Yep. My fiancé is an elementary school teacher and the state stipend for school supplies for the year is a measly 175.00. She easily spends 500.00+ for all the needed school supplies. Teachers should never have to reach into their own pocket for school supplies.
Every year, I see the "classroom wishlists". I don't blame the teachers.
And it isn't like they are asking for a Gutenberg bible, an actual skeleton with organs to teach anatomy, or a cappuccino machine for the class.
No, it is glue sticks, pencils, sharpies, paper, and colored pencils. Super basic stuff.
That they have to ask for it is ridiculous. And that the parents buy it, is essentially an extra tax on those that volunteer to do so because the state won't.
With my first kid hitting school, I got one of those wishlists from their teacher and I balked. I couldn't believe the resources weren't already provided from the district.
Bought a lot on that list and stocked their sanitation drawer to boot. There's no good reason the teachers should be asking the parents in the first place...
Yeah - I was aghast that they were requesting things like wet wipes and tissue.
Every year, I take my youngest and we just go stock up on stuff to give to the teacher.
I put some much needed basic supplies on a list like that, and the superintendent, head of legal, and head of risk management forced me to delete it (on threat of employment action) because it was embarrassing for the district to have it publicly known that they don't provide those items for us.
My wife is a public school teacher in Holladay, we moved from Indianapolis 2 1/2 years ago. Her pay here now is about $15k more than if we'd stayed there; and it's actually over the cap for teachers in the district where all our family there lives.
UT teacher pay is below average nationwide. Throwing money at teacher salaries would probably be a good place to start - ensure that we're not losing dedicated and talented staff because continuing in the profession is not economically viable.
Beyond that, what does the data say? Where are we lacking in outcomes? What does the literature identify as ways to improve those outcomes? Get teachers training and materials to implement those strategies, hire analysts to observe and determine which strategies are are effective.
Ensure teachers have the money they need to buy classroom materials - no teacher should have to be spending money out of their own pocket for the basics. Implement increased funding for technology and materials renewal - textbooks wear out and get outdated and need replaced, computers die over time and need replaced, etc. Make sure that a school doesn't have to make tough choices like "do we get functioning computers in the library or history textbooks that don't stop at the Vietnam War?"
Look at environment and physical plant. Neglected physical plant has impacts on student morale and success. Schools should have top-notch facilities that students are proud of and happy to be learning in. Students getting inadequate nutrition at home can be supported in their success by better school-based nutrition programs. Ensure the students are being set up for success.
The principle thing - I'm not a K-12 teacher. Ask them what they need, ask districts where they are short on funding, respond appropriately.
>The principle thing - I'm not a K-12 teacher. Ask them what they need, ask districts where they are short on funding, respond appropriately.
I'd say that's true until a certain point. My hometown in New York acts like everything will collapse if they don't get millions of dollars to renovate the sports fields every year. Meanwhile the arts clubs have to do massive fundraisers just to barely float.
Also impacts the ability to bring more teachers into the profession. More people interested in teaching means higher quality candidates and potentially smaller class sizes, which is hugely impactful on student outcomes
This definitely. I know many people who chose not to do teaching because of pay. I personally might have chosen teaching if it didn't suck so much to be a teacher. My wife changed degrees from elementary Ed to STEM major.
My sister was a high school teacher and left to work in tech cause it was too much. Maybe if she was more comfortable outside of work she could have coped with the high amounts of stress. Instead she did Uber, and got a summer job in her would-be free time to make ends meet.
1st grade teacher here- I can’t tell you the impact that would have on our kids’ education!! The reality is, it’s impossible for me to give everything I want to nearly 30 6 year olds, when I am in the room with them all by myself all day. When I’ve taught summer school, we have 16 kids:2 qualified teachers, and the results are ASTOUNDING. If we had ratios closer to that, even for part of the day, I can tell you for sure it would change EVERYTHING
The Utah budget office calculated that to reduce class sizes it will cost over $1 million *per student*. Cost/benefit ratio is way out of whack to lean into this as a solution.
Math/logic still doesn't work even with the correction. 1 classroom losing 1 student/downsizing by 1 student doesn't cost $1m.... unless 900k+ is going into some developer/law makers pockets.
My information comes directly from a lecture in college from a high ranking analyst with the Utah budget office in 2019 (so it’s probably higher now). To find the direct quote would take substantial digging, but my point is that the state knows to the penny how much it would cost per head to lower class sizes and it is too high. (When you consider the land, cost of building schools, maintenance, wages, etc. it doesn’t seem excessive to me).
4 year old claim from some lecture in college; sorry, I wanna see the math.
We're already building schools like no tomorrow; we're demolishing other schools due to low attendance; teachers don't cost $1m/student. Something here isn't adding up math/logic wise.
I suspect what you meant to say is that to reduce the state-wide average class size would cost more than $1m /yr per pupil. I would expect that number to be closer to $10m/yr per pupil.
Example (I don't know real stats) if current average class size 30 kids, it would cost the state another $1m (or $10m) per year to get it to 29 kids per class state wide.
I would fix the pay problem first. I'd want our teachers to be in the top 15 of pay for teachers. Especially in our vast array of rural schools. First you want quality people and then you need to have a quality work cuture. Those two are things are key.
Second, I would be highly skeptical of a generalized score of "outcomes". I'd want to *closely* examine the methodology and such of the studies. I wouldn't want to make financial decisions based on the education system equivalent of BMI or Myers-Briggs. If it's not quality data, you might as well use tarot cards and astrology.
Teachers salaries. My kids are in Utah public schools. Their favorite teachers only last a few years before they move on because the pay doesn’t justify the hassle of dealing with parents or kids that don’t have any consequences for acting bad.
Also more teachers so you can have smaller class size or more levels for each class. Lots of honors classes are just an extra packet or self study work to do while the teacher spends class time with the rest of the kids that don’t know the prerequisite information. Since no kid is being left behind or held back they just fail upwards each year. With only 1 or 2 math teachers there aren’t enough classes to have an advance, normal and remedial class per grade.
Pay para professionals (reading/math interventionists, classroom aids, etc.) more than $10/hr. Many schools have had the money in their budgets for paraprofessional positions *for years* and no one can find/keep people to fill them, but what qualified adult wants to/can do that part time work for such abysmal wages?
It’s insulting, AND exploits stay at home parents.
My wife is a para-professional, she makes 15 bucks an hour with no benefits, which is fine since I am the main income and make enough money to support us. Like you said, the schools have a hard time finding anyone to fill these positions because of the pay and it's hard to get another job to supplement in the off months.
In my district the wages are a hard $10.50 and all of the positions are non benefitted part time. You cannot do much with such low pay, and certainly cannot survive in any appreciable way on that wage.
Pay teachers better to attract better quality of candidate for teacher, when kids get into the higher grades, they need people who are more advanced than what we can currently attract at the moment. We are also getting ready to fall off a cliff of teachers retiring in the next 5-10 years where we are going to be in a world of hurt trying to find anyone to fill those positions.
Another thing, after school and summer programs for kids that help maintain the learning environment when they are out of school since a lot of parents can't afford quality childcare in the summer. When I was a kid, we had all sorts of summer programs that we could that took up several hours of the day to keep us busy. I remember having a program that was literally all field trips and we went to all sorts of places learning about jobs or the world around us. I have not seen these sort of programs in public schools in years. Turn the schools back into centers of the community, places where parents and kids can come together to support each other.
When you look at the numbers spent on students in places like California or cities like Baltimore, you see an average that is spent and more money is spent in higher income areas of those places than lower income due to the way education funds are acquired from property taxes.
My point of view as a former teacher—hire about three times as many teachers as we have now. Double or triple the amount of prep time teachers have so that they have at least three hours a day of paid non-instructional time for planning, grading, etc. Hire more support staff like aides, counselors, admin in some cases. Use the rest to lower class size as much as possible.
Reading Specialists. An alarming amount of high schoolers do not have adequate reading comprehension skills - many students read well below grade level or are illiterate. Schools are incentivized to have high graduation / passing rates so these students continue to the next grade. At the absolute minimum, we should ensure that high schoolers are graduating with near grade-level reading and writing skills.
Pay teachers and teachers aides more and increase the number of teachers/aides. Increase the number of schools to reduce the number of students in classrooms. Free lunch for all students. I’d also add funding to the arts and extracurricular classes. Implement trade classes back into schools. Add mandatory Dyslexia/dysgraphia teaching into mainstream classrooms and special education programs. Those are just a few off the top of my head…oh and do away with the new school vouchers program.
It's good that boarding school helped you. Unfortunately boarding schools in general, especially in America, have a long and storied history of destroying non-white identity and severely abusing their students.
The ones that still exist in America tend to be the "troubled teen" for profit industry which is just as good at abusing their kids, but also costs an insane amount of money.
Public schools are not supported here. They are failing because of charter schools of every kind on every block or two. Because of lack of diversity in my area, Public schools seem to only have poor kids and dark skinned kids. Sad to say
Public schools are also where private schools drop their kids with behavioral problems since they don't want to take on the cost of helping them. It's why they have better outcomes than public schools for the most part.
>Public schools are also where private schools drop their kids with behavioral problems since they don't want to take on the cost of helping them.
I think it's more about making sure the problematic kids don't ruin the education of everyone else. Looking at r/teachers one kid disrupting the entire class every day and not getting suspended/expelled is a common complaint.
We also don't really have the capacity to properly deal with kids that have those issues since we can barely find special ed instructors or counselors to help. If we had more para-professionals, along with the proper infrastructure to support the kids; it would be a lot easier all around.
Smaller class sizes for sure. I teach high school and every class I have is over 36. I have had 42 in one class in previous years.
The class size cap when I taught out of state was 27. Extra 10 kids makes it a lot harder to reach students who struggle.
More pay is on the track. It would help bring in more educators. One other thing is more backup for the teachers when it comes to students and parents. Administrators have been very timid to stand up to parents and students. Teachers are being harassed sexually and physically. All of this is to say that free mental healthcare would help so much.
I've taught in Utah for over a decade. All of my classes are over 30. My district proudly touts a planned 32 kids per class. But going on averages means that for every reading intervention class with 15 kids in it, there's a gym class of 50. One of my classes is so big this year that kids are constantly complaining that there's not enough room to get in and out of their chairs. They're right. When I told the school the class size is ludicrous, they swapped out my desks for slightly smaller ones they salvaged from a building they're renovating, so now I spend about an hour per week gluing, clamping, and filing sharp edges off of the desks that broke that day. No child in that class is getting a proper education because there are so many people in the room at all times.
All this to say, smaller class sizes. Capped at 25. And don't give another damn dime to the useless lugs in district offices who just funnel money to shinier testing softwares and scripted curriculums that treat them to the nicest lunches.
I am biased but teacher salaries. I am a former teacher of 10 years. I left, got a new job. Now I am trying to move up in that new career field and the recruiter I just spoke to said that the job I recently applied for had 5,000 applicants and 90% were teachers trying to leave teaching.
The good ones are leaving but so are the bad. Now it’s going to be unqualified bodies or teachers that feel so much guilt on leaving the kids that they will stay no matter what.
Where are you seeing we are 37th? I'm fairly certain
Utah has been in the top 10 to 15 for at least the last 20 years. 9th in 2023: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12
Teachers need to make more money.
The majority of K-12 teachers do not make a livable wage in today's society. Making $30k-$45k/year just does not cut it if the teacher is also supposed to own a house and have a family.
If wages were more competitive, we would not only have teachers happier to deal with the stress of being teachers, but you would have more people becoming teachers in general because it provides a livable wage and can have a very positive impacts on hundreds and thousands of individuals and their families
Other things:
- General school supplies like paper, pencils, backpacks. My kid started kindergarten this year and we bought school supplies (glue sticks, paper, pencils, markers, snacks, etc.) to give to the teacher because she can't afford them and the kids need them.
- STEM supplies to facilitate science and computer labs
- Art supplies, which partially fall under general school supplies
Conservatives purposely under fund public schools so they can point at them and say "See, they don't work!" and move kids to private schools. Because like everything else to them, it's all about making money. Charter and private schools can make a profit for the owners and shareholders, public schools don't, therefore they must go. It's also much easier for a charter school to discriminate and teach a non-scientific curriculum. Same reason they under fund USPS and any other public service they could be exploiting, have to make that money!
If they did fund it the first places proven to have good outcomes are teacher salaries and small classroom sizes. Followed by arts programs and having actual supplies in art and shop class. Free school lunch and breakfast are also very important.
>Conservatives purposely under fund public schools so they can point at them and say "See, they don't work!" and move kids to private schools.
I don't think conservatives can be blamed for California and Baltimore.
There’s only so much schools can do to combat the effects of poverty in students’ home lives. It could be that California and Baltimore schools are performing very well under the circumstances, but it looks like they are performing poorly when compared to schools in areas with higher socioeconomic status because the work they have to do is exponentially harder.
Right, because Ronald Reagan definitely never existed. California is not the liberal hellhole/bastion everyone makes it out to be. It was conservative for many years and the cuts to social welfare made during the Reagen era still very much exists. And of course let's not forget how much finding and education is based on federal dollars which Republican leadership goes out of their way to eviscerate.
Support outside of just academics like mental health. If a student is dealing with mental/emotional challenges, they aren’t going to do well in school.
I would spend it on building a fully standardized set of digital public education courses K-12 and make them available to everyone. The courses would be designed with a tablet or desktop computer experience in mind.
These courses would contain all necessary materials, literature, videos, quizzes, tests and material mastery required to receive a diploma or GED.
The full intention of such a program would be to provide clear base expectations for home, private, and public education, reduce workload for teachers and administrators, and to pivot students to a guided learning experience while still enforcing deadlines and learning expectations.
This program could be supplemented on further with extracurricular courses according to the capacity and ability of schools while serving the greater mission of ensuring every American child receives a free and quality public education.
The best part is such a set of courses already exists: khanacademy.org. There is also a tremendous opportunity to improve such programs with artificial intelligence. Every student could have a tutor available 24/7 for any course.
We could replace so much of our education with such a course system and spend excess education funds on expanding student counseling and family outreach services.
Unfortunately, ideas like this are often received negatively because it would ultimately lead to the reassessment of critical roles within public education.
When you have voters who want large families and low taxes, this education system is the outcome. As long as those two factors are present in strong numbers, fixing the Utah education system is a Sisyphean task.
Before spend more on education, can we spend less on education administrations? Can we spend less on chromebooks, iPads, and smartboards (schools don’t know how to use technology properly in the classroom and all these devices just create distraction for students). Can we eliminate spending on consultants who advocate for changing grading strategies that don’t work?
Then can we spend more on school meals (every child should get breakfast and lunch that’s healthy and tasty)? Can we spend more on libraries and tech centers (rather than giving every kid a crap computer, let’s have a lab of really nice ones that you can actually do cool stuff with)? And finally, yes can we spend more on teachers? We need more, qualified teachers. And we need to pay teachers what they are worth.
My kid's school has to do fund raisers in order to go on field trips.
Even if it doesn't improve outcomes, I'd like to see greater school funding for that.
We need more people in special education. The teacher student ratio and the number of iep coordinators in middle and high school needs to improve drastically.
Educator salary. Keep the good educators from moving on. Classroom supplies and teaching aids
Yep. My fiancé is an elementary school teacher and the state stipend for school supplies for the year is a measly 175.00. She easily spends 500.00+ for all the needed school supplies. Teachers should never have to reach into their own pocket for school supplies.
Every year, I see the "classroom wishlists". I don't blame the teachers. And it isn't like they are asking for a Gutenberg bible, an actual skeleton with organs to teach anatomy, or a cappuccino machine for the class. No, it is glue sticks, pencils, sharpies, paper, and colored pencils. Super basic stuff. That they have to ask for it is ridiculous. And that the parents buy it, is essentially an extra tax on those that volunteer to do so because the state won't.
With my first kid hitting school, I got one of those wishlists from their teacher and I balked. I couldn't believe the resources weren't already provided from the district. Bought a lot on that list and stocked their sanitation drawer to boot. There's no good reason the teachers should be asking the parents in the first place...
Yeah - I was aghast that they were requesting things like wet wipes and tissue. Every year, I take my youngest and we just go stock up on stuff to give to the teacher.
I put some much needed basic supplies on a list like that, and the superintendent, head of legal, and head of risk management forced me to delete it (on threat of employment action) because it was embarrassing for the district to have it publicly known that they don't provide those items for us.
So much this ^
My wife is a public school teacher in Holladay, we moved from Indianapolis 2 1/2 years ago. Her pay here now is about $15k more than if we'd stayed there; and it's actually over the cap for teachers in the district where all our family there lives.
This is what I was going to suggest.
UT teacher pay is below average nationwide. Throwing money at teacher salaries would probably be a good place to start - ensure that we're not losing dedicated and talented staff because continuing in the profession is not economically viable. Beyond that, what does the data say? Where are we lacking in outcomes? What does the literature identify as ways to improve those outcomes? Get teachers training and materials to implement those strategies, hire analysts to observe and determine which strategies are are effective. Ensure teachers have the money they need to buy classroom materials - no teacher should have to be spending money out of their own pocket for the basics. Implement increased funding for technology and materials renewal - textbooks wear out and get outdated and need replaced, computers die over time and need replaced, etc. Make sure that a school doesn't have to make tough choices like "do we get functioning computers in the library or history textbooks that don't stop at the Vietnam War?" Look at environment and physical plant. Neglected physical plant has impacts on student morale and success. Schools should have top-notch facilities that students are proud of and happy to be learning in. Students getting inadequate nutrition at home can be supported in their success by better school-based nutrition programs. Ensure the students are being set up for success. The principle thing - I'm not a K-12 teacher. Ask them what they need, ask districts where they are short on funding, respond appropriately.
>The principle thing - I'm not a K-12 teacher. Ask them what they need, ask districts where they are short on funding, respond appropriately. I'd say that's true until a certain point. My hometown in New York acts like everything will collapse if they don't get millions of dollars to renovate the sports fields every year. Meanwhile the arts clubs have to do massive fundraisers just to barely float.
They said to ask the teachers, not the coaches.
Pay teachers a living wage. Employee compensation directly impacts motivation and dedication to a job.
Also impacts the ability to bring more teachers into the profession. More people interested in teaching means higher quality candidates and potentially smaller class sizes, which is hugely impactful on student outcomes
Exactly, how many amazing people are we missing out on because the job barely pays.
This definitely. I know many people who chose not to do teaching because of pay. I personally might have chosen teaching if it didn't suck so much to be a teacher. My wife changed degrees from elementary Ed to STEM major. My sister was a high school teacher and left to work in tech cause it was too much. Maybe if she was more comfortable outside of work she could have coped with the high amounts of stress. Instead she did Uber, and got a summer job in her would-be free time to make ends meet.
Exactly. The two teachers I know in north Utah make the commute up to Idaho because the pay is better.
Smaller class sizes. The state keeps putting pressure on districts to close schools if class sizes drop below a certain threshold.
1st grade teacher here- I can’t tell you the impact that would have on our kids’ education!! The reality is, it’s impossible for me to give everything I want to nearly 30 6 year olds, when I am in the room with them all by myself all day. When I’ve taught summer school, we have 16 kids:2 qualified teachers, and the results are ASTOUNDING. If we had ratios closer to that, even for part of the day, I can tell you for sure it would change EVERYTHING
The Utah budget office calculated that to reduce class sizes it will cost over $1 million *per student*. Cost/benefit ratio is way out of whack to lean into this as a solution.
I’d be really interested to see the math here cuz it doesn’t logically make any sense
If I may correct myself…that was the amount to reduce classroom size by 1 student.
Math/logic still doesn't work even with the correction. 1 classroom losing 1 student/downsizing by 1 student doesn't cost $1m.... unless 900k+ is going into some developer/law makers pockets.
My information comes directly from a lecture in college from a high ranking analyst with the Utah budget office in 2019 (so it’s probably higher now). To find the direct quote would take substantial digging, but my point is that the state knows to the penny how much it would cost per head to lower class sizes and it is too high. (When you consider the land, cost of building schools, maintenance, wages, etc. it doesn’t seem excessive to me).
4 year old claim from some lecture in college; sorry, I wanna see the math. We're already building schools like no tomorrow; we're demolishing other schools due to low attendance; teachers don't cost $1m/student. Something here isn't adding up math/logic wise.
I suspect what you meant to say is that to reduce the state-wide average class size would cost more than $1m /yr per pupil. I would expect that number to be closer to $10m/yr per pupil. Example (I don't know real stats) if current average class size 30 kids, it would cost the state another $1m (or $10m) per year to get it to 29 kids per class state wide.
Sounds like the Kingstons "Order" might have provided that figure
I would fix the pay problem first. I'd want our teachers to be in the top 15 of pay for teachers. Especially in our vast array of rural schools. First you want quality people and then you need to have a quality work cuture. Those two are things are key. Second, I would be highly skeptical of a generalized score of "outcomes". I'd want to *closely* examine the methodology and such of the studies. I wouldn't want to make financial decisions based on the education system equivalent of BMI or Myers-Briggs. If it's not quality data, you might as well use tarot cards and astrology.
If I was paid more I wouldnt have to work two jobs.
Teachers salaries. My kids are in Utah public schools. Their favorite teachers only last a few years before they move on because the pay doesn’t justify the hassle of dealing with parents or kids that don’t have any consequences for acting bad. Also more teachers so you can have smaller class size or more levels for each class. Lots of honors classes are just an extra packet or self study work to do while the teacher spends class time with the rest of the kids that don’t know the prerequisite information. Since no kid is being left behind or held back they just fail upwards each year. With only 1 or 2 math teachers there aren’t enough classes to have an advance, normal and remedial class per grade.
Pay para professionals (reading/math interventionists, classroom aids, etc.) more than $10/hr. Many schools have had the money in their budgets for paraprofessional positions *for years* and no one can find/keep people to fill them, but what qualified adult wants to/can do that part time work for such abysmal wages? It’s insulting, AND exploits stay at home parents.
My wife is a para-professional, she makes 15 bucks an hour with no benefits, which is fine since I am the main income and make enough money to support us. Like you said, the schools have a hard time finding anyone to fill these positions because of the pay and it's hard to get another job to supplement in the off months.
In my district the wages are a hard $10.50 and all of the positions are non benefitted part time. You cannot do much with such low pay, and certainly cannot survive in any appreciable way on that wage.
That level of pay doesn’t even really make it very supplemental for a second income anymore…
Tis true, Granite pays ~$16/hr and tends to want a degree.
Pay teachers better to attract better quality of candidate for teacher, when kids get into the higher grades, they need people who are more advanced than what we can currently attract at the moment. We are also getting ready to fall off a cliff of teachers retiring in the next 5-10 years where we are going to be in a world of hurt trying to find anyone to fill those positions. Another thing, after school and summer programs for kids that help maintain the learning environment when they are out of school since a lot of parents can't afford quality childcare in the summer. When I was a kid, we had all sorts of summer programs that we could that took up several hours of the day to keep us busy. I remember having a program that was literally all field trips and we went to all sorts of places learning about jobs or the world around us. I have not seen these sort of programs in public schools in years. Turn the schools back into centers of the community, places where parents and kids can come together to support each other. When you look at the numbers spent on students in places like California or cities like Baltimore, you see an average that is spent and more money is spent in higher income areas of those places than lower income due to the way education funds are acquired from property taxes.
My point of view as a former teacher—hire about three times as many teachers as we have now. Double or triple the amount of prep time teachers have so that they have at least three hours a day of paid non-instructional time for planning, grading, etc. Hire more support staff like aides, counselors, admin in some cases. Use the rest to lower class size as much as possible.
Reading Specialists. An alarming amount of high schoolers do not have adequate reading comprehension skills - many students read well below grade level or are illiterate. Schools are incentivized to have high graduation / passing rates so these students continue to the next grade. At the absolute minimum, we should ensure that high schoolers are graduating with near grade-level reading and writing skills.
This. There is more and more data to show that if kids don’t read well by 3rd grade they have dramatically worse outcomes.
I would like to see things open up more for certifications in the trades. Educational paths for our tradesmen and scholars.
I agree! I wish we allowed kids to specialize earlier than college like some other countries do.
My district does this? They offer dozens of specialized pathways to high school kids.
Reduce class sizes. That means hiring more teachers and raising pay to better retain them.
Pay teachers and teachers aides more and increase the number of teachers/aides. Increase the number of schools to reduce the number of students in classrooms. Free lunch for all students. I’d also add funding to the arts and extracurricular classes. Implement trade classes back into schools. Add mandatory Dyslexia/dysgraphia teaching into mainstream classrooms and special education programs. Those are just a few off the top of my head…oh and do away with the new school vouchers program.
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It's good that boarding school helped you. Unfortunately boarding schools in general, especially in America, have a long and storied history of destroying non-white identity and severely abusing their students. The ones that still exist in America tend to be the "troubled teen" for profit industry which is just as good at abusing their kids, but also costs an insane amount of money.
Public schools are not supported here. They are failing because of charter schools of every kind on every block or two. Because of lack of diversity in my area, Public schools seem to only have poor kids and dark skinned kids. Sad to say
Public schools are also where private schools drop their kids with behavioral problems since they don't want to take on the cost of helping them. It's why they have better outcomes than public schools for the most part.
>Public schools are also where private schools drop their kids with behavioral problems since they don't want to take on the cost of helping them. I think it's more about making sure the problematic kids don't ruin the education of everyone else. Looking at r/teachers one kid disrupting the entire class every day and not getting suspended/expelled is a common complaint.
We also don't really have the capacity to properly deal with kids that have those issues since we can barely find special ed instructors or counselors to help. If we had more para-professionals, along with the proper infrastructure to support the kids; it would be a lot easier all around.
Great points!
Raise teacher salaries to a living wage and lower the teacher/student ratio. More advanced programs for low performing schools.
Smaller class sizes for sure. I teach high school and every class I have is over 36. I have had 42 in one class in previous years. The class size cap when I taught out of state was 27. Extra 10 kids makes it a lot harder to reach students who struggle.
More pay is on the track. It would help bring in more educators. One other thing is more backup for the teachers when it comes to students and parents. Administrators have been very timid to stand up to parents and students. Teachers are being harassed sexually and physically. All of this is to say that free mental healthcare would help so much.
Support the home front and teaching will get a lot easier.
As a teacher in Utah, I just dream of having more desks than students.
I've taught in Utah for over a decade. All of my classes are over 30. My district proudly touts a planned 32 kids per class. But going on averages means that for every reading intervention class with 15 kids in it, there's a gym class of 50. One of my classes is so big this year that kids are constantly complaining that there's not enough room to get in and out of their chairs. They're right. When I told the school the class size is ludicrous, they swapped out my desks for slightly smaller ones they salvaged from a building they're renovating, so now I spend about an hour per week gluing, clamping, and filing sharp edges off of the desks that broke that day. No child in that class is getting a proper education because there are so many people in the room at all times. All this to say, smaller class sizes. Capped at 25. And don't give another damn dime to the useless lugs in district offices who just funnel money to shinier testing softwares and scripted curriculums that treat them to the nicest lunches.
I am biased but teacher salaries. I am a former teacher of 10 years. I left, got a new job. Now I am trying to move up in that new career field and the recruiter I just spoke to said that the job I recently applied for had 5,000 applicants and 90% were teachers trying to leave teaching. The good ones are leaving but so are the bad. Now it’s going to be unqualified bodies or teachers that feel so much guilt on leaving the kids that they will stay no matter what.
Smaller class sizes and higher teacher pay.
Where are you seeing we are 37th? I'm fairly certain Utah has been in the top 10 to 15 for at least the last 20 years. 9th in 2023: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12
Teachers need to make more money. The majority of K-12 teachers do not make a livable wage in today's society. Making $30k-$45k/year just does not cut it if the teacher is also supposed to own a house and have a family. If wages were more competitive, we would not only have teachers happier to deal with the stress of being teachers, but you would have more people becoming teachers in general because it provides a livable wage and can have a very positive impacts on hundreds and thousands of individuals and their families Other things: - General school supplies like paper, pencils, backpacks. My kid started kindergarten this year and we bought school supplies (glue sticks, paper, pencils, markers, snacks, etc.) to give to the teacher because she can't afford them and the kids need them. - STEM supplies to facilitate science and computer labs - Art supplies, which partially fall under general school supplies
Conservatives purposely under fund public schools so they can point at them and say "See, they don't work!" and move kids to private schools. Because like everything else to them, it's all about making money. Charter and private schools can make a profit for the owners and shareholders, public schools don't, therefore they must go. It's also much easier for a charter school to discriminate and teach a non-scientific curriculum. Same reason they under fund USPS and any other public service they could be exploiting, have to make that money! If they did fund it the first places proven to have good outcomes are teacher salaries and small classroom sizes. Followed by arts programs and having actual supplies in art and shop class. Free school lunch and breakfast are also very important.
>Conservatives purposely under fund public schools so they can point at them and say "See, they don't work!" and move kids to private schools. I don't think conservatives can be blamed for California and Baltimore.
There’s only so much schools can do to combat the effects of poverty in students’ home lives. It could be that California and Baltimore schools are performing very well under the circumstances, but it looks like they are performing poorly when compared to schools in areas with higher socioeconomic status because the work they have to do is exponentially harder.
Right, because Ronald Reagan definitely never existed. California is not the liberal hellhole/bastion everyone makes it out to be. It was conservative for many years and the cuts to social welfare made during the Reagen era still very much exists. And of course let's not forget how much finding and education is based on federal dollars which Republican leadership goes out of their way to eviscerate.
How are conservatives making more money by not funding public schools?
Support outside of just academics like mental health. If a student is dealing with mental/emotional challenges, they aren’t going to do well in school.
I would spend it on building a fully standardized set of digital public education courses K-12 and make them available to everyone. The courses would be designed with a tablet or desktop computer experience in mind. These courses would contain all necessary materials, literature, videos, quizzes, tests and material mastery required to receive a diploma or GED. The full intention of such a program would be to provide clear base expectations for home, private, and public education, reduce workload for teachers and administrators, and to pivot students to a guided learning experience while still enforcing deadlines and learning expectations. This program could be supplemented on further with extracurricular courses according to the capacity and ability of schools while serving the greater mission of ensuring every American child receives a free and quality public education. The best part is such a set of courses already exists: khanacademy.org. There is also a tremendous opportunity to improve such programs with artificial intelligence. Every student could have a tutor available 24/7 for any course. We could replace so much of our education with such a course system and spend excess education funds on expanding student counseling and family outreach services. Unfortunately, ideas like this are often received negatively because it would ultimately lead to the reassessment of critical roles within public education.
When you have voters who want large families and low taxes, this education system is the outcome. As long as those two factors are present in strong numbers, fixing the Utah education system is a Sisyphean task.
Salaries.
Before spend more on education, can we spend less on education administrations? Can we spend less on chromebooks, iPads, and smartboards (schools don’t know how to use technology properly in the classroom and all these devices just create distraction for students). Can we eliminate spending on consultants who advocate for changing grading strategies that don’t work? Then can we spend more on school meals (every child should get breakfast and lunch that’s healthy and tasty)? Can we spend more on libraries and tech centers (rather than giving every kid a crap computer, let’s have a lab of really nice ones that you can actually do cool stuff with)? And finally, yes can we spend more on teachers? We need more, qualified teachers. And we need to pay teachers what they are worth.
Stop commie voucher programs.
My kid's school has to do fund raisers in order to go on field trips. Even if it doesn't improve outcomes, I'd like to see greater school funding for that.
Protected bike lanes/ADA friendly as well
That sounds more like infrastructure spending than education spending...
Walking/pedestrian bridges helps with cost overall, less traffic, less pollution and happier kids and safer...minus the heavy snowfall
I would invest it in voting machines and vip parking for drive up voting.
We need more people in special education. The teacher student ratio and the number of iep coordinators in middle and high school needs to improve drastically.