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In our public school,the true tragedy is how the school union took advantage of Covid to push for teachers to have almost zero accountability or responsibility

In our public school,the true tragedy is how the school union took advantage of Covid to push for teachers to have almost zero accountability or responsibility anymore. Remote learning was an obvious disaster, but problems continued post-Covid. Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom. Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. Class is often little more than an email “read chapter 7 and do the problems”. The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up. Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile. We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school.

Scoundreller 3y ago
> rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. This sounds like good real world preparation > Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile. Who was the comparator group here?
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  > > rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. > This sounds like good real world preparation Or, we could push to have a better standard for them, and get them to see and treat the shitty software as something other than an unavoidable and unchangeable status quo.
- Scubabear68 3y ago
  The comparator group is every kid in the state at the same grade level. It is very shocking to see an 8th grader with a 3.5 GPA come in at 9 percentile in multiple subjects.
GoodJokes 3y ago
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ALittleLight 3y ago
How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and challenging them on it? I do it whenever I have a chance with my niece and nephew. They're learning about multiplication? We're doing times tables in the car trip. History of some Native American tribe? What happened, who were their leaders, etc. With my son it's simpler stuff - what color is this? What letter is that? Does our house have a door? And it's mainly my wife and I teaching him, but still - evaluation is critical. During the lockdown it took my sister one to two weeks to move her kids to private schools. I can't imagine not understanding, first intuitively, and second empirically, that online education is a poor fit for young children.
- hadlock 3y ago
  > How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and A lot of parents work 2, 3 jobs to make ends meet. When they get home there's barely enough money left over for food. They get up at 4, 5 am and work until 10 or 11pm. Working 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a real luxury for some people.
  - ALittleLight 3y ago
    Looks like it's a little less than 5% of job holders working multiple jobs [1][2]. Average hours of work per week is around 34 [3]. If you're telling me that you don't know how your kids are doing in school because you never get a chance to talk to them because you're so busy working, that's sad, but it's probably not typical. It's also the case that people with greater income work more hours [4]. So, maybe you should reprioritize money versus family if you're working more than you need to. 1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 2 - https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm 3 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP 4 - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-actual-working-hours-of-different-income-levels/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-actual-working-h...
    - 3y ago
golergka 3y ago
Pretty much what I expect from a strong union. They're fighting for their members, not for their customers.
- ttymck 3y ago
  Pretty much what I expect from a union fighting a society who refuses to value the work that they do. I really have a hard time blaming teachers for anything. We (America) seem to expect them to perform miracles. We are not their "customers", public eduction is not a business, but we insist on treating it like one. We get what we deserve.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Union teachers have long campaigned for having no accountability. They've been pretty successful at it. When was the last time you heard a public school teacher take any responsibility at all for poor academic achievement? I've never heard one. They always blame: 1. the parents 2. the students 3. the administration 4. not enough pay 5. not enough technology in the classroom 6. the tests The answer is to give a bonus to teachers depending on their students meeting the grade level academic standards. I've proposed this many times, and the pushback on it is fierce.
    - Scubabear68 3y ago
      This. I know many teachers who absolutely crow about the total lack of metrics or accountability. They absolutely love it. As a result, good teachers aren’t recognized, and bad ones proliferate.
      - ttymck 3y ago
        Yes, I would agree the current state of the profession absolutely attracts low quality candidates. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Every other wealthy nation understands this.
  - kcplate 3y ago
StanislavPetrov 3y ago
The fact is that the vast majority of people who go into "education" do it because it is the one of the least demanding career paths. Yes, there are some "true believers" who go into teaching because they truly seek to make a difference, but they are the tiny minority. Majoring in education is even less rigorous than majoring in liberal arts and is more akin to majoring in gender studies or basket weaving. This is even more true of the administrators who bloat the schools and drain crucial funding from actual teachers and classrooms while adding nothing in terms of educational value (and often detracting from it). But teachers certainly aren't entirely to blame for the mess we've gotten into to - there is more than enough blame to go around. The unfortunate truth is that our educational system is horribly broken, corrupt and inefficient. We hear far more from the leadership of the teacher's union and from school administrators about diversity nonsense than we do about the fact that they are churning out a generation of kids who are not literate and cannot do basic math. The "remote learning" nonsense was the final nail in the coffin as far as many public schools were concerned. They were already on life support before the pandemic when it came to academic achievement, and "remote learning" pulled the plug entirely. "Chronic school absenteeism", defined as missing at least 15 days of school per year (3 school weeks) is 16% nationally, and much higher in many large cities. Achievement is so bad that states like New York are lowering their standards across the board so that it appears that more students are proficient. When a massive number of kids aren't even showing up at schools, teachers aren't very well educated, administrators are more interested in promoting their social and political agenda than they are in teaching children how to read and write and standards for achievement are being lowered and/or eliminated you end up with the situation we have today. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-student-math-english-17841120.php https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-...
- delecti 3y ago
  You're taking it as a given that people perceive education to not be a demanding career, and I find that incredibly absurd. I've known since I was a young child that teachers didn't get paid much, and since I was a teen that the job required a lot of extra work for grading and buying your own supplies. As an adult I've known teachers, and those things are very clearly true. I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live where everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.
treeman79 3y ago
My kids go to a charter school. They went very hard on the online learning during Covid. Crazy amount of assignments. Lots of online time. As parents the workload was totally overwhelming to stay on top of everything. They ended up going back early because the test results were just atrocious even with how hard they were pushing. My wife teaches kindergarten there. There have been massive problems with the kids that came in that missed preschool during Covid. No idea how to share or interact with others. Had to spend a lot of time with basic life skills. Lots of students that had severe mental problems / disabilities that were completely missed since they missed preschool. Basically shutting down entire classes for months while various testing and placements were handled. Lots of “Jimmy is a genius” 4 months later. He has an IQ of 50. The masks also destroyed many students. Many highly depressed kids became happy cheerful kids once the masks were removed.
- Solvency 3y ago
  It's almost like deemphasizing personal health, nutrition, and thousands of years of natural human communal relationships, and focusing entirely on vaccines, social distancing, masks, and computers wasn't a good thing.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    I think it’s a sign that the social fabric is deteriorating from so many angles that as a society, we’ve become unable to cope with any hardship at all. There is no reason why covid shutdowns and school closures means children can’t socialize. You could easily get 2-3 kids together under one roof for 3, 4 or 5 days if they’ve been tested 24 hours before. Everyone goes home, 2-3 days later, rinse and repeat. Small controlled gatherings like this should have doable but everyone is always too damned busy all the time…we’ve come to rely on the school system for all of their social interactions and used the extra free time we got as parents to just “work more”. It’s very clear to me from covid that what actually needs to happen is for the world to collectively slow the fuck down a little. And I don’t mean wipe out all ambitions but like, figure out what we value as a society and codify it rather than worshipping this bizarre work culture we have in the west.
bamfly 3y ago
I guess we have this kind of anti-union, anti-teacher propaganda to thank for anyone still choosing to major in education (such enrollment has been declining for some time, with good reason). An easy-street gravy train with no accountability and perfect job security? Sign me up! In fact, the work sucks—and parents with this kind of perspective are part of why—and the pay's bad. Accountability-seeking regulation and admin overhead gets more onerous every year. Time actually productively teaching kids keeps dropping. It's a miserable career. Get into ordinary state government then lateral-hop jobs until you land in some do-nothing office (they exist! Hop around, and you will find one!) where you can truly screw around most of the day and collect your paycheck as long as you know how to work the rules, if you want the secure, barely-working, low-paid-but-at-least-you-have-retirement "paradise" that certain folks believe teaching to be. If you go into teaching thinking these folks are right about it, you're gonna have a very bad time. > Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom. Schools were facing the loss of a ton of their teachers, if they forced them back to the classroom, for a fairly long stretch of Covid. They kept trying, and teachers kept pushing back. Many teachers personally at high risk of serious illness if they caught Covid, or with close family members at high risk, were wiling to walk if forced back. In the earlier, less-certain phase of the whole thing when the threat wasn't as clearly defined, many were offended by the "die for the children" vibe they were getting from admin. Classrooms that opened back up before the vaccine was available faced their own challenges, due to high rates of absence and teachers often being out sick or quarantining after close exposure (you know, because of Covid spreading). There's an ongoing staffing crisis as a result of stress from dealing with the school environment during Covid, which was not a cakewalk and was far worse than usual (which is saying something), and other factors (pay stagnating for years in many districts, even as high inflation hit, would be a big one). If you think the way things went was a disaster, try losing 20+% of teachers in a district in a single year. They're not in the military, you can't just order them to do whatever. > Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. They don't always get to pick them, and often hate those too :-/ They're also not tech or ed-tech experts and have little or no support from people who are. And they often had a few days or weeks to put this together, with minimal assistance with ongoing support. I assure you, none of them were happy about spending a quarter of their time doing tech support. > The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up. Schools had a choice during Covid of failing a shitload of kids, or doing this. Ultimately, they answer to parents, and were not prepared to deal with the fallout of 50%+ of their constituent families seeing F grades on report cards. This goes for in-person and remote, both. A similar effect is why grading has become more and more lax over the years—many teachers hate this and wouldn't choose to operate that way if it were up to them, but admin doesn't want to deal with a bunch of angry parents, in part because those parents can and will agitate enough to get them fired if they're upset enough, so they follow incentives. Failing kids isn't really a thing, anymore, period, even before Covid, and it's mostly not teachers making that call. Covid was a disaster for education—that's true! It was really bad!—but if you think it's because teachers don't actually care about teaching kids, you're not going to find useful solutions to those or similar problems in the future. Most of them care about that a lot—again, the job's shit, so it's a minority, overall, who are willing to tolerate that without the positive-vibes experience of teaching children. That's what most of them are there for. Certainly not the work environment, the parents (the ones who make the most noise, anyway), or the pay. > We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school. Selection bias is a hell of a thing. Nb we've sent our kids to private school at times, too—it may not be fair, and much of the difference probably is, in fact, due to that ability to select for easy-to-teach students and parents who are on-board with your particular program, but that doesn't make the advantage less real, and ultimately we personally have to play the game the rest of the table's playing, no matter what we wish it were. Incidentally, you know what enabled one private school we were involved with to open for in-person sooner and safer than area public schools? The parents. They had selected for a pool of parents who were highly likely to comply with Covid protocols and take them seriously. While a bunch of public schools were contending with a large body of parents who were evading rules and telling their kids they were bullshit and that they should chin-wear their masks, this private school could tell such parents to get fucked because they had a waiting list for admission, and, besides, had already cultivated a rather, I suppose, liberal-leaning set of parents, so it largely wasn't an issue. Fewer parents modeling poor adherence to masking and distancing for their kids, fewer parents sending their kids when they knew they were sick or had been exposed, fewer having ill-advised outings to restaurants and other high-risk places or holding family reunions or whatever during Covid infection peaks, and, go figure, they weren't dealing with as many teacher absences in the middle of a (very much related) substitute shortage, kids weren't sick or exposed as often, the families weren't sick or exposed as often, and so on. SES (socio-economic status) also helped, as many parents were well-off and had the kind of jobs where they could work from home, not performing jobs where they had to go in or else get fired, which meant fewer exposures. IOW the private school did better in part because they had Covid on easy mode, largely because the parents of the attending kids weren't giant assholes and also had the money and freedom to mitigate the risk of Covid. When they were remote, parents were better-able to help the kids learn, for similar reasons. They had tons of advantages that public schools didn't.
panzagl 3y ago
Before blaming unions, you might want to look at performance of students in districts that don't have them.
- the_shivers 3y ago
  Do you mind sharing?
  - mulletbum 3y ago
    [flagged]
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  Honest question: how many public school districts don't have a Teachers Union? My understanding is that it's close to none, and private and charter schools are the only ones without unions. A quick google search isn't returning a conclusive answer though.
  - verall 3y ago
    In some southern states, the "Teachers Unions" are forbidden from collective bargaining by law, and are also optional, so they literally do nothing. On average, these states have worse pay for teachers and worse student test scores.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    Some whole states have (due to state laws) very weak teacher's unions that can barely do anything to protect teachers when they should be protected, and that hardly have any say in anything. I think if it were at all possible to spin those states as having better educational outcomes, Republicans would be crowing about it on Fox News 24/7.
    - dantheman 3y ago
      Which states?
mensetmanusman 3y ago
School choice so that people can vote with their feet seems reasonable.
subsubzero 3y ago
You are not alone, looking at enrollment for most public schools they are falling across the board with many choosing homeschooling[1] or private school[2]. On the homeschooling article one thing that blew me away was 16.1% of black families now homeschool their kids(from 3.3%). Private school admittance went up 53% as well during the pandemic. With my daughter I am extremely disappointed in the quality and difficulty(way too easy) of her schoolwork(1st grade public school). The school iving out 2-3 homework assignments a week with mindless addition and subtraction really makes me feel like my Daughter is wasting her time and even she says she doesn't know why she is doing the same problems over and over. Overall we may look to pull her and move to a private school if the low quality of this education continues. [1] - https://www.ksbw.com/article/homeschooling-surge-continues/39728094 https://www.ksbw.com/article/homeschooling-surge-continues/3... [2] - https://www.thewellnews.com/education/private-school-enrollment-rising-in-america-since-onset-of-pandemic/ https://www.thewellnews.com/education/private-school-enrollm...
- smorrow 3y ago
  I'm curious why private school? The usual reason people don't unschool is they haven't really heard of it (or they've heard of it but believe some boomer conventional wisdom like muh socialisation or it's just for extreme Christians). You obviously have, so like... what evidence are you seeing that's convincing you of school?
- fakedang 3y ago
  I assume the higher number in black families is because of parents not sending their kids to school for other reasons?
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Usually enrollment declines on a regional basis have more to do with generational variances. People have smaller families at different times. In some areas you have more religious fanatics driving homeschooling, but the COVID numbers were really kids dropping out. Urban and rural schools did a particularly shitty job during the pandemic. Private school is no panacea either. My kids have been in private schools, and you have to keep an eye on what’s going on. The teachers get paid a lot less and they have a tendency to paint a rosy picture. You need to be a strong advocate for your kid, especially if they have needs for extra help.
jrsdav 3y ago
I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself. The thinking that it's a conveyer belt where we put our children "on-rails" for 6 hours a day and they'll come out the other side with a strong education and high test scores. This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Workers who don't even get paid a livable wage but yet have to front the cash for tools just to do the job. Absent from your comment is the reality of just how much a shit job it is to be a teacher under normal circumstances, with the pandemic being unequivocally abnormal. Teachers are still stuck in this whirlwind trying to figure out how to teach in the post-pandemic ruins that's not just our education system, but our public sentiment that is bursting with shitty expectations.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself. Are there any other countries that don't rely heavily on public education? Europe seems to lean on schools even more for shaping society, especially Swiss schools, which aggressively integrate immigrants into a common Swissness model. China, well, not 6 hours, maybe 8 hours, and boarding schools are common, see mom and dad on the weekend. They probably weathered COVID better than we did, however, just given that they went to back school much earlier or never left. Families with more resources/education did OK during COVID, the real negative effects were felt in lesser resourced families, who depended on the schools more and weren't able to provide alternatives because they had to work their non-WFH friendly jobs. Of course the teachers weren't the perpetrators here, I'm not sure the unions were either (I don't equate teachers with teacher unions, its not like they have so much choice in union representation).
- bob_theslob646 3y ago
  >This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Even if the workers in the factory made faulty parts, in the United States, it would be incredibly hard to fire the workers. Their are no incentives on either side, for the worker nor the student. Their needs to be higher pay to attract people to want to do the job.
BenFranklin100 3y ago
Union teachers in Massachusetts were among the worst. They used COVID to lobby hard to end the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) standardized tests. https://www.masslive.com/news/2020/08/mass-educators-urge-passage-of-controversial-bill-to-suspend-mcas-testing-for-four-years-saying-the-test-fails-low-income-students-and-students-of-color.html https://www.masslive.com/news/2020/08/mass-educators-urge-pa... Truly despicable.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  I remember these tests. They were a real drag. Why was it despicable to get rid of them?
  - BenFranklin100 3y ago
    The teacher’s union leadership wanted to cover up their tracks and hide objective measures of how harmful remote learning was to the Commonwealth’s children, including how it was especially harmful to poor minority children who lacked proper IT (laptops, reliable internet, etc…) and where many of whom many came from single parent households where the parent could not work from home. https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2022/11/07/study-pandemic-learning-loss-may-cost-massachusetts-students-billions-in-future-earnings/ https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2022/11/07/study-pan... As I said, despicable.
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      We have our "despicableness" threshold set somewhat differently but no, that's not good at all. Thank you for explaining.
      - BenFranklin100 3y ago
        In my book, knowingly covering up harm to at-risk children from those tasked to helping them counts as ‘despicable. You do you though.
TMWNN 3y ago
>The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up. This has happened worldwide. /u/k1next has made several Reddit posts on how German high-school graduates' grades jumped up during COVID-19. <https://www.reddit.com/user/k1next/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/k1next/submitted/>
tmaly 3y ago
Public schools are sort of a monopoly. Unless you are well off and can afford private school, you are stuck with them as your only option. Home school for most people is not an option if you have to work to support your family.
- rcme 3y ago
  Public schools aren't a monopoly. People are free to move if they would like to switch schools. Also, a major difference is that residents usually have some power over the school board, e.g. by directly electing them or electing a mayor who chooses them.
  - tmaly 3y ago
    What do you mean by move or switch schools? Switch to another public school or did you mean something else?
gemstones 3y ago
Yeah. I’m all for paying teachers better to get the best and brightest. But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest. Schools comprised of smarter teachers would look a lot more like charters. They would prioritize removing disruptive students because they recognize that it drives away the critical mass of kids that can behave well enough to learn. They would know that public school systems have an insurmountable reputation problem, and champion a solution that gradually sends kids who have a chance to make it to a different school over time. The fact that they don’t see it, and still think they can fix the public schools, tells me we don’t have the best and brightest in our education system.
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  > But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest. We're actually in a teaching shortage, so I don't think this is true.
  - gemstones 3y ago
    If you have 30 teachers, need 5, and could find 25 better teachers if pay was better, then that’s 20 people up for replacement.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  I think it's hard to say who to remove and who not to remove. I was removed from school because I didn't fit the system. Now I have a PhD in physics and work successfully as a research scientist. I would say the problem with schooling is that it's seen as some assembly line of learning goals for various topics. I was removed when I was 11 and had basically no math or science after that. But somehow I was able to succeed in physics. So the entire idea that school should academically prepare students doesn't make much sense to me. Perhaps school should be more about metacognition, emotional intelligence, and encouraging creativity and exploration.
HWR_14 3y ago
I have no idea why you would bring COVID into this. The scores were going down before COVID. They continued going down during COVID.
happymellon 3y ago
> Some teachers stayed remote Some teachers are still remote? Which country are you in, because that seems insane.
- quags 3y ago
  In my area this did not happen I’d be surprised if it really was anywhere. Remote as an option has been gone for some time.
gopher_space 3y ago
Is the random capitalized word some kind of AI artifact, or is this a new internet Affectation?

Scoundreller 3y ago

> rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. This sounds like good real world preparation > Ourselves and many parents didn’t know how bad it was until standard testing came up and our kids were scoring in the single digits in percentile. Who was the comparator group here?

_aavaa_ 3y ago
> > rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. > This sounds like good real world preparation Or, we could push to have a better standard for them, and get them to see and treat the shitty software as something other than an unavoidable and unchangeable status quo.
Scubabear68 3y ago
The comparator group is every kid in the state at the same grade level. It is very shocking to see an 8th grader with a 3.5 GPA come in at 9 percentile in multiple subjects.

GoodJokes 3y ago

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ALittleLight 3y ago

How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and challenging them on it? I do it whenever I have a chance with my niece and nephew. They're learning about multiplication? We're doing times tables in the car trip. History of some Native American tribe? What happened, who were their leaders, etc. With my son it's simpler stuff - what color is this? What letter is that? Does our house have a door? And it's mainly my wife and I teaching him, but still - evaluation is critical. During the lockdown it took my sister one to two weeks to move her kids to private schools. I can't imagine not understanding, first intuitively, and second empirically, that online education is a poor fit for young children.

hadlock 3y ago
> How do parents not know how bad the school is? Are you not, on a daily basis asking what they learned in school and A lot of parents work 2, 3 jobs to make ends meet. When they get home there's barely enough money left over for food. They get up at 4, 5 am and work until 10 or 11pm. Working 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a real luxury for some people.
- ALittleLight 3y ago
  Looks like it's a little less than 5% of job holders working multiple jobs [1][2]. Average hours of work per week is around 34 [3]. If you're telling me that you don't know how your kids are doing in school because you never get a chance to talk to them because you're so busy working, that's sad, but it's probably not typical. It's also the case that people with greater income work more hours [4]. So, maybe you should reprioritize money versus family if you're working more than you need to. 1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 2 - https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm 3 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP 4 - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-actual-working-hours-of-different-income-levels/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-actual-working-h...
  - 3y ago

golergka 3y ago

Pretty much what I expect from a strong union. They're fighting for their members, not for their customers.

ttymck 3y ago
Pretty much what I expect from a union fighting a society who refuses to value the work that they do. I really have a hard time blaming teachers for anything. We (America) seem to expect them to perform miracles. We are not their "customers", public eduction is not a business, but we insist on treating it like one. We get what we deserve.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Union teachers have long campaigned for having no accountability. They've been pretty successful at it. When was the last time you heard a public school teacher take any responsibility at all for poor academic achievement? I've never heard one. They always blame: 1. the parents 2. the students 3. the administration 4. not enough pay 5. not enough technology in the classroom 6. the tests The answer is to give a bonus to teachers depending on their students meeting the grade level academic standards. I've proposed this many times, and the pushback on it is fierce.
  - Scubabear68 3y ago
    This. I know many teachers who absolutely crow about the total lack of metrics or accountability. They absolutely love it. As a result, good teachers aren’t recognized, and bad ones proliferate.
    - ttymck 3y ago
      Yes, I would agree the current state of the profession absolutely attracts low quality candidates. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Every other wealthy nation understands this.
- kcplate 3y ago

StanislavPetrov 3y ago

The fact is that the vast majority of people who go into "education" do it because it is the one of the least demanding career paths. Yes, there are some "true believers" who go into teaching because they truly seek to make a difference, but they are the tiny minority. Majoring in education is even less rigorous than majoring in liberal arts and is more akin to majoring in gender studies or basket weaving. This is even more true of the administrators who bloat the schools and drain crucial funding from actual teachers and classrooms while adding nothing in terms of educational value (and often detracting from it). But teachers certainly aren't entirely to blame for the mess we've gotten into to - there is more than enough blame to go around. The unfortunate truth is that our educational system is horribly broken, corrupt and inefficient. We hear far more from the leadership of the teacher's union and from school administrators about diversity nonsense than we do about the fact that they are churning out a generation of kids who are not literate and cannot do basic math. The "remote learning" nonsense was the final nail in the coffin as far as many public schools were concerned. They were already on life support before the pandemic when it came to academic achievement, and "remote learning" pulled the plug entirely. "Chronic school absenteeism", defined as missing at least 15 days of school per year (3 school weeks) is 16% nationally, and much higher in many large cities. Achievement is so bad that states like New York are lowering their standards across the board so that it appears that more students are proficient. When a massive number of kids aren't even showing up at schools, teachers aren't very well educated, administrators are more interested in promoting their social and political agenda than they are in teaching children how to read and write and standards for achievement are being lowered and/or eliminated you end up with the situation we have today. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-student-math-english-17841120.php https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-...

delecti 3y ago
You're taking it as a given that people perceive education to not be a demanding career, and I find that incredibly absurd. I've known since I was a young child that teachers didn't get paid much, and since I was a teen that the job required a lot of extra work for grading and buying your own supplies. As an adult I've known teachers, and those things are very clearly true. I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live where everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.

treeman79 3y ago

My kids go to a charter school. They went very hard on the online learning during Covid. Crazy amount of assignments. Lots of online time. As parents the workload was totally overwhelming to stay on top of everything. They ended up going back early because the test results were just atrocious even with how hard they were pushing. My wife teaches kindergarten there. There have been massive problems with the kids that came in that missed preschool during Covid. No idea how to share or interact with others. Had to spend a lot of time with basic life skills. Lots of students that had severe mental problems / disabilities that were completely missed since they missed preschool. Basically shutting down entire classes for months while various testing and placements were handled. Lots of “Jimmy is a genius” 4 months later. He has an IQ of 50. The masks also destroyed many students. Many highly depressed kids became happy cheerful kids once the masks were removed.

Solvency 3y ago
It's almost like deemphasizing personal health, nutrition, and thousands of years of natural human communal relationships, and focusing entirely on vaccines, social distancing, masks, and computers wasn't a good thing.
- heyoni 3y ago
  I think it’s a sign that the social fabric is deteriorating from so many angles that as a society, we’ve become unable to cope with any hardship at all. There is no reason why covid shutdowns and school closures means children can’t socialize. You could easily get 2-3 kids together under one roof for 3, 4 or 5 days if they’ve been tested 24 hours before. Everyone goes home, 2-3 days later, rinse and repeat. Small controlled gatherings like this should have doable but everyone is always too damned busy all the time…we’ve come to rely on the school system for all of their social interactions and used the extra free time we got as parents to just “work more”. It’s very clear to me from covid that what actually needs to happen is for the world to collectively slow the fuck down a little. And I don’t mean wipe out all ambitions but like, figure out what we value as a society and codify it rather than worshipping this bizarre work culture we have in the west.

bamfly 3y ago

I guess we have this kind of anti-union, anti-teacher propaganda to thank for anyone still choosing to major in education (such enrollment has been declining for some time, with good reason). An easy-street gravy train with no accountability and perfect job security? Sign me up! In fact, the work sucks—and parents with this kind of perspective are part of why—and the pay's bad. Accountability-seeking regulation and admin overhead gets more onerous every year. Time actually productively teaching kids keeps dropping. It's a miserable career. Get into ordinary state government then lateral-hop jobs until you land in some do-nothing office (they exist! Hop around, and you will find one!) where you can truly screw around most of the day and collect your paycheck as long as you know how to work the rules, if you want the secure, barely-working, low-paid-but-at-least-you-have-retirement "paradise" that certain folks believe teaching to be. If you go into teaching thinking these folks are right about it, you're gonna have a very bad time. > Some teachers stayed remote (!), requiring assistants in the classroom. Schools were facing the loss of a ton of their teachers, if they forced them back to the classroom, for a fairly long stretch of Covid. They kept trying, and teachers kept pushing back. Many teachers personally at high risk of serious illness if they caught Covid, or with close family members at high risk, were wiling to walk if forced back. In the earlier, less-certain phase of the whole thing when the threat wasn't as clearly defined, many were offended by the "die for the children" vibe they were getting from admin. Classrooms that opened back up before the vaccine was available faced their own challenges, due to high rates of absence and teachers often being out sick or quarantining after close exposure (you know, because of Covid spreading). There's an ongoing staffing crisis as a result of stress from dealing with the school environment during Covid, which was not a cakewalk and was far worse than usual (which is saying something), and other factors (pay stagnating for years in many districts, even as high inflation hit, would be a big one). If you think the way things went was a disaster, try losing 20+% of teachers in a district in a single year. They're not in the military, you can't just order them to do whatever. > Teachers rely on a host of shitty online platforms and expect the kids to figure out how to navigate all of them. They don't always get to pick them, and often hate those too :-/ They're also not tech or ed-tech experts and have little or no support from people who are. And they often had a few days or weeks to put this together, with minimal assistance with ongoing support. I assure you, none of them were happy about spending a quarter of their time doing tech support. > The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up. Schools had a choice during Covid of failing a shitload of kids, or doing this. Ultimately, they answer to parents, and were not prepared to deal with the fallout of 50%+ of their constituent families seeing F grades on report cards. This goes for in-person and remote, both. A similar effect is why grading has become more and more lax over the years—many teachers hate this and wouldn't choose to operate that way if it were up to them, but admin doesn't want to deal with a bunch of angry parents, in part because those parents can and will agitate enough to get them fired if they're upset enough, so they follow incentives. Failing kids isn't really a thing, anymore, period, even before Covid, and it's mostly not teachers making that call. Covid was a disaster for education—that's true! It was really bad!—but if you think it's because teachers don't actually care about teaching kids, you're not going to find useful solutions to those or similar problems in the future. Most of them care about that a lot—again, the job's shit, so it's a minority, overall, who are willing to tolerate that without the positive-vibes experience of teaching children. That's what most of them are there for. Certainly not the work environment, the parents (the ones who make the most noise, anyway), or the pay. > We have since moved to a private school for both. The first year was rough as they over came the Learning deficit and learned how to study again, but both are back as normal students with the kind of understanding in math, science, reading, etc they never would have gotten in public school. Selection bias is a hell of a thing. Nb we've sent our kids to private school at times, too—it may not be fair, and much of the difference probably is, in fact, due to that ability to select for easy-to-teach students and parents who are on-board with your particular program, but that doesn't make the advantage less real, and ultimately we personally have to play the game the rest of the table's playing, no matter what we wish it were. Incidentally, you know what enabled one private school we were involved with to open for in-person sooner and safer than area public schools? The parents. They had selected for a pool of parents who were highly likely to comply with Covid protocols and take them seriously. While a bunch of public schools were contending with a large body of parents who were evading rules and telling their kids they were bullshit and that they should chin-wear their masks, this private school could tell such parents to get fucked because they had a waiting list for admission, and, besides, had already cultivated a rather, I suppose, liberal-leaning set of parents, so it largely wasn't an issue. Fewer parents modeling poor adherence to masking and distancing for their kids, fewer parents sending their kids when they knew they were sick or had been exposed, fewer having ill-advised outings to restaurants and other high-risk places or holding family reunions or whatever during Covid infection peaks, and, go figure, they weren't dealing with as many teacher absences in the middle of a (very much related) substitute shortage, kids weren't sick or exposed as often, the families weren't sick or exposed as often, and so on. SES (socio-economic status) also helped, as many parents were well-off and had the kind of jobs where they could work from home, not performing jobs where they had to go in or else get fired, which meant fewer exposures. IOW the private school did better in part because they had Covid on easy mode, largely because the parents of the attending kids weren't giant assholes and also had the money and freedom to mitigate the risk of Covid. When they were remote, parents were better-able to help the kids learn, for similar reasons. They had tons of advantages that public schools didn't.

panzagl 3y ago

Before blaming unions, you might want to look at performance of students in districts that don't have them.

the_shivers 3y ago
Do you mind sharing?
- mulletbum 3y ago
  [flagged]
MostlyStable 3y ago
Honest question: how many public school districts don't have a Teachers Union? My understanding is that it's close to none, and private and charter schools are the only ones without unions. A quick google search isn't returning a conclusive answer though.
- verall 3y ago
  In some southern states, the "Teachers Unions" are forbidden from collective bargaining by law, and are also optional, so they literally do nothing. On average, these states have worse pay for teachers and worse student test scores.
- bamfly 3y ago
  Some whole states have (due to state laws) very weak teacher's unions that can barely do anything to protect teachers when they should be protected, and that hardly have any say in anything. I think if it were at all possible to spin those states as having better educational outcomes, Republicans would be crowing about it on Fox News 24/7.
  - dantheman 3y ago
    Which states?

mensetmanusman 3y ago

School choice so that people can vote with their feet seems reasonable.

subsubzero 3y ago

You are not alone, looking at enrollment for most public schools they are falling across the board with many choosing homeschooling[1] or private school[2]. On the homeschooling article one thing that blew me away was 16.1% of black families now homeschool their kids(from 3.3%). Private school admittance went up 53% as well during the pandemic. With my daughter I am extremely disappointed in the quality and difficulty(way too easy) of her schoolwork(1st grade public school). The school iving out 2-3 homework assignments a week with mindless addition and subtraction really makes me feel like my Daughter is wasting her time and even she says she doesn't know why she is doing the same problems over and over. Overall we may look to pull her and move to a private school if the low quality of this education continues. [1] - https://www.ksbw.com/article/homeschooling-surge-continues/39728094 https://www.ksbw.com/article/homeschooling-surge-continues/3... [2] - https://www.thewellnews.com/education/private-school-enrollment-rising-in-america-since-onset-of-pandemic/ https://www.thewellnews.com/education/private-school-enrollm...

smorrow 3y ago
I'm curious why private school? The usual reason people don't unschool is they haven't really heard of it (or they've heard of it but believe some boomer conventional wisdom like muh socialisation or it's just for extreme Christians). You obviously have, so like... what evidence are you seeing that's convincing you of school?
fakedang 3y ago
I assume the higher number in black families is because of parents not sending their kids to school for other reasons?
Spooky23 3y ago
Usually enrollment declines on a regional basis have more to do with generational variances. People have smaller families at different times. In some areas you have more religious fanatics driving homeschooling, but the COVID numbers were really kids dropping out. Urban and rural schools did a particularly shitty job during the pandemic. Private school is no panacea either. My kids have been in private schools, and you have to keep an eye on what’s going on. The teachers get paid a lot less and they have a tendency to paint a rosy picture. You need to be a strong advocate for your kid, especially if they have needs for extra help.

jrsdav 3y ago

I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself. The thinking that it's a conveyer belt where we put our children "on-rails" for 6 hours a day and they'll come out the other side with a strong education and high test scores. This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Workers who don't even get paid a livable wage but yet have to front the cash for tools just to do the job. Absent from your comment is the reality of just how much a shit job it is to be a teacher under normal circumstances, with the pandemic being unequivocally abnormal. Teachers are still stuck in this whirlwind trying to figure out how to teach in the post-pandemic ruins that's not just our education system, but our public sentiment that is bursting with shitty expectations.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> I think the true tragedy of public education in the US is the sentiment of the public itself. Are there any other countries that don't rely heavily on public education? Europe seems to lean on schools even more for shaping society, especially Swiss schools, which aggressively integrate immigrants into a common Swissness model. China, well, not 6 hours, maybe 8 hours, and boarding schools are common, see mom and dad on the weekend. They probably weathered COVID better than we did, however, just given that they went to back school much earlier or never left. Families with more resources/education did OK during COVID, the real negative effects were felt in lesser resourced families, who depended on the schools more and weren't able to provide alternatives because they had to work their non-WFH friendly jobs. Of course the teachers weren't the perpetrators here, I'm not sure the unions were either (I don't equate teachers with teacher unions, its not like they have so much choice in union representation).
bob_theslob646 3y ago
>This is bolstered by yet more poor reasoning that any failures to reach that metric must surely be the fault of the workers in the factory. Even if the workers in the factory made faulty parts, in the United States, it would be incredibly hard to fire the workers. Their are no incentives on either side, for the worker nor the student. Their needs to be higher pay to attract people to want to do the job.

BenFranklin100 3y ago

Union teachers in Massachusetts were among the worst. They used COVID to lobby hard to end the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) standardized tests. https://www.masslive.com/news/2020/08/mass-educators-urge-passage-of-controversial-bill-to-suspend-mcas-testing-for-four-years-saying-the-test-fails-low-income-students-and-students-of-color.html https://www.masslive.com/news/2020/08/mass-educators-urge-pa... Truly despicable.

singleshot_ 3y ago
I remember these tests. They were a real drag. Why was it despicable to get rid of them?
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  The teacher’s union leadership wanted to cover up their tracks and hide objective measures of how harmful remote learning was to the Commonwealth’s children, including how it was especially harmful to poor minority children who lacked proper IT (laptops, reliable internet, etc…) and where many of whom many came from single parent households where the parent could not work from home. https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2022/11/07/study-pandemic-learning-loss-may-cost-massachusetts-students-billions-in-future-earnings/ https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2022/11/07/study-pan... As I said, despicable.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    We have our "despicableness" threshold set somewhat differently but no, that's not good at all. Thank you for explaining.
    - BenFranklin100 3y ago
      In my book, knowingly covering up harm to at-risk children from those tasked to helping them counts as ‘despicable. You do you though.

TMWNN 3y ago

>The icing on the cake was the grading system that gave kids a B for showing up. This has happened worldwide. /u/k1next has made several Reddit posts on how German high-school graduates' grades jumped up during COVID-19. <https://www.reddit.com/user/k1next/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/k1next/submitted/>

tmaly 3y ago

Public schools are sort of a monopoly. Unless you are well off and can afford private school, you are stuck with them as your only option. Home school for most people is not an option if you have to work to support your family.

rcme 3y ago
Public schools aren't a monopoly. People are free to move if they would like to switch schools. Also, a major difference is that residents usually have some power over the school board, e.g. by directly electing them or electing a mayor who chooses them.
- tmaly 3y ago
  What do you mean by move or switch schools? Switch to another public school or did you mean something else?

gemstones 3y ago

Yeah. I’m all for paying teachers better to get the best and brightest. But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest. Schools comprised of smarter teachers would look a lot more like charters. They would prioritize removing disruptive students because they recognize that it drives away the critical mass of kids that can behave well enough to learn. They would know that public school systems have an insurmountable reputation problem, and champion a solution that gradually sends kids who have a chance to make it to a different school over time. The fact that they don’t see it, and still think they can fix the public schools, tells me we don’t have the best and brightest in our education system.

EatingWithForks 3y ago
> But to be honest, the thing the teachers union doesn’t seem to get is that getting the best and brightest strongly implies that most teachers would have to leave the profession to make way for the best and brightest. We're actually in a teaching shortage, so I don't think this is true.
- gemstones 3y ago
  If you have 30 teachers, need 5, and could find 25 better teachers if pay was better, then that’s 20 people up for replacement.
mnky9800n 3y ago
I think it's hard to say who to remove and who not to remove. I was removed from school because I didn't fit the system. Now I have a PhD in physics and work successfully as a research scientist. I would say the problem with schooling is that it's seen as some assembly line of learning goals for various topics. I was removed when I was 11 and had basically no math or science after that. But somehow I was able to succeed in physics. So the entire idea that school should academically prepare students doesn't make much sense to me. Perhaps school should be more about metacognition, emotional intelligence, and encouraging creativity and exploration.

HWR_14 3y ago

I have no idea why you would bring COVID into this. The scores were going down before COVID. They continued going down during COVID.

happymellon 3y ago

> Some teachers stayed remote Some teachers are still remote? Which country are you in, because that seems insane.

quags 3y ago
In my area this did not happen I’d be surprised if it really was anywhere. Remote as an option has been gone for some time.

gopher_space 3y ago

Is the random capitalized word some kind of AI artifact, or is this a new internet Affectation?