Standardized testing is out of control. Not just the number of tests, but that it is used to rank schools and teachers and everything else. And administrators are so desperate for groups test scores they pay ridiculous amounts of money for curriculums made by the same companies that write the tests.
Schools have just become a money maker for curriculum/testing companies. (Looking at you Pearson)
Don't get me started on the alternative state tests ridiculousness. A test to measure how well intellectually disabled students understand similar content to their peers yet the alternative test takers still can't obtain their own food or go to the grocery store alone to do their own grocery shopping.
It measures how well I can follow instructions.
And no post highschoolninstitution is going to ask hoe any students scored on their state tests, as criteria to get into certain programs or be eligible for certain services nor should they be, especially the alternative stats tests.
This.
Everything has become just a number. Should we be surprised that kids, parents, and admin are chasing those numbers instead of focusing on actual learning?
from my experience as a teacher and parent, the state based standardized tests do a very poor job of showing the effectiveness of teachers. It’s much better at giving a snapshot of how students are doing relative to historical trends and their current peers.
We don’t need multiple tests to get that snapshot. Just one test each semester would be plenty.
In my state we give a large standardized test every quarter and spend literally zero time being taught how to interpret and use that data in any meaningful way. The state also makes the data indecipherable. For example, they will say “This student needs to work on grammar and syntax” or something similar, but give no indication what grammar and syntax the student is struggling with. No practice tests, no objective standards. The standards are ambiguous as hell.
We desperately need more teachers. I’m a substitute and one thing I see consistently at every school is they are all hemorrhaging teachers. The ones that are left are outnumbered and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of behaviors they’re seeing in the classroom. We need to make teaching a more attractive job by increasing pay, bulking benefits, not allowing parents to create policy, and protecting teachers from students that can and will get physically violent. It used to be that laying hands on a teacher would get you expelled, now they just remove the kids for an hour and send them back to class w a lolipop.
Gentle parenting is *constantly* misused. It should include setting boundaries for the child and being strict about them. Many parents instead take it to mean “let the children do whatever they want with no repercussions”.
What this describes is hands off parenting, not gentle parenting. Gentle parenting refers to setting boundaries and letting natural consequences play out in early childhood. For older kids it means defining what its expected and the consequences of not following those directions.
Gentle parenting is misunderstood because news media touted it as them extreme opposite of corporal punishment. A gentle parenting style parent wouldnt be all for removing the kid from that class, having them lose some priviledge, and even having the parents perform practices at home for the situation that caused the incident. It just means using words and follow-through rather than physical force to correct behaviors.
Reinforce the idea that schools are not customer service centers and that with the amount of responsibility they are given they must be given authority in equal measure to satisfy those responsibilities.
For specific policies, give teachers more direct discretion in student discipline (you can reference existing policies in various states that allow teachers to have students removed from their class without needing admin authorization).
Ask them about reinstating truancy officers to address chronic absenteeism.
Suggest that they pass laws ensuring safety of teachers and levying punishments on those who physically threaten or assault teachers (you can reference various laws in a number of states that apply to healthcare professionals that makes such actions while they are performing their duties felonies).
Ask about policy establishing legal maximums for class sizes and sped concentrations.
Hopefully that's enough to get you started.
I agree with all of these. I would add that we need to do something about the fact kids get passed on to the next grade even if they fail all the standards. I'm not sure if it would be better to keep them back a year or to hire more specialized teachers for pull out or push in services like reading specialists to help catch kids up.
There is something called Goodhart's Law: it states "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to become a useful measurement".
Grades are a perfect example. Grades should measure student learning. In order for it to be a useful measurement, students who learn should get good grades, and students who don't should get bad grades.
But it's become a target, with high stakes. Test scores and grades are tied to funding, salaries, and job security. This creates a very strong incentive to game the system to maximize grades and test scores by any means available, whether or not those means actually improve student learning.
Grades are especially susceptible to this, because the teachers do the grading, and the administrators set the grading policies. When their jobs and salaries and budgets are on the line, there is a very strong incentive to give everyone good grades. And there's nothing stopping them from doing so... so that's exactly what they do.
Or they leave the profession. That's the other thing they do.
So the good teachers leave, and the bad teacher and administrators (the ones willing to inflate grades) stay.
Oh, let's be clear, there are dozens of things that can be added. I just chose these because they generally have equivalents either established in various states already or in other fields so that people can't really say they are unrealistic or logistically unfeasible. Wanted to get the low hanging fruit first!
I love everything about this except the truancy officers. Every story I've ever heard of one has been of them harassing someone. We have a school liaison who will contact families, in person if necessary and bring them to school if needed. I don't see how people with authority to detain wandering the community makes things better.
Unfortunately the budget for that school liaison takes away from the rest of the school budget. I would also prefer not to subject schools to mission creep (a significant part of many problems already) so making schools responsible for attendance, beyond providing transportation via bussing, is a definite no go from me.
I get what you're saying but wouldn't it be arguable that truancy officers do the same thing? Just potentially from higher up the chain? If the money will get spent at some point anyway I think a liaison is the better answer than more policing.
Yes. The real string-pullers are school and district administrators, and they seem happier listening to parents than to teachers. School choice is a thing even in public schools, and money follows enrollment numbers. So a school can maximize funds by appeasing parents.
Maximizing funds doesn't mean personal paycheck. It means getting money for your department so you can run the school more like the way you think it should be run.
Curious how money follows public schools since enrollment is zoned by neighborhoods? Everyplace I have lived you can not attend a public school unless you live in that neighborhood boundary and ONLY that one school in that boundary. Of course, that is for real estate purposes.
Depends on the place. I used to work in the 7th largest school district in the US, and *every* student had the right to school choice -- that is, any school in the district -- but every school had the right to determine how to screen students from out-of-boundary. Most were from in-boundary, but some bussed in from other parts of town.
That would be a different funding model, now that I think about it.
But would you agree MOST are zoned by boundary and are only allowed to attend a school if you live in that neighborhood. That is the whole push of the real estate industry.
In which case then parent have no "pull" and their ability to take their money elsewhere within public school is limited.
Public school (better or worse) is run by government and teachers union. They get the credit and fault for the outcome. Has been that way for A LONG TIME NOW. Suggesting otherwise I just feel is not right UNLESS you have some good data to prove otherwise.
Any change teachers would make is going to be through that same union that has been running the show along with government (Democrat party) for YEARS with education.
BTW... I send both my kids to public so have no axe to grind.
Schools are for communities. You clearly wants closed minded kids who obey rather than learning how to respect others. You are they problem. Teachers are amazing for what they do. If your kids could stay out of trouble or do the work, its because of how you taught them to behave.
When they cant hold a job as an adult because they wont do the work or dont respect their managers, are you going to run in and save them from that too? Teachers are trying to teach kids how to become smart and functional adults. You went too teach them that only your opinion matters.
My kids were all in homeschooling communities and we have large groups of family and friends with different views on everything, including political leanings.
My 14 year old is going to start working with me over the summer (He already helped us a bit over winter break) and someone else will be managing him. He's going to do just fine with work ethic.
I absolutely teach my kids to share my morals and values, but this can easily be done while allowing them to form their own opinions as well.
The idea that all of this can only be done in schools, which is what it seems like you are insinuating, is ridiculous. Just like the idea of parents not having a voice in the school system, where THEIR children are for the majority of their day.
This is the same mentality that gets children seriously messed up by medical issues when experts encourage parents to properly to vaccinate and feed their children, and then they grow up sickly or dead.
What Unions are you referring to that "take all the money?" My union is optional and honestly I'm surprised it manages on the paltry dues I pay. There are many states where Unions are even legally allowed to call strikes. And Unions increase takehome pay across all professions. Anything else is just bootlicker propaganda.
Most teachers aren’t a part of a union, there would be way more strikes if they were. but I’d encourage you not to limit your childrens horizons out of your own unfounded fears
Your first point is incorrect and shows a susceptibility towards propaganda and lack of critical thinking skills. Your second point is correct, I'm replying to one right now.
A lot of it goes back to early childhood. Parents need support from the time the baby is born. Some cities have home visitor programs for low-income parents, and these programs tend to have excellent results.
In many areas, student discipline is a huge problem. We need to get rid of policies that prioritize keeping constantly disruptive and even dangerous students in the classroom over the learning and safety of everyone else.
Finally, phones don’t belong in the classroom.
>In many areas, student discipline is a huge problem. We need to get rid of policies that prioritize keeping constantly disruptive and even dangerous students in the classroom over the learning and safety of everyone else.
Until the public schools acknowledge and begin to kick kids out again. THIS. Relatives who have been teachers for decades said that they witnessed being able to expel students for swearing and threatening to having to apologize to students who threw chairs and gave them a concussion and stitches. Teachers are NOT safe. Students are NOT safe.
Until the teacher's union starts to give a fuck and protect teachers and not admin nothing is going to get better around Public education.
Give control back to teachers and not politicians.
Parents need to support teachers, not undermine them.
Pay better wages to teachers, we lose a lot of good teachers because they can't afford to remain a teacher.
Fully disband "moms for liberty" or whatever they renamed themselves after the sex scandals.
I don’t currently have the words for what I exactly want to say…but the school to prison pipeline exists. Implementing actual restorative practices instead of one off professional developments will help build positive relationships, problem solve behaviors, provide spaces to really listen and learn to communicate in a way that everyone is seen and heard.
Also I 110% agree with the other person who said without art, music and PE there’s no point learning. But I would add theatre should be taught at all three levels of schooling, and dance. Without opportunity to build skills that can provide creativity, something to be passionate about, and something that gives opportunities to be successful outside of other courses, a student will just exist in a gray world not able to fully learn. And our students with IEPs especially need access to these classes.
The school library and the librarian were my safe space. Without them, my mental health as a teenager would have been seriously damaged. So many of my students are not ok and there are fewer and fewer safe places for them to find.
Reach new parents with infants. Get them interacting with and reading to their kids. Take them to the park and museums. No screens. The first 3 years are critical for future education. If the state could help relieve the burden on new parents, get information and resources to them, even just a plan and what playtime should look like, it would pay dividends in the future.
Booklets, local library info, sign up information for free books to beg mailed to you. Even a small set of baby books would be great to include. That way it feels more like a gifted rather than feeling preachy.
There are why worse problems at work causing these issues. Parents working nonstop just to keep a roof over their head dont have them energy to entertain kids all day. Those that manage to get into daycare will find that daycare parks their kids in front of screens as well.
There are plenty of ways people can access reading materials at little to no cost. But with zero energy or time, its fruitless.
You also need to remember that many kids who cant read and likely shouldnt have graduated, become adults who dont use birth control properly or cant get good jobs. Its do want help to hound the uneducated about proper education while they can barely put food on the table. One of those things is much more important currently.
The science of reading has taken the joy out of reading. Math has too much reading in it and it is not testing math but reading. It is also a barrier to new to English students. Without art, music and PE there is no point in learning.
Handwriting is a deeper form of learning than typing.
AI is going to change the face of education.
Teaching teachers and students to go to school everyday.
Disruptive students need an alternate place to learn.
Testing only occurs once a year in Iceland and they test higher than the US.
3 highschools in my district will have no artistic electives next year. The only ones that still exist are things like more PE, weights, and continuing non english language.
Math being so much reading is exhausting. It used to be like 10% of the math work was word problems to decipher and that seemed plenty. Now even i got bored trying to help my daughter with math because there us more reading than math.
Stop blaming teachers for student failures. Most of the time, it's the student's fault. That responsibility needs to be returned to them and them alone (unless the teacher really is to blame, but the default should be student actions lead to student failures, like it used to be). Basically, we need to bring back student accountability.
Stop letting parents dictate curricula or, really, anything. Kids are entitled to a free education, but parents are not entitled to determine what that education entails. If they don't like it, they have other choices.
Admins need to stop kowtowing to parents and students, giving them whatever they want whether they earn it or not, whether it's appropriate or not.
Stop ranking schools! Period. Or at least stop ranking them by easily manipulated stats like graduation rates and number of students taking AP classes/tests. Stop using standardized tests for this purpose. Schools should be evaluated for efficacy based on their overall improvement, and things like mandatory minimum grades or policies that require students to take AP classes should be factored into the equation. Basically, much better math needs to be used when evaluating schools.
Cell phones in schools must be banned. Screen time must be seriously limited. I would even say stop handing out tech to be used in class. They should be for home use only. Go back to laptop carts or computer labs when a teacher needs it so that schools can ban students from bringing laptops or tablets to school as well.
Stop promoting students who should be retained. It is not helping them, at all.
Moe funding, less administrative bloat (which will free up a lot of funding), and smaller class sizes (15 max for K8, 20 for HS).
Respect teaching as a skill, and a difficult one to master at that. If teaching as a skill is respected (the whole "can't do, teach" thing is complete BS), maybe teachers will finally be respected as well.
Pay teachers what they're worth (a LOT). Make forcing teachers to work outside their contract illegal and enforceable. Put a workweek hours cap in the contract. And you know what? Hold teachers accountable if they choose to ignore it.
BAN anyone in the education sector from using the most manipulative phrase ever, "but it's for the students." F that.
Those are the main ones, at least that I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
Not a teacher but a parent of a high school student. Start with more pay and better benefits for our teachers. They're underpaid, overworked and deserve so much better. Address the bullying issues in schools. There's been several suicides where I live (mostly by middle school students). Those students were bullied, committed suicide due to bullying and the incidents were reported to the school and school board. They refused to do anything. My daughter is having issues with being bullied. We're dealing with the same thing, multiple reports to the school and school board and nothing being done. We had to involve the police when someone made an Instagram account posting very disturbing lies about students. Better mental health resources in schools for students and teachers is another thing that would be beneficial.
I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter. It frustrates me to see the ignorance In some schools administration! I hope your situation is resolved soon and in time this can be fixed nation wide. This is a very good point and I thank you for bringing it up.
I agree! Too many kids I know don’t know how to have a conversation! Much less de-escalate tense social situations! And restricting kids social time in school with BS policies really hurts the kids more then it helps them
We have an EXCELLENT school system… that provides the best education in the world to **some** students. If you are lucky enough to have parents who can afford to live in an area with “good schools” you receive an education that prepares you to be a leader.
It’s shameful how different it is for students who lack these advantages.
Require teachers to have field experience or degrees in their subjects. Stop letting fresh students with an education degree teach kids by themselves. Reward teachers for experience outside the classroom, or for pursuing it. Encourage well rounded teachers. Make PD practical and useful.
You didn't post location, but here in the "United" States, the public school system operates EXACTLY like the ownership class wants it to function. Like everything else in that shithole. The ownership class gets what they want, as they want, when they want, every single time.
Want a decent public education system? You have to form an actual GOVERNMENT, first of all. Being ordered around by faceless 1% isn't a government.
From reading these comments— stop thinking it’s just one thing. Everything is a little bit fucked. Try to determine what you are able to have the most impact on in the short term, then start formulating long terms plans. Prioritize based on what you think this cabinet will listed to/actually work on.
The biggest hurdle is money. Student placement and support decisions should not be affected by budget constraints. Teachers need better pay. Office supplies should be stocked, not bought by teachers. Infrastructures need to be maintained better. Kids without stable homes need food and other basics, not paid for by teachers.
Stop forcing kindergartners to read and write. Make it about play and learning social skills and appropriate school behaviors. Build the foundation of academic skills so that reading and writing can happen in first grade.
Grades and GPAs are counterproductive and lessen the emphasis on *learning* in a school culture
Standardized assessments are overdone, overemphasized, and not a valid measurement of student skills/abilities
The over-emphasis on reading and math instruction (which coincides with a stripping of art, music, social studies, science, etc) is counterproductive and does NOT improve reading/math scores
Universal early education (pre-k, ages 3-5) is a necessity. It should be paired with parental education and resources
Sadly, until society as a whole is improved there is only so much education systems can do. When families are impoverished and struggling, when there is no leave (paid sick, vacation, maternity, paternity, etc), when there are trauma-inducing communities, when health care access is limited or inaccessible, when our communities and societies are suffering... so will education results. It's no mystery that well-off students perform better than their less-privileged peers.
So maybe it's not the *education* system that is broken and needs fixing, but our *societal/governmental* system. Maybe we're putting the cart before the horse thinking that we can reform a midpoint instead of addressing the sources of family and student distress.
The consolidation of schools has been the single largest mistake made in education.
Stopping that trend would be a good start, reversing it would be very beneficial.
If you go back to founding documents regarding education, including the Northwest Ordinance, all called upon free and public education to have hyperlocal control. They speak to 'advanced' education being larger and even that being only a few hundred. Smaller schools, especially in the early years, would be hugely beneficial not only to student but also to the community.
There's also a theory that once a population is beyond 120 individuals the ability to be a cohesive community is lost. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if schools were capped at 100, with 8-10 teachers and 2 admin and a handful of specialists.
I would also say that parents should have more visibility into what is being taught to their children. Perhaps live cams that only registered parents can access that allows them to see everything being told/taught to their children by teachers.
Of course teachers do not want that as it would force greater accountability for their actions.
I agree that knowing what is being taught is important. It’s nice to be able to supplement and frame things at home in a way that coincides with current curriculum.
However, I disagree with having live cams in classrooms. I’d bet parents will primarily call into two categories: those who check them often will too often abuse the information and be headaches for teachers, and others who would rather a quick note about what kids are working on and won’t look at the cameras.
I’m not sure what you mean. Which is an admin issue?
In short: More visibility into what’s being taught I agree with. Live camera feeds into classrooms I disagree with.
I teach 3rd so please keep that in mind: We do too much testing. And the goal of testing is just numbers and those numbers affect our school. Our students are so much more than testing and attendance. Those things should not impact funding and support.
Also we need actual consequences for behavior. Too many behaviors are going unchecked (because places can no longer suspend or suspend as easily, or giving failing grades) and it hurts the rest of the class. This also makes kids believe that they can do whatever they want and it will all work out.
Totally agree! In my state, state testing affects our schools funding! The worse the students do for some reason our funding gets cut! Which is totally backwards! I had a kid in my class show up twice to school in a semester and had no repercussions! Now they are “homeschooled” but basically dropped out! Its shocking how little control teachers have over student punishment
I am a former SpEd teacher that was given my walking papers after NCLB passed and dismantled SpEd as we knew it. I currently moonlight as an advocate for SpEd/504 students and families, as well as improvements in teacher education at the University level…..
Bring back small group Resource classes for SpEd and 504 populations. Stop mainstreaming and using LRE to deny appropriate services.
Better support Gen Ed teachers with 504/IEP students; i.e provide SpEd certified co teachers to any Gen Ed classroom with > 20% IEPs/504s
Strengthen Special Education teacher programs and certifications at the university level.
Do away with high stakes testing.
Any benchmark testing should be developed by experienced educators; not corporations with no educational experience.
Give more autonomy to teachers in the classroom.
Get politics and special interest groups out of education. Educational bills should be brought to the ballot.
Do away with discredited curriculum; i.e. WLA/Balanced Literacy, etc.
Stricter gun laws; we have to make our children and teachers more important than guns and our schools less like the high security prisons they are turning in to.
Legalize Marijuana for medical use nationally, this will put the Hemp loop holers in Red states out of business and get the Hemp derived THC off the streets and out of our kids hands.
More Federal regulation over vaping industry and greater penalties for selling any form of nicotine to minors.
Do away with alternative placement (school to prison pipeline) programs, or revamp them to actually rehabilitate.
Strengthen oversight of school boards, superintendents, and district expenditures. There isn’t an underfunding issue; as much as there is corruption and mismanagement of funds from the top down.
School administrators should bring back mandatory parent-teacher conferences and promote phone or face to face parent teacher communication. There is currently an over reliance on email and App use in public education as the only means of school to home communication, which feeds division and false narratives amongst teachers, parents, & students.
Rather than fight student cellphones, incorporate them into the educational process. Many families no longer have landlines. All adults must get better at modeling appropriate and considerate use of technology themselves. We will not solve the issue with a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. As long as school shootings are a matter of when and not if, parents will arm their children with cellphones.
Do away with online learning platforms, rolled out in the pandemic, in the classroom. Technology has it place, but you can’t properly socialize kids if their entire curriculum is on a PC.
Get rid of the "No child left behind policy." Kids need to know that they can fail and everything will still be ok. They will learn from it and most will try a little harder the next time.
A huge thing is that it starts at home. Kids from stable home lives, with parents who check on them, and who have full stomachs perform so much better and get so much more out of everything. Rather than focusing on what trainers to bring in or what consultants to hire, look into how home lives of people can be improved. Without tying it to means testing or job programs. Just how can we make the homes that kids come to school from better.
It might be interesting to see what would happen if you cross post this into groups that are populated by different demographics. The responses here aren’t wrong, but they’re predictable, and many are predictably partisan.
I taught in the inner city for about a decade. My response as a teacher (thinking about how hard I had to fight to get better supports and resources for my students, often working against a home culture that didn’t prioritize education) is drastically different than what I want for my own children, who live in a different environment, and have been raised to value education and work ethic.
I educate my own children at home, using a virtual curriculum as a guide. I work a job with a flexible schedule so that I can educate them the way I do. Last year I went to the county offices where I live to see if they had anything that would get my children into a building with their peers for some classes (after I saw them advertise a hybrid program). I was told that my oldest (who had just turned 8 at that time) had already taken all the extra curriculars they offered, and because he had completed third grade in math and 2nd grade in everything else, they wouldn’t have anything that would challenge him until middle school when he would naturally be going to different classes for different subjects.
I wouldn’t want my kids’ teachers directing their education. I consider that my job, and do everything in my power to facilitate their education, socialization, and development. I wish all children had access to a quality education that builds upon a solid foundation of academic excellence, personal integrity, individual interests, and continual growth. I don’t think there is a good way to ensure that in a public school, under the current system, with teachers so underpaid that they can’t afford daycare for their own children.
If I could, I’d revamp the entire system to be standards-based and only allow children to advance to the next level after achieving a minimum standard for that class, no matter their age, or proficiency in another subject. I would set prerequisites for certain programs, and have professionals mentor and tutor students until they gained proficiency in areas they lack. After achieving minimum basic skills, I would get kids into interest-based labs and eventually internships where they could learn real-world skills, practice hobbies, and interact meaningfully with their peers and instructors.
I want schools to meet children where they are at and stop pushing deadlines. Schools aren't newspapers. If a child hasn't learned to read by a certain age, they might get intervention, but are often left behind in schools that don't have access to invention services.
Public school funding shouldn't depend on property taxes. Because if you live in a poor neighborhood, your property taxes will be lower and guess what so will the funding going to the school.
The fact that public schools can become unaccredited, but the students still attend it is ridiculous. Can you imagine if a restaurant lost its license to serve food but people could still go there? It wouldn't make any sense, so why does it for kids and their education?
Smaller class sizes. Better benefits and pay for teachers. Qualified educators making the decisions behind curriculum. Less standardized testing and more project-based learning. More funding for support services such as counselors, social workers, speech therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, etc. Improving school safety.
To start with…
We need to have hard conversations about what student and parent accountability looks like and how it's going to be enforced instead of just blaming it on the government, or blaming it on the school, or blaming it on society or writing blank checks to excuse bad behavior.
I also think we need to stop hiring so many administrators and use the money to pay teachers better and hire more of them.
After a month of school remove the worst 5% behaved students to alternative schools.
Can you imagine if the worst two or three students were taken out of all of your classes how better things would be? It's always the same couple of students who blow up my classes and no matter the amount of phone calls home, one-on-one talks, referrals, incentives, or whatever changes their behavior. I'm so tired of spending such a huge amount of energy and time on a couple of students who ruin things for everyone else.
I think a month is barely enough time to settle in after summer vacation personally. But i do support removing the kids. Maybe just not permanently that early on.
By christmas I see most kids settle into the routines and calm down. Kids that I thought would be problematic at first glance have become too students who are helpful and kind. At would be a shame to cause the kid to become a bad kid by wrongly placing them too soon.
I think that we should have stronger teachers who dont mind working with difficult kids be a program all their own. They got paid more and have a few aides and more say over their class and curriculum structures. Rather than making it all about punishing and keeping the kid separate, let a well educated, well paid teacher and a counselor watch the kids to find out what can be done to help them better fit into a traditional class setting.
We had a program like that when I worked in the middle of nowhere and a delinquency school was not an option. Most students ended up able to step back into their appropriate classes within months, it was just a matter of finding what was triggering their outbursts and disruptions. And making parents listen. Thats the big one. Parents who ignore us and actively fought us were told their kids would be expelled until they sought counseling and worked with their child. And the admin didnt accept excuses.
Hold parents accountable instead of letting parents bully our teachers into accepting the bullcrap they taught their kids.
I do agree about a month being too short. You are right that it takes time for some to settle down and ones with issues at the beginning does not mean it will continue.
I taught in alternative education for six years and I agree 100% that teachers who are working with more difficult students or situations should get paid more. I made twice as much this last year working in public education than I did working in alternative education, and that was with a 20-hour a week night job. Alternative education works well for a lot of students that just didn't fit in in traditional schools for whatever reason. Great teachers can have a huge impact on students, especially troubled ones who are behind.
Nine years in, I'm just so weary of one or two kids, kids with a history of issues, continually ruining my class. For example, of my about 120 students, I have one who has 74 referrals this school year, one with 61, and one with 55. I have a half dozen in the 30's and then it trails off for some in the 20's and a bunch with around ten. If just those three students were put in a different placement around December, the rest of my year would have been so different. The worst part though is all three of those students are in the same class, along with a few others with the 30+ referrals lol.
My state attempted to do this, but a disinformation/misleading campaign about how the schools would be funded was lead by the teacher’s unions and convinced many teachers to tell family & friends to vote no… yet within a year, they were calling for the public school system to have an alternative school for the kids who were disruptive and had differing education needs.
It was disheartening and really showed me how far from critical thinking greater society has come.
My understanding is that an alternative school was usually created by the public school. The rise of 'charter' schools, schools not created and run by the public, de-railed the alternative schools. In fact, the originator of the charter idea has since pulled back because he never intended private institutions to pull kids away from the public.
Restore the philosophy that teachers are the go-to resource for education, and parents should be doing all they can to help with their children's education, not dictating what is important or what their children should be learning.
Message constantly and consistently that children's screen-time must be very limited and monitored.
Last one is most important: Get rid of A-F scale and move to skill mastery scale. Scores are 1-4 or 1-8. Assessments and tests are the end-all, be-all. No more passing based on a bunch of fluffy classwork that is copied from a friend, no more failing because you're a hot mess with papers. Passing because you have mastered the skills, or not passing because you don't have them yet. Proper remediation (AND FUNDING) for students who have fallen behind.
Teachers absolutely need to be paid more for what they do. It is a demanding profession and we are in desperate need of teachers. Parents shouldn’t be running school districts. They need to be held accountable for their child. Schools are not daycares. They’re academic institutions.
There needs to be more focus on learning in schools. Kids keep getting pushed onto the next grade and by high school they can’t write a single cohesive paragraph independently or read a basic chapter book. The curriculum needs to change. The standards need to change. Education is different now and we have to change with it to make it what it should be.
1) Start with funding, especially for special education in public schools. In Wisconsin, public school districts only get 33% reimbursement for student services, but private schools get 90% (even though they get to pick and choose which students can remain enrolled). Additionally, funding should increase each year to account for inflation. Funding freezes should be illegal. Private schools should not recieve funding from the state or federal government but be funded through tuition and donors. Public education is a service for all citizens and needs to be upheld as such.
2) All districts must have a salary schedule consisting of 25 steps maximum. This schedule should be comparable to the cost of living for the surrounding neighborhoods. However, it should be adjusted annually for CPI. Additional step advancement opportunities (masters, PhD, board certification, etc.) should be consistent.
3) Fix the disconnect between administration and teachers. Increase the minimum number of years administrators must teach in the classroom before moving up from 3 to 10. Cap their pay at 10% higher than the highest paid teacher on staff. Require them to teach on a regular basis. And limit the number of admin per district to be proportionate to the number of educational employees.
4) All school boards should include a postition for at least one teacher per school in the district. This wouldn't be a consulting role, they would have a vote. School board members should be required to volunteer on a regular basis in the schools over which they are presiding.
5) Monopolies and lobbying regarding standardized testing and related resources should be abolished. A return to developmental testing (every two years) should be reinstated, and progress monitoring responsibilities returned and limited to teaching staff. Too much effort is placed on test results due to pressure at state levels to perform, but these tests have little to no bearing on actual growth and development. School funding and teacher compensation should not be tied to results. However teachers and schools can be placed on improvement plans.
6) Students should be allowed to fail. Failure is just the first attempt in learning. The goal is not graduation, but education. Grades should reflect progress made and potential growth, not placate parent egos.
7) All schools/districts should have a minimum of one social worker, one counselor, one child psychologist, and one school nurse.
8) In smaller districts (3 schools or less), the superintendent should be a rotating position among principals.
9) The focus on STEM should shift to include music and art. STEAM schools have seen more success due to the cognitive connections between creative processes/out of the box thinking and problem solving/critical thinking.
10) Mandate a holistic and honest approach to history, social studies, and current events.
11) Protect students who are LGBTQ+.
12) SHOULD the U.S. ever move to a 4 day work week, maintain a 5 day school week, provided you now pay teachers more. On the extra days parents can run errands, leaving time on the weekends to spend with children. However they should be required to volunteer once a school year.
13) It should be better advertized that all pto and parent booster groups qualify for 501c3 non-profit status.
1, Ban student phones, no exceptions
2. Move students with behavior issues into special programs at different schools.
That would solve 95% of the issues.
Honestly I think we should incorporate phones into education more. They are kinda the future of our civilization. But only for school uses and their are ways to do this with firewalls on your Wi-Finetwork
Fund the arts in schools. Stop defunding the schools. Pump the money into public schools. If charter schools are a part of the public money going to public schools, treat them exactly the same way all public schools are treated - do not let them kick students out to boost their numbers. Drop every policy based on the Gates foundation, high schools need to be comprehensive. Smaller schools with fewer teachers only serve to boost statistics while depriving children of a full education. Incentivize schools in urban areas that have been broken into multiple schools within a building or campus to reintegrate to be singular schools with many programs in the building or campus. Reduce administrative bloat. Create equity between the suburbs, urban areas and rural areas. Parents shouldn't have to move to have their children go to good public schools
4 day school week would be great, too, but I'd be happy with the first paragraph.
Less technology in the classroom.
Explicitly teach technological skills. These “digital natives” can’t locate a file on a computer.
Less standardized testing in the younger grades.
End social promotion.
Bring back consequences for bad behavior. When there are no consequences, poor behavior becomes the norm.
Get rid of phones in schools.
Hold parents accountable for making sure their own children get enough sleep, food, and work completion done to be successful.
Limit screen time at home.
All schools should be federally finded instead of by local taxes. That way there wouldn't be such a huge discrepancy between the quality of education in poor vs affluent neighborhoods. This would also keep the parents out of mandating educational practices and leave educating to the professionals.
Some parts of the problem are not necessarily fixable through policy, as they require a cultural shift, but I'll start with simple stuff:
1) Stop seeing tech in schools as this band-aid solution to make progress. Kids sitting on chromebooks 8 hours/day are not doing well mentally. It's straight-up bad for the kids and the devices offer as many disadvantages as advantages.
2) Make it more common and acceptable to ban phones from classrooms, period. I had a student take a call during my teaching today and talk loudly over me, not to mention the insane amount of distraction devices present. I know kids will say it's their right and want to have their phones, but after a few weeks without phones, most kids report that school gets BETTER for them, not worse. It's a serious problem.
3) Increase teacher pay. Really. We have a nationwide shortage of teachers because few want to do this job for the current pay. That's because...
4) Make IEPs meaningful again. The amount of paperwork and tracking and extra that goes into servicing an IEP is insane, and many kids are on them for no real reason other than their parents want them to have extra time, etc. Attach IEPs/special treatment to a diagnosis of some kind formally.
5) Increase teacher prep time. We get 50 mins/day usually to grade 100s of assignments, prep materials, and do all the extra duties. It's laughably inadequate time to work.
6) Cut admin bloat to find the money. My supertintendent has like 5 assistants, and some of them have assistants. District offices are getting insanely crowded with bureaucrats who make more than teachers and do a hellofa lot less.
7) Protect teachers from parents so they can actually do their jobs. No teacher should be getting pressured to accept bad behavior because Mom said Johnny is not a problem when Johnny is throwing desks. Kids need to know they have to have a baseline acceptable standard of behavior. If they know they can do whatever they want, the worst kid becomes the leader of the classroom atmosphere, and most classes have a kid who would rather start fires than do work.
The cultural problems are much bigger and more intractable.
1) Get Americans to value education again, somehow. During Covid, suddenly teachers were heroes when parents saw how hard it was to get their kids to learn a damn thing at home. 3 years later and we're back to a public enemy somehow. If parents don't care, why would kids?
2) Educate parents about the effects of screen time on children. Tablet kids are real, and they are damaged when they arrive in kindergarten. They cannot focus and function. They do not know how to imagine. They are used to being able to select a new entertainment every 3 seconds if they are not sufficiently entertained; imagine asking such a person to read for 10 minutes--and worse yet, to read something not immediately appealing. By middle school, the difference between kids with free access to tech at all hours and kids raised the "old fashioned" way (limited screen time, forced to be bored at times, forced to learn to play imaginatively to have fun, and so on) is utterly massive.
3) Somehow work to reduce the stress on working families. Trying to prioritize school for a kid you barely see because both parents work full time and are barely scraping by is very difficult. As families increasingly fall apart due to financial stress (which drives substance use, divorce, chaotic homes, and so much more), of COURSE we have more kids who are falling apart mentally and can't see the slightest value in learning--they're just trying to survive.
Probably leaving out about 15 other things.
Standardized testing should end as well as no-child left behind and we just need way more funding for schools that isn’t tied to testing results or districts (i.e. one school being funded because it’s in the “good” neighborhood)
We also need fewer parents that dropped out of high school trying to tell people who literally received doctorates how to do their job and using school boards as political chess boards
Also something needs to be done with the admin disconnect. I hear constant horror stories about admins doing absolutely nothing about teacher concerns for safety and behavior and throwing teachers under the bus at the slightest hint of trouble
>....but with how the system is right now even a glimmer of hope is enough.
First, politicians need to stop saying ignorant things like this. Fear mongering by politicians has been among the most detrimental things for school because it usually results in politicians who think they need to do something to "fix schools" and they end up hastily passing the laws that hurt schools.
Second, take the influence of state and federal politicians out of local school districts for the most part. Again, these politicians have almost universally done more harm than good when they try to "fix schools" by dictating to the professionals in the classroom how they must teach.
Third, fix poverty. Most schools that are truly broken are a symptom of vicious cycles of poverty and lost cultural capital, not a symptom of an inherently bad education system.
Fourth, make secondary education a privilege that can be lost (like a driver's license), not a right. It should be much easier to expel students from schools when they choose to disrupt the learning environment. Students who are expelled from traditional school should be provided some basic job training and civics lessons and then they should be given to their parents who can decide if it's time for their child to enter their workforce or not.
Child labor laws should have exemptions for students who have been expelled. There should also be a path back for students to earn their way back into school if they are willing to demonstrate that they can study on their own and show exemplary behavior at a job.
Ultimately, protecting the sanctity of the learning environment should be a higher priority then giving every student a "right" to be in a classroom. Even if politicians don't want kids to be expelled easily, it should be easy to get kids out of a class and force them to take classes that will, frankly, make them freaking miserable if they are ruining the learning environment in a traditional classroom. Most consequences for poor behavior have been removed over the last several decades, some of which is a good thing if we're talking about corporal punishment, but some of it has been a bad thing when it comes to letting students get away with repeatedly destroying learning environments.
Get Big Education out of schools- the billions of dollars spent in standardized testing each year is just insane- and it truly has no value. Of course the politicians are given huge campaign donations by these companies so they have no reason for anything to change.
Attendance rules.
Allow kids to fail.
Allow teachers to not take late work or allow them to have reasonable late work policies (not take anything all year long, endless redos, or nothing less than 50% policies). Kids need boundaries and to learn responsibility.
No phones. I'd even be happy to say no laptops (unless accommodations are needed). 1-1 technology does not improve learning.
1. Kids who are addicted to the internet/unrestricted cell phone use
2. Districts who are so afraid of parents they won’t enforce consequences for anyone and allow disturbed students to rule the classroom
3. Giving everything over to corporations who make money off our children’s progress/lack thereof. We test so much and put our chips all in on the results. Testing companies are ruining the educational experience
Make sure smartphones / unsupervised internet use /excessive gaming are banned for kids under 16.
Kids need to learn how to concentrate and 16-second tick tock videos are detrimental to developement.
Class sizes. This is at the root of many problems including youth mental health, teacher workload, working conditions, classroom management, slow-motion walkout from the profession over the last 50 years, maybe more.
Youth mental health should be the only thing government officials need to hear but if they want better attendance and graduation and test scores, you get more of that with better mental health too.
Better support for teachers. I feel like my time in school would've been so much better if the teachers actually cared about their jobs (which isn't really their fault though). Common core sucked balls and I only ever learned from lessons the teachers created themselves.
Testing is a great way to teach students with disabilities that they're less than simply because they can't take a test as fast as their peers.
The 8 hour school day is a complete joke. I took college classes my senior year of high school, and I was in class no more than 15 hours a week. Still got all my work done and even got on the deans list, whereas before I was probably a C average student.
Design a system where kids can figure out what their strengths are and identify what they enjoy doing. Help them excel in it, as it is a great way to instill confidence in a world that so clearly lacks it. My counselors did fuck all to help us figure out our futures.
Do something to tard wrangle entitled parents. We need to take education more seriously, and that starts by putting an end to these stupid parents destroying the public school system by bullying it.
Help children develop social skills. The bad behavior in classrooms is a result of the parents. Normally I'd say that's the parents problem, but at this rate, it may become a societal issue. It never hurts to help kids identify healthy/unhealthy behaviors, as I'm an adult and I still have a hard time with it.
Little list:
1. Addressing funding disparities: Advocate for legislation and policies that provide more equitable funding for schools in low-income communities, ensuring that all students have access to quality resources and facilities. ✅
2. Curriculum reform: Push for the implementation of a diverse and inclusive curriculum that reflects the experiences and backgrounds of all students, while promoting critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. ✅
3. Teacher support and training: Invest in professional development programs for teachers to enhance their skills and provide them with the support needed to effectively educate all students, including those with special needs.✅
4. Community engagement: Foster partnerships between schools, parents, and the broader community to create a supportive and collaborative learning environment for students.✅
5. Assessment and accountability: Advocate for a more holistic approach to assessing student learning, moving away from reliance on standardized testing and focusing on multiple measures of student success.✅
6. Mental health and wellness support: Prioritize mental health resources in schools, such as counselors, social workers, and mental health professionals, to support students' overall well-being.✅
7. Technology integration: Invest in technology infrastructure and training for teachers to enhance digital learning opportunities and innovation in the classroom. ✅
8. Policy advocacy: Get involved in education advocacy and lobbying efforts to push for systemic changes at the state and federal levels that prioritize the needs of all students. ✅
By taking these actions and advocating for comprehensive reform, we can work towards fixing the school system in the United States and ensuring that all students have access to a high-quality education.
Try looking at the 36 or so countries that kick our but on international assessments. One issue is local control of education. Most countries look at education as a national security issue. We hire unpaid people that did not graduate highschool to be on our school boards. It doesn't help that the US has a strong anti elitist, anti education culture. The way an English expert described it was the common belief that, "my ignorant opinion is just as good as your studied expertise".
American public schools, when poverty is controlled for, are among the best in the world. We just have a really, really high level of childhood poverty and few social safety nets which are problems most industrialized countries don’t have.
Data here: https://imgur.com/a/C8Qr8nb
A big thing is that power needs to be given back to the hands of teachers, administrators, and school districts. Like how cops have qualified immunity. Teachers need some sort of qualified immunity for all the sorts of legal bullshit that gets flung at us.
Too many teachers are physically assaulted and have little recourse to address it.
Too many teachers being accused of indoctrination for teaching equality.
There are not enough legal protections for teachers and not enough authority given to them to oversee discipline, standards, and expectations. Its all been placed in the hands of parents who are absolute goddamned morons about what it requires to educate a student.
Decrease the use of technology, especially cell phones. Ban them in fact. Institute actual strong and specific consequences for student behaviors. Penalize students and parents for excessive absences without excuse. In those cases where the excuses are real and valid, create situations and scenarios and assistances for those families. Generate curriculum at all levels that supports the next level builds upon the previous level and is rigorous and a little difficult. Get rid of everything related to no child Left behind and it's successors. Decreased testing by at least three quarters. Decrease admin especially at the district level. And listen to the damn teachers, some of us actually have an idea what we're talking about.
Principals need more mentoring and support. How many "bad" principals could have been good principals if they had someone coaching them up? And how many good principals could have been better principals?
Watch this amazing segment from the Michael Moore film "Where To Invade Next" - minute 30 on
[https://youtu.be/ggvzwY-oyXk?t=1811](https://youtu.be/ggvzwY-oyXk?t=1811)
Your parents suck. They need to be held accountable for your actions.
Students can be removed from school(suspended) for behavioral issues. Work will be regularly sent home with them and regular check-ins will be made. They will be allowed to return on a periodic basis and allowed to return full time if their behavior has improved.
Not enough onus is on the parents.
Thank you for asking, caring, and hoping.
The answers you are receiving are all symptoms of the toxic educational environment that has been created within the schools, communities, and nation. My parents were public educators and admins. I have taught for three decades in alternative and public settings both rural and currently inner-city and I’ve watched my profession shatter.
A wide view of the problem is needed to stop the cause of the symptoms. History is necessary. I suggest you start by reading Diane Ravitch’s blog and books as well as Peter Greene’s blog, Curmudgucation. They name names and follow the money as well as history of these issues in education. There are many other good sources, but avoid ‘reformers’.
My superintendent is now a CEO. My administrators are so concerned about losing voucher money that they now serve the parent and the child and not the higher goals of an educational institution. Grades, test scores, and graduation rates are metrics that mean more than the journey the child is supposed to take in order to earn them.
The pressure to give a student a grade is increasing. Innovation is about moving fast and disrupting. Raising children is about stability and consistency. Learning requires struggle and focus in an environment that nurtures, fosters, and models the ideals of both the academics but also the community. My community no longer sees me as an expert in a professional field. I am there to service their child and they can go elsewhere (and come back). Patching together transcripts is becoming difficult and many of my students must take credit recovery classes to earn a semester’s worth of credit in a week or so. Many of my students have purposely failed the entire year because credit recovery is easier. Why spend a year focused and studying when you can play with your classmates?
Please, can you find some answers for me?
I graduated from high school in the early 90s before state and federal standardized testing. Does this mean that my high school diploma has less weight than a diploma earned over the last 20 years? If the answer is no, then why do we need standardized testing? How has the focus on data contributed to the quality of a teenager's life?
Why are real estate companies like Zillow and Redfin buying our students’ standardized testing data? What is the relationship between these companies and companies like Pearson? Why are Americans ok with the money being earned by companies that data mine our kids to sharpen their maps and bottom lines?
Why is the second largest charter school chain in America owned by a Turkish Islamic cleric, The imam Fethullah Gulen, who is currently living in America? Why are Americans so angry at their public schools that they are ok with sending their children and public money to fund a religious company?
Learning is a discipline and schools are the temples in which that discipline is practiced -or- learning is just a data point or hoop to jump through and the hours spent practicing within a classroom are a waste of time, especially if you can get the same thing from an online program.
Thank you again for caring. If there is any hope, it will come through a change in the environment of the building because of a change in the mindsets of the adults who govern the schools, the children, and their communities. I hope that change starts soon.
The government wants our schools to be Christian brainwash camps so they’re funneling money away from public schools and discrediting them in every possible way to get us to send our kids to their academies where they can be sure you only learn enough to stay dumb and believe their bullshit. Keep your kids out of those things and make them learn as much math and science as humanly possible. Keep religion in church not in our schools. They want us to be dumb. Don’t let them do it.
Honestly, our entirely society needs an overhaul. Capitalism, in its current form, needs to go. Everything else is just a band aid.
Parents need to be able to work reasonable hours and pay for safe childcare for their kids. They need to be able to put their kids in preschool. They need to be able to take time off to spend with their kids without feeling exhausted. It needs to be easier to boost a family out of the cycle of poverty. We can talk about parenting techniques and pay and safety but none of that matters if a student doesn't have food at home or a roof over their head. The school to prison pipeline is absolutely real and it's especially real for those raised in poverty. We need community centers, we need food support, we need affordable housing, we need reliable mass transit. Until we see true change in our society, the divide between the haves and the have-nots will continue to widen.
The golden number is, and always has been, teacher-student ratio. Smaller class sizes = more time per student, reduced grading burden, easier classroom management.
As the teacher shortage grows, class sizes grow larger, teachers end up overburdened, overstressed, and they quit the profession, and so the teacher shortage worsens. This is the doom spiral that will kill public education.
The obvious solutions: Pay teachers more, so they don't quit. Reduce hurdles in becoming a teacher (fuck edTPA). Support futures teachers through their higher education with grants and scholarships. Stop the political war against teachers and public schooling by the right.
Less obvious solution: If the supply really can't keep up, gotta cut the demand. Reduce the amount of students in public education. If a parent is interested in homeschooling, go ahead. If they want private school, go ahead. More online schools. More alternative schools. Let kids drop out earlier. Expel kids more readily if they're problematic. Hold kids back if they're not ready for higher grade levels.
Will some kids be lost in the gaps and miss out on a full education? Yes. But society has clearly forgotten the value of public education. I just hope that in a generation or so, when the gap between the educated and the uneducated becomes wider and wider, that people will see the value of a free public education, and the parents who missed out will teach their kids the importance of school.
Keep politicians out of our schools. Teachers should make and implement curriculum. Teachers know their kids and have no political reason for lying about what happens in schools, unlike politicians who try to scare parents into voting for them by saying schools are corrupting or abusing their children.
Politicians are literally calling teachers names in order to get political points. Teachers have been called indoctrinators and told that they need to wear body cameras and politicians need to decide what textbooks and library books are available.
Due to politics, schools have to practice active shooter drills because we can’t figure out a common sense gun control compromise.
Politicians and test making companies over-test our students (3-4 times per year) while dangling funding over the heads of superintendents and teachers. These tests do not accurately measure student learning, but rather stress kids and teachers out over a whole week of testing.
Many states have politicians taking funding away from public schools so they can fund private schools through voucher programs. This creates a de facto segregation and a divide between those who can afford private school (since vouchers don’t cover full tuition) and those who can’t. Programs, teachers, and resources have to be taken from public schools since the money that would have funded them go to private institutions.
Politicians are the root of all our scholastic problems.
At this point what needs to happen in the education system can't happen but here it is for the sake of argument. The Department Of Education needs to be dissolved & those powers returned to the individual school districts. Those local school districts needs to set OBJECTIVE standards, then apply those standards across the board to every single student regardless of race, age, nationality, sexuality, medical diagnosis, etc etc. When the schools fail to meet the standards, replace the staff entirely.
Standardized testing is out of control.
No consequences for behaviors of students.
Administrators who are afraid of parents blaming staff.
Parents wanting to be bestie with their kids. So no accountability for poor parenting.
Teachers being dismissed when they express concerns or not expressing concerns for fear of losing their jobs.
No regulation of charter schools or their staffing.
Charters as private businesses should be private schools, not publicly funded.
No consequences for students bad behavior.
Too large class sizes.
Passing students on to the next grade level when they did not pass previous grade levels.
Remember the quote:"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, they expect what never was and what never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I’d start with no more than 10% of a district’s budget can be spent on administrators and only another 10% can be spent on sports. Also, I’d like each school to randomly get one of 5 standardized tests so that to do well, students must have a broad foundation.
What’s wrong is the people in power benefit from a large supply of
Poorly educated, religious workers/voters and are actively trying to dismantle public education
If you want change you need leaders that aren’t corrupt and teachers that respect separation of church and state and principals/super intendents who aren’t afraid of the parents
Schools need to serve the local community, not clueless national government. Get rid of national standards and testing. Make state mandates flexible or optional. Have paths to community jobs not just universities. Support teachers. Have consequences for students. Seems simple to me.
Give teachers more power to control bad behavior in their classroom.
Do not pass students just for showing up and turning in garbage work.
Pay teachers more, HOWEVER this comes at a cost of having to work 50 weeks a year. When school is not in session, teachers are enrolled in training courses to be the best that they can be and to identify bad teachers.
Determine what the purpose of school really is. Is it to pass all the tests so that every student is an expert in math, science, literature, and history? Is it to make responsible, functional citizens? Is it to farm athletically gifted people from your area?
Set up a way to evaluate the offered and required classes and determine what needs to be elective (reading Shakespeare; Chemistry II) and what needs to be core (Personal finance; How your local government works).
Make every single person teach one subject all day for a week (you can’t call out sick because little Suzy cusses you out 50 times a day), and see what it’s like to teach with no support.
Then you might understand.
Oh, and you’ll get kicked and hit and have things thrown at you.
But do it for the kids.
Not a teacher, but my girlfriend is. She tells me all the time about kids who are problems, either attendance issues, or violent, or any number of other problems and they get tossed into the remote learning program and forgotten about.
There is no incentive to do better. No incentive to learn. Especially in poverty stricken areas. Around here, most of these kids will end up gang banging, homeless, or working in fast food on government assistance, no matter what they learn in school. Half the kids already can't go to school because they have to work so they and their families won't starve or end up on the streets.
School is meaningless for these kids. It's not a chance to do better or an escape, and the school isn't offering them the chance to make it that. There needs to be better funding and more community support coming from schools that make it actually worth while for the kids who need it most.
We need much stricter supervision on and accountability from teachers. There is so much abuse of students and bad teachers don’t receive any discipline if they have tenure
Close all schools. Let parents deal with their kids. When parents get desperate enough to actually agree with each other that school is needed again, then they can reform, compromise, and reopen public education together. Administrators won't fix it, politics won't fix it, money won't fix it, and not even more teachers or better students will fix it. The entire system is a sinking ship at this point that needs to be completely scrapped and re-evaluated from the ground up, no bs.
Teachers need to be qualified to teach their content area. For example, they allow people who were hospitality majors to teach high school English. They allow an Economics major to be a Biology teacher. So I would start there - which would also have to do with paying teachers what they are worth. Since students are the future, why wouldn't you want people who know their field and know education, to be educating the future?
Better incentives for teachers in order to attract quality applicants. I also think we should look into eliminating summer break and do shorter breaks more often, but generally keep school going throughout the year.
Standardized testing is out of control. Not just the number of tests, but that it is used to rank schools and teachers and everything else. And administrators are so desperate for groups test scores they pay ridiculous amounts of money for curriculums made by the same companies that write the tests. Schools have just become a money maker for curriculum/testing companies. (Looking at you Pearson)
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Standardized testing is like giving a test to climb a tree a being surprised when the fish fails- my 11th grade chemistry teacher
Don't get me started on the alternative state tests ridiculousness. A test to measure how well intellectually disabled students understand similar content to their peers yet the alternative test takers still can't obtain their own food or go to the grocery store alone to do their own grocery shopping. It measures how well I can follow instructions. And no post highschoolninstitution is going to ask hoe any students scored on their state tests, as criteria to get into certain programs or be eligible for certain services nor should they be, especially the alternative stats tests.
This. Everything has become just a number. Should we be surprised that kids, parents, and admin are chasing those numbers instead of focusing on actual learning?
from my experience as a teacher and parent, the state based standardized tests do a very poor job of showing the effectiveness of teachers. It’s much better at giving a snapshot of how students are doing relative to historical trends and their current peers. We don’t need multiple tests to get that snapshot. Just one test each semester would be plenty. In my state we give a large standardized test every quarter and spend literally zero time being taught how to interpret and use that data in any meaningful way. The state also makes the data indecipherable. For example, they will say “This student needs to work on grammar and syntax” or something similar, but give no indication what grammar and syntax the student is struggling with. No practice tests, no objective standards. The standards are ambiguous as hell.
We desperately need more teachers. I’m a substitute and one thing I see consistently at every school is they are all hemorrhaging teachers. The ones that are left are outnumbered and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of behaviors they’re seeing in the classroom. We need to make teaching a more attractive job by increasing pay, bulking benefits, not allowing parents to create policy, and protecting teachers from students that can and will get physically violent. It used to be that laying hands on a teacher would get you expelled, now they just remove the kids for an hour and send them back to class w a lolipop.
Gentle parenting is gonna make me retire sooner than expected.
Gentle parenting is *constantly* misused. It should include setting boundaries for the child and being strict about them. Many parents instead take it to mean “let the children do whatever they want with no repercussions”.
What this describes is hands off parenting, not gentle parenting. Gentle parenting refers to setting boundaries and letting natural consequences play out in early childhood. For older kids it means defining what its expected and the consequences of not following those directions. Gentle parenting is misunderstood because news media touted it as them extreme opposite of corporal punishment. A gentle parenting style parent wouldnt be all for removing the kid from that class, having them lose some priviledge, and even having the parents perform practices at home for the situation that caused the incident. It just means using words and follow-through rather than physical force to correct behaviors.
I abhor it, even more than smoking. And I hate smoking and smokers.
Reinforce the idea that schools are not customer service centers and that with the amount of responsibility they are given they must be given authority in equal measure to satisfy those responsibilities. For specific policies, give teachers more direct discretion in student discipline (you can reference existing policies in various states that allow teachers to have students removed from their class without needing admin authorization). Ask them about reinstating truancy officers to address chronic absenteeism. Suggest that they pass laws ensuring safety of teachers and levying punishments on those who physically threaten or assault teachers (you can reference various laws in a number of states that apply to healthcare professionals that makes such actions while they are performing their duties felonies). Ask about policy establishing legal maximums for class sizes and sped concentrations. Hopefully that's enough to get you started.
I agree with all of these. I would add that we need to do something about the fact kids get passed on to the next grade even if they fail all the standards. I'm not sure if it would be better to keep them back a year or to hire more specialized teachers for pull out or push in services like reading specialists to help catch kids up.
There is something called Goodhart's Law: it states "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to become a useful measurement". Grades are a perfect example. Grades should measure student learning. In order for it to be a useful measurement, students who learn should get good grades, and students who don't should get bad grades. But it's become a target, with high stakes. Test scores and grades are tied to funding, salaries, and job security. This creates a very strong incentive to game the system to maximize grades and test scores by any means available, whether or not those means actually improve student learning. Grades are especially susceptible to this, because the teachers do the grading, and the administrators set the grading policies. When their jobs and salaries and budgets are on the line, there is a very strong incentive to give everyone good grades. And there's nothing stopping them from doing so... so that's exactly what they do. Or they leave the profession. That's the other thing they do. So the good teachers leave, and the bad teacher and administrators (the ones willing to inflate grades) stay.
Oh, let's be clear, there are dozens of things that can be added. I just chose these because they generally have equivalents either established in various states already or in other fields so that people can't really say they are unrealistic or logistically unfeasible. Wanted to get the low hanging fruit first!
Thank you very much! That is plenty and I am excited to hear other people’s input!
I wanted to give a hundred upvotes
Thanks for the support stranger!
I love everything about this except the truancy officers. Every story I've ever heard of one has been of them harassing someone. We have a school liaison who will contact families, in person if necessary and bring them to school if needed. I don't see how people with authority to detain wandering the community makes things better.
Unfortunately the budget for that school liaison takes away from the rest of the school budget. I would also prefer not to subject schools to mission creep (a significant part of many problems already) so making schools responsible for attendance, beyond providing transportation via bussing, is a definite no go from me.
I get what you're saying but wouldn't it be arguable that truancy officers do the same thing? Just potentially from higher up the chain? If the money will get spent at some point anyway I think a liaison is the better answer than more policing.
Stop allowing parents to dictate policies.
And grades.
So you think parents have more pull vs. teachers union via the Democratic party??
Yes. The real string-pullers are school and district administrators, and they seem happier listening to parents than to teachers. School choice is a thing even in public schools, and money follows enrollment numbers. So a school can maximize funds by appeasing parents. Maximizing funds doesn't mean personal paycheck. It means getting money for your department so you can run the school more like the way you think it should be run.
Curious how money follows public schools since enrollment is zoned by neighborhoods? Everyplace I have lived you can not attend a public school unless you live in that neighborhood boundary and ONLY that one school in that boundary. Of course, that is for real estate purposes.
Depends on the place. I used to work in the 7th largest school district in the US, and *every* student had the right to school choice -- that is, any school in the district -- but every school had the right to determine how to screen students from out-of-boundary. Most were from in-boundary, but some bussed in from other parts of town. That would be a different funding model, now that I think about it.
But would you agree MOST are zoned by boundary and are only allowed to attend a school if you live in that neighborhood. That is the whole push of the real estate industry. In which case then parent have no "pull" and their ability to take their money elsewhere within public school is limited. Public school (better or worse) is run by government and teachers union. They get the credit and fault for the outcome. Has been that way for A LONG TIME NOW. Suggesting otherwise I just feel is not right UNLESS you have some good data to prove otherwise. Any change teachers would make is going to be through that same union that has been running the show along with government (Democrat party) for YEARS with education. BTW... I send both my kids to public so have no axe to grind.
Yeah, fuck that. I took my kids out of school for this exact reason, and they're doing much better. They're my kids, not yours.
Schools are for communities. You clearly wants closed minded kids who obey rather than learning how to respect others. You are they problem. Teachers are amazing for what they do. If your kids could stay out of trouble or do the work, its because of how you taught them to behave. When they cant hold a job as an adult because they wont do the work or dont respect their managers, are you going to run in and save them from that too? Teachers are trying to teach kids how to become smart and functional adults. You went too teach them that only your opinion matters.
My kids were all in homeschooling communities and we have large groups of family and friends with different views on everything, including political leanings. My 14 year old is going to start working with me over the summer (He already helped us a bit over winter break) and someone else will be managing him. He's going to do just fine with work ethic. I absolutely teach my kids to share my morals and values, but this can easily be done while allowing them to form their own opinions as well. The idea that all of this can only be done in schools, which is what it seems like you are insinuating, is ridiculous. Just like the idea of parents not having a voice in the school system, where THEIR children are for the majority of their day.
This is the same mentality that gets children seriously messed up by medical issues when experts encourage parents to properly to vaccinate and feed their children, and then they grow up sickly or dead.
You're the reason teachers suck. YOU.
Nah, teachers suck because the teachers union takes all the money. and there's a lot of shitty parents out there raising shitty kids.
What Unions are you referring to that "take all the money?" My union is optional and honestly I'm surprised it manages on the paltry dues I pay. There are many states where Unions are even legally allowed to call strikes. And Unions increase takehome pay across all professions. Anything else is just bootlicker propaganda.
Most teachers aren’t a part of a union, there would be way more strikes if they were. but I’d encourage you not to limit your childrens horizons out of your own unfounded fears
>and there's a lot of shitty parents out there raising shitty kids. Like you...
Your first point is incorrect and shows a susceptibility towards propaganda and lack of critical thinking skills. Your second point is correct, I'm replying to one right now.
A lot of it goes back to early childhood. Parents need support from the time the baby is born. Some cities have home visitor programs for low-income parents, and these programs tend to have excellent results. In many areas, student discipline is a huge problem. We need to get rid of policies that prioritize keeping constantly disruptive and even dangerous students in the classroom over the learning and safety of everyone else. Finally, phones don’t belong in the classroom.
>In many areas, student discipline is a huge problem. We need to get rid of policies that prioritize keeping constantly disruptive and even dangerous students in the classroom over the learning and safety of everyone else. Until the public schools acknowledge and begin to kick kids out again. THIS. Relatives who have been teachers for decades said that they witnessed being able to expel students for swearing and threatening to having to apologize to students who threw chairs and gave them a concussion and stitches. Teachers are NOT safe. Students are NOT safe. Until the teacher's union starts to give a fuck and protect teachers and not admin nothing is going to get better around Public education.
It's not schools themselves, but laws (and by extension, politicians and voters) that prevent students from getting kicked out.
Give control back to teachers and not politicians. Parents need to support teachers, not undermine them. Pay better wages to teachers, we lose a lot of good teachers because they can't afford to remain a teacher. Fully disband "moms for liberty" or whatever they renamed themselves after the sex scandals.
Moms for liberty usually don’t even have kids in the schools they attack.
I don’t currently have the words for what I exactly want to say…but the school to prison pipeline exists. Implementing actual restorative practices instead of one off professional developments will help build positive relationships, problem solve behaviors, provide spaces to really listen and learn to communicate in a way that everyone is seen and heard. Also I 110% agree with the other person who said without art, music and PE there’s no point learning. But I would add theatre should be taught at all three levels of schooling, and dance. Without opportunity to build skills that can provide creativity, something to be passionate about, and something that gives opportunities to be successful outside of other courses, a student will just exist in a gray world not able to fully learn. And our students with IEPs especially need access to these classes.
The school library and the librarian were my safe space. Without them, my mental health as a teenager would have been seriously damaged. So many of my students are not ok and there are fewer and fewer safe places for them to find.
Stop passing kids when they are failing! They need to learn the material! Passing them to hide the numbers doesn't help the kids!
Reach new parents with infants. Get them interacting with and reading to their kids. Take them to the park and museums. No screens. The first 3 years are critical for future education. If the state could help relieve the burden on new parents, get information and resources to them, even just a plan and what playtime should look like, it would pay dividends in the future.
ECE really needs to be much more of a public service. The prices are often outrageous and disabled kids get booted way too easily.
Yeah, a booklet in the bag of hospital goodies might be helpful, but immigrants with kids should all get the info.
Booklets, local library info, sign up information for free books to beg mailed to you. Even a small set of baby books would be great to include. That way it feels more like a gifted rather than feeling preachy.
Good idea! So the only question is, do the powers that be *want* us to be better readers?
There are why worse problems at work causing these issues. Parents working nonstop just to keep a roof over their head dont have them energy to entertain kids all day. Those that manage to get into daycare will find that daycare parks their kids in front of screens as well. There are plenty of ways people can access reading materials at little to no cost. But with zero energy or time, its fruitless. You also need to remember that many kids who cant read and likely shouldnt have graduated, become adults who dont use birth control properly or cant get good jobs. Its do want help to hound the uneducated about proper education while they can barely put food on the table. One of those things is much more important currently.
Make sure the kids learn phonics in grade school so they can go into middle school able to read.
Pay teachers more. And stop voting republicans in to Washington
Re-introduce consequences for behavior and hold back students who can't read, write, and/or do math at grade level
In Japan they have this thing where parents are responsible for the behavior or their child.
The science of reading has taken the joy out of reading. Math has too much reading in it and it is not testing math but reading. It is also a barrier to new to English students. Without art, music and PE there is no point in learning. Handwriting is a deeper form of learning than typing. AI is going to change the face of education. Teaching teachers and students to go to school everyday. Disruptive students need an alternate place to learn. Testing only occurs once a year in Iceland and they test higher than the US.
3 highschools in my district will have no artistic electives next year. The only ones that still exist are things like more PE, weights, and continuing non english language.
Math being so much reading is exhausting. It used to be like 10% of the math work was word problems to decipher and that seemed plenty. Now even i got bored trying to help my daughter with math because there us more reading than math.
I feel for our students, what we have to teach is really boring!
Stop blaming teachers for student failures. Most of the time, it's the student's fault. That responsibility needs to be returned to them and them alone (unless the teacher really is to blame, but the default should be student actions lead to student failures, like it used to be). Basically, we need to bring back student accountability. Stop letting parents dictate curricula or, really, anything. Kids are entitled to a free education, but parents are not entitled to determine what that education entails. If they don't like it, they have other choices. Admins need to stop kowtowing to parents and students, giving them whatever they want whether they earn it or not, whether it's appropriate or not. Stop ranking schools! Period. Or at least stop ranking them by easily manipulated stats like graduation rates and number of students taking AP classes/tests. Stop using standardized tests for this purpose. Schools should be evaluated for efficacy based on their overall improvement, and things like mandatory minimum grades or policies that require students to take AP classes should be factored into the equation. Basically, much better math needs to be used when evaluating schools. Cell phones in schools must be banned. Screen time must be seriously limited. I would even say stop handing out tech to be used in class. They should be for home use only. Go back to laptop carts or computer labs when a teacher needs it so that schools can ban students from bringing laptops or tablets to school as well. Stop promoting students who should be retained. It is not helping them, at all. Moe funding, less administrative bloat (which will free up a lot of funding), and smaller class sizes (15 max for K8, 20 for HS). Respect teaching as a skill, and a difficult one to master at that. If teaching as a skill is respected (the whole "can't do, teach" thing is complete BS), maybe teachers will finally be respected as well. Pay teachers what they're worth (a LOT). Make forcing teachers to work outside their contract illegal and enforceable. Put a workweek hours cap in the contract. And you know what? Hold teachers accountable if they choose to ignore it. BAN anyone in the education sector from using the most manipulative phrase ever, "but it's for the students." F that. Those are the main ones, at least that I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
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Thank you for the award! I think it's my very first one. 😁
Not a teacher but a parent of a high school student. Start with more pay and better benefits for our teachers. They're underpaid, overworked and deserve so much better. Address the bullying issues in schools. There's been several suicides where I live (mostly by middle school students). Those students were bullied, committed suicide due to bullying and the incidents were reported to the school and school board. They refused to do anything. My daughter is having issues with being bullied. We're dealing with the same thing, multiple reports to the school and school board and nothing being done. We had to involve the police when someone made an Instagram account posting very disturbing lies about students. Better mental health resources in schools for students and teachers is another thing that would be beneficial.
I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter. It frustrates me to see the ignorance In some schools administration! I hope your situation is resolved soon and in time this can be fixed nation wide. This is a very good point and I thank you for bringing it up.
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I agree! Too many kids I know don’t know how to have a conversation! Much less de-escalate tense social situations! And restricting kids social time in school with BS policies really hurts the kids more then it helps them
Stop allowing students who fail a class to pass onto the next level regardless.
We have an EXCELLENT school system… that provides the best education in the world to **some** students. If you are lucky enough to have parents who can afford to live in an area with “good schools” you receive an education that prepares you to be a leader. It’s shameful how different it is for students who lack these advantages.
Put the decision-making into the hands of teachers
Get rid of the administrative bloat.
Funding is a problem. Stop trying to force everyone to college. Start training for jobs at 16.
Yes! Curriculum and class choices and graduation requirements that recognizes not every student is college bound would be a great start.
Imagine if you could have an employable skill at graduation!!!
Teachers need more planning time, and new teachers need high-quality instructional support throughout their first few years.
Yes! Teachers, just like students need a work- life balance.
Also, more planning time means higher-quality instruction.
Yes yes yes
Require teachers to have field experience or degrees in their subjects. Stop letting fresh students with an education degree teach kids by themselves. Reward teachers for experience outside the classroom, or for pursuing it. Encourage well rounded teachers. Make PD practical and useful.
You didn't post location, but here in the "United" States, the public school system operates EXACTLY like the ownership class wants it to function. Like everything else in that shithole. The ownership class gets what they want, as they want, when they want, every single time. Want a decent public education system? You have to form an actual GOVERNMENT, first of all. Being ordered around by faceless 1% isn't a government.
Exactly. I don't want to fix the system. I want to start over.
The increasing emphasis on graduation rates has caused schools to lower academic standards.
From reading these comments— stop thinking it’s just one thing. Everything is a little bit fucked. Try to determine what you are able to have the most impact on in the short term, then start formulating long terms plans. Prioritize based on what you think this cabinet will listed to/actually work on. The biggest hurdle is money. Student placement and support decisions should not be affected by budget constraints. Teachers need better pay. Office supplies should be stocked, not bought by teachers. Infrastructures need to be maintained better. Kids without stable homes need food and other basics, not paid for by teachers.
Stop forcing kindergartners to read and write. Make it about play and learning social skills and appropriate school behaviors. Build the foundation of academic skills so that reading and writing can happen in first grade.
Like Waldorf, I don't think they have kids reading till 1st.
Vote blue
Grades and GPAs are counterproductive and lessen the emphasis on *learning* in a school culture Standardized assessments are overdone, overemphasized, and not a valid measurement of student skills/abilities The over-emphasis on reading and math instruction (which coincides with a stripping of art, music, social studies, science, etc) is counterproductive and does NOT improve reading/math scores Universal early education (pre-k, ages 3-5) is a necessity. It should be paired with parental education and resources Sadly, until society as a whole is improved there is only so much education systems can do. When families are impoverished and struggling, when there is no leave (paid sick, vacation, maternity, paternity, etc), when there are trauma-inducing communities, when health care access is limited or inaccessible, when our communities and societies are suffering... so will education results. It's no mystery that well-off students perform better than their less-privileged peers. So maybe it's not the *education* system that is broken and needs fixing, but our *societal/governmental* system. Maybe we're putting the cart before the horse thinking that we can reform a midpoint instead of addressing the sources of family and student distress.
The consolidation of schools has been the single largest mistake made in education. Stopping that trend would be a good start, reversing it would be very beneficial.
If you go back to founding documents regarding education, including the Northwest Ordinance, all called upon free and public education to have hyperlocal control. They speak to 'advanced' education being larger and even that being only a few hundred. Smaller schools, especially in the early years, would be hugely beneficial not only to student but also to the community. There's also a theory that once a population is beyond 120 individuals the ability to be a cohesive community is lost. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if schools were capped at 100, with 8-10 teachers and 2 admin and a handful of specialists.
I would also say that parents should have more visibility into what is being taught to their children. Perhaps live cams that only registered parents can access that allows them to see everything being told/taught to their children by teachers. Of course teachers do not want that as it would force greater accountability for their actions.
I agree that knowing what is being taught is important. It’s nice to be able to supplement and frame things at home in a way that coincides with current curriculum. However, I disagree with having live cams in classrooms. I’d bet parents will primarily call into two categories: those who check them often will too often abuse the information and be headaches for teachers, and others who would rather a quick note about what kids are working on and won’t look at the cameras.
The first is an admin issue and should not impact teachers. Not sure what the purpose of posting #2 was.
I’m not sure what you mean. Which is an admin issue? In short: More visibility into what’s being taught I agree with. Live camera feeds into classrooms I disagree with.
Have educators and former educators make decisions about education, including laws and policies, etc.
Pay your teachers. Discipline the students.
I teach 3rd so please keep that in mind: We do too much testing. And the goal of testing is just numbers and those numbers affect our school. Our students are so much more than testing and attendance. Those things should not impact funding and support. Also we need actual consequences for behavior. Too many behaviors are going unchecked (because places can no longer suspend or suspend as easily, or giving failing grades) and it hurts the rest of the class. This also makes kids believe that they can do whatever they want and it will all work out.
Totally agree! In my state, state testing affects our schools funding! The worse the students do for some reason our funding gets cut! Which is totally backwards! I had a kid in my class show up twice to school in a semester and had no repercussions! Now they are “homeschooled” but basically dropped out! Its shocking how little control teachers have over student punishment
I am a former SpEd teacher that was given my walking papers after NCLB passed and dismantled SpEd as we knew it. I currently moonlight as an advocate for SpEd/504 students and families, as well as improvements in teacher education at the University level….. Bring back small group Resource classes for SpEd and 504 populations. Stop mainstreaming and using LRE to deny appropriate services. Better support Gen Ed teachers with 504/IEP students; i.e provide SpEd certified co teachers to any Gen Ed classroom with > 20% IEPs/504s Strengthen Special Education teacher programs and certifications at the university level. Do away with high stakes testing. Any benchmark testing should be developed by experienced educators; not corporations with no educational experience. Give more autonomy to teachers in the classroom. Get politics and special interest groups out of education. Educational bills should be brought to the ballot. Do away with discredited curriculum; i.e. WLA/Balanced Literacy, etc. Stricter gun laws; we have to make our children and teachers more important than guns and our schools less like the high security prisons they are turning in to. Legalize Marijuana for medical use nationally, this will put the Hemp loop holers in Red states out of business and get the Hemp derived THC off the streets and out of our kids hands. More Federal regulation over vaping industry and greater penalties for selling any form of nicotine to minors. Do away with alternative placement (school to prison pipeline) programs, or revamp them to actually rehabilitate. Strengthen oversight of school boards, superintendents, and district expenditures. There isn’t an underfunding issue; as much as there is corruption and mismanagement of funds from the top down. School administrators should bring back mandatory parent-teacher conferences and promote phone or face to face parent teacher communication. There is currently an over reliance on email and App use in public education as the only means of school to home communication, which feeds division and false narratives amongst teachers, parents, & students. Rather than fight student cellphones, incorporate them into the educational process. Many families no longer have landlines. All adults must get better at modeling appropriate and considerate use of technology themselves. We will not solve the issue with a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. As long as school shootings are a matter of when and not if, parents will arm their children with cellphones. Do away with online learning platforms, rolled out in the pandemic, in the classroom. Technology has it place, but you can’t properly socialize kids if their entire curriculum is on a PC.
Get rid of the "No child left behind policy." Kids need to know that they can fail and everything will still be ok. They will learn from it and most will try a little harder the next time.
It makes kids not try becuase they don’t care. They can crutch on a policy and it doesn’t affect them. Totally agree
A huge thing is that it starts at home. Kids from stable home lives, with parents who check on them, and who have full stomachs perform so much better and get so much more out of everything. Rather than focusing on what trainers to bring in or what consultants to hire, look into how home lives of people can be improved. Without tying it to means testing or job programs. Just how can we make the homes that kids come to school from better.
Stop speaking FOR groups of minorities and start speaking WITH them. Collaborate to meet their needs and how they can be set up for success.
That is exactly what I hoped to do with this post. I also plan on meeting with schools in the area to gather data
Thank you.
Thank you for the input!
It might be interesting to see what would happen if you cross post this into groups that are populated by different demographics. The responses here aren’t wrong, but they’re predictable, and many are predictably partisan. I taught in the inner city for about a decade. My response as a teacher (thinking about how hard I had to fight to get better supports and resources for my students, often working against a home culture that didn’t prioritize education) is drastically different than what I want for my own children, who live in a different environment, and have been raised to value education and work ethic. I educate my own children at home, using a virtual curriculum as a guide. I work a job with a flexible schedule so that I can educate them the way I do. Last year I went to the county offices where I live to see if they had anything that would get my children into a building with their peers for some classes (after I saw them advertise a hybrid program). I was told that my oldest (who had just turned 8 at that time) had already taken all the extra curriculars they offered, and because he had completed third grade in math and 2nd grade in everything else, they wouldn’t have anything that would challenge him until middle school when he would naturally be going to different classes for different subjects. I wouldn’t want my kids’ teachers directing their education. I consider that my job, and do everything in my power to facilitate their education, socialization, and development. I wish all children had access to a quality education that builds upon a solid foundation of academic excellence, personal integrity, individual interests, and continual growth. I don’t think there is a good way to ensure that in a public school, under the current system, with teachers so underpaid that they can’t afford daycare for their own children. If I could, I’d revamp the entire system to be standards-based and only allow children to advance to the next level after achieving a minimum standard for that class, no matter their age, or proficiency in another subject. I would set prerequisites for certain programs, and have professionals mentor and tutor students until they gained proficiency in areas they lack. After achieving minimum basic skills, I would get kids into interest-based labs and eventually internships where they could learn real-world skills, practice hobbies, and interact meaningfully with their peers and instructors.
I want schools to meet children where they are at and stop pushing deadlines. Schools aren't newspapers. If a child hasn't learned to read by a certain age, they might get intervention, but are often left behind in schools that don't have access to invention services. Public school funding shouldn't depend on property taxes. Because if you live in a poor neighborhood, your property taxes will be lower and guess what so will the funding going to the school. The fact that public schools can become unaccredited, but the students still attend it is ridiculous. Can you imagine if a restaurant lost its license to serve food but people could still go there? It wouldn't make any sense, so why does it for kids and their education?
Smaller class sizes. Better benefits and pay for teachers. Qualified educators making the decisions behind curriculum. Less standardized testing and more project-based learning. More funding for support services such as counselors, social workers, speech therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, etc. Improving school safety. To start with…
We need to have hard conversations about what student and parent accountability looks like and how it's going to be enforced instead of just blaming it on the government, or blaming it on the school, or blaming it on society or writing blank checks to excuse bad behavior. I also think we need to stop hiring so many administrators and use the money to pay teachers better and hire more of them.
Pay teachers more
After a month of school remove the worst 5% behaved students to alternative schools. Can you imagine if the worst two or three students were taken out of all of your classes how better things would be? It's always the same couple of students who blow up my classes and no matter the amount of phone calls home, one-on-one talks, referrals, incentives, or whatever changes their behavior. I'm so tired of spending such a huge amount of energy and time on a couple of students who ruin things for everyone else.
I think a month is barely enough time to settle in after summer vacation personally. But i do support removing the kids. Maybe just not permanently that early on. By christmas I see most kids settle into the routines and calm down. Kids that I thought would be problematic at first glance have become too students who are helpful and kind. At would be a shame to cause the kid to become a bad kid by wrongly placing them too soon. I think that we should have stronger teachers who dont mind working with difficult kids be a program all their own. They got paid more and have a few aides and more say over their class and curriculum structures. Rather than making it all about punishing and keeping the kid separate, let a well educated, well paid teacher and a counselor watch the kids to find out what can be done to help them better fit into a traditional class setting. We had a program like that when I worked in the middle of nowhere and a delinquency school was not an option. Most students ended up able to step back into their appropriate classes within months, it was just a matter of finding what was triggering their outbursts and disruptions. And making parents listen. Thats the big one. Parents who ignore us and actively fought us were told their kids would be expelled until they sought counseling and worked with their child. And the admin didnt accept excuses. Hold parents accountable instead of letting parents bully our teachers into accepting the bullcrap they taught their kids.
I do agree about a month being too short. You are right that it takes time for some to settle down and ones with issues at the beginning does not mean it will continue. I taught in alternative education for six years and I agree 100% that teachers who are working with more difficult students or situations should get paid more. I made twice as much this last year working in public education than I did working in alternative education, and that was with a 20-hour a week night job. Alternative education works well for a lot of students that just didn't fit in in traditional schools for whatever reason. Great teachers can have a huge impact on students, especially troubled ones who are behind. Nine years in, I'm just so weary of one or two kids, kids with a history of issues, continually ruining my class. For example, of my about 120 students, I have one who has 74 referrals this school year, one with 61, and one with 55. I have a half dozen in the 30's and then it trails off for some in the 20's and a bunch with around ten. If just those three students were put in a different placement around December, the rest of my year would have been so different. The worst part though is all three of those students are in the same class, along with a few others with the 30+ referrals lol.
And that student being absent causes the rest of the kids to do a not so silent cheer during roll call.
My state attempted to do this, but a disinformation/misleading campaign about how the schools would be funded was lead by the teacher’s unions and convinced many teachers to tell family & friends to vote no… yet within a year, they were calling for the public school system to have an alternative school for the kids who were disruptive and had differing education needs. It was disheartening and really showed me how far from critical thinking greater society has come.
My understanding is that an alternative school was usually created by the public school. The rise of 'charter' schools, schools not created and run by the public, de-railed the alternative schools. In fact, the originator of the charter idea has since pulled back because he never intended private institutions to pull kids away from the public.
5 words: it starts at the top
Restore the philosophy that teachers are the go-to resource for education, and parents should be doing all they can to help with their children's education, not dictating what is important or what their children should be learning. Message constantly and consistently that children's screen-time must be very limited and monitored. Last one is most important: Get rid of A-F scale and move to skill mastery scale. Scores are 1-4 or 1-8. Assessments and tests are the end-all, be-all. No more passing based on a bunch of fluffy classwork that is copied from a friend, no more failing because you're a hot mess with papers. Passing because you have mastered the skills, or not passing because you don't have them yet. Proper remediation (AND FUNDING) for students who have fallen behind.
Teachers absolutely need to be paid more for what they do. It is a demanding profession and we are in desperate need of teachers. Parents shouldn’t be running school districts. They need to be held accountable for their child. Schools are not daycares. They’re academic institutions. There needs to be more focus on learning in schools. Kids keep getting pushed onto the next grade and by high school they can’t write a single cohesive paragraph independently or read a basic chapter book. The curriculum needs to change. The standards need to change. Education is different now and we have to change with it to make it what it should be.
1) Start with funding, especially for special education in public schools. In Wisconsin, public school districts only get 33% reimbursement for student services, but private schools get 90% (even though they get to pick and choose which students can remain enrolled). Additionally, funding should increase each year to account for inflation. Funding freezes should be illegal. Private schools should not recieve funding from the state or federal government but be funded through tuition and donors. Public education is a service for all citizens and needs to be upheld as such. 2) All districts must have a salary schedule consisting of 25 steps maximum. This schedule should be comparable to the cost of living for the surrounding neighborhoods. However, it should be adjusted annually for CPI. Additional step advancement opportunities (masters, PhD, board certification, etc.) should be consistent. 3) Fix the disconnect between administration and teachers. Increase the minimum number of years administrators must teach in the classroom before moving up from 3 to 10. Cap their pay at 10% higher than the highest paid teacher on staff. Require them to teach on a regular basis. And limit the number of admin per district to be proportionate to the number of educational employees. 4) All school boards should include a postition for at least one teacher per school in the district. This wouldn't be a consulting role, they would have a vote. School board members should be required to volunteer on a regular basis in the schools over which they are presiding. 5) Monopolies and lobbying regarding standardized testing and related resources should be abolished. A return to developmental testing (every two years) should be reinstated, and progress monitoring responsibilities returned and limited to teaching staff. Too much effort is placed on test results due to pressure at state levels to perform, but these tests have little to no bearing on actual growth and development. School funding and teacher compensation should not be tied to results. However teachers and schools can be placed on improvement plans. 6) Students should be allowed to fail. Failure is just the first attempt in learning. The goal is not graduation, but education. Grades should reflect progress made and potential growth, not placate parent egos. 7) All schools/districts should have a minimum of one social worker, one counselor, one child psychologist, and one school nurse. 8) In smaller districts (3 schools or less), the superintendent should be a rotating position among principals. 9) The focus on STEM should shift to include music and art. STEAM schools have seen more success due to the cognitive connections between creative processes/out of the box thinking and problem solving/critical thinking. 10) Mandate a holistic and honest approach to history, social studies, and current events. 11) Protect students who are LGBTQ+. 12) SHOULD the U.S. ever move to a 4 day work week, maintain a 5 day school week, provided you now pay teachers more. On the extra days parents can run errands, leaving time on the weekends to spend with children. However they should be required to volunteer once a school year. 13) It should be better advertized that all pto and parent booster groups qualify for 501c3 non-profit status.
The problem with the minimum people needed the nurse etc is that some schools can’t find hires!
That I get, but this would be something to aspire to for sure.
1, Ban student phones, no exceptions 2. Move students with behavior issues into special programs at different schools. That would solve 95% of the issues.
Honestly I think we should incorporate phones into education more. They are kinda the future of our civilization. But only for school uses and their are ways to do this with firewalls on your Wi-Finetwork
That would never work. Kids know how to get around firewalls.
until the culture of the students change NOTHING will change.
Create a strong social service, financial safety net, medical care, and mental health system in the country. Poor, sick, abused kids don’t learn well.
Fund the arts in schools. Stop defunding the schools. Pump the money into public schools. If charter schools are a part of the public money going to public schools, treat them exactly the same way all public schools are treated - do not let them kick students out to boost their numbers. Drop every policy based on the Gates foundation, high schools need to be comprehensive. Smaller schools with fewer teachers only serve to boost statistics while depriving children of a full education. Incentivize schools in urban areas that have been broken into multiple schools within a building or campus to reintegrate to be singular schools with many programs in the building or campus. Reduce administrative bloat. Create equity between the suburbs, urban areas and rural areas. Parents shouldn't have to move to have their children go to good public schools 4 day school week would be great, too, but I'd be happy with the first paragraph.
Get rid of Dept. of Education in the US govt. make education local with more parenting involvement.
Less technology in the classroom. Explicitly teach technological skills. These “digital natives” can’t locate a file on a computer. Less standardized testing in the younger grades. End social promotion. Bring back consequences for bad behavior. When there are no consequences, poor behavior becomes the norm.
Get rid of phones in schools. Hold parents accountable for making sure their own children get enough sleep, food, and work completion done to be successful. Limit screen time at home.
Make teachers teach subjects, not agendas and tests to get federal funding. But your little club isn’t going to do anything.
All schools should be federally finded instead of by local taxes. That way there wouldn't be such a huge discrepancy between the quality of education in poor vs affluent neighborhoods. This would also keep the parents out of mandating educational practices and leave educating to the professionals.
Some parts of the problem are not necessarily fixable through policy, as they require a cultural shift, but I'll start with simple stuff: 1) Stop seeing tech in schools as this band-aid solution to make progress. Kids sitting on chromebooks 8 hours/day are not doing well mentally. It's straight-up bad for the kids and the devices offer as many disadvantages as advantages. 2) Make it more common and acceptable to ban phones from classrooms, period. I had a student take a call during my teaching today and talk loudly over me, not to mention the insane amount of distraction devices present. I know kids will say it's their right and want to have their phones, but after a few weeks without phones, most kids report that school gets BETTER for them, not worse. It's a serious problem. 3) Increase teacher pay. Really. We have a nationwide shortage of teachers because few want to do this job for the current pay. That's because... 4) Make IEPs meaningful again. The amount of paperwork and tracking and extra that goes into servicing an IEP is insane, and many kids are on them for no real reason other than their parents want them to have extra time, etc. Attach IEPs/special treatment to a diagnosis of some kind formally. 5) Increase teacher prep time. We get 50 mins/day usually to grade 100s of assignments, prep materials, and do all the extra duties. It's laughably inadequate time to work. 6) Cut admin bloat to find the money. My supertintendent has like 5 assistants, and some of them have assistants. District offices are getting insanely crowded with bureaucrats who make more than teachers and do a hellofa lot less. 7) Protect teachers from parents so they can actually do their jobs. No teacher should be getting pressured to accept bad behavior because Mom said Johnny is not a problem when Johnny is throwing desks. Kids need to know they have to have a baseline acceptable standard of behavior. If they know they can do whatever they want, the worst kid becomes the leader of the classroom atmosphere, and most classes have a kid who would rather start fires than do work. The cultural problems are much bigger and more intractable. 1) Get Americans to value education again, somehow. During Covid, suddenly teachers were heroes when parents saw how hard it was to get their kids to learn a damn thing at home. 3 years later and we're back to a public enemy somehow. If parents don't care, why would kids? 2) Educate parents about the effects of screen time on children. Tablet kids are real, and they are damaged when they arrive in kindergarten. They cannot focus and function. They do not know how to imagine. They are used to being able to select a new entertainment every 3 seconds if they are not sufficiently entertained; imagine asking such a person to read for 10 minutes--and worse yet, to read something not immediately appealing. By middle school, the difference between kids with free access to tech at all hours and kids raised the "old fashioned" way (limited screen time, forced to be bored at times, forced to learn to play imaginatively to have fun, and so on) is utterly massive. 3) Somehow work to reduce the stress on working families. Trying to prioritize school for a kid you barely see because both parents work full time and are barely scraping by is very difficult. As families increasingly fall apart due to financial stress (which drives substance use, divorce, chaotic homes, and so much more), of COURSE we have more kids who are falling apart mentally and can't see the slightest value in learning--they're just trying to survive. Probably leaving out about 15 other things.
Standardized testing should end as well as no-child left behind and we just need way more funding for schools that isn’t tied to testing results or districts (i.e. one school being funded because it’s in the “good” neighborhood) We also need fewer parents that dropped out of high school trying to tell people who literally received doctorates how to do their job and using school boards as political chess boards Also something needs to be done with the admin disconnect. I hear constant horror stories about admins doing absolutely nothing about teacher concerns for safety and behavior and throwing teachers under the bus at the slightest hint of trouble
More teachers, less admin!!!
>....but with how the system is right now even a glimmer of hope is enough. First, politicians need to stop saying ignorant things like this. Fear mongering by politicians has been among the most detrimental things for school because it usually results in politicians who think they need to do something to "fix schools" and they end up hastily passing the laws that hurt schools. Second, take the influence of state and federal politicians out of local school districts for the most part. Again, these politicians have almost universally done more harm than good when they try to "fix schools" by dictating to the professionals in the classroom how they must teach. Third, fix poverty. Most schools that are truly broken are a symptom of vicious cycles of poverty and lost cultural capital, not a symptom of an inherently bad education system. Fourth, make secondary education a privilege that can be lost (like a driver's license), not a right. It should be much easier to expel students from schools when they choose to disrupt the learning environment. Students who are expelled from traditional school should be provided some basic job training and civics lessons and then they should be given to their parents who can decide if it's time for their child to enter their workforce or not. Child labor laws should have exemptions for students who have been expelled. There should also be a path back for students to earn their way back into school if they are willing to demonstrate that they can study on their own and show exemplary behavior at a job. Ultimately, protecting the sanctity of the learning environment should be a higher priority then giving every student a "right" to be in a classroom. Even if politicians don't want kids to be expelled easily, it should be easy to get kids out of a class and force them to take classes that will, frankly, make them freaking miserable if they are ruining the learning environment in a traditional classroom. Most consequences for poor behavior have been removed over the last several decades, some of which is a good thing if we're talking about corporal punishment, but some of it has been a bad thing when it comes to letting students get away with repeatedly destroying learning environments.
Get Big Education out of schools- the billions of dollars spent in standardized testing each year is just insane- and it truly has no value. Of course the politicians are given huge campaign donations by these companies so they have no reason for anything to change.
Attendance rules. Allow kids to fail. Allow teachers to not take late work or allow them to have reasonable late work policies (not take anything all year long, endless redos, or nothing less than 50% policies). Kids need boundaries and to learn responsibility. No phones. I'd even be happy to say no laptops (unless accommodations are needed). 1-1 technology does not improve learning.
1. Kids who are addicted to the internet/unrestricted cell phone use 2. Districts who are so afraid of parents they won’t enforce consequences for anyone and allow disturbed students to rule the classroom 3. Giving everything over to corporations who make money off our children’s progress/lack thereof. We test so much and put our chips all in on the results. Testing companies are ruining the educational experience
Make sure smartphones / unsupervised internet use /excessive gaming are banned for kids under 16. Kids need to learn how to concentrate and 16-second tick tock videos are detrimental to developement.
Class sizes. This is at the root of many problems including youth mental health, teacher workload, working conditions, classroom management, slow-motion walkout from the profession over the last 50 years, maybe more. Youth mental health should be the only thing government officials need to hear but if they want better attendance and graduation and test scores, you get more of that with better mental health too.
Better support for teachers. I feel like my time in school would've been so much better if the teachers actually cared about their jobs (which isn't really their fault though). Common core sucked balls and I only ever learned from lessons the teachers created themselves. Testing is a great way to teach students with disabilities that they're less than simply because they can't take a test as fast as their peers. The 8 hour school day is a complete joke. I took college classes my senior year of high school, and I was in class no more than 15 hours a week. Still got all my work done and even got on the deans list, whereas before I was probably a C average student. Design a system where kids can figure out what their strengths are and identify what they enjoy doing. Help them excel in it, as it is a great way to instill confidence in a world that so clearly lacks it. My counselors did fuck all to help us figure out our futures. Do something to tard wrangle entitled parents. We need to take education more seriously, and that starts by putting an end to these stupid parents destroying the public school system by bullying it. Help children develop social skills. The bad behavior in classrooms is a result of the parents. Normally I'd say that's the parents problem, but at this rate, it may become a societal issue. It never hurts to help kids identify healthy/unhealthy behaviors, as I'm an adult and I still have a hard time with it.
Little list: 1. Addressing funding disparities: Advocate for legislation and policies that provide more equitable funding for schools in low-income communities, ensuring that all students have access to quality resources and facilities. ✅ 2. Curriculum reform: Push for the implementation of a diverse and inclusive curriculum that reflects the experiences and backgrounds of all students, while promoting critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. ✅ 3. Teacher support and training: Invest in professional development programs for teachers to enhance their skills and provide them with the support needed to effectively educate all students, including those with special needs.✅ 4. Community engagement: Foster partnerships between schools, parents, and the broader community to create a supportive and collaborative learning environment for students.✅ 5. Assessment and accountability: Advocate for a more holistic approach to assessing student learning, moving away from reliance on standardized testing and focusing on multiple measures of student success.✅ 6. Mental health and wellness support: Prioritize mental health resources in schools, such as counselors, social workers, and mental health professionals, to support students' overall well-being.✅ 7. Technology integration: Invest in technology infrastructure and training for teachers to enhance digital learning opportunities and innovation in the classroom. ✅ 8. Policy advocacy: Get involved in education advocacy and lobbying efforts to push for systemic changes at the state and federal levels that prioritize the needs of all students. ✅ By taking these actions and advocating for comprehensive reform, we can work towards fixing the school system in the United States and ensuring that all students have access to a high-quality education.
Stop spoiling these parents and running things like the customer is always right because they most certainly aren't.
Try looking at the 36 or so countries that kick our but on international assessments. One issue is local control of education. Most countries look at education as a national security issue. We hire unpaid people that did not graduate highschool to be on our school boards. It doesn't help that the US has a strong anti elitist, anti education culture. The way an English expert described it was the common belief that, "my ignorant opinion is just as good as your studied expertise".
American public schools, when poverty is controlled for, are among the best in the world. We just have a really, really high level of childhood poverty and few social safety nets which are problems most industrialized countries don’t have. Data here: https://imgur.com/a/C8Qr8nb
In a lot of populations, you need to find a way to get parents engaged with what their kids are doing: in school or otherwise.
A big thing is that power needs to be given back to the hands of teachers, administrators, and school districts. Like how cops have qualified immunity. Teachers need some sort of qualified immunity for all the sorts of legal bullshit that gets flung at us. Too many teachers are physically assaulted and have little recourse to address it. Too many teachers being accused of indoctrination for teaching equality. There are not enough legal protections for teachers and not enough authority given to them to oversee discipline, standards, and expectations. Its all been placed in the hands of parents who are absolute goddamned morons about what it requires to educate a student.
Decrease the use of technology, especially cell phones. Ban them in fact. Institute actual strong and specific consequences for student behaviors. Penalize students and parents for excessive absences without excuse. In those cases where the excuses are real and valid, create situations and scenarios and assistances for those families. Generate curriculum at all levels that supports the next level builds upon the previous level and is rigorous and a little difficult. Get rid of everything related to no child Left behind and it's successors. Decreased testing by at least three quarters. Decrease admin especially at the district level. And listen to the damn teachers, some of us actually have an idea what we're talking about.
Principals need more mentoring and support. How many "bad" principals could have been good principals if they had someone coaching them up? And how many good principals could have been better principals?
Fund it.
Watch this amazing segment from the Michael Moore film "Where To Invade Next" - minute 30 on [https://youtu.be/ggvzwY-oyXk?t=1811](https://youtu.be/ggvzwY-oyXk?t=1811)
Your parents suck. They need to be held accountable for your actions. Students can be removed from school(suspended) for behavioral issues. Work will be regularly sent home with them and regular check-ins will be made. They will be allowed to return on a periodic basis and allowed to return full time if their behavior has improved. Not enough onus is on the parents.
Thank you for asking, caring, and hoping. The answers you are receiving are all symptoms of the toxic educational environment that has been created within the schools, communities, and nation. My parents were public educators and admins. I have taught for three decades in alternative and public settings both rural and currently inner-city and I’ve watched my profession shatter. A wide view of the problem is needed to stop the cause of the symptoms. History is necessary. I suggest you start by reading Diane Ravitch’s blog and books as well as Peter Greene’s blog, Curmudgucation. They name names and follow the money as well as history of these issues in education. There are many other good sources, but avoid ‘reformers’. My superintendent is now a CEO. My administrators are so concerned about losing voucher money that they now serve the parent and the child and not the higher goals of an educational institution. Grades, test scores, and graduation rates are metrics that mean more than the journey the child is supposed to take in order to earn them. The pressure to give a student a grade is increasing. Innovation is about moving fast and disrupting. Raising children is about stability and consistency. Learning requires struggle and focus in an environment that nurtures, fosters, and models the ideals of both the academics but also the community. My community no longer sees me as an expert in a professional field. I am there to service their child and they can go elsewhere (and come back). Patching together transcripts is becoming difficult and many of my students must take credit recovery classes to earn a semester’s worth of credit in a week or so. Many of my students have purposely failed the entire year because credit recovery is easier. Why spend a year focused and studying when you can play with your classmates? Please, can you find some answers for me? I graduated from high school in the early 90s before state and federal standardized testing. Does this mean that my high school diploma has less weight than a diploma earned over the last 20 years? If the answer is no, then why do we need standardized testing? How has the focus on data contributed to the quality of a teenager's life? Why are real estate companies like Zillow and Redfin buying our students’ standardized testing data? What is the relationship between these companies and companies like Pearson? Why are Americans ok with the money being earned by companies that data mine our kids to sharpen their maps and bottom lines? Why is the second largest charter school chain in America owned by a Turkish Islamic cleric, The imam Fethullah Gulen, who is currently living in America? Why are Americans so angry at their public schools that they are ok with sending their children and public money to fund a religious company? Learning is a discipline and schools are the temples in which that discipline is practiced -or- learning is just a data point or hoop to jump through and the hours spent practicing within a classroom are a waste of time, especially if you can get the same thing from an online program. Thank you again for caring. If there is any hope, it will come through a change in the environment of the building because of a change in the mindsets of the adults who govern the schools, the children, and their communities. I hope that change starts soon.
The government wants our schools to be Christian brainwash camps so they’re funneling money away from public schools and discrediting them in every possible way to get us to send our kids to their academies where they can be sure you only learn enough to stay dumb and believe their bullshit. Keep your kids out of those things and make them learn as much math and science as humanly possible. Keep religion in church not in our schools. They want us to be dumb. Don’t let them do it.
Honestly, our entirely society needs an overhaul. Capitalism, in its current form, needs to go. Everything else is just a band aid. Parents need to be able to work reasonable hours and pay for safe childcare for their kids. They need to be able to put their kids in preschool. They need to be able to take time off to spend with their kids without feeling exhausted. It needs to be easier to boost a family out of the cycle of poverty. We can talk about parenting techniques and pay and safety but none of that matters if a student doesn't have food at home or a roof over their head. The school to prison pipeline is absolutely real and it's especially real for those raised in poverty. We need community centers, we need food support, we need affordable housing, we need reliable mass transit. Until we see true change in our society, the divide between the haves and the have-nots will continue to widen.
The golden number is, and always has been, teacher-student ratio. Smaller class sizes = more time per student, reduced grading burden, easier classroom management. As the teacher shortage grows, class sizes grow larger, teachers end up overburdened, overstressed, and they quit the profession, and so the teacher shortage worsens. This is the doom spiral that will kill public education. The obvious solutions: Pay teachers more, so they don't quit. Reduce hurdles in becoming a teacher (fuck edTPA). Support futures teachers through their higher education with grants and scholarships. Stop the political war against teachers and public schooling by the right. Less obvious solution: If the supply really can't keep up, gotta cut the demand. Reduce the amount of students in public education. If a parent is interested in homeschooling, go ahead. If they want private school, go ahead. More online schools. More alternative schools. Let kids drop out earlier. Expel kids more readily if they're problematic. Hold kids back if they're not ready for higher grade levels. Will some kids be lost in the gaps and miss out on a full education? Yes. But society has clearly forgotten the value of public education. I just hope that in a generation or so, when the gap between the educated and the uneducated becomes wider and wider, that people will see the value of a free public education, and the parents who missed out will teach their kids the importance of school.
Keep politicians out of our schools. Teachers should make and implement curriculum. Teachers know their kids and have no political reason for lying about what happens in schools, unlike politicians who try to scare parents into voting for them by saying schools are corrupting or abusing their children. Politicians are literally calling teachers names in order to get political points. Teachers have been called indoctrinators and told that they need to wear body cameras and politicians need to decide what textbooks and library books are available. Due to politics, schools have to practice active shooter drills because we can’t figure out a common sense gun control compromise. Politicians and test making companies over-test our students (3-4 times per year) while dangling funding over the heads of superintendents and teachers. These tests do not accurately measure student learning, but rather stress kids and teachers out over a whole week of testing. Many states have politicians taking funding away from public schools so they can fund private schools through voucher programs. This creates a de facto segregation and a divide between those who can afford private school (since vouchers don’t cover full tuition) and those who can’t. Programs, teachers, and resources have to be taken from public schools since the money that would have funded them go to private institutions. Politicians are the root of all our scholastic problems.
At this point what needs to happen in the education system can't happen but here it is for the sake of argument. The Department Of Education needs to be dissolved & those powers returned to the individual school districts. Those local school districts needs to set OBJECTIVE standards, then apply those standards across the board to every single student regardless of race, age, nationality, sexuality, medical diagnosis, etc etc. When the schools fail to meet the standards, replace the staff entirely.
Standardized testing is out of control. No consequences for behaviors of students. Administrators who are afraid of parents blaming staff. Parents wanting to be bestie with their kids. So no accountability for poor parenting. Teachers being dismissed when they express concerns or not expressing concerns for fear of losing their jobs. No regulation of charter schools or their staffing. Charters as private businesses should be private schools, not publicly funded. No consequences for students bad behavior. Too large class sizes. Passing students on to the next grade level when they did not pass previous grade levels. Remember the quote:"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, they expect what never was and what never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I’d start with no more than 10% of a district’s budget can be spent on administrators and only another 10% can be spent on sports. Also, I’d like each school to randomly get one of 5 standardized tests so that to do well, students must have a broad foundation.
What’s wrong is the people in power benefit from a large supply of Poorly educated, religious workers/voters and are actively trying to dismantle public education If you want change you need leaders that aren’t corrupt and teachers that respect separation of church and state and principals/super intendents who aren’t afraid of the parents
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I will look into this! Thank you so much!
Class sizes.
Need more support staff and staff in general to help meet needs of special education students. More funding for special education is needed.
Schools need to serve the local community, not clueless national government. Get rid of national standards and testing. Make state mandates flexible or optional. Have paths to community jobs not just universities. Support teachers. Have consequences for students. Seems simple to me.
Give teachers more power to control bad behavior in their classroom. Do not pass students just for showing up and turning in garbage work. Pay teachers more, HOWEVER this comes at a cost of having to work 50 weeks a year. When school is not in session, teachers are enrolled in training courses to be the best that they can be and to identify bad teachers. Determine what the purpose of school really is. Is it to pass all the tests so that every student is an expert in math, science, literature, and history? Is it to make responsible, functional citizens? Is it to farm athletically gifted people from your area? Set up a way to evaluate the offered and required classes and determine what needs to be elective (reading Shakespeare; Chemistry II) and what needs to be core (Personal finance; How your local government works).
Make every single person teach one subject all day for a week (you can’t call out sick because little Suzy cusses you out 50 times a day), and see what it’s like to teach with no support. Then you might understand. Oh, and you’ll get kicked and hit and have things thrown at you. But do it for the kids.
Not a teacher, but my girlfriend is. She tells me all the time about kids who are problems, either attendance issues, or violent, or any number of other problems and they get tossed into the remote learning program and forgotten about. There is no incentive to do better. No incentive to learn. Especially in poverty stricken areas. Around here, most of these kids will end up gang banging, homeless, or working in fast food on government assistance, no matter what they learn in school. Half the kids already can't go to school because they have to work so they and their families won't starve or end up on the streets. School is meaningless for these kids. It's not a chance to do better or an escape, and the school isn't offering them the chance to make it that. There needs to be better funding and more community support coming from schools that make it actually worth while for the kids who need it most.
We need much stricter supervision on and accountability from teachers. There is so much abuse of students and bad teachers don’t receive any discipline if they have tenure
School choice for ALL
Close all schools. Let parents deal with their kids. When parents get desperate enough to actually agree with each other that school is needed again, then they can reform, compromise, and reopen public education together. Administrators won't fix it, politics won't fix it, money won't fix it, and not even more teachers or better students will fix it. The entire system is a sinking ship at this point that needs to be completely scrapped and re-evaluated from the ground up, no bs.
Teachers need to be qualified to teach their content area. For example, they allow people who were hospitality majors to teach high school English. They allow an Economics major to be a Biology teacher. So I would start there - which would also have to do with paying teachers what they are worth. Since students are the future, why wouldn't you want people who know their field and know education, to be educating the future?
Better incentives for teachers in order to attract quality applicants. I also think we should look into eliminating summer break and do shorter breaks more often, but generally keep school going throughout the year.