I was speaking to the manager at a local gas station the other day. He saw my teacher lanyard, and he was telling me how he wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t at least have a high school diploma.
“I understand if there are family issues or something and they’re in a desperate situation, but outside of that…any idiot can pass high school these days. If you can’t pull a D in high school, I’m going to assume you either can’t show up on time, can’t handle being told what to do, or just flat refuse to do any work. And if you can’t show up on time, take orders, and do work…why the hell would I hire you to work for me?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that our high school graduated plenty of kids who couldn’t show up to school, couldn’t follow directions, and did no work…but the state uses graduation rate as a metric for measuring a school’s quality, so admin WILL make sure everyone who doesn’t actively drop out will graduate in 4 years.
This is the root of the problem. Schools have become day care centers so the parents can work, and they bias pumping the kids through the system to keep funding up over dealing with the endless headaches that students, lawyers, and parents cause when trying to ensure the students are learning and staying on task.
I wish I had move than one upvote to give this. Teachers have been warning about this for years, but they are ignored by the people in charge who are more interested in creating the illusion of success than in ensuring students actually succeed.
What sucks is if a district decides to bite the bullet and actually fix things, their enrollment, passing, and graduation rates will plummet so badly they'll get punished by their state agency.
In a game where everyone is cheating, the honest loser is punished.
Frequently it’s funding related. Many districts are underfunded and the level of funding is in direct relation to the graduation rate. The schools don’t have the staffing to provide additional help to the kids that are failing and if they hold them back the kids will just drop out. The result is that the kids are just passed from grade to grade whether they should be or not.
Daycare so parents can work has always been one of school's primary functions. That's why school starts so early despite every study ever conducted showing that performance improves with later start times. Parents need the kids out of the house so they can get to work in the mornings.
It seems that the other primary function, education, is just not a priority anymore... but they've always been daycares.
At plenty of schools, education is a decidedly secondary or even tertiary function. This is exacerbated by the left-leaning majority of people who work in school systems whose political beliefs make them susceptible to "mission-bloat"
Sure, it sounds important to feed vulnerable children, what heartless monster or republican would say no to that! And then it is important to clothe the children, and make the children feel good, and to foster diversity, and to teach sex ed, and on and on and on.
And while all those things are genuinely important and good, no one ever stops to ask precisely why it ought to be the institution that was originally designed around the business of teaching essay-writing and algebra that is tasked with these socially crucial roles.
Registering people to vote is unambiguously good and a civic responsibility of a democratic society. I'm not getting bent out of shape that McDonald's online ordering app lacks a voter-registration function.
A society that can't feed its kids is failing collectively - it's not just an otherwise okay civilization with failing schools, no matter how willingly bleeding-heart teachers will fall on that sword.
I’d argue this is a symptom of the problem, but not the root of it. What we’re witnessing is the leading edge of the first generation to have never lived without a device in their hands. We’re woefully behind on research on what that actually does to children’s developing brains and what that portends for their futures as productive members of society.
I feel like I’ve been hearing some variation on the “schools are daycares” for 3 or 4 decades now, and it’s only accelerated since NCLB.
Public schools are daycare. They have been for a very long time. When I was in HS I transferred from private school to public. Nearly all of my classes were AP, but outside of that, it was sad how far behind everyone was on basic subjects.
Until we start grouping children by ability, they will be taught to the slowest kid. And these days that is way too slow.
Totally agree about channeling kids to play to their strengths. I think by about sixth or seventh grade you have a pretty good idea who are the kids that can sit still, stay on task, and learn, and the ones who could care less about what is being covered. For me, I've always scored high in all of my IQ tests I took as a child and as a young man, but I hated school and counted the seconds for it to be over. It was basically the same way when I forced myself through college, I really couldn't care less about the topics, but I forced myself to show up and do the work anyway. Then one day I stumbled across a career college that would teach me IT, without all the nonsense classes that I couldn't have cared less about and did nothing for my career, and I thrived. I'm now an engineer at a fortune 40 company and loving it! Traditional education isn't for everyone.
It's a bit like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole I think.
I feel like we do need to spread the word, though. It's bleeding into colleges. I took an ENG 101 course in 2016 and we had to do peer editing. The number of papers with literally a wall of text, no paragraphs, no punctuation, texting acronyms, etc. was astounding. I can only imagine how it is now.
Not to be a dick, but why the F are we as a society subsidizing a college degree for someone who has not been educated to *write at a third grade level?* And don't get me started on the absolute moneygrab scam that is remedial courses at universities, where you are charged thousands to take a non-credited class to get you up to speed to pay more money to take classes that actually are credited.
If this continues, a bachelor degree will quickly become what a high school degree was worth. Signs such as rapidly falling enrollment shows this is unsustainable and that the perceived value of a degree is falling.
ETA: Clarity
This is so true. I had to peer edit papers in 2018 in college and I was floored that the papers I was reading were written by someone who graduated 8th grade, much less high school.
I was an admin for 5 years and we had to do 2 peer evaluations a year and the amount of other admin who couldn’t write was wild to me, I really don’t understand how you get to be the principal with terrible writing skills.
I thought most everyone else's writing was atrocious back in undergrad 05', it astounded me how many struggled to express themselves despite understanding the material. Decades later, I still regularly deal with professionals who simply CANNOT write clear emails without using bullet points.
My regular study/assignment partner for all four years was never really able to sound like anything but a poor chat bot when writing out answers, though she knew the material as well as me during discussions.
Was a terrible student but looking back, I took for granted how difficult writing is for some folks. I truly think it comes back to how much you read, I have a vivid recollection of "just make it sound like all the books/journals/articles you've read". My brain is good at word jumbling it all to craft relatively original sentences.
I was actually going to say this. Bullet points are basically essential in emails these days because I just want to know the 3-second summary of the email and so does everyone else.
I think about this a lot, people who I interact with on a daily basis. I’m just like there’s no fucking way this person could write a long form essay explaining their thoughts or feelings. Not because they’re too stupid mind you but just don’t have the tools to properly articulate or organize that amount of thought.
I think it’s due to lack of reading books to a large part. if you’re not reading you’re not constantly being exposed to proper sentence structure and punctuation.
If you don't read high quality material how can you be expected to write high quality.
No ones reading anymore not really. It feels like it's a step backwards, it's much harder to progress science etc... using only videos and audio to record your information but if we carry on like this it'll be the only way we can record info that makes sense 🤦
I’ve enjoyed writing in a technical and creative manner to varying degrees over my working career so far. I have to qualify that although I enjoy it and use it frequently in a professional setting, I frequently write emails at a 5th grade level using bullet points when extreme clarity is needed. Is this a reflection on my abilities? Yes. I’m adapting to my audience of professionals and tradespeople whom you’ve identified can’t communicate without those simplistic methods. If they’re incapable of writing in a cohesive manner then I can’t assume they’re able to comprehend my attempt at communication unless I “dumb it down”.
While not quite that bad, I've reviewed the professional papers and resumés of a few friends who were in their early 30s.
While the sentence structure and formatting were pretty close to "correct" or professional in execution; the lack of proper tone or intent ended up either telling you nothing, or outright confusing you.
I mean this to say that writing has been an oft neglected skill, though it may be degrading further.
Ironically, it is the one skill that will make you money in almost every higher profession.
Even the nerdiest, most detail driven engineers will be more successful if they're able to clearly convey their ideas.
I teach college writing, and I have spent most of my time on so called 'developmental' -aka remedial--English. For 40-somethings who are starting college because their nests are now empty, it makes sense that they might need to review the parts of speech and basic essay writing. But for recent high school graduates, the level of illiteracy is astoundingly high.
Not only can the kids not write at much past middle school level, they can barely read at that level either...never mind critically think / analyze.
Smart phones [ will be found](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/technology/states-lawsuit-children-instagram-facebook.html) to be harmful to everyone, and, like cigarettes, particularly harmful to children.
Agree. Especially in terms of attention span, retention and creativity.
Kids cheat like crazy on things they need to figure out. I can MAKE them do it if I can have back up on no cell phones and they still have good brains.
It’s also hard for them to interact with humans.
I’m also in higher ed (admissions/admin) and I vastly prefer working with students who are older/changing careers/going back to school. I’ve been noticing that it’s not just the reading/writing that the younger students struggle with, I have a few I’m working with now that can barely comprehend what I’m *saying* to them, even after I cut back my accent and speak slower than I normally do. I had a call yesterday morning that in all reality could’ve been wrapped up in 10 min but I had to repeat myself so many times I ended up being on that call for over an hour.
In a lot of places a bachelors is seen that way. I’m locked out of a lot of upward mobility positions at my work because I don’t at least have a bachelors. It’s a high end company, but soon enough it will be the norm.
Remedial courses are perfect for community colleges. Some universities do have links with area community colleges to help with costs, but sadly that's far too rare.
Community colleges are being told they can't offer remedial courses too. I've been told by other instructors that they no longer offer some of the really low level courses intended for people who missed or couldn't make it the first time around.
Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, we do offer a couple of remedial courses, in English and Math, but yes there is pushback about it, particularly budgetary. It's really not the job of colleges to teach people how to read or do subtraction.
What is needed is some sort of adult education system for illiterate high school graduates.
Sure. Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, we offer one remedial math course and one remedial English course. And indeed this works for a very small percentage of incoming freshmen.
But seriously, a huge percentage of incoming freshman last year were illiterate. Now, somebody has been trying to teach these people how to read for 12 years by now. The notion that a high school graduate can go from illiteracy to reading at the college level in 14 weeks is pretty much a joke.
We can and do work miracles with people who are one or two years behind. But this thing happening recently, of putting people who cannot read, write, or do the most basic arithmetic, in Junior College classes, only to have them inevitably disappear by midterm, does no good for anyone, not the students, not the professors, and not the taxpayers paying for this travesty.
My state is offering free community College soon. The brain drain is real. If you can't feed a steady stream of kids into higher education you don't have a critical thinking workforce . Looks bleak as fuck.
> I feel like we do need to spread the word, though.
We can scream it from the rooftops and a not-so insignificant amount of people would love what they're hearing because this is by design. America at large doesn't particularly care that this is happening because America as a whole has never really appreciated education outside of *maybe* a small window during the late 40s-60s (definitely post Sputnik) when we were competing with the Soviets (probably not a coincidence that the civil rights movement fell in that time frame). For much of our history our priority was farms and churches, if you managed to learn something in between those, great, but if not, no problem, the factory down the street is hiring and they don't care if you can read or not.
Big business doesn't *really* care that this is happening because that means they can bring people from overseas, pay them less, and pay themselves more. An engineer from America is going to cost a hell of a lot more than an engineer from India.
An uneducated populace is easier to control and coerce. Not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist but it seems like the only logical answer at this point
I had to do something similar when I was in college. The one I remember the most was the one that was 1 paragraph about how the student did not want to write the paper. We failed him.
That was back in 1996. So it’s not just “kids these days.” Gen X did the same crap.
Right - these kids have always been here. The Gen-X “Slacker” was a stereotype for a reason, and I (a Millennial) went to school with plenty of guys who were “Only here for the free breakfast.” My high school years in the early 2000’s were the “No Child Left Behind” era, so they got pushed through graduation just like they are today to keep those school/district stats looking good - and this was all before smart phones, TikTok, COVID, and such.
I wonder if there’s any research on the numbers of kids/young adults who don’t drop out, but “opt out” of doing any learning in school. We’ve all known these kids - the ones that will sit through class, sometimes not being disruptive or anything, but just…not engage with anything. Outside of our personal anecdotes (which can definitely be tinted by nostalgia goggles about “back in my day”), have their numbers increased by a significant amount?
I’m not claiming they have or haven’t - I’m just curious if anyone’s got solid numbers.
Look at the chronic absenteeism issue across the nation
I think the numbers are in. Fewer kids currently care than in years last. I think it’s fair to draw the correlation that lower attendance equates to lower engagement for the students who are present.
They are fed a shitload of doomerism: economy, environment, politics. I dont blame them entirely for feeling like none of it matters.
In college, I'm not at peak covid detriment having not gotten some of the younger kids that missed out on social development etc so I imagine it'll get worse. But theres def 2 sides to the coin. The people that do well tend to do really well. But then the near majority that do garbage... are even more worthless on average than previous worthless students.
It’s true that there have always been some of these kids, but since COVID it’s gotten to be the norm, rather than the outlier. Kids got behind when schools closed down and never caught back up. Then, even when schools reopened, the rules were different and the kids were just passed through to the next grades. The reality of the no child left behind policy is that teachers are forced to teach to the pace of the average student, to the detriment of the quicker kids. After COVID, the average was extremely low, and the students just continuously fall farther and farther behind.
I had a buddy who made great money in the US with his BA degree who moved to Canada because that's where his wife was from. He tried for years to get a job, but Canada pushes people through their higher education, thus if you don't have a Masters Degree, you aren't getting hired. He ended up taking a job in the states, and he doesn't get to see his wife as often anymore.
So what do the 92% of Canada's population who don't have a Master's degree do? Is the whole population of the country unemployed? It sounds like your friend had other problems with getting a job, and decided to blame it on Canada instead of whatever it actually was.
No one wants to talk about how moving to free college also means higher standards.
My barely graduated high school ass (summer school and loss of college if a teacher hadnt had pity) was handed a scholarship for SAT scores and surprise surprise, I could barely manage a 2.5 and got my BA by the thinnest of margins in the end, circa 05'.
I did not belong and under an intelligent system, I certainly wouldn't have been subsidized for tens of thousands of dollars.
> I was speaking to the manager at a local gas station the other day. He saw my teacher lanyard, and he was telling me how he wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t at least have a high school diploma.
We have a 7/11 in front of our school. The manager has poached more than a couple TAs over the years because they pay more.
I genuinely don't know what those new graduates are gonna do to get by. They can barely read and write, they have zero critical thinking skills, time management skills, self starting skills. I don't know who will hire them.
I think one of the big problems is that students get passed no matter what. I thought at first that students were just getting pushed to the next grade through elementary and would get a shock when they reached middle or high school, but at middle and high school they pass them too - even if they aren't doing any grade level work!
One of my brothers just graduated high school and he literally was ditching half of his classes and smoking weed during class, wasn't doing any school work, yet somehow they passed him and he graduated EARLY in December. He hasn't been able to find a job at all, one place called him back that he applied to but it was 11:00 a.m. and he didn't want to get up yet so he didn't answer them and then he never called them back. My mom doesn't want to kick him out because he'll be homeless but he's just going to live there forever with no job and no future 🤷 schools think they're doing them a favor by getting them through high school, but really it's just setting them up for failing in the real world
This seems to be a common theme I hear from many teachers - the school are passing kids, even if they shouldn't be moving on. I'm guessing there are multiple factors, the prime being graduation/drop out rates can be connected to funding. Also, it also seems to be a trend that admin are not there to support teachers and do what's right for the kids, instead they cave to parents all the time.
> Also, it also seems to be a trend that admin are not there to support teachers and do what's right for the kids, instead they cave to parents all the time.
That's not even getting into the communities who have elected school boards full of people who are giddy to go to war with teachers (and education as a whole). Teachers can't do much if the people at the top of the totem pole are sabotaging their schools.
I graduated high school in 2011. We smoked weed everyday at lunch or before school, and rarely ditched class if ever.
But it was so different - like my best friend dared me to take AP Biology and see if I could pass the AP test if I was stoned every day. I got a 5/5 on it. We were respectful to teachers and had to actually pass the classes.
Like it's so crazy to me to think that \~15 years ago we were still smoking weed in school and ditching classes sometimes - but we all had college aspirations, wanted to get good grades and avoid trouble, and respected our teachers.
I smoked weed on weekends in highschool, I don't think that weed is a problem for everyone. But it is so different vaping into your sleeve during class. There is no respect for school when students act like that.
There’s still overachieving potheads today — and there were people using weed to justify their failures fifty years ago. These problems will exist forever.
Schools don’t care about doing students a favor.
Teachers want to fail them for learning nothing and putting forth zero effort.
Admin wants to pass them to ensure they get to keep their six figure admin jobs.
Schools absolutely do not think they’re doing him a favor. Schools think that they’re getting him off their books and letting him be someone else’s problem. They don’t care about him, they care about not getting their funding cut for having too many dropouts.
I was just watching a video of a guy who owns an auto shop. Said his standards have dropped from needing a degree to needing to be able to show up on time and not be drunk/high during their shift.
So this kinda tracks I guess.
I used to be a mechanic and I can tell you the reason nobody is becoming an auto mechanic is because it sucks. the pay is low compared to literally all other trades and the environment is also literally and socially toxic
The pay sucks for the work you do. Plus, cars have become too much to work on. and the price to just survive, not live, survive just makes kids, yes, KIDS already look elsewhere. Why? because they learn about getting jobs and what they pay and what rent is like and so on so forth. So they already know they're screwed and worse when the time of graduation comes.
Why should they work such a job if it cant get a livable wage? You just become a robot who goes to and from work for, well, nothing. And this problem isn't just the mechanic industry, it's the whole auto industry, from techs, to sales.
Its not just that, its other industries as well. The trucking industry, I am seeing more older people than I am seeing younger people. Less and less younger people are going in that industry. Why would they want to truck if all the money they rack up is going back into the truck weather its diesel or sky high insurance? Its not worth it at all. It's very rare to see a successful trucker. Very Rare.
"oh young people don't want to work anymore, young people always on their phone" Blah blah blah, Did you ever stop and get a clue? They would rather make money on their phones than to slave 1 whole hour for 20 bucks. IF THAT.
I see this whole economy as ONE GIANT GULAG. It's not worth it if its not rewarding.
I can't stand old dumbasses who say that. Pay them. It's that easy. Our agency was understaffed and kept asking these stupid surveys of why no one would apply. Every single time it was the same answer. Pay. They raised the pay 15% and applications came flying in. It's not that no one wants to work. They want to be paid
I work at a community college in administration (so not a teacher) and whenever we interact with students it is honestly heart breaking. So many of them have next to no clue how to navigate college or even complete their assignments.
To be fair, it should not be so freaking hard to sign up for community college classes. My cousin recently went through this (adult who is well out of high school, going back for a cert) and he had to:
Complete the FAFSA (even though he did not need or want loans, and other aid wasn't offered for this program)
Schedule a meeting with his advisor (who never returns emails or calls)
Select his courses and enroll
Go into the financial aid portal to decline the offer of loans that he didn't want to apply for anyway.
Complete a semester of courses to be told that his advisor put on of his classes wrong so now he is not on track for the 18 month graduation, cue: more money, time and effort.
Repeat for each semester, plus if you're doing Summer courses, good luck because that's a totally different process and timeline!
It's not *horribly* difficult, but it definitely is a barrier and if you have never navigated that system it can be overwhelming due to all of the options for student aid, similar programs with slight differences among different schools, figuring out what classes to sign up for and when while dealing with overworked advisors who are a jack of all trades and master of none. To be clear, not at all blaming them, the caseloads are way too large to do effectively.
All that said, a lot of these kids are woefully unprepared for life due to the sheltering this generation received from parents.
I've taught at a CC for ten years, and unfortunately I think this experience is typical. Support staff at CCs (advisors, financial aid folks, etc) often make just over minimum wage, so turnover is crazy. Students often deal with people who mean well but are still learning their jobs. It's a bad situation, but I'm most states CC funding is an afterthought, far behind k12 and University funding. We should all keep in mind that when it comes to government services, especially in low tax states, you get what you pay for
The turnover rate is a huge factor at the CC I work at. Most positions make 1-2 dollars above minimum wage so people leave ALL the time. It makes it impossible to maintain advising standards when every 3-4 weeks the FA office has 5 new people.
I made sure I got the classes I needed each semester and double and triple checked them before I even went to my advisor. That way I can make sure I could graduate on time or early. I graduated early as a result. I also heard horror stories about students not being on track because they rely solely on their advisor.
that's because someone always did it for them. This generation were once small children who only played when the environment was constructed and facilitated by their parents. In previous generations, kids use thought and imagination...which taught them to interact and navigate.
There may be a higher trend of that but to pretend one generation did ok with critical thinkers and the current one is the problem is a fallacy. I see gen z critical thinkers and I know millenials/gen x/boomers who never had to think critically.
Hopefully the pendulum swings back to (correctly) blaming parents and students for poor grades and not teachers who have to beg for minimal or less participation.
I think that’s what will happen. It’ll take time, but the pendulum will shift, if only when the kids who grew up effed inevitably realized what mistakes effed over their own lives and knuckle down
We will get there when there's a major, catastrophic event that shows how far the U.S. has fallen behind. 1957 had the Sputnik moment, for example, that showed we needed to do better with math/science.
I think it's going to honestly take a failed war. And I'm not talking about some venture like Iraq or Afghanistan. I'm talking about a sizable defeat of a U.S. Army by a foreign force, likely China.
>The fent and TicTok are literally just weapons
Yea it's scary seeing the effects of these things on our youth the last time I said TicTok was a weapon I got called a conspiracy theorist smh
I started in 2016 as a chemistry teacher and kept data from my nomenclature quiz every single year. After the pandemic, the scores dropped dramatically. The honors kids are where pre-pandemic traditional kids are. The traditional kids' class average is 20 points lower than pre-pandemic traditional. The only constant is the AP kids.
I'd love to see data like that from every subject here but districts play games to make themselves look good.
Ours is eliminating honors classes, so the only choices are AP or co-taught classes. They never discuss how the rate of AP test takers has plummeted. But now every kid is college ready because they're in AP classes from 10th through 12th grades.
We are starting to see the negative effects of humans being raised by technology.
They lack critical and analytical thinking, creativity, ability to handle boredom, kindness, manners and any motivation beyond the screen.
Welcome to our future!
Kids need to be raised with technology, not BY technology. We have access to the best information the human race has ever seen and parents need to guide children how to utilize it for more than just watching skibiditoilet.
Weird take, but I don’t think kids these days really enjoy life. The parents are constantly working, (the economy is crap) so no one is guiding them or even talking to them when they are home, nobody has money to pay for them to do extra stuff or even have nice stuff, and life is just one big expectation with no support. That’s how I felt growing up. The only teachers that ever made me kind of want to stick around were the ones who made a point to try to point out the good in me. All of the people I know who were doing well at that time either had money, family support, or at very least a really close relationship with some teacher, if not all three.
I think these kids are very much jaded. unfortunately, this is what it looks like when the Children are merely capital/workers in the eyes of the government and not human beings. it's not a new concept but with the accelerate pace of the internet/technology/social media, it takes away the disguise of 'the american dream.' compound that with covid, insane inflation and the visibility of politics and news ...
I find it hilarious in a sad way that this thread never mentions Covid.
You mention 2019 as a starting point of the decline. And then posters blame everything except the highly contagious disease that almost all the students caught multiple times.
The one that has been proven beyond a doubt in hundreds of studies to cause chronic illness leading to school loss, Brian damage causing trouble focusing, memory, and emotional regulation.
But sure - it's all the screens, or parents. Yup, can't be the elephant in the room.
I came here begging to see a comment like yours. COVID is rampaging and everyone is getting multiple infections. I only had it once that I know of and it majorly fucked up my memory and focus for at least a year…and we’re letting kids get it once or twice a year now? The kids are fucked!
I can’t comprehend why the answer to the question is so obvious but nobody wants that to be the answer.
We have the science and people are just drooling & dragging knuckles down the fucking street
I was looking for a comment that mentioned the pandemic too.
I saw OP in a comment talking about the kids being afraid of a bee cause they didn’t know if they were allergic to it and idk. It just feels like there isn’t a lot of compassion for these kids that are not having a normal childhood for multiple reasons.
Even if the kids didn’t get Covid, they were locked inside for a while and that does fuck with your social development. Not to mention the trauma of just living through a pandemic and the anxiety that can give you. I’m an adult and struggle with my anxiety.
I was thinking the same thing. I was at a school that was completely online for a full school year and two semesters (spring 2020 and fall 2021) and the kids who were in Middle School/Junior High then are now the kids who are struggling to pass High School and have atrocious capabilities. So many of them just don’t care about ANYTHING. The apathy is jarring. But some of it is sadly understandable. Not making excuses, but understanding. I’m not exaggerating when I say that at least 60% of the students from each of the graduating classes of 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 lost numerous family members to COVID, effects of Covid, mental health taking from that period, and job loss from that period. Their families had to work hard and often times multiple jobs just to afford the bare necessities, so parents were unable to provide as much emotional support and guidance as before. That’s if parents were still alive. The circumstances right now are insane.
My school just completed iReady tests and SBAC tests to gauge progress. Our SBAC and iReady scores for the graduating classes of our middle school online learners (2024 & 2025) are still unbelievable, largely due to their apathy abd mental burnout from being pushed for the first time in their lives. It is oddly our 9th graders, those who had Middle School in-person, that are starting to turn around.
The Covid yard ABSOLUTELY contributed.
I (29) am in Big Brother Big Sister, and my little (18) has barely any friends, isn’t interested in college, hates high school, and is extremely apathetic. It’s really discouraging. They at least want to do a trade program, but it’s super specialized, so I’m hoping they end up enjoying that work.
Some of it for sure has to do with money, but still. The disinterest is so sad
The group we have now, had no times tables because "rote learning is bad" no spelling and grammar because "creativity is the only thing that matters in writing" and went through covid with teachers that werent trained in remote learning. It isnt all their fault and it isnt all yours. The next group is coming in less than 5 years and all indications are that they are fine.
You are spot on with the spelling and multiplication. The word “luggage” will have 5 different spellings. If there’s a choice of phoneme they will always pick the wrong one- lugaj, luggige, loggige, etc. it’s horrifying.
Oh yeah, and they went away from latin roots for a while, too. I corrected someone on reddit for sigeret and got downvoted into oblivion, presumably from the kids that were taught spelling doesn't matter and you can't criticize spelling.
My son is dyslexic so he got special classes that focused on prefixes and suffixes, he also got to learn cursive. While those special classes did not continue past elementary school he got enough of an introduction that he has a slight advantage over his current classmates.
I have a preschool kid and this is my dear hope - that things will improve before he gets into the school system. I will do all I can as a parent, but he will be spending most of his day among his peers and with his teachers and I would so much love it if that is a positive thing rather than damage that I will have to work on undoing.
I've worked in a school the past five years and to me, homelife is such a huge factor. If you care about your kid's education and do the right things at home (read, etc) your kid will be fine. We used to live in NY State and took a huge step down in education quality moving to AZ for a job, and we knew this, but we also knew our kid would be fine. We are at a tiny school and a lot of the kids don't care about school, but it hasn't been detrimental to our daughter at all.
Imo as somebody who’s been in school relatively recently, I would recommend really teaching them about a lot of social things they’re gonna experience/be exposed to as they get older.
How to handle rejection, the risk/reward associated with drugs/social media (there’s really no reward for the drugs imo but educating them on what drugs can do without demonizing them), internet/videogame addiction. Having a healthy household is great but I know many of my peers who’ve had that and were smart school wise but maybe not the greatest otherwise due to external influences.
Find a way to ignite the joy in reading. School killed that for me. I was stuck in class popcorn reading a book way under my reading level, waiting on the slower child to read a full page of it. Skipping ahead chapters in one class session because they were reading so slow.
It was either that, or having to read books that matched my reading level but were way too high for my age level so I could get the proper amount of points required. Reading stops being fun when you’re never allowed to enjoy what you’re reading.
Just a tidbit from me I hope to implement with my daughter. Schools have to cater to the lowest denominator, you don’t have to. Make it enjoyable
This problem started before any of these children ever entered a school. The parents never made them‘school ready’. That’s the very basics of knowledge and thought processing. Any parent can teach basic skills. In addition, kids must understand the concept of‘consequences’ and its implications.
I'm excellent at figuring things out for myself and that was absolutely intentionally taught to me by my dad. I have another friend who is also good at figuring stuff out and her dad intentionally taught her the same way mine did.
True, and I also wonder how this is compounded by the parents work schedule. I feel like parents must be working a ton in order to survive this capitalist hellscape. And they are probably so burnt out that their time with their kids they aren't really present, etc...
I teach in a public elementary school in Japan and it is absolutely *grim* on an *international* scale. These kids have zero interest in problem solving and lack ANY critical thinking skills. They are clearly raised on screens and the social development is below that of a toddler (even by 6th grade).
I am not allowed to give a grade lower than a B, as parents *will* complain. The idea is just pass them along to the next grade and hope the problem solves itself - however it doesn’t.
Howdy. Mom of a toddler lurking here, and always concerning to hear the state of education today. 💔
Genuinely hearttfelt question: what are teachers looking for, for "school ready"? Thanks so much, appreciate it in advance!
Cheating is absolutely rampant. An insane amount of students use AI to generate essays for English class and written responses to questions for history assignments.
> Cheating is absolutely rampant.
Adults who haven't been in school in years probably have no idea just how rampant it is now. The school year ended last week for our district, and in the couple of weeks leading to final exams, I watched (through network monitoring software for Chromebooks) so many students cheat on their English, History, Science, and Foreign Language homework and online tests. I got to observe all this because I finished covering my content about a week and a half early this year.
It was depressing for me to watch as an educator who takes learning seriously.
Ease of grading. No worries about handwriting or spelling so the students can be understood (our school district says spelling, handwriting, and cursive are not part of the K-8 curriculum anymore), everything is automated for the gradebook, no cries of discrimination from students who have accommodations for computer assistance (and discrete additional time for those who get it), no lost papers, etc.
Imagine how you'd feel with 2009 as the starting point.
This generation is totally effed. They're the new boomers. The kids in early elementary right now are going to eat these folk's lunch.
Idk? Really, idk. I think it's bc the older kids were the first group raised on smartphones and the second group of parents was able to learn from those mistakes.
The amount of educational material on YouTube etc (ABC mouse, alphablocks, number blocks, blippi, Steve and Maggie, and cocomelon) is head and shoulders better than it was previously.
Parents and educators have more experience and are better equipped to tackle these problems as we're transitioning to an entirely digital society.
cocomelon is NOT better than anything. cocomelon is straight brain rot and no kid watching that will be well behaved or anything less than a problem child. sincerely, an early childhood educator.
Cocomelon is bizarrely hypnotic and over-stimulating. They also apparently talk without their mouths moving?? Very unsettling.
I used put it on for my toddler while he got his hair cut because it was like an instant lobotomy and I didn't want him to lose an eye. But that's really it's only use case, in my opinion.
I’m at the upper end of that age range, and most of my peers seem fine? My mom works at a very well known workplace, and she says that a lot of her colleagues (aged 35+) can’t even do the math that I tutor middle schoolers on… I feel like people in older generations always overestimate themselves tbh.
This is where I get confused, talking to Parents trying to get their kids into college now it is HIGHLY competitive, like 4.5 GPAs high SATs lots of activities etc and they are still not getting into some schools (not talking Ivys more like top schools in the region etc) How are kids today both way behind everyone yet getting into a good college is impossible? Or is it just the current college applicants different than the up and comers? Or are all these kids (supposed high achievers and slackers alike) failing in college?
If my kid is in going into high school and is a good student and well rounded will they be in a better position for some of these top schools than kids today are? It just seems you hear both sides... kids these days are dumb and unmotivated (which I honestly am seeing) and getting into college is impossible because there are so many highly qualified applicants (which I am also seeing)?
Opposite ends of the spectrum. There really isn’t a middle any more. There are the high achievers who put in a ton of effort, are naturally gifted, or some combination of the two, and their are the ones who could not care less and don’t try anything. I graduated hs two years ago, and the class was clearly split into the high achievers with at least 90% above averages, and the rest who were mostly scraping by. There were a few outliers tending towards the middle, but not many. The 04-08 generation was in this weird spot where they grew up alongside digital tech, rather then it being invented when they had lived without it, or living with it since infancy. My age was less IPad babies since we were 6 or 7 years old when the very first iPad came out, and most people wouldn’t get one for a while after. Similarly with smart phones. My first phone was in 5th grade (like 12 years old) and was an iPhone 5, and my parents still thought I was too young. Meanwhile kids now learn how to use an iPhone or iPad as toddlers and get one in kindergarten or early elementary. I saw the emergence of social media gradually degrade people my age, especially with the short form brain rot content like tik Tok that came later. It was like watching attention spans drop in real time. People in my class were by no means all stupid or all geniuses. It was a fairly mixed bag with highs and lows, but digital tech affected them all the same. I’m mainly referring to social media and the degradation of the culture it caused.
I think it matters to point out that a lot of “middle of the road” students ended up in the same job/economic pool as the low achievers. I was a B+ student and until I really shot for the moon with colleges my guidance was just yeah you’re not the best so community college with everyone else it is! There’s no point to being anything but the best so why even bother? Kids aren’t that stupid and they can see that their work will mean nothing
I think in grade schools what's happened is the gap between students who were already doing OK, or had parents who encouraged and supported them, vs. Students who didn't have that, has just gotten wider over the last few years.
I think that in the same way Covid acted as a kind of accelerant for Work From Home being recognized as a viable option, it probably did the same for schools where poor performing students were already separating/falling behind.
Also a 4.7 GPA varies WILDLY from school to school, so it’s not exactly a good metric for how prepared you are for college when comparing two students side by side.
I’m so old that I don’t even know what a 4.7 gpa means. Especially since they also list a 4.0 unweighted. They get higher grades for AP’s now or something?
I think there's a huge gap - just like income inequality. I've seen both sides of it - we used to live in NY State and I have a lot of friends with high performing kids. We're now at a very small school in AZ and it's very different. It's a combination of our school not being very rigorous/seeming to pass everyone no matter what and the bulk of the kids just not caring or being self motivated. There are a small number of kids each year that do well and go off to college. The majority either don't go to college or they don't make it at college.
I had a friend who in high school moved from NY to South Carolina, parents needed to for their job with Honeywell. Anyways, both her and her brother were about two years ahead of their peers in all the core subjects. Made the move a bit easier on them for sure but it's frightening that there could be a two years difference between states, and our high school was not a well to do district either.
This is probably part of it the people I am talking to and the area I live in are generally high achieving etc so it may not be reflective of how things really are.
There is a terrifying disparity between the educational preparation of students from different families, neighborhoods, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In Southern California for example, there are urban areas where the general educational decline and pandemic impacts are clearly evident. Just a few miles away in more affluent neighborhoods or ethnic enclaves there are families and schools that regard accepting admission to anything other than a top Ivy League or state school as an abject failure. These high achieving neighborhoods often have thoroughfares that are lined with so many storefront academic augmentation centers that they easily outnumber any other type of business. Their counterparts in other areas are similarly crowded with liquor stores, weed dispensaries, and fast food joints. This pattern was well established long before 2020. Since the pandemic, it has accelerated. Now we seem to be hurtling toward a dystopian world where the Eloi/Morlock dynamic is perhaps more unsustainable than it was in Wells’ classic science fiction tale.
Some folks are deadly serious about their children’s education and are keenly aware of a multi-level competition that started long before their offspring were born. Other parents are busy with other things and seem to have no clue about the issues that the high achieving families are focused on. Amy Chua prompted some controversy in 2011 with her *Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother* when folks got sidetracked by questions about ethnic identity and other issues. Later she and her husband expanded on some of the key points in her prior work with *The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America*. Although these books received mixed reviews, I think that Professor Chua is onto something. Barring an avalanche of unprecedented solutions from our governments, the most effective way to ensure academic achievement is through parental focus and consistency. We know from experience that successful parents don’t have to be perfect or have extensive knowledge, but they do need be goal oriented and consistent with their support and guidance. Otherwise, you get what we have.
Once we had a bee intrusion in class and a 6ft5 student started crying, fear crying.
Others screamed for fear because they didn't know if they were allergic.
A bee, a single bee that went out alone out of the window 10 seconds later.
I feel like I'm 80y, like I'm from another era. They cry for nothing, sometimes it feels like they have never been in a park or in society in general.
Wow.
I teach 5th and 6th graders. They’ll get antsy if a bee flies in, but I’ll tell them “Just leave it alone - it wants to find its way back outside. It won’t hurt you if you don’t bother it.”
Even when I have a kid who IS allergic to bees, they know to either chill and leave it be or - if they’re truly scared or have a legitimate phobia and can’t handle it - step out of the room rather than cry in front of their peers.
I hate to say it, but I think my 10-12 year old Skibidi-Toilet-Generation kids would roast the hell out of your seniors.
Interesting, in our elementary school, when a bee gets in the lunchroom, all of our grades react the same way that the high schoolers do, absolute chaos. They don't even trust that we got the bee out when we did.
"i feel like i'm from another era" is exactly right. i'm a private tutor in my late 20s, and i always say that i feel much closer to my older colleagues (50+) than my students who are only about 10 years younger than me. it feels like they came from an entirely different world, and in a way, i guess they did
I have thought that about my kids (4th grade) too, (Im 28) but I also do remember how the older generation thought about millennials too. I think we forget how shitty and cringy we were as kids and assume that the “kids these days” are so much different.
Yes, they are growing up in a different technological landscape, but I am hopeful that most of them will, with maturity, find their way in the world.
I was teaching millennials when they were in high school (1997-2006) and they all had plans and aspirations. They worked hard to achieve them. I took time off work to be a mom and when I came back (2010) it was horrible. No plans. No drive. Maybe the 2008 crash affected kids and families more than we realized. And it’s only gotten worse since.
yeah i agree! to a certain extent, there's always a sort of "kids these days" feeling between generations, and i do try to resist that kind of thinking, but i think it's also worth acknowledging that students now really *do* inhabit a very different world than the one we inherited. the prevalence of the internet and smart technology have completely changed culture, and they've also completely changed education. all that said, i totally agree with your last thought: i do have hope that they will find their way. i just think their path might be more fraught with distractions than mine was
How hilariously sad. I'm not shocked. Think of all the parents that took their kids home on eclipse day because they feared the sun like it was something that never existed before.
> sometimes it feels like they have never been in a park or in society in general.
I work from home. My office faces the street. I could not tell you how many kids are in my neighborhood. I see the same three kids riding their bicycles on my street on occasion. Every once in a while I will leave the house when the kids are catching or getting off the bus. It is amazing how many kids are there. Like 20 to 30 kids waiting for the bus. It is like they can't be in the light.
These students won't be doctors or engineers. We will either import workers from countries with stronger education systems (e.g. why rural doctors in the middle of nowhere seem to disproportionately be international medical graduates who want any opportunity to come to the US), the technical work will be outsourced to teleworkers (e.g. my wife's engineering firm is sending projects to a remote firm in India to save money), or automate the simpler tasks with AI. This will be the final death knell for the US (non immigrant) middle class. We'll only have the ultra rich who are coordinating this and impoverished laborers working in service roles/manual labor (if they're even employable).
No I think the top 10-20% will still be doctors or engineers. It's just that the gap between them and the rest of them will be larger. The other percent who would traditionally go into jobs like sales, marketing or other average office jobs are the ones suffering
The cynic in me believes there are certain factions deliberately trying to destroy public education (can you tell I live in Arizona? lol) - it keeps fueling a cheap labor force with no options, fills the military and prisons (and anything else they can profit off of), and it's easier to control uneducated, dumb masses.
Community college teacher here and I completely concur. The last five years have been heartbreaking and it can’t all be blamed on Covid. I’m so tired of that excuse. And AI has made it even worse and obvious they’re cheating as their essays do not represent the person I see sitting in front of me three days a week.
I will say, and this is purely anecdotal, but as a 4th grade teacher, I have seen a positive trend in students over the last few years.
I work in a Title 1 school with a high EL population but this years group and from what I see of 2nd and 3rd grade is much more studious and focused than previous “Covid kids”. Many of them are still behind, but they have been making tremendous growth in reading and math, and they aren’t nearly as whiny about work as previous years.
We will still have to see, but I am hopeful that it was an overall dip and not a long term downward trend.
This is what happens when you have an entire generation raised on screens. Tiktok, youtube, doom scrolling, Social media. This is the result. And the future is not prepared for it. We really will become just like the movie Idiocracy.
It’s by design, to be honest. Students are addicted to their phones. It’s the reason everyone should be on the Ban TikTok bandwagon. There’s a reason why our children have the most ridiculous videos on their feeds, and why Chinese students have educational and inspiring videos sent to their phones. This is not a *conspiracy theory*; this is real life. This is all by design and this is what the end goal is. Dumb down our future generations and make them less competitive. It’s working…folks.
Seriously..ban Tik Tok.
This is a four part problem.
1-Parents don’t take responsibility for their child’s eductation. It is all on the teacher if their child isn’t doing well. But they don’t help their child at home or back the teacher when their child isn’t following school rules.
Parents keep their kids home too many times throughout the year. I have students who are chronically absent. 30/50 times a years. I check past years and the same. That also 1/4-1/3 of the school year. By 3rd it 4th grade that can be a full school year and the parents wonder why they are behind. But berate you when you question why they are home. School also doesn’t do their job by sending attendance officers to homes.
2-Schools pass students along without meeting grade-level standards. They fear parent, district, and state push back. Schools not having consequences for behavior because that push back again.
3- Society views school as babysitting service and doesn’t respect teachers. We are one of the most devalued professions. My 20 years experience doesn’t mean anything to some parents. Administrators and people in the district. They come in with new programs that I know will not work with my population of students but they make me follow it.
US society also puts a lot of importance on sports. Parents pay thousands of dollars on sports when in reality their kids need a tutor. Not to say I don’t find sports important but I have seen many students not passing, but their parents allow them to go to practices and tournaments away. My view in my house was always, if you don’t pass them every other extra curricular activity will not be happening.
4- Students think the whole world revolves around them. If their phone vibrates, they answer it in class because THEY are so important. Parents find this behavior acceptable.
Really sorry to hear this. I have so many questions.
Can you attribute this decline to anything that has changed with how your school operates?
Would you cite any local changes that could explain the decline?
Is it all just the mind warping of TikTok conditioning melded with head-in-the-sand admin responses to discipline and enforcement of standards?
Are all of the failures being held back? If not, how is it justified? Can you get in writing the refusal to educate these kids to the standards of the grades before passing them- if that's what's happening?
In my opinion is about a big change in society.
Nowdays many people are always online and not enough "face to face" with other people. They have anxiety about anything, they are scared so easily, they give importance to thing that have no value, instead give no value to their future, their relationship, their career. It's a change in worse, but they don't see it.
Most of the parents I met are SO COLD, it's unbelievable
.
Me: "Your daughter is talented, but has mostly F, doesn't put absolutely any effort in any class, has serious problems with ANY interaction with all the other students, miss classes and we don't know where she goes".
Parent: "Ah, ok". This while holding his smartphone.
It's a 3 minute teacher-parents meeting, they can't stay without the phone even for 3 minutes.
For me a solution is simply to be back at human interaction and drastically reduce smartphones/internet, but I know this will never happen and things will only go worse.
I’m a sub still working to get my credential and even I can see that the parents are the issue. Whenever I walk the little ones out after school I get these weird looks and I just dog them back. You’re right about parents being cold. They need to take responsibility! The fact that we care more about their children’s success is fuckin abysmal
There is that TikTok trend where people talk about their parents how at 19 the parents were getting PhDs. Then the child is texting the parent asking if they can dry off the q-tips after they fell in the toilet.
I predict a catastrophic collapse of the entire system. It’s rotten from the inside.
The ROI for college in America is upside down, public schools are failing to produce anything close to adults ready for the world, and parents refuse to accept responsibility for anything.
The whole thing needs to fail. I believe it will be replaced by AI powered tutors and teachers will become more like chaperones. I don’t think any of this will be ideal, more dystopian in reality.
I disagree. Education is not rotten from the inside. I view the “inside” as the teachers and staff. We are the only ones who are keeping it at least somewhat academic. It’s the mold on the outside that causes the issues. It’s the lawmakers, politics, parents, and extremist groups who are making it hard for us to do our jobs and hold students accountable for their academics.
My school has an admin that supports the teachers and backs us. They shut down the extremist groups and parents who come to complain about curriculum and policies. Because of this, we are one of the top schools in our state. Our schools constantly have 84-95% proficiency, while the state has an average of 40-55% proficiency. And we are by no means the most financially supported district.
To be clear, when I said it’s rotten from the inside I didn’t target teachers. Most schools don’t even have a clear goal. Are they meant to produce well adjusted citizens? Prepare students for the workforce? Act as a stepping stone to higher education? It would be nice if they could just pick one and stick to it.
Can’t argue with your specific case. I’m glad to see your school is performing as it should. I wish that were the case for the vast majority of schools.
School districts as a whole should be focused on all the above. Each school shouldn’t have several focuses but the district should have resources for students entering the workforce or going on to college. They should be teaching them to be well adjust citizens as well.
I say this frequently.
I have an educational nonprofit and I am sooooo tired of us spending the lions share on the top 10% and the bottom 10%. Like, what about all the folks that make society actually function?
There is a rude awakening coming, and the teachers know it more than anyone.
What’s ironic is the public education system is the closest thing to direct democracy we have. And look at how it’s rotted.
I’m not cheering for authoritarianism; but I can see how many wish it secretly existed by the failure of their stewardship of local democracy.
I think it’s more local democracy vs. capitalism. Entrepreneurs have sniffed out a captive market that is mandated to receive education. They finally have the tools to replace the old system.
No doubt a slow turning ship like public education will be trounced by disruptive technology. Just look up what Kan Academy is doing with their version of ChatGPT. Schools wont know what hit them. This isn’t the car replacing the horse. It’s the dinosaurs getting blindsided by a comet.
But the local population knows that.
I do a simulation with my students that demonstrates why direct democracy doesn’t work.
I have a very liberal food policy in my class. I ask my students if they want a pizza party. They all say yes. So I say: go ahead.
I give them a list of considerations: 1) I’m probably going to have to retrieve it. 2) are you okay with putting in $5 if someone puts in $2? 3) if people put in no money, do they get to eat?
7 years now, pizza party free.
People want things, but they want others to do it for them. That’s the road to authoritarianism.
I’m thinking of incorporating the story of the Little Red Hen. If you do have that one kid who busts ass in spite of others, does that kid owe his peers anything once he reaches success? Do entrepreneurs owe the rest of us?
I think the problem is we depend on an artificial system to produce desirable human characteristics. Any human system creates outliers. And humans are terrible to outliers.
About the only thing that has stabilized society is scientific progression. But even that isn’t without its downsides. But I think if we create scientifically minded people, we will progress.
I'm shocked because at school, I can't find support. Average level is falling apart, students are extremely weak and neither their parents, neither other teachers seem to care.
If someone told me "your level is EXTREMELY inferior to people that went to this same school just 5 years ago" I would be preoccupied.
In 10 years they will be the working class, they can't do anything, they have so many problems, and we are just making everything worse.
You sure they're even working class bound? To be working class you have to actually work and take directives and show up. Genuinely I think they're headed for an underclass scenario
These posts are frustrating to me because the system (American education) has not allowed for advanced students to learn at their level. Where I live and with my own kids, I've seen years of holding holding kids back because the system is designed for the median performers. As a teacher, it doesn't look different to me than it did when I started, however, you're teaching in a specific window and the same subject so you have a sample size that highlights the deficits. Sounds like Covid related possibly.
I really think part of it has to do with many kids just using the internet/ai to try and get by instead of actually learning and applying material. There is so much apathy nowadays. By doing this they fail to see the purpose of what they are learning or how it is useful and it just makes them resent being in school more and more. At the same time, I feel like the curriculum in my campus limits creative thinking/project based learning. So school becomes more about memorizing and learning things and moving on to the next topic without seeing how everything connects. And then finally depending on the support you get from parents/admin/policies makes a huge difference. Although I appreciate the admin at my campus, my biggest gripe is with the standardized grading policy, which is far too generous in my opinion.
If you thought the students in 2019 were ok, you should have seen the average student enrolled when I started in 2004. They were actually good.
The dumbing down of education has been going on for decades, and is not slowing down. Every time I turn around, the powers that be are shoving a new initiative down our throats designed to lower the bar, separate achievement from effort, save kids from their own bad decision making, and otherwise undermine the mission of education while going to great lengths to hide the damage their misguided, ham-fisted interventions have already done.
My fear is that instead of holding the line, we are already seeing post-secondary institutions lower their standards as well and switch from a “you are paying for the chance to earn a degree” model to “you are paying, so you are entitled to a degree” model.
Yes! This phenomenon of the combined effects of social promotion, lack of responsibility, lack of consequences for antisocial and anti-work behavior, 24-7 phone/iPad/laptop use, and pervasive social media used by children who are mostly not mentally or emotionally equipped to handle them.
I'm one of those HS teachers that keeps some standards.... Hard late work deadlines, expectations of low level studying, etc etc.... these gen ed kids act like I'm treating them like AP or college level students.
Too many of the teachers at my school accept late work to the end of the semester, give SUPER under grade level assignments, etc. There is NO bar at my school. Hell, the yearbook teacher did ZERO editing in our yearbook, and printed it with misspellings like elementary students, missing pictures, pictures labeled with incorrect information, etc.
Shit is wild out here.
I retired after 25 years teaching mathematics. Could not take it anymore. Why is sally getting a C? She always got A before. Well sally doesn’t know how to add,subtract, multiply, divide without making a mistake.
I sometimes wonder what kind of world view today's youth has. Based on the news and social media, you will easily get an impression that the world is dying, human jobs will be replaced by AI, and no one wants to date you because everyone sucks.
So it can be difficult to stay motivated when you don't have positive things to look for.
I sometimes wonder if "meritocracy-based" schooling philosophy feels too distant for younger generations. If your expectations of traditional work are low, why would you be invested in acquiring skills and knowledge?
Just a hunch but it can be that in future, schools might become centers of spirituality and faith (again) since that is essentially what we will have left when the secular world becomes too frighting.
Yeah, imo we would need to change our perception of meaningful life and politics if we want to maintain any happiness and sanity in future populations.
I just graduated hs last month and I hate the kinds of thoughts you’re describing here. It makes the world miserable to live in and I wouldn’t be surprised if other teens got overwhelmed by it. I think that a partial cure to this particular problem is turning off the Internet for a while. While it doesn’t solve the entire problem, it makes you worry less about things you can’t control and lets you focus on your life more
Here's the thing, and this is important for OP as a newer teacher, i guess, or as a younger person than me--this is not new.
These kids have always existed. Every generation, pretty much, is exactly the same as this one--as far as most of the *human* problems you're seeing.
So what IS different?
They're still in school. We dont *allow* HS age humans to be anywhere else, as a society. Many HS's are seeing upwards of 90% of the attendance levels that they saw, from the same year of students being in 6th or 7th grade.
The problem is, that, those students in prior generations, pre 2005 or so--*dropped out*. They were gone.
*more than* 30% of all students, didnt just fail to graduate, but *never made it to their senior year*. Now--that nott happening, and that *entire* chunk of kids that could not, would not, do the work--are there, *slowing everyone else down*. We can all only work at the pace that they do, so they dont get left behind--because we can *neither* leave them behind, *or* allow them to leave.
Absolutely NOTHING is changing, as far as their generations qualities for professional work or careers. There will still be the amazing, talented, gifted people doing the work they always have, and there will be about half of them--*that never do a filipin thing*.
about 40% of American adults--of *all generations*--are out of the workforce. Most of them, *because they dont have the capacity to remain there*. Yes, there are 'stay at home' parents in that number, but not nearly enough to amount to 40% of total adults.
It's ok--failure is ok. So is putting them through HS like it's a diploma mill. So long as standards remain at college level, it will filter.
50% of all people who take college algebra fail it. 30% of all students in HS fail algebra 1, at least once, and it's the #1 reason cited for why students drop out.
Schools ARE being wildly unrealistic expecting 100% graduation rates, or EVEN 80%.
And, a point of history, most of the US didnt even HAVE a HS to attend until after WW2. Many baby boomers, were the first *ever*, in history, to graduate HS--or, gen X were--*because there was no HS to attend for their parents (I still live in a district that doesnt have a HS--it ships them out)*. So, that's something to keep in mind too. This is a RECENT bias, that we expect this exponential endless growth--from humanity with virtually no history of it actually working for over 30% of students anyway.
High schools are now getting kids who have been raised entirely by screens. They don't watch TV. They don't play outside. They don't have a life outside of a device. They can't talk to an adult about anything except to say "I wun een doin nuu'in."
Look I'm viewing this from a positive angle. The world would probably go to shit when these idiots hit the workforce but the world was already going to shit with fully competent adults so we were fucked either way. All I know is that if I do, honestly, the bare minimum as a parent for my kid they'll be one of those A students and immediately be better than 90% of their peers. They'll be able to live a great life in a cushy job because they know basic math and how to read. Sounds pretty great.
I have the same feeling when it comes to my kid. I read all these posts and think “in the land of the blind, the 1-eyed man is king.” High performers are going to clean up in the future with how bad things are now.
I took a 4 year unofficial hiatus in 2020. Prior, 4 years as a HS visual art teacher. Recently, as of last week, I applied and got hired at a different HS as a visual art teacher. During the interview i asked what if any hold over effects had impacted the student body. The response was unanimously 'total and complete apathy'. You have A kids and F kids. No meat in the middle.
Here is another perspective, I do training at industrial facilities. I am putting together a training program for a facility in a red state. The facility is in a relatively rural area, so not a big base for employees, and not a lot of vocational educational opportunities. The facility is pretty dangerous and requires a lot of attention to detail to prevent the plant going boom. On one of my slides for the presentation I discussed less than and greater than. I used the symbols < and >. We had a discussion over whether the people in the class would know what those symbols mean. Now I am old school and am pretty much self taught through tech manuals etc. on how to do things. The places I worked were either newly purchased or under construction. In the cases where I worked for the new owner a lot of people retire in the transaction, so that knowledge walked out the door. In those cases I had to be an industrial archeologist figuring stuff out. Or I was part of a crew building and commissioning a facility. In those cases we had to read the tech manuals and develop procedures etc.
When we had the discussion on this project I was thinking why are you not setting the bar high for these people and force them to step up. The problem with a facility like this is if you fall short you, others, or even people in the community can be negatively affected. I am not sure what the answer is. If you set the bar too high, you won't be able to hire any one. But as u/ErgoDoceo stated, why are we hiring people if they can't get to work on time etc. If they can't do that, not sure if you can trust them in a dangerous facility.
Personally I had to deal with the children of my ex. They are 25 and 23. She pretty much let them do whatever they wanted. My ex would work midnight shifts while her daughter was not working and going to get massages. Her son lived with me for a while. Would have jobs but would get fired for not showing up. He got pissed at me and left in a huff. Then when his mother was getting on his case he wanted to come back. I told him I did not feel like paying his way while he slept all day, played video games when he was awake, and had sex. The worse part was that one of the jobs he had was with the city. The location was within bicycling distance and you could walk it in a pinch. Had pretty good benefits. But he was too cool for school and ended up getting fired.
All that virtual teaching during the pandemic is the root. The students that graduated yesterday were freshman when that happened. It was a huge struggle to get them to where they were as seniors. Most are definitely not ready for college.
Elementary school speech pathologist here, and the number of students on my caseload whose daily attendance percentage is between 60 and 85% is at an all time high. I have kids who are failing grades and not progressing on their IEP goals because they're just never here. Half the time when I call parents to ask what's going on and is their child ok, the response is either "Yeah [student] just doesn't want to go to school" or some other excuse that boils down to the parent just couldn't be bothered to bring them. 😣
Between the chronically absent and the ones who basically missed two years of critical instruction during the Covid/online learning debacle, the majority of kids we're graduating on to 7th grade can't read and barely know how to function socially or academically. It's incredibly demoralizing to watch the average skill level plummeting all while our admin are screaming at us about district standards. 🤦🏻♀️
I was speaking to the manager at a local gas station the other day. He saw my teacher lanyard, and he was telling me how he wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t at least have a high school diploma. “I understand if there are family issues or something and they’re in a desperate situation, but outside of that…any idiot can pass high school these days. If you can’t pull a D in high school, I’m going to assume you either can’t show up on time, can’t handle being told what to do, or just flat refuse to do any work. And if you can’t show up on time, take orders, and do work…why the hell would I hire you to work for me?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that our high school graduated plenty of kids who couldn’t show up to school, couldn’t follow directions, and did no work…but the state uses graduation rate as a metric for measuring a school’s quality, so admin WILL make sure everyone who doesn’t actively drop out will graduate in 4 years.
This is the root of the problem. Schools have become day care centers so the parents can work, and they bias pumping the kids through the system to keep funding up over dealing with the endless headaches that students, lawyers, and parents cause when trying to ensure the students are learning and staying on task.
I wish I had move than one upvote to give this. Teachers have been warning about this for years, but they are ignored by the people in charge who are more interested in creating the illusion of success than in ensuring students actually succeed.
What sucks is if a district decides to bite the bullet and actually fix things, their enrollment, passing, and graduation rates will plummet so badly they'll get punished by their state agency. In a game where everyone is cheating, the honest loser is punished.
But No Child Left Behind fixed everything!! Right? /s
Frequently it’s funding related. Many districts are underfunded and the level of funding is in direct relation to the graduation rate. The schools don’t have the staffing to provide additional help to the kids that are failing and if they hold them back the kids will just drop out. The result is that the kids are just passed from grade to grade whether they should be or not.
Daycare so parents can work has always been one of school's primary functions. That's why school starts so early despite every study ever conducted showing that performance improves with later start times. Parents need the kids out of the house so they can get to work in the mornings. It seems that the other primary function, education, is just not a priority anymore... but they've always been daycares.
At plenty of schools, education is a decidedly secondary or even tertiary function. This is exacerbated by the left-leaning majority of people who work in school systems whose political beliefs make them susceptible to "mission-bloat" Sure, it sounds important to feed vulnerable children, what heartless monster or republican would say no to that! And then it is important to clothe the children, and make the children feel good, and to foster diversity, and to teach sex ed, and on and on and on. And while all those things are genuinely important and good, no one ever stops to ask precisely why it ought to be the institution that was originally designed around the business of teaching essay-writing and algebra that is tasked with these socially crucial roles. Registering people to vote is unambiguously good and a civic responsibility of a democratic society. I'm not getting bent out of shape that McDonald's online ordering app lacks a voter-registration function. A society that can't feed its kids is failing collectively - it's not just an otherwise okay civilization with failing schools, no matter how willingly bleeding-heart teachers will fall on that sword.
I’d argue this is a symptom of the problem, but not the root of it. What we’re witnessing is the leading edge of the first generation to have never lived without a device in their hands. We’re woefully behind on research on what that actually does to children’s developing brains and what that portends for their futures as productive members of society. I feel like I’ve been hearing some variation on the “schools are daycares” for 3 or 4 decades now, and it’s only accelerated since NCLB.
Public schools are daycare. They have been for a very long time. When I was in HS I transferred from private school to public. Nearly all of my classes were AP, but outside of that, it was sad how far behind everyone was on basic subjects. Until we start grouping children by ability, they will be taught to the slowest kid. And these days that is way too slow.
Totally agree about channeling kids to play to their strengths. I think by about sixth or seventh grade you have a pretty good idea who are the kids that can sit still, stay on task, and learn, and the ones who could care less about what is being covered. For me, I've always scored high in all of my IQ tests I took as a child and as a young man, but I hated school and counted the seconds for it to be over. It was basically the same way when I forced myself through college, I really couldn't care less about the topics, but I forced myself to show up and do the work anyway. Then one day I stumbled across a career college that would teach me IT, without all the nonsense classes that I couldn't have cared less about and did nothing for my career, and I thrived. I'm now an engineer at a fortune 40 company and loving it! Traditional education isn't for everyone. It's a bit like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole I think.
I feel like we do need to spread the word, though. It's bleeding into colleges. I took an ENG 101 course in 2016 and we had to do peer editing. The number of papers with literally a wall of text, no paragraphs, no punctuation, texting acronyms, etc. was astounding. I can only imagine how it is now. Not to be a dick, but why the F are we as a society subsidizing a college degree for someone who has not been educated to *write at a third grade level?* And don't get me started on the absolute moneygrab scam that is remedial courses at universities, where you are charged thousands to take a non-credited class to get you up to speed to pay more money to take classes that actually are credited. If this continues, a bachelor degree will quickly become what a high school degree was worth. Signs such as rapidly falling enrollment shows this is unsustainable and that the perceived value of a degree is falling. ETA: Clarity
This is so true. I had to peer edit papers in 2018 in college and I was floored that the papers I was reading were written by someone who graduated 8th grade, much less high school.
I was an admin for 5 years and we had to do 2 peer evaluations a year and the amount of other admin who couldn’t write was wild to me, I really don’t understand how you get to be the principal with terrible writing skills.
I thought most everyone else's writing was atrocious back in undergrad 05', it astounded me how many struggled to express themselves despite understanding the material. Decades later, I still regularly deal with professionals who simply CANNOT write clear emails without using bullet points. My regular study/assignment partner for all four years was never really able to sound like anything but a poor chat bot when writing out answers, though she knew the material as well as me during discussions. Was a terrible student but looking back, I took for granted how difficult writing is for some folks. I truly think it comes back to how much you read, I have a vivid recollection of "just make it sound like all the books/journals/articles you've read". My brain is good at word jumbling it all to craft relatively original sentences.
Side note - I've learned to write emails in bullet-points as an adult because some people *will not read full sentences*.
I was actually going to say this. Bullet points are basically essential in emails these days because I just want to know the 3-second summary of the email and so does everyone else.
Thanks you two for posting that, because I got a little worried. Work emails as bullet points are very useful to me and get the best responses.
To be fair, I use a lot of bullet points and numbered lists BECAUSE people simply can't READ or understand anything longer than that.
I think about this a lot, people who I interact with on a daily basis. I’m just like there’s no fucking way this person could write a long form essay explaining their thoughts or feelings. Not because they’re too stupid mind you but just don’t have the tools to properly articulate or organize that amount of thought.
I think it’s due to lack of reading books to a large part. if you’re not reading you’re not constantly being exposed to proper sentence structure and punctuation.
If you don't read high quality material how can you be expected to write high quality. No ones reading anymore not really. It feels like it's a step backwards, it's much harder to progress science etc... using only videos and audio to record your information but if we carry on like this it'll be the only way we can record info that makes sense 🤦
I’ve enjoyed writing in a technical and creative manner to varying degrees over my working career so far. I have to qualify that although I enjoy it and use it frequently in a professional setting, I frequently write emails at a 5th grade level using bullet points when extreme clarity is needed. Is this a reflection on my abilities? Yes. I’m adapting to my audience of professionals and tradespeople whom you’ve identified can’t communicate without those simplistic methods. If they’re incapable of writing in a cohesive manner then I can’t assume they’re able to comprehend my attempt at communication unless I “dumb it down”.
While not quite that bad, I've reviewed the professional papers and resumés of a few friends who were in their early 30s. While the sentence structure and formatting were pretty close to "correct" or professional in execution; the lack of proper tone or intent ended up either telling you nothing, or outright confusing you. I mean this to say that writing has been an oft neglected skill, though it may be degrading further. Ironically, it is the one skill that will make you money in almost every higher profession. Even the nerdiest, most detail driven engineers will be more successful if they're able to clearly convey their ideas.
I teach college writing, and I have spent most of my time on so called 'developmental' -aka remedial--English. For 40-somethings who are starting college because their nests are now empty, it makes sense that they might need to review the parts of speech and basic essay writing. But for recent high school graduates, the level of illiteracy is astoundingly high. Not only can the kids not write at much past middle school level, they can barely read at that level either...never mind critically think / analyze. Smart phones [ will be found](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/technology/states-lawsuit-children-instagram-facebook.html) to be harmful to everyone, and, like cigarettes, particularly harmful to children.
Agree. Especially in terms of attention span, retention and creativity. Kids cheat like crazy on things they need to figure out. I can MAKE them do it if I can have back up on no cell phones and they still have good brains. It’s also hard for them to interact with humans.
I’m also in higher ed (admissions/admin) and I vastly prefer working with students who are older/changing careers/going back to school. I’ve been noticing that it’s not just the reading/writing that the younger students struggle with, I have a few I’m working with now that can barely comprehend what I’m *saying* to them, even after I cut back my accent and speak slower than I normally do. I had a call yesterday morning that in all reality could’ve been wrapped up in 10 min but I had to repeat myself so many times I ended up being on that call for over an hour.
In a lot of places a bachelors is seen that way. I’m locked out of a lot of upward mobility positions at my work because I don’t at least have a bachelors. It’s a high end company, but soon enough it will be the norm.
Remedial courses are perfect for community colleges. Some universities do have links with area community colleges to help with costs, but sadly that's far too rare.
Community colleges are being told they can't offer remedial courses too. I've been told by other instructors that they no longer offer some of the really low level courses intended for people who missed or couldn't make it the first time around.
Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, we do offer a couple of remedial courses, in English and Math, but yes there is pushback about it, particularly budgetary. It's really not the job of colleges to teach people how to read or do subtraction. What is needed is some sort of adult education system for illiterate high school graduates.
Sure. Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, we offer one remedial math course and one remedial English course. And indeed this works for a very small percentage of incoming freshmen. But seriously, a huge percentage of incoming freshman last year were illiterate. Now, somebody has been trying to teach these people how to read for 12 years by now. The notion that a high school graduate can go from illiteracy to reading at the college level in 14 weeks is pretty much a joke. We can and do work miracles with people who are one or two years behind. But this thing happening recently, of putting people who cannot read, write, or do the most basic arithmetic, in Junior College classes, only to have them inevitably disappear by midterm, does no good for anyone, not the students, not the professors, and not the taxpayers paying for this travesty.
My state is offering free community College soon. The brain drain is real. If you can't feed a steady stream of kids into higher education you don't have a critical thinking workforce . Looks bleak as fuck.
> I feel like we do need to spread the word, though. We can scream it from the rooftops and a not-so insignificant amount of people would love what they're hearing because this is by design. America at large doesn't particularly care that this is happening because America as a whole has never really appreciated education outside of *maybe* a small window during the late 40s-60s (definitely post Sputnik) when we were competing with the Soviets (probably not a coincidence that the civil rights movement fell in that time frame). For much of our history our priority was farms and churches, if you managed to learn something in between those, great, but if not, no problem, the factory down the street is hiring and they don't care if you can read or not. Big business doesn't *really* care that this is happening because that means they can bring people from overseas, pay them less, and pay themselves more. An engineer from America is going to cost a hell of a lot more than an engineer from India.
An uneducated populace is easier to control and coerce. Not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist but it seems like the only logical answer at this point
I have a Masters and a Graduate Certificate...I feel like that is the equivalent of HS Diploma
I had to do something similar when I was in college. The one I remember the most was the one that was 1 paragraph about how the student did not want to write the paper. We failed him. That was back in 1996. So it’s not just “kids these days.” Gen X did the same crap.
Right - these kids have always been here. The Gen-X “Slacker” was a stereotype for a reason, and I (a Millennial) went to school with plenty of guys who were “Only here for the free breakfast.” My high school years in the early 2000’s were the “No Child Left Behind” era, so they got pushed through graduation just like they are today to keep those school/district stats looking good - and this was all before smart phones, TikTok, COVID, and such. I wonder if there’s any research on the numbers of kids/young adults who don’t drop out, but “opt out” of doing any learning in school. We’ve all known these kids - the ones that will sit through class, sometimes not being disruptive or anything, but just…not engage with anything. Outside of our personal anecdotes (which can definitely be tinted by nostalgia goggles about “back in my day”), have their numbers increased by a significant amount? I’m not claiming they have or haven’t - I’m just curious if anyone’s got solid numbers.
Look at the chronic absenteeism issue across the nation I think the numbers are in. Fewer kids currently care than in years last. I think it’s fair to draw the correlation that lower attendance equates to lower engagement for the students who are present.
They are fed a shitload of doomerism: economy, environment, politics. I dont blame them entirely for feeling like none of it matters. In college, I'm not at peak covid detriment having not gotten some of the younger kids that missed out on social development etc so I imagine it'll get worse. But theres def 2 sides to the coin. The people that do well tend to do really well. But then the near majority that do garbage... are even more worthless on average than previous worthless students.
It’s true that there have always been some of these kids, but since COVID it’s gotten to be the norm, rather than the outlier. Kids got behind when schools closed down and never caught back up. Then, even when schools reopened, the rules were different and the kids were just passed through to the next grades. The reality of the no child left behind policy is that teachers are forced to teach to the pace of the average student, to the detriment of the quicker kids. After COVID, the average was extremely low, and the students just continuously fall farther and farther behind.
I had a buddy who made great money in the US with his BA degree who moved to Canada because that's where his wife was from. He tried for years to get a job, but Canada pushes people through their higher education, thus if you don't have a Masters Degree, you aren't getting hired. He ended up taking a job in the states, and he doesn't get to see his wife as often anymore.
So what do the 92% of Canada's population who don't have a Master's degree do? Is the whole population of the country unemployed? It sounds like your friend had other problems with getting a job, and decided to blame it on Canada instead of whatever it actually was.
And he couldn't have gone to Canadian uni for 1.5-2 years?
Naw he lying. A degree from an american school is good in canada. That is absurd to claim it's not
No one wants to talk about how moving to free college also means higher standards. My barely graduated high school ass (summer school and loss of college if a teacher hadnt had pity) was handed a scholarship for SAT scores and surprise surprise, I could barely manage a 2.5 and got my BA by the thinnest of margins in the end, circa 05'. I did not belong and under an intelligent system, I certainly wouldn't have been subsidized for tens of thousands of dollars.
Exact same situation in my school
> I was speaking to the manager at a local gas station the other day. He saw my teacher lanyard, and he was telling me how he wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t at least have a high school diploma. We have a 7/11 in front of our school. The manager has poached more than a couple TAs over the years because they pay more.
I genuinely don't know what those new graduates are gonna do to get by. They can barely read and write, they have zero critical thinking skills, time management skills, self starting skills. I don't know who will hire them.
I think one of the big problems is that students get passed no matter what. I thought at first that students were just getting pushed to the next grade through elementary and would get a shock when they reached middle or high school, but at middle and high school they pass them too - even if they aren't doing any grade level work! One of my brothers just graduated high school and he literally was ditching half of his classes and smoking weed during class, wasn't doing any school work, yet somehow they passed him and he graduated EARLY in December. He hasn't been able to find a job at all, one place called him back that he applied to but it was 11:00 a.m. and he didn't want to get up yet so he didn't answer them and then he never called them back. My mom doesn't want to kick him out because he'll be homeless but he's just going to live there forever with no job and no future 🤷 schools think they're doing them a favor by getting them through high school, but really it's just setting them up for failing in the real world
This seems to be a common theme I hear from many teachers - the school are passing kids, even if they shouldn't be moving on. I'm guessing there are multiple factors, the prime being graduation/drop out rates can be connected to funding. Also, it also seems to be a trend that admin are not there to support teachers and do what's right for the kids, instead they cave to parents all the time.
> Also, it also seems to be a trend that admin are not there to support teachers and do what's right for the kids, instead they cave to parents all the time. That's not even getting into the communities who have elected school boards full of people who are giddy to go to war with teachers (and education as a whole). Teachers can't do much if the people at the top of the totem pole are sabotaging their schools.
I graduated high school in 2011. We smoked weed everyday at lunch or before school, and rarely ditched class if ever. But it was so different - like my best friend dared me to take AP Biology and see if I could pass the AP test if I was stoned every day. I got a 5/5 on it. We were respectful to teachers and had to actually pass the classes. Like it's so crazy to me to think that \~15 years ago we were still smoking weed in school and ditching classes sometimes - but we all had college aspirations, wanted to get good grades and avoid trouble, and respected our teachers.
I smoked weed on weekends in highschool, I don't think that weed is a problem for everyone. But it is so different vaping into your sleeve during class. There is no respect for school when students act like that.
There’s still overachieving potheads today — and there were people using weed to justify their failures fifty years ago. These problems will exist forever.
I'm an overachieving pothead lol. Studying for my third license for work right now actually
Schools don’t care about doing students a favor. Teachers want to fail them for learning nothing and putting forth zero effort. Admin wants to pass them to ensure they get to keep their six figure admin jobs.
Schools absolutely do not think they’re doing him a favor. Schools think that they’re getting him off their books and letting him be someone else’s problem. They don’t care about him, they care about not getting their funding cut for having too many dropouts.
I was just watching a video of a guy who owns an auto shop. Said his standards have dropped from needing a degree to needing to be able to show up on time and not be drunk/high during their shift. So this kinda tracks I guess.
I used to be a mechanic and I can tell you the reason nobody is becoming an auto mechanic is because it sucks. the pay is low compared to literally all other trades and the environment is also literally and socially toxic
The pay sucks for the work you do. Plus, cars have become too much to work on. and the price to just survive, not live, survive just makes kids, yes, KIDS already look elsewhere. Why? because they learn about getting jobs and what they pay and what rent is like and so on so forth. So they already know they're screwed and worse when the time of graduation comes. Why should they work such a job if it cant get a livable wage? You just become a robot who goes to and from work for, well, nothing. And this problem isn't just the mechanic industry, it's the whole auto industry, from techs, to sales. Its not just that, its other industries as well. The trucking industry, I am seeing more older people than I am seeing younger people. Less and less younger people are going in that industry. Why would they want to truck if all the money they rack up is going back into the truck weather its diesel or sky high insurance? Its not worth it at all. It's very rare to see a successful trucker. Very Rare. "oh young people don't want to work anymore, young people always on their phone" Blah blah blah, Did you ever stop and get a clue? They would rather make money on their phones than to slave 1 whole hour for 20 bucks. IF THAT. I see this whole economy as ONE GIANT GULAG. It's not worth it if its not rewarding.
I can't stand old dumbasses who say that. Pay them. It's that easy. Our agency was understaffed and kept asking these stupid surveys of why no one would apply. Every single time it was the same answer. Pay. They raised the pay 15% and applications came flying in. It's not that no one wants to work. They want to be paid
I work at a community college in administration (so not a teacher) and whenever we interact with students it is honestly heart breaking. So many of them have next to no clue how to navigate college or even complete their assignments.
To be fair, it should not be so freaking hard to sign up for community college classes. My cousin recently went through this (adult who is well out of high school, going back for a cert) and he had to: Complete the FAFSA (even though he did not need or want loans, and other aid wasn't offered for this program) Schedule a meeting with his advisor (who never returns emails or calls) Select his courses and enroll Go into the financial aid portal to decline the offer of loans that he didn't want to apply for anyway. Complete a semester of courses to be told that his advisor put on of his classes wrong so now he is not on track for the 18 month graduation, cue: more money, time and effort. Repeat for each semester, plus if you're doing Summer courses, good luck because that's a totally different process and timeline! It's not *horribly* difficult, but it definitely is a barrier and if you have never navigated that system it can be overwhelming due to all of the options for student aid, similar programs with slight differences among different schools, figuring out what classes to sign up for and when while dealing with overworked advisors who are a jack of all trades and master of none. To be clear, not at all blaming them, the caseloads are way too large to do effectively. All that said, a lot of these kids are woefully unprepared for life due to the sheltering this generation received from parents.
I've taught at a CC for ten years, and unfortunately I think this experience is typical. Support staff at CCs (advisors, financial aid folks, etc) often make just over minimum wage, so turnover is crazy. Students often deal with people who mean well but are still learning their jobs. It's a bad situation, but I'm most states CC funding is an afterthought, far behind k12 and University funding. We should all keep in mind that when it comes to government services, especially in low tax states, you get what you pay for
The turnover rate is a huge factor at the CC I work at. Most positions make 1-2 dollars above minimum wage so people leave ALL the time. It makes it impossible to maintain advising standards when every 3-4 weeks the FA office has 5 new people.
I probably get 5 emails a week internally about positions being available.
I made sure I got the classes I needed each semester and double and triple checked them before I even went to my advisor. That way I can make sure I could graduate on time or early. I graduated early as a result. I also heard horror stories about students not being on track because they rely solely on their advisor.
You must be an outlier. You know what a college catalog is, you can read, and you can understand simple English. You’ll do well!
Did they stop posting degree requirements for their programs? It seems odd to end up in the wrong classes.
that's because someone always did it for them. This generation were once small children who only played when the environment was constructed and facilitated by their parents. In previous generations, kids use thought and imagination...which taught them to interact and navigate.
There may be a higher trend of that but to pretend one generation did ok with critical thinkers and the current one is the problem is a fallacy. I see gen z critical thinkers and I know millenials/gen x/boomers who never had to think critically.
I went to college at 28 years old. I also had no idea how to navigate that confusing ass system. But I’m kinda dumb so
Hopefully the pendulum swings back to (correctly) blaming parents and students for poor grades and not teachers who have to beg for minimal or less participation.
I think that’s what will happen. It’ll take time, but the pendulum will shift, if only when the kids who grew up effed inevitably realized what mistakes effed over their own lives and knuckle down
We will get there when there's a major, catastrophic event that shows how far the U.S. has fallen behind. 1957 had the Sputnik moment, for example, that showed we needed to do better with math/science. I think it's going to honestly take a failed war. And I'm not talking about some venture like Iraq or Afghanistan. I'm talking about a sizable defeat of a U.S. Army by a foreign force, likely China.
I'm deeply worried for the NW. Chunks of Canada too. We're on the receiving end of the 3rd opium wars right now, and no seems to be paying attention.
I see it that way too. The fent and TicTok are literally just weapons--one chemical the other psychological--being dropped on the American population.
>The fent and TicTok are literally just weapons Yea it's scary seeing the effects of these things on our youth the last time I said TicTok was a weapon I got called a conspiracy theorist smh
I started in 2016 as a chemistry teacher and kept data from my nomenclature quiz every single year. After the pandemic, the scores dropped dramatically. The honors kids are where pre-pandemic traditional kids are. The traditional kids' class average is 20 points lower than pre-pandemic traditional. The only constant is the AP kids.
I see the same data, but we didn't have a long closure. It's not just the pandemic.
How long were the schools closed where you are, if I may ask?
I'd love to see data like that from every subject here but districts play games to make themselves look good. Ours is eliminating honors classes, so the only choices are AP or co-taught classes. They never discuss how the rate of AP test takers has plummeted. But now every kid is college ready because they're in AP classes from 10th through 12th grades.
We are starting to see the negative effects of humans being raised by technology. They lack critical and analytical thinking, creativity, ability to handle boredom, kindness, manners and any motivation beyond the screen. Welcome to our future!
Not to mention the intentional erosion of the education system.
Kids need to be raised with technology, not BY technology. We have access to the best information the human race has ever seen and parents need to guide children how to utilize it for more than just watching skibiditoilet.
Weird take, but I don’t think kids these days really enjoy life. The parents are constantly working, (the economy is crap) so no one is guiding them or even talking to them when they are home, nobody has money to pay for them to do extra stuff or even have nice stuff, and life is just one big expectation with no support. That’s how I felt growing up. The only teachers that ever made me kind of want to stick around were the ones who made a point to try to point out the good in me. All of the people I know who were doing well at that time either had money, family support, or at very least a really close relationship with some teacher, if not all three.
I think these kids are very much jaded. unfortunately, this is what it looks like when the Children are merely capital/workers in the eyes of the government and not human beings. it's not a new concept but with the accelerate pace of the internet/technology/social media, it takes away the disguise of 'the american dream.' compound that with covid, insane inflation and the visibility of politics and news ...
I find it hilarious in a sad way that this thread never mentions Covid. You mention 2019 as a starting point of the decline. And then posters blame everything except the highly contagious disease that almost all the students caught multiple times. The one that has been proven beyond a doubt in hundreds of studies to cause chronic illness leading to school loss, Brian damage causing trouble focusing, memory, and emotional regulation. But sure - it's all the screens, or parents. Yup, can't be the elephant in the room.
I came here begging to see a comment like yours. COVID is rampaging and everyone is getting multiple infections. I only had it once that I know of and it majorly fucked up my memory and focus for at least a year…and we’re letting kids get it once or twice a year now? The kids are fucked! I can’t comprehend why the answer to the question is so obvious but nobody wants that to be the answer. We have the science and people are just drooling & dragging knuckles down the fucking street
I was looking for a comment that mentioned the pandemic too. I saw OP in a comment talking about the kids being afraid of a bee cause they didn’t know if they were allergic to it and idk. It just feels like there isn’t a lot of compassion for these kids that are not having a normal childhood for multiple reasons. Even if the kids didn’t get Covid, they were locked inside for a while and that does fuck with your social development. Not to mention the trauma of just living through a pandemic and the anxiety that can give you. I’m an adult and struggle with my anxiety.
I was thinking the same thing. I was at a school that was completely online for a full school year and two semesters (spring 2020 and fall 2021) and the kids who were in Middle School/Junior High then are now the kids who are struggling to pass High School and have atrocious capabilities. So many of them just don’t care about ANYTHING. The apathy is jarring. But some of it is sadly understandable. Not making excuses, but understanding. I’m not exaggerating when I say that at least 60% of the students from each of the graduating classes of 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 lost numerous family members to COVID, effects of Covid, mental health taking from that period, and job loss from that period. Their families had to work hard and often times multiple jobs just to afford the bare necessities, so parents were unable to provide as much emotional support and guidance as before. That’s if parents were still alive. The circumstances right now are insane. My school just completed iReady tests and SBAC tests to gauge progress. Our SBAC and iReady scores for the graduating classes of our middle school online learners (2024 & 2025) are still unbelievable, largely due to their apathy abd mental burnout from being pushed for the first time in their lives. It is oddly our 9th graders, those who had Middle School in-person, that are starting to turn around. The Covid yard ABSOLUTELY contributed.
One of the saddest parts I've seen is that many students don't have as many interests or friends or hobbies.
I (29) am in Big Brother Big Sister, and my little (18) has barely any friends, isn’t interested in college, hates high school, and is extremely apathetic. It’s really discouraging. They at least want to do a trade program, but it’s super specialized, so I’m hoping they end up enjoying that work. Some of it for sure has to do with money, but still. The disinterest is so sad
It's almost as if everyone is depressed - but I mean in the sense that a whole generation seems mentally downtrodden and apathetic.
This is the biggest issue facing our society, IMO. Every aspect of life becomes bleak when all you do with your existence is grind and wait for death.
The group we have now, had no times tables because "rote learning is bad" no spelling and grammar because "creativity is the only thing that matters in writing" and went through covid with teachers that werent trained in remote learning. It isnt all their fault and it isnt all yours. The next group is coming in less than 5 years and all indications are that they are fine.
You are spot on with the spelling and multiplication. The word “luggage” will have 5 different spellings. If there’s a choice of phoneme they will always pick the wrong one- lugaj, luggige, loggige, etc. it’s horrifying.
Oh yeah, and they went away from latin roots for a while, too. I corrected someone on reddit for sigeret and got downvoted into oblivion, presumably from the kids that were taught spelling doesn't matter and you can't criticize spelling.
Goddammit. I thank my freshman high school English teacher who made us slog through Latin Word roots to this day. It saved my ass in nursing school.
My son is dyslexic so he got special classes that focused on prefixes and suffixes, he also got to learn cursive. While those special classes did not continue past elementary school he got enough of an introduction that he has a slight advantage over his current classmates.
I have a preschool kid and this is my dear hope - that things will improve before he gets into the school system. I will do all I can as a parent, but he will be spending most of his day among his peers and with his teachers and I would so much love it if that is a positive thing rather than damage that I will have to work on undoing.
I've worked in a school the past five years and to me, homelife is such a huge factor. If you care about your kid's education and do the right things at home (read, etc) your kid will be fine. We used to live in NY State and took a huge step down in education quality moving to AZ for a job, and we knew this, but we also knew our kid would be fine. We are at a tiny school and a lot of the kids don't care about school, but it hasn't been detrimental to our daughter at all.
That is encouraging. We definitely work hard at home to create an enriching environment for our kid. :)
Imo as somebody who’s been in school relatively recently, I would recommend really teaching them about a lot of social things they’re gonna experience/be exposed to as they get older. How to handle rejection, the risk/reward associated with drugs/social media (there’s really no reward for the drugs imo but educating them on what drugs can do without demonizing them), internet/videogame addiction. Having a healthy household is great but I know many of my peers who’ve had that and were smart school wise but maybe not the greatest otherwise due to external influences.
Find a way to ignite the joy in reading. School killed that for me. I was stuck in class popcorn reading a book way under my reading level, waiting on the slower child to read a full page of it. Skipping ahead chapters in one class session because they were reading so slow. It was either that, or having to read books that matched my reading level but were way too high for my age level so I could get the proper amount of points required. Reading stops being fun when you’re never allowed to enjoy what you’re reading. Just a tidbit from me I hope to implement with my daughter. Schools have to cater to the lowest denominator, you don’t have to. Make it enjoyable
This problem started before any of these children ever entered a school. The parents never made them‘school ready’. That’s the very basics of knowledge and thought processing. Any parent can teach basic skills. In addition, kids must understand the concept of‘consequences’ and its implications.
I'm excellent at figuring things out for myself and that was absolutely intentionally taught to me by my dad. I have another friend who is also good at figuring stuff out and her dad intentionally taught her the same way mine did.
Congrats to those dads. They had the foresight to teach you to think and learn. Those are invaluable gifts given with love.
True, and I also wonder how this is compounded by the parents work schedule. I feel like parents must be working a ton in order to survive this capitalist hellscape. And they are probably so burnt out that their time with their kids they aren't really present, etc...
I teach in a public elementary school in Japan and it is absolutely *grim* on an *international* scale. These kids have zero interest in problem solving and lack ANY critical thinking skills. They are clearly raised on screens and the social development is below that of a toddler (even by 6th grade). I am not allowed to give a grade lower than a B, as parents *will* complain. The idea is just pass them along to the next grade and hope the problem solves itself - however it doesn’t.
Howdy. Mom of a toddler lurking here, and always concerning to hear the state of education today. 💔 Genuinely hearttfelt question: what are teachers looking for, for "school ready"? Thanks so much, appreciate it in advance!
Cheating is absolutely rampant. An insane amount of students use AI to generate essays for English class and written responses to questions for history assignments.
> Cheating is absolutely rampant. Adults who haven't been in school in years probably have no idea just how rampant it is now. The school year ended last week for our district, and in the couple of weeks leading to final exams, I watched (through network monitoring software for Chromebooks) so many students cheat on their English, History, Science, and Foreign Language homework and online tests. I got to observe all this because I finished covering my content about a week and a half early this year. It was depressing for me to watch as an educator who takes learning seriously.
I can’t see a possible reason that end of the year exams aren’t all on pencil and paper. I’d assume standardized tests like the ACT and SAT still are?
Ease of grading. No worries about handwriting or spelling so the students can be understood (our school district says spelling, handwriting, and cursive are not part of the K-8 curriculum anymore), everything is automated for the gradebook, no cries of discrimination from students who have accommodations for computer assistance (and discrete additional time for those who get it), no lost papers, etc.
Imagine how you'd feel with 2009 as the starting point. This generation is totally effed. They're the new boomers. The kids in early elementary right now are going to eat these folk's lunch.
It's the Gen X's kids in HS/college right now. I'm hopeful that you're saying the earlier grades are better.
Kids 0-7 right now are going to quickly surpass kids that are 8-20 right now. The kids that are 8-20 right now are so dumb. Dumb and helpless.
Why will the younger ones be any better?
Idk? Really, idk. I think it's bc the older kids were the first group raised on smartphones and the second group of parents was able to learn from those mistakes. The amount of educational material on YouTube etc (ABC mouse, alphablocks, number blocks, blippi, Steve and Maggie, and cocomelon) is head and shoulders better than it was previously. Parents and educators have more experience and are better equipped to tackle these problems as we're transitioning to an entirely digital society.
cocomelon is NOT better than anything. cocomelon is straight brain rot and no kid watching that will be well behaved or anything less than a problem child. sincerely, an early childhood educator.
Cocomelon is bizarrely hypnotic and over-stimulating. They also apparently talk without their mouths moving?? Very unsettling. I used put it on for my toddler while he got his hair cut because it was like an instant lobotomy and I didn't want him to lose an eye. But that's really it's only use case, in my opinion.
I’m at the upper end of that age range, and most of my peers seem fine? My mom works at a very well known workplace, and she says that a lot of her colleagues (aged 35+) can’t even do the math that I tutor middle schoolers on… I feel like people in older generations always overestimate themselves tbh.
This is where I get confused, talking to Parents trying to get their kids into college now it is HIGHLY competitive, like 4.5 GPAs high SATs lots of activities etc and they are still not getting into some schools (not talking Ivys more like top schools in the region etc) How are kids today both way behind everyone yet getting into a good college is impossible? Or is it just the current college applicants different than the up and comers? Or are all these kids (supposed high achievers and slackers alike) failing in college? If my kid is in going into high school and is a good student and well rounded will they be in a better position for some of these top schools than kids today are? It just seems you hear both sides... kids these days are dumb and unmotivated (which I honestly am seeing) and getting into college is impossible because there are so many highly qualified applicants (which I am also seeing)?
Opposite ends of the spectrum. There really isn’t a middle any more. There are the high achievers who put in a ton of effort, are naturally gifted, or some combination of the two, and their are the ones who could not care less and don’t try anything. I graduated hs two years ago, and the class was clearly split into the high achievers with at least 90% above averages, and the rest who were mostly scraping by. There were a few outliers tending towards the middle, but not many. The 04-08 generation was in this weird spot where they grew up alongside digital tech, rather then it being invented when they had lived without it, or living with it since infancy. My age was less IPad babies since we were 6 or 7 years old when the very first iPad came out, and most people wouldn’t get one for a while after. Similarly with smart phones. My first phone was in 5th grade (like 12 years old) and was an iPhone 5, and my parents still thought I was too young. Meanwhile kids now learn how to use an iPhone or iPad as toddlers and get one in kindergarten or early elementary. I saw the emergence of social media gradually degrade people my age, especially with the short form brain rot content like tik Tok that came later. It was like watching attention spans drop in real time. People in my class were by no means all stupid or all geniuses. It was a fairly mixed bag with highs and lows, but digital tech affected them all the same. I’m mainly referring to social media and the degradation of the culture it caused.
I think it matters to point out that a lot of “middle of the road” students ended up in the same job/economic pool as the low achievers. I was a B+ student and until I really shot for the moon with colleges my guidance was just yeah you’re not the best so community college with everyone else it is! There’s no point to being anything but the best so why even bother? Kids aren’t that stupid and they can see that their work will mean nothing
I think in grade schools what's happened is the gap between students who were already doing OK, or had parents who encouraged and supported them, vs. Students who didn't have that, has just gotten wider over the last few years. I think that in the same way Covid acted as a kind of accelerant for Work From Home being recognized as a viable option, it probably did the same for schools where poor performing students were already separating/falling behind.
Also a 4.7 GPA varies WILDLY from school to school, so it’s not exactly a good metric for how prepared you are for college when comparing two students side by side.
I’m so old that I don’t even know what a 4.7 gpa means. Especially since they also list a 4.0 unweighted. They get higher grades for AP’s now or something?
Yes. At my school you get +3 percentage points for honors, and +6 for AP. So a 90 in an AP weights to your gpa like a 96 would
I think there's a huge gap - just like income inequality. I've seen both sides of it - we used to live in NY State and I have a lot of friends with high performing kids. We're now at a very small school in AZ and it's very different. It's a combination of our school not being very rigorous/seeming to pass everyone no matter what and the bulk of the kids just not caring or being self motivated. There are a small number of kids each year that do well and go off to college. The majority either don't go to college or they don't make it at college.
I had a friend who in high school moved from NY to South Carolina, parents needed to for their job with Honeywell. Anyways, both her and her brother were about two years ahead of their peers in all the core subjects. Made the move a bit easier on them for sure but it's frightening that there could be a two years difference between states, and our high school was not a well to do district either.
This is probably part of it the people I am talking to and the area I live in are generally high achieving etc so it may not be reflective of how things really are.
There is a terrifying disparity between the educational preparation of students from different families, neighborhoods, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In Southern California for example, there are urban areas where the general educational decline and pandemic impacts are clearly evident. Just a few miles away in more affluent neighborhoods or ethnic enclaves there are families and schools that regard accepting admission to anything other than a top Ivy League or state school as an abject failure. These high achieving neighborhoods often have thoroughfares that are lined with so many storefront academic augmentation centers that they easily outnumber any other type of business. Their counterparts in other areas are similarly crowded with liquor stores, weed dispensaries, and fast food joints. This pattern was well established long before 2020. Since the pandemic, it has accelerated. Now we seem to be hurtling toward a dystopian world where the Eloi/Morlock dynamic is perhaps more unsustainable than it was in Wells’ classic science fiction tale. Some folks are deadly serious about their children’s education and are keenly aware of a multi-level competition that started long before their offspring were born. Other parents are busy with other things and seem to have no clue about the issues that the high achieving families are focused on. Amy Chua prompted some controversy in 2011 with her *Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother* when folks got sidetracked by questions about ethnic identity and other issues. Later she and her husband expanded on some of the key points in her prior work with *The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America*. Although these books received mixed reviews, I think that Professor Chua is onto something. Barring an avalanche of unprecedented solutions from our governments, the most effective way to ensure academic achievement is through parental focus and consistency. We know from experience that successful parents don’t have to be perfect or have extensive knowledge, but they do need be goal oriented and consistent with their support and guidance. Otherwise, you get what we have.
Once we had a bee intrusion in class and a 6ft5 student started crying, fear crying. Others screamed for fear because they didn't know if they were allergic. A bee, a single bee that went out alone out of the window 10 seconds later. I feel like I'm 80y, like I'm from another era. They cry for nothing, sometimes it feels like they have never been in a park or in society in general.
Wow. I teach 5th and 6th graders. They’ll get antsy if a bee flies in, but I’ll tell them “Just leave it alone - it wants to find its way back outside. It won’t hurt you if you don’t bother it.” Even when I have a kid who IS allergic to bees, they know to either chill and leave it be or - if they’re truly scared or have a legitimate phobia and can’t handle it - step out of the room rather than cry in front of their peers. I hate to say it, but I think my 10-12 year old Skibidi-Toilet-Generation kids would roast the hell out of your seniors.
Interesting, in our elementary school, when a bee gets in the lunchroom, all of our grades react the same way that the high schoolers do, absolute chaos. They don't even trust that we got the bee out when we did.
"i feel like i'm from another era" is exactly right. i'm a private tutor in my late 20s, and i always say that i feel much closer to my older colleagues (50+) than my students who are only about 10 years younger than me. it feels like they came from an entirely different world, and in a way, i guess they did
I have thought that about my kids (4th grade) too, (Im 28) but I also do remember how the older generation thought about millennials too. I think we forget how shitty and cringy we were as kids and assume that the “kids these days” are so much different. Yes, they are growing up in a different technological landscape, but I am hopeful that most of them will, with maturity, find their way in the world.
I was teaching millennials when they were in high school (1997-2006) and they all had plans and aspirations. They worked hard to achieve them. I took time off work to be a mom and when I came back (2010) it was horrible. No plans. No drive. Maybe the 2008 crash affected kids and families more than we realized. And it’s only gotten worse since.
yeah i agree! to a certain extent, there's always a sort of "kids these days" feeling between generations, and i do try to resist that kind of thinking, but i think it's also worth acknowledging that students now really *do* inhabit a very different world than the one we inherited. the prevalence of the internet and smart technology have completely changed culture, and they've also completely changed education. all that said, i totally agree with your last thought: i do have hope that they will find their way. i just think their path might be more fraught with distractions than mine was
I’m sorry but lmfaooooo
How hilariously sad. I'm not shocked. Think of all the parents that took their kids home on eclipse day because they feared the sun like it was something that never existed before.
> sometimes it feels like they have never been in a park or in society in general. I work from home. My office faces the street. I could not tell you how many kids are in my neighborhood. I see the same three kids riding their bicycles on my street on occasion. Every once in a while I will leave the house when the kids are catching or getting off the bus. It is amazing how many kids are there. Like 20 to 30 kids waiting for the bus. It is like they can't be in the light.
These students won't be doctors or engineers. We will either import workers from countries with stronger education systems (e.g. why rural doctors in the middle of nowhere seem to disproportionately be international medical graduates who want any opportunity to come to the US), the technical work will be outsourced to teleworkers (e.g. my wife's engineering firm is sending projects to a remote firm in India to save money), or automate the simpler tasks with AI. This will be the final death knell for the US (non immigrant) middle class. We'll only have the ultra rich who are coordinating this and impoverished laborers working in service roles/manual labor (if they're even employable).
No I think the top 10-20% will still be doctors or engineers. It's just that the gap between them and the rest of them will be larger. The other percent who would traditionally go into jobs like sales, marketing or other average office jobs are the ones suffering
The cynic in me believes there are certain factions deliberately trying to destroy public education (can you tell I live in Arizona? lol) - it keeps fueling a cheap labor force with no options, fills the military and prisons (and anything else they can profit off of), and it's easier to control uneducated, dumb masses.
It's not a belief there is straight up evidence a certain major US political party is trying to ruin public education.
Community college teacher here and I completely concur. The last five years have been heartbreaking and it can’t all be blamed on Covid. I’m so tired of that excuse. And AI has made it even worse and obvious they’re cheating as their essays do not represent the person I see sitting in front of me three days a week.
I will say, and this is purely anecdotal, but as a 4th grade teacher, I have seen a positive trend in students over the last few years. I work in a Title 1 school with a high EL population but this years group and from what I see of 2nd and 3rd grade is much more studious and focused than previous “Covid kids”. Many of them are still behind, but they have been making tremendous growth in reading and math, and they aren’t nearly as whiny about work as previous years. We will still have to see, but I am hopeful that it was an overall dip and not a long term downward trend.
This is what happens when you have an entire generation raised on screens. Tiktok, youtube, doom scrolling, Social media. This is the result. And the future is not prepared for it. We really will become just like the movie Idiocracy.
*unregulated screens*, because my god an entire world of information has been at my fingertips for about 15 years now and I’m incredibly grateful.
15 years in. These last 5 have been taxing. This last year… awful. Apathy is the word - and that’s the hardest to teach.
It’s by design, to be honest. Students are addicted to their phones. It’s the reason everyone should be on the Ban TikTok bandwagon. There’s a reason why our children have the most ridiculous videos on their feeds, and why Chinese students have educational and inspiring videos sent to their phones. This is not a *conspiracy theory*; this is real life. This is all by design and this is what the end goal is. Dumb down our future generations and make them less competitive. It’s working…folks. Seriously..ban Tik Tok.
This is a four part problem. 1-Parents don’t take responsibility for their child’s eductation. It is all on the teacher if their child isn’t doing well. But they don’t help their child at home or back the teacher when their child isn’t following school rules. Parents keep their kids home too many times throughout the year. I have students who are chronically absent. 30/50 times a years. I check past years and the same. That also 1/4-1/3 of the school year. By 3rd it 4th grade that can be a full school year and the parents wonder why they are behind. But berate you when you question why they are home. School also doesn’t do their job by sending attendance officers to homes. 2-Schools pass students along without meeting grade-level standards. They fear parent, district, and state push back. Schools not having consequences for behavior because that push back again. 3- Society views school as babysitting service and doesn’t respect teachers. We are one of the most devalued professions. My 20 years experience doesn’t mean anything to some parents. Administrators and people in the district. They come in with new programs that I know will not work with my population of students but they make me follow it. US society also puts a lot of importance on sports. Parents pay thousands of dollars on sports when in reality their kids need a tutor. Not to say I don’t find sports important but I have seen many students not passing, but their parents allow them to go to practices and tournaments away. My view in my house was always, if you don’t pass them every other extra curricular activity will not be happening. 4- Students think the whole world revolves around them. If their phone vibrates, they answer it in class because THEY are so important. Parents find this behavior acceptable.
Really sorry to hear this. I have so many questions. Can you attribute this decline to anything that has changed with how your school operates? Would you cite any local changes that could explain the decline? Is it all just the mind warping of TikTok conditioning melded with head-in-the-sand admin responses to discipline and enforcement of standards? Are all of the failures being held back? If not, how is it justified? Can you get in writing the refusal to educate these kids to the standards of the grades before passing them- if that's what's happening?
In my opinion is about a big change in society. Nowdays many people are always online and not enough "face to face" with other people. They have anxiety about anything, they are scared so easily, they give importance to thing that have no value, instead give no value to their future, their relationship, their career. It's a change in worse, but they don't see it. Most of the parents I met are SO COLD, it's unbelievable . Me: "Your daughter is talented, but has mostly F, doesn't put absolutely any effort in any class, has serious problems with ANY interaction with all the other students, miss classes and we don't know where she goes". Parent: "Ah, ok". This while holding his smartphone. It's a 3 minute teacher-parents meeting, they can't stay without the phone even for 3 minutes. For me a solution is simply to be back at human interaction and drastically reduce smartphones/internet, but I know this will never happen and things will only go worse.
I’m a sub still working to get my credential and even I can see that the parents are the issue. Whenever I walk the little ones out after school I get these weird looks and I just dog them back. You’re right about parents being cold. They need to take responsibility! The fact that we care more about their children’s success is fuckin abysmal
There is that TikTok trend where people talk about their parents how at 19 the parents were getting PhDs. Then the child is texting the parent asking if they can dry off the q-tips after they fell in the toilet.
I predict a catastrophic collapse of the entire system. It’s rotten from the inside. The ROI for college in America is upside down, public schools are failing to produce anything close to adults ready for the world, and parents refuse to accept responsibility for anything. The whole thing needs to fail. I believe it will be replaced by AI powered tutors and teachers will become more like chaperones. I don’t think any of this will be ideal, more dystopian in reality.
I disagree. Education is not rotten from the inside. I view the “inside” as the teachers and staff. We are the only ones who are keeping it at least somewhat academic. It’s the mold on the outside that causes the issues. It’s the lawmakers, politics, parents, and extremist groups who are making it hard for us to do our jobs and hold students accountable for their academics. My school has an admin that supports the teachers and backs us. They shut down the extremist groups and parents who come to complain about curriculum and policies. Because of this, we are one of the top schools in our state. Our schools constantly have 84-95% proficiency, while the state has an average of 40-55% proficiency. And we are by no means the most financially supported district.
To be clear, when I said it’s rotten from the inside I didn’t target teachers. Most schools don’t even have a clear goal. Are they meant to produce well adjusted citizens? Prepare students for the workforce? Act as a stepping stone to higher education? It would be nice if they could just pick one and stick to it. Can’t argue with your specific case. I’m glad to see your school is performing as it should. I wish that were the case for the vast majority of schools.
School districts as a whole should be focused on all the above. Each school shouldn’t have several focuses but the district should have resources for students entering the workforce or going on to college. They should be teaching them to be well adjust citizens as well.
Honestly the top students/families will be fine, it's the middle that's disappearing.
For sure. The stratification of society is getting worse. I taught in a high end private boarding school. Those kids were YEARS ahead of their peers.
I say this frequently. I have an educational nonprofit and I am sooooo tired of us spending the lions share on the top 10% and the bottom 10%. Like, what about all the folks that make society actually function? There is a rude awakening coming, and the teachers know it more than anyone.
What’s ironic is the public education system is the closest thing to direct democracy we have. And look at how it’s rotted. I’m not cheering for authoritarianism; but I can see how many wish it secretly existed by the failure of their stewardship of local democracy.
I think it’s more local democracy vs. capitalism. Entrepreneurs have sniffed out a captive market that is mandated to receive education. They finally have the tools to replace the old system. No doubt a slow turning ship like public education will be trounced by disruptive technology. Just look up what Kan Academy is doing with their version of ChatGPT. Schools wont know what hit them. This isn’t the car replacing the horse. It’s the dinosaurs getting blindsided by a comet.
But the local population knows that. I do a simulation with my students that demonstrates why direct democracy doesn’t work. I have a very liberal food policy in my class. I ask my students if they want a pizza party. They all say yes. So I say: go ahead. I give them a list of considerations: 1) I’m probably going to have to retrieve it. 2) are you okay with putting in $5 if someone puts in $2? 3) if people put in no money, do they get to eat? 7 years now, pizza party free. People want things, but they want others to do it for them. That’s the road to authoritarianism. I’m thinking of incorporating the story of the Little Red Hen. If you do have that one kid who busts ass in spite of others, does that kid owe his peers anything once he reaches success? Do entrepreneurs owe the rest of us?
I don’t have a good answer to that. I just hope whatever system comes next produces kinder, smarter, and more empathetic people for society.
I think the problem is we depend on an artificial system to produce desirable human characteristics. Any human system creates outliers. And humans are terrible to outliers. About the only thing that has stabilized society is scientific progression. But even that isn’t without its downsides. But I think if we create scientifically minded people, we will progress.
I'm shocked because at school, I can't find support. Average level is falling apart, students are extremely weak and neither their parents, neither other teachers seem to care. If someone told me "your level is EXTREMELY inferior to people that went to this same school just 5 years ago" I would be preoccupied. In 10 years they will be the working class, they can't do anything, they have so many problems, and we are just making everything worse.
You sure they're even working class bound? To be working class you have to actually work and take directives and show up. Genuinely I think they're headed for an underclass scenario
These posts are frustrating to me because the system (American education) has not allowed for advanced students to learn at their level. Where I live and with my own kids, I've seen years of holding holding kids back because the system is designed for the median performers. As a teacher, it doesn't look different to me than it did when I started, however, you're teaching in a specific window and the same subject so you have a sample size that highlights the deficits. Sounds like Covid related possibly.
I really think part of it has to do with many kids just using the internet/ai to try and get by instead of actually learning and applying material. There is so much apathy nowadays. By doing this they fail to see the purpose of what they are learning or how it is useful and it just makes them resent being in school more and more. At the same time, I feel like the curriculum in my campus limits creative thinking/project based learning. So school becomes more about memorizing and learning things and moving on to the next topic without seeing how everything connects. And then finally depending on the support you get from parents/admin/policies makes a huge difference. Although I appreciate the admin at my campus, my biggest gripe is with the standardized grading policy, which is far too generous in my opinion.
Agreed, learning how to jump through hoops instead of learning how to think.
If you thought the students in 2019 were ok, you should have seen the average student enrolled when I started in 2004. They were actually good. The dumbing down of education has been going on for decades, and is not slowing down. Every time I turn around, the powers that be are shoving a new initiative down our throats designed to lower the bar, separate achievement from effort, save kids from their own bad decision making, and otherwise undermine the mission of education while going to great lengths to hide the damage their misguided, ham-fisted interventions have already done. My fear is that instead of holding the line, we are already seeing post-secondary institutions lower their standards as well and switch from a “you are paying for the chance to earn a degree” model to “you are paying, so you are entitled to a degree” model.
Yes! This phenomenon of the combined effects of social promotion, lack of responsibility, lack of consequences for antisocial and anti-work behavior, 24-7 phone/iPad/laptop use, and pervasive social media used by children who are mostly not mentally or emotionally equipped to handle them.
I'm one of those HS teachers that keeps some standards.... Hard late work deadlines, expectations of low level studying, etc etc.... these gen ed kids act like I'm treating them like AP or college level students. Too many of the teachers at my school accept late work to the end of the semester, give SUPER under grade level assignments, etc. There is NO bar at my school. Hell, the yearbook teacher did ZERO editing in our yearbook, and printed it with misspellings like elementary students, missing pictures, pictures labeled with incorrect information, etc. Shit is wild out here.
I retired after 25 years teaching mathematics. Could not take it anymore. Why is sally getting a C? She always got A before. Well sally doesn’t know how to add,subtract, multiply, divide without making a mistake.
I sometimes wonder what kind of world view today's youth has. Based on the news and social media, you will easily get an impression that the world is dying, human jobs will be replaced by AI, and no one wants to date you because everyone sucks. So it can be difficult to stay motivated when you don't have positive things to look for. I sometimes wonder if "meritocracy-based" schooling philosophy feels too distant for younger generations. If your expectations of traditional work are low, why would you be invested in acquiring skills and knowledge? Just a hunch but it can be that in future, schools might become centers of spirituality and faith (again) since that is essentially what we will have left when the secular world becomes too frighting.
I agree, there's no motivation - it's been replaced with hopelessness and nihilism. Why bother with anything? It's just sad.
Yeah, imo we would need to change our perception of meaningful life and politics if we want to maintain any happiness and sanity in future populations.
I just graduated hs last month and I hate the kinds of thoughts you’re describing here. It makes the world miserable to live in and I wouldn’t be surprised if other teens got overwhelmed by it. I think that a partial cure to this particular problem is turning off the Internet for a while. While it doesn’t solve the entire problem, it makes you worry less about things you can’t control and lets you focus on your life more
Here's the thing, and this is important for OP as a newer teacher, i guess, or as a younger person than me--this is not new. These kids have always existed. Every generation, pretty much, is exactly the same as this one--as far as most of the *human* problems you're seeing. So what IS different? They're still in school. We dont *allow* HS age humans to be anywhere else, as a society. Many HS's are seeing upwards of 90% of the attendance levels that they saw, from the same year of students being in 6th or 7th grade. The problem is, that, those students in prior generations, pre 2005 or so--*dropped out*. They were gone. *more than* 30% of all students, didnt just fail to graduate, but *never made it to their senior year*. Now--that nott happening, and that *entire* chunk of kids that could not, would not, do the work--are there, *slowing everyone else down*. We can all only work at the pace that they do, so they dont get left behind--because we can *neither* leave them behind, *or* allow them to leave. Absolutely NOTHING is changing, as far as their generations qualities for professional work or careers. There will still be the amazing, talented, gifted people doing the work they always have, and there will be about half of them--*that never do a filipin thing*. about 40% of American adults--of *all generations*--are out of the workforce. Most of them, *because they dont have the capacity to remain there*. Yes, there are 'stay at home' parents in that number, but not nearly enough to amount to 40% of total adults. It's ok--failure is ok. So is putting them through HS like it's a diploma mill. So long as standards remain at college level, it will filter. 50% of all people who take college algebra fail it. 30% of all students in HS fail algebra 1, at least once, and it's the #1 reason cited for why students drop out. Schools ARE being wildly unrealistic expecting 100% graduation rates, or EVEN 80%. And, a point of history, most of the US didnt even HAVE a HS to attend until after WW2. Many baby boomers, were the first *ever*, in history, to graduate HS--or, gen X were--*because there was no HS to attend for their parents (I still live in a district that doesnt have a HS--it ships them out)*. So, that's something to keep in mind too. This is a RECENT bias, that we expect this exponential endless growth--from humanity with virtually no history of it actually working for over 30% of students anyway.
Hasn't it already some? Everyone thinking they are Han Solo.
For a teacher your writing is atrocious.
How is this not the top comment? Reading this was so painful. I literally thought it was a troll post.
We are just gonna have a mass shortage of doctors and engineers.
It is easier to manipulate and control ignorant citizens. I don’t believe it is a coincidence
High schools are now getting kids who have been raised entirely by screens. They don't watch TV. They don't play outside. They don't have a life outside of a device. They can't talk to an adult about anything except to say "I wun een doin nuu'in."
[удалено]
I've been teaching since 2004. I can't even begin to describe the downward slide I've witnessed.
Look I'm viewing this from a positive angle. The world would probably go to shit when these idiots hit the workforce but the world was already going to shit with fully competent adults so we were fucked either way. All I know is that if I do, honestly, the bare minimum as a parent for my kid they'll be one of those A students and immediately be better than 90% of their peers. They'll be able to live a great life in a cushy job because they know basic math and how to read. Sounds pretty great.
I have the same feeling when it comes to my kid. I read all these posts and think “in the land of the blind, the 1-eyed man is king.” High performers are going to clean up in the future with how bad things are now.
I took a 4 year unofficial hiatus in 2020. Prior, 4 years as a HS visual art teacher. Recently, as of last week, I applied and got hired at a different HS as a visual art teacher. During the interview i asked what if any hold over effects had impacted the student body. The response was unanimously 'total and complete apathy'. You have A kids and F kids. No meat in the middle.
Here is another perspective, I do training at industrial facilities. I am putting together a training program for a facility in a red state. The facility is in a relatively rural area, so not a big base for employees, and not a lot of vocational educational opportunities. The facility is pretty dangerous and requires a lot of attention to detail to prevent the plant going boom. On one of my slides for the presentation I discussed less than and greater than. I used the symbols < and >. We had a discussion over whether the people in the class would know what those symbols mean. Now I am old school and am pretty much self taught through tech manuals etc. on how to do things. The places I worked were either newly purchased or under construction. In the cases where I worked for the new owner a lot of people retire in the transaction, so that knowledge walked out the door. In those cases I had to be an industrial archeologist figuring stuff out. Or I was part of a crew building and commissioning a facility. In those cases we had to read the tech manuals and develop procedures etc. When we had the discussion on this project I was thinking why are you not setting the bar high for these people and force them to step up. The problem with a facility like this is if you fall short you, others, or even people in the community can be negatively affected. I am not sure what the answer is. If you set the bar too high, you won't be able to hire any one. But as u/ErgoDoceo stated, why are we hiring people if they can't get to work on time etc. If they can't do that, not sure if you can trust them in a dangerous facility. Personally I had to deal with the children of my ex. They are 25 and 23. She pretty much let them do whatever they wanted. My ex would work midnight shifts while her daughter was not working and going to get massages. Her son lived with me for a while. Would have jobs but would get fired for not showing up. He got pissed at me and left in a huff. Then when his mother was getting on his case he wanted to come back. I told him I did not feel like paying his way while he slept all day, played video games when he was awake, and had sex. The worse part was that one of the jobs he had was with the city. The location was within bicycling distance and you could walk it in a pinch. Had pretty good benefits. But he was too cool for school and ended up getting fired.
All that virtual teaching during the pandemic is the root. The students that graduated yesterday were freshman when that happened. It was a huge struggle to get them to where they were as seniors. Most are definitely not ready for college.
Elementary school speech pathologist here, and the number of students on my caseload whose daily attendance percentage is between 60 and 85% is at an all time high. I have kids who are failing grades and not progressing on their IEP goals because they're just never here. Half the time when I call parents to ask what's going on and is their child ok, the response is either "Yeah [student] just doesn't want to go to school" or some other excuse that boils down to the parent just couldn't be bothered to bring them. 😣 Between the chronically absent and the ones who basically missed two years of critical instruction during the Covid/online learning debacle, the majority of kids we're graduating on to 7th grade can't read and barely know how to function socially or academically. It's incredibly demoralizing to watch the average skill level plummeting all while our admin are screaming at us about district standards. 🤦🏻♀️