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 fo

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.