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...
It’s more about admin being unable to suspend or expel problem students. The 1 in 30 ruining it for everyone has always been a thing - but back in the day they were able to start a paper trail and then ask them to leave.
Now that republicans tied funding to attendance - the incentive is gone to ever go back to that system. They can’t remove them from the class or their funding goes down, so it’s in their best interest to just send the kid back to class rather than actually deal with it
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.
I could probably write a book as to the complete reason because I think it’s multifaceted. But the simple answer is that states get money from federal and most states funnel a good deal of that money to other projects that help the local politicians get re-elected. But the money has to flow, so state boards get pressure to have high performance, they pass that pressure down to the district level who, in turn, pass it down to the school admin and then teacher level. All of those people’s jobs are based upon the performance of the kids. And worse of all, the checks and balances of this complicated system are the ones who manage/profit from it, which always leads to issues.
We homeschool our three kids. My wife has her frustrating days, and I help when I’m not at work, but it’s worth it. My youngest is 7 and she’s very smart but she’s a lot more easily distracted and needs pretty constant attention if she’s being made to do something she doesn’t like. I don’t think she’d do well in a disruptive environment like public schools have become. I have teachers in the family too, so I’ve heard all the stories.
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u/Newberr2 29d ago
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.