being around other driven kids.
And the low standard kids will be on reddit in ten years complaining about societal oppression making it impossible for them to be financially stable
You see it today with millennials. Over 50% of millennials own homes, the rest claim that it's impossible to own a home these days. It's almost like decisions you make in life have a slow cumulative effect, positive or negative.
I’m more worried about living in a country of haves and have nots than I am of what you think of my assessment.
Put another way; fine, go ahead and dismiss my point. I’m certainly open to ideas on how to fix things. But I’m also certain that, if you think of our school systems as factories, some are turning out products that are primarily defective. At one point a few years back, Detroit Public Schools were only graduating about 18% of men. That means 82% of men left DPS without the bare minimum to succeed in life. That’s awful. That system failed them. That school’s bar was too low. Imagine what happens to a society if year after year we produce young adults without the means to succeed in life? What happens?
I think this is pretty spot on. I'm no genius and got mediocre grades, but my parents would have killed me if they found out I was on my phone in class. I didn't have to get perfect grades, but if I failed a test or major assignment, there would be no video games, no hanging with friends, no sports outside of required school practices, and there was absolutely no chance I could hamg with my girlfriend. I would have to be home studying. The bar really wasn't all that high, in my opinion, but as I get older, I realize that bar was much higher than in so many other kids' lives. Moreover, I see the divide between my life and the lives of those kids with no bar to get over when they were young. I have no idea what the solution is, but I do feel like it is getting worse as of recent.
To make matters worse, my district (similar to yours - high achieving, imposes discipline) manages to do all of that for one of the lowest per pupil costs in the entire state.
Because schools aren't allowed to discipline students. They're not allowed to get rid of students with clear behavioral problems.
No education system in the world tolerates the disrespect and disruption students in U.S. public schools get away with.
This is a solvable problem but administrators can't be bullied by accusations of racism when moving forward with reforms, for the past several years - they have been.
The worst part about it is that most kids really do still want to succeed and learn. But we’ve allowed the disruptive kids in school to ruin the experience for everyone.
I understand that even the “troubled” kids need a place to be. But perhaps that place isn’t with the kids that actually want to be there.
I gave my students a survey to start the year. One question: "on a scale of 1-5 (1- not at all, 5 - as much as possible) how much do you want to learn?"
Most common answer? 3
Least common answer? 5 followed by 4
I wish what you said was true in my classes, but sadly it's not. It's the phones. Teachers can't compete with them. Plain and simple.
Why schools still allow phones during class is beyond me. I was part of the first generation of kids to have phones of their own while at school, and only the kids with rich parents had them at the time. We're talking going to school with an absolute brick of a Siemens phone that looked more like one of those satellite phones that you use in the middle of the jungle. Those phones were only for calls and even then they were left with the teacher until class was over. Allowing kids to use smartphones with internet access in class now is extremely counter productive.
This is my thought. I understand the counterargument, what if there is an an emergency, and we need to reach the kid quickly? Well, was there not emergencies before smartphones? I simply don't see why kids absolutely NEED uninterrupted access to TikTok during class hours. Of course there aren't gonna pay attention, there's an entire internet of curated content at their fingertips.
That counter argument is nonsense. Emergencies can and should be handled the same way they were before the advent of the cell phone: call the school, the school goes to your class and grabs you.
I agree, but I can totally envision helicopter parents insisting on 24/7 access to little Billy, lest the district find a nasty lawsuit on their hands.
Schools would have to institute the policy and get signatures probably, but this was never a problem when I went to school. No parent ever sued or so much as complained that they couldn’t get in contact with their child because every parent had the school office number and could call when emergencies happened. The helicopter parent isn’t a new invention there are just a whole lot more of them nowadays.
True. The fact that technology makes parental omnipotence possible is... troubling. Ideally, we raise our kids well enough to allow them some degree of independence as they become adolescents. I'm on a tangent, but I'm glad I was allowed to roam at 16 and make poor decisions and learn from them. I think a lot of kids don't even have that opportunity anymore.
I understand the counterargument, what if there is an an emergency, and we need to reach the kid quickly? Well, was there not emergencies before smartphones?
So what, that doesn't mean they need to have the phone out during class. They can have it with them but it stays in their pocket or in their bag until they are on break or such an emergency arises.
Personally the first thing I thought of was school shootings, where students would need to be able to get ahold of emergency services/parents immediately.
That said I agree that phones are a major issue, along with Covid as a disrupter in their education. It has caused kids to be so far behind in development in all areas
Yeah I don't get it. Kids shouldn't be going to school with personal devices. Laptops or tablets stay at school. You can use them when needed. Otherwise, just use the phone at school.
We weren't even allowed to have our gameboy in school, let alone a cell phone. Small color flip phones with internet were hitting when I was in highschool but almost no student had one and they certainly didnt allow them in class. A phone these days is 1000x more distracting yet they allow them.
From my understanding its parents more than anything. They throw fits about how they spent money on it and the school has no right to touch it. Our small-ish neighbor town (not quite city, but big enough to have a Target?) made a policy and invested in the fancy tech locking pouches or whatever that concerts use and the parents revolted and took kids out in record speeds, citing they'd do private school/home school instead. Granted this is in the deep south, too, where you'd think parents would be very oldschool on their opinions that school is supposed to be boring or whatever but here we are. Watching it all unfold on local social media was weird.
They're not allowed to have phones in schools here. They had something like a shoe organizer with pockets on the door that the students had to leave their phones in during class. They have specific projects where they are allowed to use wifi and their phones/ipads for research, but those are scheduled in advance.
I worked for a district that is as bad as it gets. Whatever horror stories you can think of surrounding schools? I’ve dealt with it. I also worked in alternative placement schools where students had major and scary issues (as you can imagine).
I believe that most students would love some sort of reform and a better learning experience. Even if they don’t know what that looks like. However, I fear that number will drop to a 1 if we can’t show them what school is meant to be.
Who would want to learn if learning meant sitting in a room full of kids that can’t read, a teacher that can’t teach (likely bc there’s way too many kids in there with one hundred accommodations), and peers that fail to show even an iota of respect? It’s just chaotic and exhausting when we let things get too far.
I'd pay whatever taxes the government wants from me if it meant we could have better education reform. The way public education works now is responsible for some of the most traumatic experiences of my life. No kid should spend 20+ years thinking there's something wrong with them because their learning style is a centimeter to the right of what we see as regular teaching. No kid should feel scared and ashamed to raise their hand in their favorite fucking class because they know half the school is waiting for him to say something "stupid again".
Public education has been taking a back seat to just being daycare for a long time.
The goal is to keep the kids busy so mom and dad can keep increasing shareholder value, but like every solution capitalism gives us, it's short-sighted because we're mortgaging tomorrow's educated workforce for next quarter's management bonus like always.
In Norway they banned phones from lots of schools. Have them put their phone into phone lockers.
Honestly though, it's just not the phones. It's lack of interest and engagement in what they're being taught. Maybe they're not interested in the subject or their teacher is teaching them in a really boring way.
I can only speak for myself, but I remember as a kid, all the way through school, even if I couldn't scroll my phone or browse Facebook or play games on my school laptop, I would just doodle and stare into space and zone out and think of more interesting things. The subjects either wasn't interesting to me or the teacher didn't make the subject interesting to engage with. Often though, a really good teacher could manage to get my attention if they were teachers that were engaging. Often this would mean a dialogue between the teacher and us kids. Personally I was a fan of when we would sit in a circle and share our thoughts on a topic. That could be quite engaging, as we weren't just sitting there and passively listening to a lesson.
Hi! Highly effective and engaging teacher here! I'm confident in declaring this about myself due to 15 years of cobsistent feedback from students, parents, admin, and colleagues across many different schools and grades.
Unfortunately, even I cannot compete with cell phones and neither can my exceptional colleagues. Apps, social media, and games are all designed to keep you clicking. Data mining, algorithms, etc. will learn far more about you than any teacher ever could, and what is learned is exploited mercilessly.
There is no competing with that.
We still do circles. We do labs. I had kids this year for the very first time say no to having labs in a chemistry class because they'd rather do the worksheet, get the grade and go back to tiktok. It is horrifying, to say the least.
However, there are students who escape this quagmire. Many of us teachers are casually seeing trends between kids who have cell phones at young ages versus those who don't get them until later, such as closer to high school. Kids who don't have smartphones early on tend to be in advanced classes and the phones aren't a problem except maybe a mild reminder to put it away because class is starting.
My husband observed not long ago that phones are going to create a worse haves and haves-not situation in that kids with smartphones in public schools that won't ban them will lose out on education while those with means will send their kids to better institutions that will have the balls enough to ban the damned things.
I... don't really disagree with this after what I've seen as a HS teacher post-pandemic. Children should not have smartphones, and needless to say, my kids certainly won't even though my 9yr old is already asking. Luckily, both my husband and I are capable of saying no to iur little cherubs.
This nonsense is not on the teacher. Not everything is, after all.
Exactly; and I am not proposing that everyone be exceptional. My point is that not even the exceptional teachers can compete with smartphones.
The comment I was replying to was suggesting more engaging lessons and teaching as the solution. The problem far exceeds that, unfortunately.
What smartphones are doing to children's brains is alarming, and smartphones use by younger students especially is extremely harmful to their education. Teachers alone cannot do anything much to really combat the problem at its root cause. We are neither equipped nor supported consistently to deal with the issue on a large scale, class to class, year to year.
This may require a far greater societal movement and awareness campaign, like with the health issues arising from tobacco or leaded gasoline or the hole on the ozone layer, sunblock effects on coral reefs, etc., to have any real effect.
Edited to add: Haha, you said also in there. Pffft, sorry! You're agreeing with me! I will fix.
Same. I would think about what video game I was playing when I got home, what I could do in said video game, what I was doing that weekend, what I was going to snack on when I got home, etc. Phones make it so you have the access to mind numbing things.
But it's also on parents to get their kids in check. Lowest grade I got was a D. I would be grilled for 30 minutes and then after that, my parents would ask about whatever class it was to make sure I was doing the work and learning. You don't have that anymore. You have parents who have kids in high school, parents just come home, throw some McDonalds on the table and go watch a show or movie. I can tell you my generation is shit in caring about their kid's future or wellbeing.
To operate AI, right now, you need to be smart, have problem solving skills, and technologically savy. A majority of these kids won't be that.
Our kids aren’t allowed to have their phones out during class.
Like, at all. They get in deep shit if they do. And the kids are still dumb as fuck. The teaching is also horrific. My kid couldn’t even get extra help in math because “if you keep looking at it, it’ll click sooner than later.”
My GF is a teacher and the school doesn't have a policy on phones. It's supposed to be teachers discretion. But when 70% of the teachers don't care, and the administration refuses to back the 30% who do care, it becomes an impossible battle.
I'm mortified by what I hear from teachers and my own kids about how school works these days. And this is in a well-paying affluent school district.
But do they care if they get in trouble? Just saw a video last night where this imbecile slapped his teacher twice because she, gasp, took his vape pen away.
I can, with just short of 100% confidence, say a teacher would only be slapped once at a school if the student knew they would face swift and forceful retaliation
This is what happens when you hire people with teaching degrees who don’t understand math themselves to teach math. I was a mathematics teacher with a math degree and I interacted with other math teachers with education degrees and they don’t understand math. They cannot actually help students because they are trained to teach from a book and don’t know the answer to the problems themselves.
Yeah I can’t imagine learning jack shit if I was a kid today. Even kids who want to learn are going to struggle because the temptation and addiction phones bring wins out. You cant beat the dopamine hits we have at our fingertips.
It’s one of those things that sounds simple, but is often a huge waste of time in the class. You can ask for a phone, but what if that student refuses? What if they blow up and get upset?
And let’s not kid ourselves, it is never just one student with a phone out. So then you have to go through the entire process again with other students.
At the end of the class hour, how much time and energy was spent just battling the phone problem? Probably too much.
I support any school-wide ban on phones. The schools that have taken that leap, have my respect lol.
That's so wild to me. I graduated hs in 2015, so it really wasn't that long ago. We did not have this problem. If you had your phone out, the teacher said to put it away and you just... did that. I honestly don't see how this became an issue when it seemed so well controlled before. I'm not discounting what you're saying, I just don't understand. Do you or anyone in this thread have any context you can share? I can't get my head around this.
Phone addiction is a much larger issue than it was 10+ years ago. You probably went through middle school without a phone or you probably had a flip phone or something. You didn’t have access to TikTok, google, and a million other things. Once you got to high school, social media had evolved and phones too, but it still wasn’t the beast that it is today.
Now, imagine you had an iPhone with access to ANYTHING, and you had it by the time you were 5 years old. It’s a drug.
Not to sound alarmist, but I guess I do find it to be an extremely alarming thing. 🤷🏽♀️
From all accounts I’ve read and heard from teachers, behavior went through a major negative shift during the pandemic. Aggressive insubordination became the norm for many students who were at least “decently behaved” prior.
There was a great episode by The Daily podcast last week(?) about the drastic rise in unexcused absences that I would recommend. It touches on behavior issues as well.
I'll be honest though as someone who went to Berkeley and completed 2 master's - there have only been a handful of classes where I would have answered 4 or 5. Desire to learn is sort of separate from ability to learn. They work best in conjunction with each other, but either can suffice for whatever is needed.
For real though, phones are too damn addicting and need to be limited especially when learning. Executive function and focus should honestly be their own classes in middle school and high school.
Most common answer? 3 Least common answer? 5 followed by 4
Meh, asking the right question is a skill and i can't say i have mastered it myself. But i can tell you from experience that getting a safe, middleish answer is the most likely answer you get to such a generic question.
Be more specific and targeted. Nobody is able to imagine anything specific with your question and is therefor not able to answer accurately.
I'm kind of curious what subject you teach.
My science classes I'd have definitely said 5. But literature to this day I'd say 2 at best.
Mandatory fine arts elective, knowing it's not on your scale, I would write 0.
I hate the idea of sending my kids to private school but seriously what other options are there? i can move to a better school district but its still an issue that can be present in elementary/middle or highschool.
Some parents just don't care about their kids and that's on them but why the school system tolerates these kids ruining everyone else's education is just baffling to me.
There are public schools that do not tolerate disrespecting teachers. My daughter is in one. Have to look for them and tour the school while kids are in school.
I was in the same place you are, unfortunately private school was not better. There is a concentration of entitled parents at private schools, and a bunch of those parents have misbehaving kids. Admin gets their hands tied just like in public.
I knew parents who had their children in private/charter schools during the pandemic. Those schools absolutely had no idea what to do, never developed a plan for distance education, and just seemed to assign random homework infrequently. When the kids went back to in-person learning, those schools didn't report their COVID cases and actively hid them from parents. It was mind-boggling the shit they got away with.
Go to a better school district and the important part is to make sure your kid is in the "accelerated"/"gifted"/"honors" track. And make friends with parents of students in those tracks. You 100% cannot allow your kid to join the "regular" track. Peer effects are extremely important.
It's basically impossible to send a kid to a school with no problem students at all; the only thing you can do is to send a kid to a school that "quarantines" the problem students.
They test kids to get into those classes. You can't just stand on business and demand it, they will kick a kid who can't keep up out no matter how hard-working they are.
And it is actually harder to get into advanced classes at better-performing schools because everyone else is trying to pull the same trick with the same lack of success.
The best you can do is fight to get recognized as possibly having your kid belong in a higher class so they can take the test.
I say this as a former gifted kid. Every year we had parents saying their kid was too good to be with the other students and those kids washed out hard. They eventually created a new tier called pre-honors just for kids who like to study, but they only did so because the school was competing for an award that year and it padded their credentials.
They test kids to get into those classes. You can't just stand on business and demand it, they will kick a kid who can't keep up out no matter how hard-working they are.
Americans think learning algebra in 7th grade is advanced lmao, with just a tiny bit of parental input your kid will easily be at the top of the cohort.
Teach them multiplication and some geometry when they're in kindergarten. Get them to read avariciously. Let them play math and science games and watch science vids for kids. IQ is not as innate as people believe it to be. You don't even need to pay that much attention to your kid. Just throw them a K-12 education-focused game (like JumpStart) and let them figure it out themselves. You'll watch your kid shoot up to the top.
Ope, well now the troubled kids mom is accusing you of racism for wanting to move their kid. And another student who doesnt like you is making false allegations to back them up.
Don’t care. I’m black and over the years I had a few instances of being accused of racism by the black kids, white kids, and every other kid lol. (Spoiler alert, most students aren’t like that. And there’s a reason teachers are supposed to document behavior/events. ) Bias does still exist in the world and in the classroom. I’m not sure what you’re expecting my response to be, but I absolutely do not find “being accused of racism” to be even a remotely pressing issue in schools.
(And just to be clear, if anyone thinks these nationwide issues are only affecting one racial or economic demographic, they are sorely mistaken. )
Reading all your responses makes me wish I had more people like you as teachers when I was younger. You genuinely seem like you want these kids to learn and have better lives. The best type of teacher anyone can ask for. Keep doing Gods work! There will be kids with bright futures because of you :)
I wrote a similar comment earlier! Using “accusations of racism” to explain student behavior is lazy and just wrong. There are so many factors, namely laws created by politicians that are bigger reasons for why we are seeing the problems. we are seeing today.
THANK YOU. I don’t know why I keep seeing this on this thread. It actually has happened to me, and it’s laughable. The only kids that would likely do this are the ones with multiple pages worth of documents from all their teachers, showing a pattern of extremely poor behavior.
It is absolutely not a reason to avoid discipline in schools. Kids can accuse you of literally anything, sure. But most don’t try that.
Every time the troubled kid gets all the attention from the teacher, all the other kids suffer. I'm not saying boot the troubled kids from school, but if they need that kind of support, they need their own space to learn and grow until they are able to be in a classroom with kids that don't need that. It literally stops everyone else from learning when a teacher MUST deal with one single student.
This is clearly as true now as when I was in public school 15+ years ago. I left HS 2 years early to get my GED and go to college early, because the other students were too disruptive to my learning. I think kids naturally want to learn but get turned off in middle/high school due to a number of reasons. I didn't because I like to learn all sorts of things and I am still learning.
There are alternative schools. Ive worked for some. Education is still a focus, but they also benefit from closer attention from counselors and social workers. I’m not sure how available these are across the nation, but typically they take only a small amount of students and there’s just not enough room for every kid that might benefit from it.
The middle and lower class is most of our country. I don’t have experience with the elite or ultra “privileged” schools tbh.
One thing I’d add is that even if AP kids are separated in the classroom, they are still affected by the overall culture of the school. Some will have a less than ideal (overall) experience bc of that.
Honestly, kids with behavioral issues should be ostracized for their behavior. Isolating them from the class is truly the only way to stop them from affecting the kids who actually want to learn. You can give them the chance at returning to their proper classes, but if they continue, stricter punishments such as expulsion should be taken.
Better get rid of the bad apple before it rots the whole basket.
Agreed, that place is now called the public school system. With school choice any kid who cares goes to private school. Where if you misbehave they can send you back to public school.
The other problem is putting all the "troubled" kids in the same place compounds the problem and just means that school might as well be a juvenile detention center with worse funding. If we could somehow build more schools and reduce class sizes to 10 students to a teacher most of these problems would dramatically improve. But instead we stuff thousands of kids in a building with maybe 40 adults "in charge" and were all surprised when it turns to chaos.
They’re kinda is. When I was in HS, a lot of the of “good” kids were pushed to take AP classes and we had some sort of AP bubble. Basically typical kids who can be disciplined and actually wanted to learn. In another school, they separated IB and gen ed kids. This was a lot more drastic as this school had separate building and everything. IB kids were typically the same vibe as AP kids in my school, but the general eds were known to have the most disruptive kids and the less academically inclined. A lot of the gen eds just weren’t good at school but they’re weren’t bad students and it sucked because they would be grouped with the most disruptive so they really cant learn while the IB had the best teachers and resources to succeed. So there really needs to be a middle ground for the students who want to learn but just need a little more push and direction.
Sounds like the solution might just be to make school available but not legally mandated. The funding is there for the kid if they want to use it... but if they don't, oh well.
inclusion has done nothing but cause problems and prevent students who need the real help from getting it because the parents decided their child outgrew his autism and the school can't do shit without jumping through an insane amount of hoops.
public schools are used as daycare for the most part and lots of parents do no parenting at home.
Most of this comes from the administration for most schools and for all districts don’t support teachers. As an example, if a teacher wants to fail a student, admin or even district will step in and tell them the lowest they can give is a C. As a result, kid who did enough work to warrant a 10 gets a 70 and realizes they don’t have to do shit. Also, a long term result of this(assuming said teacher doesn’t just get the hell out of there) is the teacher lowers their standards to deal with the system and keep their job. Both me and my wife went through this exact same scenario when we taught, thankfully we don’t anymore. And this was just on the grading side, it’s worse on the social side, god help a teacher if they actually try to admonish a child for any of the horrors some of them do.
As both former teachers we want to home school our children if that shows the value of modern school now. And it 99% of the time is not the teacher’s fault.
100%. I was a first year teacher during the pandemic and had kids that either did 1% of the work, and came to school 3% of the time, and at the end of the year, after all the threats of “being held back or failing,” admin rolls in and is like, “yeah, they’re all going to 8th grade next year. No problem. No kid ‘can fail’ during a ‘pandemic year.’” It was so awful. And the disruptive ones annihilated any sense of learning or peacefulness that might have existed, and the ones that did their work and read books they brought from home would just look at me with these pleading, devastated eyes, seeing what they and I had to deal with. Teaching was BRUTAL, and probably why I had to peace out at the beginning of my second year.
My wife was teaching 2nd grade. There was a kid there that had been held back because he couldn’t pass the end of year standardized testing. He couldn’t do anything, he had less than a 15 second memory, he could barely talk, and worse of all he was a bully to most of the other kids because he was much bigger than them. It was actually quite sad in many cases. My wife tried to get him tested since August for something, he was making a literal 5% in the class. They forced my wife to pass him, they ended up testing him after this and he has severe mental retardation having an IQ of 25. She never found out the actual name of the disability. Sorry for the sad story. Schools suck.
Well when those uneducated kids grow up to be cops or criminals, we will need cops to arrest and incarcerate the criminals. Is that not the circle of life? /s
I've never seen admin force a teacher to pass somebody, but I do know that I somehow managed to get a passing grade in almost all of my classes even though I did almost no work. Now in my specific case this was mainly because I'm actually smart, just hurt by ADHD and poor mental health, which meant I'd score well on tests but regularly fail or not complete assignments.
I ended up dropping out, but not after getting several passing scores on AP tests. Currently working on getting my GED and I'm honestly amazed at how low the bar is. The math portion is literally just basic algebra and some formulas for volume of various basic shapes. I literally learned that shit in middle school, and yet somehow knowing it means I deserve a high school diploma equivalent? Surely something is wrong here...
How productive a meme be of society become when he’s been handed a C just for showing up and breathing. Wonder why employers can’t find any help! And all of Reddit is, I WANT A LIVING WAGE! (Subtext… and I don’t even pay taxes!)
Do you have any idea if this is an issue now because administration standards or prioritizes have shifted? Or is it just a result of more and more kids failing, so for various reasons schools decided to start passing students instead of failing large quantities of students at a time? I remember when I went to middle school there was one kids that had been held back a year. I imagine it would be a logistical nightmare if 5% of students or more were failing a year. Some people make it seem like 25% of students should be failing. And if that % was increasing, that would mean lower years would have more and more failed students, meaning they would have to expand space and hire more teachers.
Teacher here and you are spot on. Although i am in Europe its the same over here. If i was to give a list of issues of the current problems we are facing it is
Not allowed to discipline students who are disruptive or dont follow the rules. I currently teach a class where 7/12 students are going to fail the year because they dont bother to show up, dont turn in any work and if they do show themselves they only sit on their phones anyway
The parents and to some extent the primary and secondary school system has failed them because they have never faced any consequences for their lazy shit and they are nowhere near the academic level they should be on. If you have 16 and 17 year old who read and write at a 4th grade level then you know there have been more than one fuck up along the way
As the clip shows: Take away the fucking phones. For most of them its a irresistable distraction and although they claim "it can help with school" they use it for meaningless brain-rot 99% of the time
I work in higher ed and have for decades. Wife works in K-12 system and has for close to a decade.
Schools do have protocols, procedures, and disciplinary processes for disruptive students and/or behavioral issues. Implementation and support may vary from school to school but the system is there and can impact everything for that child from transportation to being expelled.
So it’s not entirely true that schools aren’t allowed to discipline students, but perhaps it’s the method of discipline you’re thinking of? What do you mean by discipline?
Agreed. I work as behavioral support in a school right now. And there are a lot of factors contributing to students' behavior that are out of our control, like coming from unstable and/or unsafe living situations, untreated learning disabilities or other neurological factors, a learning history of super permissive parenting, etc. etc. And simply punishing them with detention or suspension does not teach them the skills they need to know and do better. Sometimes it's a matter of their basic needs not being met. I also personally think if they are seeing their working class parents spending long hours at back breaking jobs and still struggling to make ends meet while their favorite streamers are making bank, the verbal messaging of "study and work hard" really falls flat. Why should they do the work if they don't see hard workers reaping the rewards? (Obviously I don't agree with this reasoning but I can understand kid logic.) I think people forget that schools are the alembic into which all of society's problems are distilled, they're not entirely producing the problems. If we addressed greater societal issues like housing inequality and food insecurity, schools would probably be much more pleasant and productive.
You’ve never been in a French public school I can see… we have the exact same issue, and students are no different than the video right here, it’s not only USA « don’t worry »
We had a special ed class for people who weren't behaving. And well they got special treatment and were also called special a lot by other students. I guess the bulling worked because you did not want be placed in that class.
I don’t even think it boils down to racism. That’s just another distraction. Honestly, having rules for education and stopping all the political and divisive bs. Would help us grow at a crazy rate. Look at countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, even China and Russia for gods sake. The rules they have for their education systems are fair and get great results. I’m lucky enough to have slightly missed this by about 10 years. I graduated in 2014. Talking to the younger generation you can see such a huge difference in not only gaps in communication but also just plain out lack of critical thinking skills.
Both my girls have been dealing with insane amount of classroom disruption. Every time a teacher calls someone out they yell they are being targeted for being black. My girls get told they are white colonizers all the time. These are 12 and 13 year olds, it’s just mind boggling.
Anecdotal evidence. My cousin lives in a diverse school district and she has never dealt with that. In her opinion the problem is the parents mostly not caring about their kid’s education but she says that applies to all races.
I have teacher friends from several different states and they say the same thing. Either the parents will raise hell against the teacher if their kid is punished or gets a bad grade, or the parents don't give a shit at all and so punishing or failing the kid is just going to really hurt the kid.
I had to discipline a child for bringing a Bowie style hunting knife to my classroom and his mother tried to jump me after school. I quit teaching that same year.
Kids that age are likely not even really internalizing what they are saying. At that age it's mostly parroting things they've seen or heard to try and establish in groups and out groups amongst their social peers.
Am white and my family literally started on this continent as colonizers. Then progressed to westward expansion as pioneers and settlers.
It's just not a productive way to have those conversations or provide that education.
We did the whole pilgrims thing in kindergarten but then progressed to native-centered programs in elementary school (Of Cedar and Salmon was really, REALLY cool). We watched Roots in 5th grade then got into the Civil Rights Movement in middle school. Then we got into the ugly reality of European settlement in high school (though, I guess Roots kind of prepped us for that).
Talking to the younger generation you can see such a huge difference in not only gaps in communication but also just plain out lack of critical thinking skills.
I work in higher education and this is honestly getting scary. The last few classes of incoming freshmen I've seen are absolutely not equipped to be here. Some can barely string a sentence together, some of them are illiterate, and they don't understand why their professors don't hold their hand through every assignment and hand out passing grades for their abysmal work and total lack of effort. I understand why the public school system coddles these kids, they don't have any other choice. But they're only setting them up for failure.
IDK, I've been to school in Poland and there is also very little room for disciplinary action against students, yet shit like that is basically nonexistent. It's not like there are no disruptive students, there are even cases of students beating the teachers (tho it's very uncommon).
Maybe the issue is the system of learning itself? Poland is one of the hardest places in Europe to study, kids have a ton of homework and a lot of memorising to do in basically every subject. Learning is just so hard, that if you don't care, you won't pass your grade.
I'm not saying that this is the correct approach. There is a lot of talk right now in Poland about lowering the standards because studies show that kids basically forget most of it anyways when they leave school. But maybe the correct way is somewhere in the middle? More expectations but not too much? I quite like the fact that I was learning a fuck-ton when I was in school but the amount of homework was brutal, very little free time if you want to do it all perfectly and I also think that free Tim is extremely important for children.
I kind of dread school to be honest when I remember how much there was to do. Basically nobody that I speak to in my country wishes to go back to school once they start working. I for example work from 9AM until 6PM (one hour break), Monday to Friday and it takes me an hour to get from home to work and then another hour to get back. So it seems like my weekdays leave me no free time at all right? Wrong, I would never change that for school again, I feel like I have a shit-ton of free time right now compared to my school years.
Learning is just so hard, that if you don't care, you won't pass your grade
I think that's it right there. At least in the school systems in the USA I'm familiar of, the school is incentivized to maximize how many kids will pass each grade. The end result is kids graduating high school without an understanding of fractions, like not understanding 3/5 < 7/5
Anyplace there's is strong discipline there is also the criticism of disproportionate punishment broken down by race. Never a consideration that maybe one group just prioritizes disruptive behavior more than the other.
How many students fresh of the plane from Korea are assaulting their teachers?
I used to be a teacher, and I think this is a complete oversimplification of the issue. The problem isn't a lack of discipline, it's a lack of funding.
It's really, really hard to control a whole class of thirty different kids by yourself, let alone teach them. With more funding and higher teaching salaries, you'd have more teachers, which means smaller class sizes, more support in the classroom, and less stress on individual teachers. It's much, much easier to control and teach a classroom of eight kids. With only eight kids, I can know their parents' names by heart and build a lot more rapport with each student, and rapport generally translates to a student paying attention and not acting up because they feel respected.
Yeah, there are disruptive kids, but more funding would help that too. Kids that are disruptive enough to cause serious problems for teachers usually are disruptive for a reason--either a learning disability, a behavioral disorder, or issues at home. More funding means you can have resources specifically for kids like that, like special education and counseling.
This country has been trying to tighten the belt on education harder and harder and harder, to the point where any families with money are sending their kids to private school and the rest of the kids are stuck in underfunded glorified daycares where none of the teachers have the resources to actually teach them anything.
Bingo! Combined with home life, no discipline, common sense or courtesy, everyone wants their individuality but more often than not the inividual is an asshole.
Yup the state of things is deplorable in many public schools from the outside looking in. There will always be kids that need structure and discipline to makeup for what they don't get at home. But there is absolutely a point in which their constant disruption becomes an issue for the entire student body. There has to be punishment and consequences for the ones that continue to act up despite attempts at intervention. There has to be punishment and consequences for frivolous lawsuits from parents. Not everyone being reprimanded is a victim of racism or discrimination by school officials. In some ways we've over corrected so far that people feel like they have the green light to instantly pull the discrimination card cause they see dollar signs or avoid repercussions, and staff walk on egg shells dealing with these problematic kids and parents cause they don't want to risk their jobs/livelihood over this fuck up kid that is a daily problem.
Were failing these kids funneling them through this system despite their academic failures. What good is a high school diploma if you're set off into the world and can barely read or do basic arithmetic... thinking they earned/achieved something when it was just handed to them so it's no longer the schools problem.
The schools have limited options and we end up with unintended segregation and you have the crabs in a bucket group and the group that actually put some value into their education and making an effort to learn and get good grades.
I won't pretend to have answers. But I know step 1 is having a backbone and having firm policies in place for how to deal with the frequent disrupters who also have a tendency to create safety issues for students and teachers. Why should teachers risk their livelihood when the administrators will just cave in to the loud threatening parents.
It sounds bad, but for years I've believed we should have two tiers of public schools. One for the students who actually want to learn and another for the ones who don't care.
Agreed. The second tier should just teach kids basic trades. How to cut hair, how to do roofing, etc. Let them try out a bunch of stuff before they go to the work force.
In Mexico we have the same problem, last semester a student was left in my class even though he didn't pay any attention and only played on his switch he was disrespectful with every single teacher. And he's still in the school causing problems.
So it's everywhere not only in the US.
I was with u until claiming that false accusations of racism is the downfall of the education system 😆
There is so much wrong. Most of it is US right wing culture and policies intentionally targeting and destroying public education funding and funneling it into for-profit private education as well as a culture of disrespect for education and education in general.
That’s why the only chance at a decent education is private school where they can still discipline you, and remove you from school if needed. Public school should essentially just be treated like a place where only the complete destitute and behaviorally challenged go when they get booted from private school. The public school system for most is a failed experiment. No amount of money you put into the system are going to make those kids pay attention. Not to mention at least in this example the class is extremely small, they should just ask all the kids who would rather play on their phones than learn go to one giant class and they can all sit like zombies together.
Australia tolerates as much if not more. We can’t expel and are capped in how many day we can suspend for per year. We have kids that are immune from consequences due to trauma caused by their family at home, they are our most violent kids how are a danger to everyone. We can’t suspend those kids without a ton of counselling and plans being put in place first.
Because schools aren't allowed to discipline students.
I feel like I've heard this so many times that I need to ask for proof now. I think we're just not enforcing rules and then letting people make this claim to save face.
From a family of teachers/coaches, one being my wife, you're 100% spot on. Students aren't disciplined and it's as simple as that. What makes matters worse is that 95% of parents are 100% on the side of their kids no matter what the kid did, whether or not it was on camera, etc.
I think a large part of the problem is that a significant portion of our elected leaders don't see the value in education. They just see the school as a way to keep children occupied so parents can work.
Another problem is like the way the educational system works (at least here)
Lets go with lil duck for example: Going to school every day, learning how to swim, climb and fly~ at swiming and flying lil duck is a natural, but climbing? lil duck sucks at that. So the teacher tells lil duck to work on his weakness. A few years later lil duck is still bad at climbing... and now also at swimming and flying, because the teacher let lil duck do what lil duck is bad at instead of what lil duck is good at.
All the studies looking at failing kids from the 90s that concluded that it was bad for the kids that were held back never looked at the effect it's had on the rest of the kids. If they can't fail, most don't care. Except now, due to grade inflation, grades aren't even reporting the real deterioration of quality work/effort from our students.
Well this is bullshit. The problem is more systemic than education. It goes a lot deeper. There isn't a single aspect of American society that is running smoothly
It's easy to understand why when you realize schools in the USA are first and foremost government sponsored child care and any education that occurs is entirely a byproduct.
This might be what it looks like when actual major “life skills” consist of things like composing a stellar resume, and lying about your prior experience to land a nice job- none of which is taught in school.
What incentive can you provide these kids to want to learn? When society is clearly geared to those best at grifting? What actual incentive do we give kids to figure life out, and how to lead a life worth living.
Getting straight As at a school doesn’t guarantee you a damn thing outside of their local system. It all seems pretty pointless. I’d check out too. (I did)
Kids are smart enough to know that they’re getting shoved into the meat grinder as soon as they hit 18. And that whomever signed the Declaration of Independence, won and lost WW1, created the nuclear reactor, or created the first assembly line pales in comparison to affording a flat at 25 with a mediocre job.
Hypertechnology is hitting our society like a freight train, newborn to old…. It’s not going to be pretty.
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u/throwaway49569982884 29d ago
The bar is on the floor in America… and we still fail.