11 ms·

Half of Americans say Public K-12 Education is Going In The Wrong Direction

44 points by sarimkx 2y ago

grej 2y ago
I would like to know if the people citing, "Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)", as the reason why K-12 Education is going the wrong direction actually have any experience with this or know any examples, or are they just parroting the points of political leaders that are doing the bidding of donors trying to drive school vouchers?
- dfxm12 2y ago
  FWIW, the poll is among adults, not adults with children. I'm willing to bet most respondents don't have kids currently in public K-12 schools or don't have experience with this.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  It's real and I wish it wasn't. :/ Two things I've personally heard discussed. 1. Teaching "evolution" instead of "creationism" 2. "Oppressing" white students with "diversity". I've personally experienced the second in the 1990s. A few teachers and professors are really into social justice and take it way too far. No matter how much I agree with them, I can not support berating and shaming white students in front of an entire class as if they were personally responsible for actions that occurred over century before their ancestors even reached the US. (My ancestors did not come from imperialist nations that murdered entire native tribes, thank you very much.) For people who are already primed to think the worst of the entire education system, my experience is all the proof they need that the entire system is out to destroy them.
- ericmcer 2y ago
  A huge part is probably right wing personalities talking about "wokeness" in our schools. Personally, I do shake my head at some of the stuff my kid talks about. For instance, they were taught that the WW2 era American internment camps should be called American concentration camps. That said I care very little about the social aspects of education unless they are taking away from math, science and making kids who are competent at independent thinking and problem solving.
  - dantheman 2y ago
    They were concentration camps - that's the definition. Perhaps your conflating death camps with concentration camps.
    - tivert 2y ago
      > Perhaps your conflating death camps with concentration camps. I would wager most Americans would not even be aware of that distinction. In popular discussion, they're the same thing. So if school kids are being taught "the WW2 era American internment camps should be called American concentration camps," they're actually being mislead. The lesson can't be oblivious to popular understandings or less precise popular usage. It's also worth noting that strategic obliviousness to the difference between popular and technical definitions is a time-tested and effective way to lie and mislead, because it lends itself to a fallacious but effective motte and bailey defense, which also exploits embarrassment over not wanting to seem ignorant and prejudice against people who appear ignorant to silence challenges.
      - JAlexoid 2y ago
        Calling them internment camps is as misleading as equating them to Nazi death camps.
        tivert 2y ago
        > Calling them internment camps is as misleading as equating them to Nazi death camps. No, because people know what the term "internment camps" means in this context. At least in the American colloquial context, "concentration camps" and "internment camps" are more names for specific historical instances not types.
        JAlexoid 2y ago
        > No, because people know what the term "internment camps" means in this context. I disagree, because the topic is very intentionally glossed over. Most people couldn't tell you what internment means and will not associate it with anything bad.
- VS1999 2y ago
  This has nothing to do with "the bidding of donors trying to drive school vouchers" or whatever conspiracy that is. We just don't want teachers pushing their political views on children.
- overrun11 2y ago
  Not allowing people to criticize things without direct personal experience is a bizarrely high standard. I wonder if you hold others to this same standard on issues you agree with?
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- skyde 2y ago
  As a parent myself I see this happening daily. Teacher public shaming my kids for having pretzel in his lunch saying it’s not healthy. Then later the same day the school give all the kids crackers as snack :-) Or teachers spending 2 hours telling kids which brand of soap or shampoo they should buy and which brand they should avoid. Or teacher giving a 1 hour talk saying they should open a checking accounts at a particular credit union. For some reason new teacher are not afraid to brainwash kids with their own personal agenda.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Yes lots of experience with this. I think it depends on where you live. Highly progressive cities and states in the US tend to have staff and administration that are openly pushing their politics in schools. That can show up in terms of curriculum (like requiring ethnic studies and displacing other content), bans on gifted education for DEI reasons, or the more directly political / controversial issues showing up in classrooms and assignments (topics like Trump or gender identity or BLM or whatever).
f1yght 2y ago
I'm surprised funding isn't the number 1 issue across the spectrum. It's abundantly clear the schools near me are already underfunded and also have a 100 million a year budget hole. You can complain about admin and what not, but at the end of the day class sizes are big and schools are being closed. That's a massive funding issue.
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  Chicago Public Schools spends $30,000 per student per year on some of the worst outcomes in all of education. It's clearly not sufficient to just "fund" education.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    Also the head of the teacher’s union sends her own kids to a private Catholic high school. When the people who run the system won’t even send their own kids there, you know it’s terrible.
    - thefaux 2y ago
      Yeah, that is particularly egregious but I have a friend who worked for years in the education bureaucracy and specifically moved to a particular neighborhood for the schools. It's slightly more subtle but the same indictment.
    - momwasteach 2y ago
      My mother was a teacher at my public high school and sent me to the public schools where I grew up. She knew the schools were bad -- they're ranked deep in the bottom half of Massachusetts -- and always would say something to the extent of "but how would it look for a public school teacher to send their kids to private school?". Well, I sort of wish she had? If the schools are a mess and you know it directly from experience, to do otherwise is pretty ridiculous. We have to be honest with reality.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I'm no fan of teachers unions, but this factoid doesn't actually tell us much. The head of CTU wouldn't even theoretically need to be a teacher in order to advocate effectively for their constituents.
dkobia 2y ago
Parents want to tell teachers how to teach. Kids have no respect for teachers. Teachers are not paid nearly enough. Of course its going in the wrong direction.
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  Teachers are often wrong about the best ways to teach. See the popularity of "whole language" learning over Phonics for a good example in teaching fads being detrimental to literacy across the board.
  - vkou 2y ago
    And regionally, parents are wildly wrong about what to teach. Evolution, religion and its role in government, carbon dioxide, fundamentals of medicine, basic civics, recent history, how to navigate a world where gay people exist...
    - sickofparadox 2y ago
      That's an interesting assertation to make out of hand, but I don't think the data backs it up.[1][2] [1]https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info-Brief-2015-2.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info... [2]https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1005657.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1005657.pdf
      - vkou 2y ago
        That data doesn't actually counter-indicate what I'm saying, for a myriad reasons. I'll name one obvious one: Homeschool parents are, at minimum, present in their child's education. Compare their numbers to public school parents who are also present in theirs. Here's another obvious one: Most parents who are wildly deluded about those subjects don't homeschool, they just complain (and regionally, vote in representatives who will apply those delusions to the curriculum).
  - bradfa 2y ago
Hayvok 2y ago
> We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons: > Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%) > Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%) > Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%) As someone who has lots of friends in conservative circles, these sentiments ring true. (I am surprised "health decisions / vaccine mandates" aren't in the list.) A lot of my wife's friends are choosing to homeschool, and #2 on that list is their primary reason. They acknowledge its likely a minority of teachers engaging in that behavior, but their feeling is "it only takes one" to ruin the entire school experience for their kid, and create a ton of problems for them to deal with at home. (Disclaimer: we homeschool for reason #1 and because my wife was homeschooled and it's a comfortable way for her to run our schedule and home.)
- hobs 2y ago
  And the question I have for conservatives is, then why doesn't that apply to cops? Public sector job, unaccountable to the individual, has authority over people we care about, etc. I have heard more conservatives complain about librarians (again, same deal, except they dont shoot anyone) than cops.
- skhunted 2y ago
  It’s disconcerting that people who have no training on how to teach think they can do it well enough. Those same people generally seek out those with training to do things in other areas of their life. But when it comes to teaching they think they know better. Asimov’s famous quote on ignorance comes to mind. EDIT: Do people generally use those without training to provide medical care, fix cars, cut hair, do electrical work, etc.? The answer is no. But when it comes to teaching science to k-12 students it’s ok to use someone with no training? It’s crazy.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    All of those things you listed are totally normal for people to DIY. It's kind of bizarre to me that you think otherwise. It's like when Randy on South Park teaches his kids to call the handyman to fix the oven door. Or there's a handyman on youtube who's talked about being called and charging people like $500 to push the button on a GFCI outlet. It's hard to believe he's serious. He's also talked about being called by millennials to change smoke alarm batteries.
jollyllama 2y ago
I'm more surprised that half say it's going in the right direction.
- sophacles 2y ago
  They're the ones who are opposed to having an education system.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  They don't. There's a large "not sure" component.
- deweller 2y ago
  > A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction.
- deleted 2y ago
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monero-xmr 2y ago
Peruse r/teachers subreddit to get some of the vibe of teaching. Here’s the second highest post of all time https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/FQCaxMsQrC https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/FQCaxMsQrC The major issues as I have observed are: Can’t expel disruptive kids. Schools pass students regardless if they learn the material, and now a significant portion of high school students in America can barely read. Teachers are mostly doing daycare instead of teaching. Phones everywhere which distracts kids. And most importantly: advanced kids are no longer removed from gen pop and put into their own smart kid bubble. Identifying gifted kids and giving them more difficult material is the single most important thing we need to do as a society for K12 education.
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  I have a new family member that's a teacher and she says she basically talks to a brick wall while every kid in class messes around on their phones. She's not allowed to do anything about it.
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- pennomi 2y ago
  Trying to get my children into an advanced program has been taking years of effort, even at a very good public school. They are bored out of their minds because they already know everything being taught. We are sabotaging our brightest minds from an early age.
- thefaux 2y ago
  I agree with your point about tracking but I also see why it is a third rail. Some parents of average students will raise hell and accuse you of discrimination if you give anyone special treatment. Of course, the irony is I remember that when I was in fifth grade and given advanced math material with three other students that we actually got less teacher attention than the rest of the class. But it was far, far better for us than being stuck in the slow track.
cde-v 2y ago
Half will always say it is going the wrong direction based on who is in the White House at the time.
bityard 2y ago
The article is meh. Election year. Partisan politics. Repeats the same set of points 3 times. It can be safely skipped. But I will note that we quite deliberately sent our kids to a well-regarded public school system in our state and it went from pretty nice to nearly a warzone in the last 10 years. When our daughter started Kindergarten there, the school had a big emphasis on positivity, accommodating kids with special needs, and a strong anti-bullying policy. Since then, all of the classrooms have devolved from learning to daycare. From the outside, I see these as the main causes: 1) Incompetent management and leadership from the superintendent all the way down to the teachers. 2) Removal of separate classrooms and teachers equipment to handle students with special needs. Now all of the students with behavioral and emotional problems are placed in regular classrooms and whole days go by without any actual learning happening due to disruptions caused by the special needs kids. 4) Bullying, verbal abuse, and physical abuse is fully tolerated with no reprecussions at all. Teachers and staff have no power to punish or remove bullies from the school. My son has been particularly impacted by this. He's a bright and friendly kid, but gullible, and you'd frankly be shocked how abusive and manipulative 8 to 10 years old with shitty parents can be. We are actively moving our son from that school and into a STEM-centric school farther away, in the hopes that the educational and emotional damage he has suffered there won't leave too big a scar going forward.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Why is there so much focus on public education and aversion to private options like charter schools? I feel like this has turned into an ideological battle of left versus right in the US. Consumer choice and competition benefit society in virtually all other areas, so why not here? Personally I think the one size fits all nature of public schooling, how they are funded, how curriculum are determined by state agencies, and how teachers politics (individually and through unions) influences education have all contributed to a decay in quality of education despite lots of funding. At least where I am, funding per student has gone up dramatically over the last 10 years but parents universally say schooling is worse than ever. It’s also interesting seeing the gaps on certain questions: > Teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom (76% vs. 23%) If you are on the political side that is benefiting from teachers bringing their personal political views into the classroom, then you would not view it as a problem since it benefits your ideology. If you are on the other political side, then you would see it as a problem since it is a use of institutions to spread your political opponents influence.
- aantix 2y ago
  >Why is there so much focus on public education and aversion to private options like charter schools Because public schools are infrastructure. I pay for roads on the other side of town, even if I will never use them. I pay for kids that I will never meet to get a safe education, regardless of their behavior/economics/orientation/aptitude. Private schools are allowed to discriminate on who they can take. That's directly against the mission of public schooling. Charter schools are not offered consistently everywhere, so it steals money from already under-resourced rural public schools. Rural kids may not have any nearby, alternative offerings. There has to be a baseline education with a consistent budget. A non-discriminatory offering where all kids are welcomed. A place where no one can be denied an education. Any other alternative you're welcome to attend (if they'll take you), but you must fund it on your own.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    I haven’t thought through the phrasing of “infrastructure” and what it implies. But I am not debating the existence of funding for education - so even if you are not using schools because you don’t have children, there would be funding. I’m just saying parents should have choice over where that money goes for their children. If $20K is spent per student per year, a parent should get to select whatever provider they want or use the same money for homeschooling or for parent-led shared groups or whatever else. As for private schools being allowed to discriminate on who they can take - I think that can be solved separately. You could pass regulations to require accepting students or simply fund students by need (for example parents of special needs children or children scoring poorly can get vastly more funding to spend as they choose). > Any other alternative you're welcome to attend (if they'll take you), but you must fund it on your own. I see this sentiment a lot from those against parental choice, but I don’t understand it. Why must I fund it on my own? If tax money is collected from me and only made available to the public school system, then I am deprived of my money and then not given the option to just “fund it on my own” unless I am rich and have enough leftover money still. That is really unjust. There is a certain amount of money that would be spent on a child per year anyways - and I think parents should be able to attend any alternative and use that equivalent funding elsewhere. Why would the public option get to keep it when they are relieved of the cost of educating a child that is attending some other option?
bongoman42 2y ago
As a parent of a 7 year old, I would also say the same. Our kid goes to a public school and overall they spend way less time on core subjects but a lot more on things related to race and so on which really do not have relevance to their level. The math is so far back that we had to put him into an additional math tutoring outside of school. Pretty much all parents in our area send their kids to something like Russian School of Math or so. Within people I directly know a couple have put their kids into private school and I am strongly considering it moving forward though it will be a huge financial strain. A more problematic thing I see with schools not challenging kids is that all kinds of behavior problems arise because they do not have anything to learn. Our kid was a lot better when I gave him math stuff from grade 4 or higher to learn. Kids need challenge. There is a limit to how much you can occupy them with coloring numbers and iPads. And at least here it is definitely not a funding issue. In fact his school has a cap on spending because if they spent more it would increase disparities with neighboring schools.
- skyyler 2y ago
  >Our kid goes to a public school and overall they spend way less time on core subjects but a lot more on things related to race and so on which really do not have relevance to their level. I'm curious about this. Could you explain more?
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Not the same person, but we recently started touring schools in different districts. They all seemed to push diversity and anti-bullying programs as a main part of their pitch. There was very little focus on the academics. It was basically you get the normal classes unless you test into an IEP or G-IEP. Then they'd show off their facilities, how every kid gets a Chromebook, and after enough good stickers under the bully program they get a pizza party, etc. The thing that spoke to me the most was looking in on the classes. Some of the schools seemed to just have the kids on screens in every class. Others had more of a mix. Behavior was also noticeable in one school, as was the aditude of the administration (both negative). On parent at that school told me you can't even tell the teacher about bullying and bad behavior. The kids are expected to fill out an incident report on their Chromebook.
renewiltord 2y ago
40% of US households have children, so this means people without a clue are just spouting off haha. I could care less but I find these things amusing.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Hmm... both parties agree that it's going in the wrong direction, but differ on why. (Probably because they differ on what the wrong direction is.) It seems to me that "parents trying to tell teachers what to teach" and "teachers bring their personal views into the classroom" are both kind of saying "teach the core content" - don't wander off into what the teacher wants, and don't wander off into what the parents want. (Yeah, I know, you can't entirely, especially with reading. They have to read something, and that something carries some content. Who gets to decide what it is?)
HumblyTossed 2y ago
Of course it is. This is BY DESIGN. A certain political party wants public education to go away and have private education funded by your tax dollars. It's yet another money grab by the wealthy.
- deleted 2y ago
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- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  In blue states, people also think the schools are going in the wrong direction. You realize that your "certain political party" doesn't control the schools there, right?
gamerDude 2y ago
As someone working in EdTech, I think the idea of schools being underfunded is very complicated. School Districts horribly mismanage their budgets. One of the largest school districts in the country and one of my clients just didn't know how much money they had spent for two years. So, their solution was to not renew any contracts the following year. Didn't matter how important they were, you were only safe if you had a multi-year contract (which thankfully I did). The people who are making spending choices in districts are often clueless about how to spend money or think about ROI. Some schools are likely underfunded. But they also just need financial literacy training.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  I work in EdTech as well and I tend to agree, but there is also a very strong correlation between funding and rank of schools. 8 of the top 10 schools in terms of educational outcomes also are in the top 10 for spending. Due to paying for education with property taxes, this of course carries on into the county level where many schools are incredibly over funded and have good education, where as others have poor funding and terrible education. I do agree overall though, when you look at the numbers at a macro scale. Here in Florida, average class has around 20 kids, we pay around $10k per kid per year. How does that not fund the school, how do teachers make so little? Average pay is around $50k, you could put two teachers in each room and still have $100k left over for all the expenses of running the school. I believe its a bit of you get what you pay for, the states paying more get better talent who use the money more effectively. The main factor that money can't fix are the parents. We have a Drop out Recovery program and well, the common factor is the parents and income.
- lupire 2y ago
  EdTech is one the large classes of misspending.
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abeppu 2y ago
Maybe a more constructive question is, do we agree on which countries are doing public education well? And what insights or practices can we learn from them?
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
Education? Try parenting. The average parent nowadays is a sycophant for their children. They expect teachers to do ALL of the education work, they don't want their kids to have any homework, and they don't expect educators to discipline unruly kids who have been raised by their cell phones and tablets in a Lord of the Flies online social setting. People who didn't get anything and everything they wanted from their parents when they were growing up have decided to try to be friends with their kids instead of teaching them how to behave in public or sit down with them to teach them how to freaking read. IQs are going down because Millennials and Zoomers are collectively irresponsible as parents and will attack educators instead of taking responsibility for their childrens' educational welfare. They treat teachers like garbage and their kids follow suit. And what can they POSSIBLY point to? New Math? Gay people exist and you shouldn't treat them with hatred? LOL, please.
- sarimkx 2y ago
  This is such an important point and one that pretty much everyone fails to understand. I am in the process of writing a pretty long, detailed essay on this. While, yes, institutional problems in public education do exist, so much of the "bad education" discourse is just plain bad parenting.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  When was it ever common for most middle class parents to teach their kids gradeschool-level math and science? If anything parents are now compelled to spend more time tutoring their kids owing to the education system falling short of expectations.
  - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    Uh... always? Child goes home, does homework, doesn't understand something. Child asks parent. Parent helps child understand. Even more with reading, most parents flat out don't read to their kids anymore, and don't help them with their reading assignments. So you end up with a worst case scenario where kids can't fucking read and can't spell either because they communicate with each other through slang while texting online. An education system where parents are disengaged is an education system doomed to failure. Teachers do not have enough time in the day to adequately fill the gaps.
digitalsushi 2y ago
In 2022, a town in my state, Croydon NH, voted to get rid of the school system and replace it with a cheap private online vendor. They did a revote and reminded the town that voting is important, but, for a week that was the plan. A system as engrained as schooling not actually being so was startling to observe so close by.
ARandomerDude 2y ago
Meanwhile, homeschooling my kids is going exactly the way I want. We have great curriculum, the kids work hard and we take our recess together. WFH + homeschool is amazing if your situation allows.
- imzadi 2y ago
  Some parents may do homeschooling well, but most don't. Most use homeschooling as a way to isolate their kids from outside world views and prevent them from questioning what the parents believe. It's a way to indoctrinate kids into a specific viewpoint. Kids should be exposed to many different cultures and viewpoints so that they have a chance to develop their own viewpoints, improve critical thinking skills, and become independent thinkers.
  - overrun11 2y ago
    The stats I've seen show that homeschooled students do substantially better on tests than their public school counterparts. I'm open to the possibility that those stats are wrong but you should at least address that if you're going to take the "homeschooling produces only indoctrination" line. If most homeschoolers are flat-earthers teaching their children that fossils aren't real and are STILL crushing public schools on science, math and reading tests– then that is an embarrassing indictment of public schools.
    - imzadi 2y ago
      Being able to pass a standardized test on a basic subject isn't the same thing as being able to think critically.
      - anthonygd 2y ago
        > being able to think critically. That was strongly discouraged long ago when I was in school. Completely unheard of when my daughter was in school. Sounds like you're grasping at straws here; standardized test scores are pretty terrible but you're suggesting kids are able to think more critically now that they can't do arithmetic?
nonethewiser 2y ago
It's been going the wrong direction since it was formed in 1979. It was a minor bureau before then. Americans were and would be better served by locally driven standards driven by teachers. You know, the actual experts in education. If you axed 75% of admin and returned the DOE to a minor bureau and moved all that money to teachers salaries then I suspect learning outcomes would improve drastically. It's the same problem as Boeing. Put the money back into the fucking product.
- gruez 2y ago
  > It's been going the wrong direction since it was formed in 1979. It was a minor bureau before then. Americans were and would be better served by locally driven standards driven by teachers. You know, the actual experts in education. I thought the K-12 curriculum was set at the state level? What role does the DOE has to play in this?
  - lupire 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - ImJamal 2y ago
    The federal government sets standards like "No child left behind" and gives less funding if a state does not accept them. States don't have the money to not accept the standards so they generally accept them.
EcommerceFlow 2y ago
K-12 needs to absolutely DRILL reading comprehension and mathematics, much more than other subjects. This sets students up for pretty much any major in college. For example, Econ programs rely more on reading comprehension than one might think. The problem is reading comp probably takes years to tune, improve upon, etc. It's not a simple equation you just learn, it's something that comes with years of reading and application.
- ryathal 2y ago
  Even in K-12 reading is hugely important. Grades 2-3 are the transition point where students go from learning to read, to reading to learn. Every year past that point where a student is deficient in reading, causes them to fall behind their peers.
spamizbad 2y ago
People without kids in public schools have a pretty warped view of what things are actually like. When you poll actual parents who enroll their kids in public education you see a different picture. I'm actually really shocked people genuinely believe schools aren't focusing on core academic subjects... if anything they're too narrowly focused on a subset of ELA and Math rather than taking a broader approach to these subjects. As a parent with kids enrolled in public school tho, I'd probably be a "wrong direction" person but probably not for the reasons outlined. My biggest gripes are: 1) Teachers have limited autonomy to shape their curriculum and (at least at our school) teach a canned curriculum to ensure standardized test scores move in the correct direction. This also feeds into more advanced kids getting bored out of their minds. 2) Schools often have lopsided resourcing for various special education concerns. There's significant resources available for kids who struggle in math and reading but if a student's needs are social, speech, etc (eg: kids on the autism spectrum) the support isn't as widely available. If your child is well-behaved and academically strong but has support needs elsewhere they're not going to bend-over backwards despite whatever a state law may say. But it's not all bad. I've also noticed: Bullying seems to be taken WAY more seriously these days. To the point where the kind of stuff that I'm not sure would've even gotten recognized as bullying when I was in school gets clamped down by schools. However, for schools that are more permissive with devices, as I've understood it, much of this bullying just gets pushed online. I think allowing kids to have devices in school is probably the worst thing for education. And this is 100% on the parents for forcing schools to tolerate this. And I think any politician that tried to run on getting devices out of schools would probably get run out of town.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  this mirrors my experience. the OMG DEI IS RUNING SCHOOOLS WAHHHHHH posts are either in San Francisco or are shills. Maybe NYC or greater DC; big city wankery. In all of the cases I saw the diversity and such was limited mostly to the same "golden rule" stuff we got when I was a kid. a lot of the learning materials tended to have characters with different skin colors, but that's just in the "Jamal has 4 bananas, and decides to give 2 away, how many does he have left?" sense -- trivial stuff. My main concern is the screen time and chromebooks, and plain ole student to teacher ratio.
freitzkriesler2 2y ago
Best decision I ever made was pulling my kids from k-8 and homeschooling them due to psychological bullying by peers. By the time they made it into high school, they were well adjusted, studied, had great physical prowess, and somehow managed to become very popular. I attribute this to avoiding the "socialization" aka bullying that goes on in elementary and middle school. Subject wise my kids went faster too but that's just a consequence of the Prussian style schooling.
- underseacables 2y ago
  Same. We pulled our four kids out in 2021 and they go to a local homeschooling group half the day. Class size is less than ten and they are excelling across the board. It seems to have taken a lot of social pressure off of them, they seem more "willing to be taught" than they ever were in public schools. My oldest is in 9th grade and she has opened up in so many positive ways. The downside is that my wife works part time from home, so our income is a little less, but we won't go back. Public schools are just too dangerous.
overrun11 2y ago
There's a fringe political theory popular among those influential in education policy that smart students need to be artificially constrained for the good of society. This view is deeply unpopular with the general public both right AND left. Is it any wonder people are losing trust in this system?
- lupire 2y ago
  Right or wrong, these policies only affect the outliers, and so won't show up on broad statistics. For the large majority of people, quality of gifted education isn't their concern.
  - jinushaun 2y ago
    The extrapolation is that this policy drags everyone down instead of lifting anyone up. Gifted kids are just the canary in the coal mine
lupire 2y ago
If, hypothetically, USA has an unequiratblemsociety that left half the county behind, then we'd expect half the country to say that moving toward equity is moving in the direction.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  > unequiratblemsociety Um... I presume that autocorrect got you, but I can't tell what you were trying to say here. Also, "moving toward equity is moving in the direction"? What direction? The right one, or the wrong one?
friend_and_foe 2y ago
It is. And how could it not? It's mostly a single payer babysitting program. Teachers can't do anything about unruly children except call the police. A whole class has to slow down to accommodate the below average kids. We spend our first year in school playing around and singing the ABC song and drawing purple and green dinosaurs. Educational science has advanced far beyond the Prussian model, but we have to navigate a bureaucracy to change anything, there's no way to keep up. And their chant is "we can fix it for more money." We live in a time now that you can access any and all information that is known to the public on a whim for free. This is very new for us, so people don't know what to do with it. You can, right now, with just a laptop, give your kids an education that even 2 generations ago most people didn't even know enough to be able to dream about, for free. You can educate yourself on any topic to any degree of depth that you like. Institutional education is obsolete. People will be competent from now on to the degree their parents care to teach them. That is with or without public schooling. I'm putting together an education plan for my infant son, that I intend to release to the world once he has had a little go at it, for free. It uses FLOSS software and publicly available information, I'm going to rely heavily on Anki. I intend to teach him how to read starting at the age of 2, and I expect that by the time he is 5 he will have a handle on reading, a decent vocabulary, and basic arithmetic at least, I'm shooting for basic geometry as well. Writing and typing also. My goal is to have him educated at a high school level by the age of 12, with just 3 hours a day of "schooling." I'm pretty sure I can do it, the bar is very low.
- lupire 2y ago
  The only step in your plan that matters at all, is the hours per day of 1:1 tutoring.
  - friend_and_foe 2y ago
    [flagged]
misiti3780 2y ago
They are going in the wrong direction - The simplesolution to this problem is create more charter schools and breaking up the teacher's unions. Until those things happen, nothing will change.

44 points by sarimkx 2y ago

grej 2y ago

I would like to know if the people citing, "Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)", as the reason why K-12 Education is going the wrong direction actually have any experience with this or know any examples, or are they just parroting the points of political leaders that are doing the bidding of donors trying to drive school vouchers?

dfxm12 2y ago
FWIW, the poll is among adults, not adults with children. I'm willing to bet most respondents don't have kids currently in public K-12 schools or don't have experience with this.
kayodelycaon 2y ago
It's real and I wish it wasn't. :/ Two things I've personally heard discussed. 1. Teaching "evolution" instead of "creationism" 2. "Oppressing" white students with "diversity". I've personally experienced the second in the 1990s. A few teachers and professors are really into social justice and take it way too far. No matter how much I agree with them, I can not support berating and shaming white students in front of an entire class as if they were personally responsible for actions that occurred over century before their ancestors even reached the US. (My ancestors did not come from imperialist nations that murdered entire native tribes, thank you very much.) For people who are already primed to think the worst of the entire education system, my experience is all the proof they need that the entire system is out to destroy them.
ericmcer 2y ago
A huge part is probably right wing personalities talking about "wokeness" in our schools. Personally, I do shake my head at some of the stuff my kid talks about. For instance, they were taught that the WW2 era American internment camps should be called American concentration camps. That said I care very little about the social aspects of education unless they are taking away from math, science and making kids who are competent at independent thinking and problem solving.
- dantheman 2y ago
  They were concentration camps - that's the definition. Perhaps your conflating death camps with concentration camps.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > Perhaps your conflating death camps with concentration camps. I would wager most Americans would not even be aware of that distinction. In popular discussion, they're the same thing. So if school kids are being taught "the WW2 era American internment camps should be called American concentration camps," they're actually being mislead. The lesson can't be oblivious to popular understandings or less precise popular usage. It's also worth noting that strategic obliviousness to the difference between popular and technical definitions is a time-tested and effective way to lie and mislead, because it lends itself to a fallacious but effective motte and bailey defense, which also exploits embarrassment over not wanting to seem ignorant and prejudice against people who appear ignorant to silence challenges.
    - JAlexoid 2y ago
      Calling them internment camps is as misleading as equating them to Nazi death camps.
      - tivert 2y ago
        > Calling them internment camps is as misleading as equating them to Nazi death camps. No, because people know what the term "internment camps" means in this context. At least in the American colloquial context, "concentration camps" and "internment camps" are more names for specific historical instances not types.
        JAlexoid 2y ago
        > No, because people know what the term "internment camps" means in this context. I disagree, because the topic is very intentionally glossed over. Most people couldn't tell you what internment means and will not associate it with anything bad.
VS1999 2y ago
This has nothing to do with "the bidding of donors trying to drive school vouchers" or whatever conspiracy that is. We just don't want teachers pushing their political views on children.
overrun11 2y ago
Not allowing people to criticize things without direct personal experience is a bizarrely high standard. I wonder if you hold others to this same standard on issues you agree with?
- deleted 2y ago
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skyde 2y ago
As a parent myself I see this happening daily. Teacher public shaming my kids for having pretzel in his lunch saying it’s not healthy. Then later the same day the school give all the kids crackers as snack :-) Or teachers spending 2 hours telling kids which brand of soap or shampoo they should buy and which brand they should avoid. Or teacher giving a 1 hour talk saying they should open a checking accounts at a particular credit union. For some reason new teacher are not afraid to brainwash kids with their own personal agenda.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Yes lots of experience with this. I think it depends on where you live. Highly progressive cities and states in the US tend to have staff and administration that are openly pushing their politics in schools. That can show up in terms of curriculum (like requiring ethnic studies and displacing other content), bans on gifted education for DEI reasons, or the more directly political / controversial issues showing up in classrooms and assignments (topics like Trump or gender identity or BLM or whatever).

f1yght 2y ago

I'm surprised funding isn't the number 1 issue across the spectrum. It's abundantly clear the schools near me are already underfunded and also have a 100 million a year budget hole. You can complain about admin and what not, but at the end of the day class sizes are big and schools are being closed. That's a massive funding issue.

nsxwolf 2y ago
Chicago Public Schools spends $30,000 per student per year on some of the worst outcomes in all of education. It's clearly not sufficient to just "fund" education.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  Also the head of the teacher’s union sends her own kids to a private Catholic high school. When the people who run the system won’t even send their own kids there, you know it’s terrible.
  - thefaux 2y ago
    Yeah, that is particularly egregious but I have a friend who worked for years in the education bureaucracy and specifically moved to a particular neighborhood for the schools. It's slightly more subtle but the same indictment.
  - momwasteach 2y ago
    My mother was a teacher at my public high school and sent me to the public schools where I grew up. She knew the schools were bad -- they're ranked deep in the bottom half of Massachusetts -- and always would say something to the extent of "but how would it look for a public school teacher to send their kids to private school?". Well, I sort of wish she had? If the schools are a mess and you know it directly from experience, to do otherwise is pretty ridiculous. We have to be honest with reality.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I'm no fan of teachers unions, but this factoid doesn't actually tell us much. The head of CTU wouldn't even theoretically need to be a teacher in order to advocate effectively for their constituents.

dkobia 2y ago

Parents want to tell teachers how to teach. Kids have no respect for teachers. Teachers are not paid nearly enough. Of course its going in the wrong direction.

sickofparadox 2y ago
Teachers are often wrong about the best ways to teach. See the popularity of "whole language" learning over Phonics for a good example in teaching fads being detrimental to literacy across the board.
- vkou 2y ago
  And regionally, parents are wildly wrong about what to teach. Evolution, religion and its role in government, carbon dioxide, fundamentals of medicine, basic civics, recent history, how to navigate a world where gay people exist...
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    That's an interesting assertation to make out of hand, but I don't think the data backs it up.[1][2] [1]https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info-Brief-2015-2.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info... [2]https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1005657.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1005657.pdf
    - vkou 2y ago
      That data doesn't actually counter-indicate what I'm saying, for a myriad reasons. I'll name one obvious one: Homeschool parents are, at minimum, present in their child's education. Compare their numbers to public school parents who are also present in theirs. Here's another obvious one: Most parents who are wildly deluded about those subjects don't homeschool, they just complain (and regionally, vote in representatives who will apply those delusions to the curriculum).
- bradfa 2y ago

Hayvok 2y ago

> We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons: > Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%) > Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%) > Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%) As someone who has lots of friends in conservative circles, these sentiments ring true. (I am surprised "health decisions / vaccine mandates" aren't in the list.) A lot of my wife's friends are choosing to homeschool, and #2 on that list is their primary reason. They acknowledge its likely a minority of teachers engaging in that behavior, but their feeling is "it only takes one" to ruin the entire school experience for their kid, and create a ton of problems for them to deal with at home. (Disclaimer: we homeschool for reason #1 and because my wife was homeschooled and it's a comfortable way for her to run our schedule and home.)

hobs 2y ago
And the question I have for conservatives is, then why doesn't that apply to cops? Public sector job, unaccountable to the individual, has authority over people we care about, etc. I have heard more conservatives complain about librarians (again, same deal, except they dont shoot anyone) than cops.
skhunted 2y ago
It’s disconcerting that people who have no training on how to teach think they can do it well enough. Those same people generally seek out those with training to do things in other areas of their life. But when it comes to teaching they think they know better. Asimov’s famous quote on ignorance comes to mind. EDIT: Do people generally use those without training to provide medical care, fix cars, cut hair, do electrical work, etc.? The answer is no. But when it comes to teaching science to k-12 students it’s ok to use someone with no training? It’s crazy.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  All of those things you listed are totally normal for people to DIY. It's kind of bizarre to me that you think otherwise. It's like when Randy on South Park teaches his kids to call the handyman to fix the oven door. Or there's a handyman on youtube who's talked about being called and charging people like $500 to push the button on a GFCI outlet. It's hard to believe he's serious. He's also talked about being called by millennials to change smoke alarm batteries.

jollyllama 2y ago

I'm more surprised that half say it's going in the right direction.

sophacles 2y ago
They're the ones who are opposed to having an education system.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
They don't. There's a large "not sure" component.
deweller 2y ago
> A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction.
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monero-xmr 2y ago

Peruse r/teachers subreddit to get some of the vibe of teaching. Here’s the second highest post of all time https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/FQCaxMsQrC https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/FQCaxMsQrC The major issues as I have observed are: Can’t expel disruptive kids. Schools pass students regardless if they learn the material, and now a significant portion of high school students in America can barely read. Teachers are mostly doing daycare instead of teaching. Phones everywhere which distracts kids. And most importantly: advanced kids are no longer removed from gen pop and put into their own smart kid bubble. Identifying gifted kids and giving them more difficult material is the single most important thing we need to do as a society for K12 education.

nsxwolf 2y ago
I have a new family member that's a teacher and she says she basically talks to a brick wall while every kid in class messes around on their phones. She's not allowed to do anything about it.
- deleted 2y ago
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pennomi 2y ago
Trying to get my children into an advanced program has been taking years of effort, even at a very good public school. They are bored out of their minds because they already know everything being taught. We are sabotaging our brightest minds from an early age.
thefaux 2y ago
I agree with your point about tracking but I also see why it is a third rail. Some parents of average students will raise hell and accuse you of discrimination if you give anyone special treatment. Of course, the irony is I remember that when I was in fifth grade and given advanced math material with three other students that we actually got less teacher attention than the rest of the class. But it was far, far better for us than being stuck in the slow track.

cde-v 2y ago

Half will always say it is going the wrong direction based on who is in the White House at the time.

bityard 2y ago

The article is meh. Election year. Partisan politics. Repeats the same set of points 3 times. It can be safely skipped. But I will note that we quite deliberately sent our kids to a well-regarded public school system in our state and it went from pretty nice to nearly a warzone in the last 10 years. When our daughter started Kindergarten there, the school had a big emphasis on positivity, accommodating kids with special needs, and a strong anti-bullying policy. Since then, all of the classrooms have devolved from learning to daycare. From the outside, I see these as the main causes: 1) Incompetent management and leadership from the superintendent all the way down to the teachers. 2) Removal of separate classrooms and teachers equipment to handle students with special needs. Now all of the students with behavioral and emotional problems are placed in regular classrooms and whole days go by without any actual learning happening due to disruptions caused by the special needs kids. 4) Bullying, verbal abuse, and physical abuse is fully tolerated with no reprecussions at all. Teachers and staff have no power to punish or remove bullies from the school. My son has been particularly impacted by this. He's a bright and friendly kid, but gullible, and you'd frankly be shocked how abusive and manipulative 8 to 10 years old with shitty parents can be. We are actively moving our son from that school and into a STEM-centric school farther away, in the hopes that the educational and emotional damage he has suffered there won't leave too big a scar going forward.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Why is there so much focus on public education and aversion to private options like charter schools? I feel like this has turned into an ideological battle of left versus right in the US. Consumer choice and competition benefit society in virtually all other areas, so why not here? Personally I think the one size fits all nature of public schooling, how they are funded, how curriculum are determined by state agencies, and how teachers politics (individually and through unions) influences education have all contributed to a decay in quality of education despite lots of funding. At least where I am, funding per student has gone up dramatically over the last 10 years but parents universally say schooling is worse than ever. It’s also interesting seeing the gaps on certain questions: > Teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom (76% vs. 23%) If you are on the political side that is benefiting from teachers bringing their personal political views into the classroom, then you would not view it as a problem since it benefits your ideology. If you are on the other political side, then you would see it as a problem since it is a use of institutions to spread your political opponents influence.

aantix 2y ago
>Why is there so much focus on public education and aversion to private options like charter schools Because public schools are infrastructure. I pay for roads on the other side of town, even if I will never use them. I pay for kids that I will never meet to get a safe education, regardless of their behavior/economics/orientation/aptitude. Private schools are allowed to discriminate on who they can take. That's directly against the mission of public schooling. Charter schools are not offered consistently everywhere, so it steals money from already under-resourced rural public schools. Rural kids may not have any nearby, alternative offerings. There has to be a baseline education with a consistent budget. A non-discriminatory offering where all kids are welcomed. A place where no one can be denied an education. Any other alternative you're welcome to attend (if they'll take you), but you must fund it on your own.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  I haven’t thought through the phrasing of “infrastructure” and what it implies. But I am not debating the existence of funding for education - so even if you are not using schools because you don’t have children, there would be funding. I’m just saying parents should have choice over where that money goes for their children. If $20K is spent per student per year, a parent should get to select whatever provider they want or use the same money for homeschooling or for parent-led shared groups or whatever else. As for private schools being allowed to discriminate on who they can take - I think that can be solved separately. You could pass regulations to require accepting students or simply fund students by need (for example parents of special needs children or children scoring poorly can get vastly more funding to spend as they choose). > Any other alternative you're welcome to attend (if they'll take you), but you must fund it on your own. I see this sentiment a lot from those against parental choice, but I don’t understand it. Why must I fund it on my own? If tax money is collected from me and only made available to the public school system, then I am deprived of my money and then not given the option to just “fund it on my own” unless I am rich and have enough leftover money still. That is really unjust. There is a certain amount of money that would be spent on a child per year anyways - and I think parents should be able to attend any alternative and use that equivalent funding elsewhere. Why would the public option get to keep it when they are relieved of the cost of educating a child that is attending some other option?

bongoman42 2y ago

As a parent of a 7 year old, I would also say the same. Our kid goes to a public school and overall they spend way less time on core subjects but a lot more on things related to race and so on which really do not have relevance to their level. The math is so far back that we had to put him into an additional math tutoring outside of school. Pretty much all parents in our area send their kids to something like Russian School of Math or so. Within people I directly know a couple have put their kids into private school and I am strongly considering it moving forward though it will be a huge financial strain. A more problematic thing I see with schools not challenging kids is that all kinds of behavior problems arise because they do not have anything to learn. Our kid was a lot better when I gave him math stuff from grade 4 or higher to learn. Kids need challenge. There is a limit to how much you can occupy them with coloring numbers and iPads. And at least here it is definitely not a funding issue. In fact his school has a cap on spending because if they spent more it would increase disparities with neighboring schools.

skyyler 2y ago
>Our kid goes to a public school and overall they spend way less time on core subjects but a lot more on things related to race and so on which really do not have relevance to their level. I'm curious about this. Could you explain more?
- giantg2 2y ago
  Not the same person, but we recently started touring schools in different districts. They all seemed to push diversity and anti-bullying programs as a main part of their pitch. There was very little focus on the academics. It was basically you get the normal classes unless you test into an IEP or G-IEP. Then they'd show off their facilities, how every kid gets a Chromebook, and after enough good stickers under the bully program they get a pizza party, etc. The thing that spoke to me the most was looking in on the classes. Some of the schools seemed to just have the kids on screens in every class. Others had more of a mix. Behavior was also noticeable in one school, as was the aditude of the administration (both negative). On parent at that school told me you can't even tell the teacher about bullying and bad behavior. The kids are expected to fill out an incident report on their Chromebook.

renewiltord 2y ago

40% of US households have children, so this means people without a clue are just spouting off haha. I could care less but I find these things amusing.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

Hmm... both parties agree that it's going in the wrong direction, but differ on why. (Probably because they differ on what the wrong direction is.) It seems to me that "parents trying to tell teachers what to teach" and "teachers bring their personal views into the classroom" are both kind of saying "teach the core content" - don't wander off into what the teacher wants, and don't wander off into what the parents want. (Yeah, I know, you can't entirely, especially with reading. They have to read something, and that something carries some content. Who gets to decide what it is?)

HumblyTossed 2y ago

Of course it is. This is BY DESIGN. A certain political party wants public education to go away and have private education funded by your tax dollars. It's yet another money grab by the wealthy.

deleted 2y ago
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AnimalMuppet 2y ago
In blue states, people also think the schools are going in the wrong direction. You realize that your "certain political party" doesn't control the schools there, right?

gamerDude 2y ago

As someone working in EdTech, I think the idea of schools being underfunded is very complicated. School Districts horribly mismanage their budgets. One of the largest school districts in the country and one of my clients just didn't know how much money they had spent for two years. So, their solution was to not renew any contracts the following year. Didn't matter how important they were, you were only safe if you had a multi-year contract (which thankfully I did). The people who are making spending choices in districts are often clueless about how to spend money or think about ROI. Some schools are likely underfunded. But they also just need financial literacy training.

bearjaws 2y ago
I work in EdTech as well and I tend to agree, but there is also a very strong correlation between funding and rank of schools. 8 of the top 10 schools in terms of educational outcomes also are in the top 10 for spending. Due to paying for education with property taxes, this of course carries on into the county level where many schools are incredibly over funded and have good education, where as others have poor funding and terrible education. I do agree overall though, when you look at the numbers at a macro scale. Here in Florida, average class has around 20 kids, we pay around $10k per kid per year. How does that not fund the school, how do teachers make so little? Average pay is around $50k, you could put two teachers in each room and still have $100k left over for all the expenses of running the school. I believe its a bit of you get what you pay for, the states paying more get better talent who use the money more effectively. The main factor that money can't fix are the parents. We have a Drop out Recovery program and well, the common factor is the parents and income.
lupire 2y ago
EdTech is one the large classes of misspending.

deleted 2y ago

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abeppu 2y ago

Maybe a more constructive question is, do we agree on which countries are doing public education well? And what insights or practices can we learn from them?

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

Education? Try parenting. The average parent nowadays is a sycophant for their children. They expect teachers to do ALL of the education work, they don't want their kids to have any homework, and they don't expect educators to discipline unruly kids who have been raised by their cell phones and tablets in a Lord of the Flies online social setting. People who didn't get anything and everything they wanted from their parents when they were growing up have decided to try to be friends with their kids instead of teaching them how to behave in public or sit down with them to teach them how to freaking read. IQs are going down because Millennials and Zoomers are collectively irresponsible as parents and will attack educators instead of taking responsibility for their childrens' educational welfare. They treat teachers like garbage and their kids follow suit. And what can they POSSIBLY point to? New Math? Gay people exist and you shouldn't treat them with hatred? LOL, please.

sarimkx 2y ago
This is such an important point and one that pretty much everyone fails to understand. I am in the process of writing a pretty long, detailed essay on this. While, yes, institutional problems in public education do exist, so much of the "bad education" discourse is just plain bad parenting.
slothtrop 2y ago
When was it ever common for most middle class parents to teach their kids gradeschool-level math and science? If anything parents are now compelled to spend more time tutoring their kids owing to the education system falling short of expectations.
- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  Uh... always? Child goes home, does homework, doesn't understand something. Child asks parent. Parent helps child understand. Even more with reading, most parents flat out don't read to their kids anymore, and don't help them with their reading assignments. So you end up with a worst case scenario where kids can't fucking read and can't spell either because they communicate with each other through slang while texting online. An education system where parents are disengaged is an education system doomed to failure. Teachers do not have enough time in the day to adequately fill the gaps.

digitalsushi 2y ago

In 2022, a town in my state, Croydon NH, voted to get rid of the school system and replace it with a cheap private online vendor. They did a revote and reminded the town that voting is important, but, for a week that was the plan. A system as engrained as schooling not actually being so was startling to observe so close by.

ARandomerDude 2y ago

Meanwhile, homeschooling my kids is going exactly the way I want. We have great curriculum, the kids work hard and we take our recess together. WFH + homeschool is amazing if your situation allows.

imzadi 2y ago
Some parents may do homeschooling well, but most don't. Most use homeschooling as a way to isolate their kids from outside world views and prevent them from questioning what the parents believe. It's a way to indoctrinate kids into a specific viewpoint. Kids should be exposed to many different cultures and viewpoints so that they have a chance to develop their own viewpoints, improve critical thinking skills, and become independent thinkers.
- overrun11 2y ago
  The stats I've seen show that homeschooled students do substantially better on tests than their public school counterparts. I'm open to the possibility that those stats are wrong but you should at least address that if you're going to take the "homeschooling produces only indoctrination" line. If most homeschoolers are flat-earthers teaching their children that fossils aren't real and are STILL crushing public schools on science, math and reading tests– then that is an embarrassing indictment of public schools.
  - imzadi 2y ago
    Being able to pass a standardized test on a basic subject isn't the same thing as being able to think critically.
    - anthonygd 2y ago
      > being able to think critically. That was strongly discouraged long ago when I was in school. Completely unheard of when my daughter was in school. Sounds like you're grasping at straws here; standardized test scores are pretty terrible but you're suggesting kids are able to think more critically now that they can't do arithmetic?

nonethewiser 2y ago

It's been going the wrong direction since it was formed in 1979. It was a minor bureau before then. Americans were and would be better served by locally driven standards driven by teachers. You know, the actual experts in education. If you axed 75% of admin and returned the DOE to a minor bureau and moved all that money to teachers salaries then I suspect learning outcomes would improve drastically. It's the same problem as Boeing. Put the money back into the fucking product.

gruez 2y ago
> It's been going the wrong direction since it was formed in 1979. It was a minor bureau before then. Americans were and would be better served by locally driven standards driven by teachers. You know, the actual experts in education. I thought the K-12 curriculum was set at the state level? What role does the DOE has to play in this?
- lupire 2y ago
  [flagged]
- ImJamal 2y ago
  The federal government sets standards like "No child left behind" and gives less funding if a state does not accept them. States don't have the money to not accept the standards so they generally accept them.

EcommerceFlow 2y ago

K-12 needs to absolutely DRILL reading comprehension and mathematics, much more than other subjects. This sets students up for pretty much any major in college. For example, Econ programs rely more on reading comprehension than one might think. The problem is reading comp probably takes years to tune, improve upon, etc. It's not a simple equation you just learn, it's something that comes with years of reading and application.

ryathal 2y ago
Even in K-12 reading is hugely important. Grades 2-3 are the transition point where students go from learning to read, to reading to learn. Every year past that point where a student is deficient in reading, causes them to fall behind their peers.

spamizbad 2y ago

People without kids in public schools have a pretty warped view of what things are actually like. When you poll actual parents who enroll their kids in public education you see a different picture. I'm actually really shocked people genuinely believe schools aren't focusing on core academic subjects... if anything they're too narrowly focused on a subset of ELA and Math rather than taking a broader approach to these subjects. As a parent with kids enrolled in public school tho, I'd probably be a "wrong direction" person but probably not for the reasons outlined. My biggest gripes are: 1) Teachers have limited autonomy to shape their curriculum and (at least at our school) teach a canned curriculum to ensure standardized test scores move in the correct direction. This also feeds into more advanced kids getting bored out of their minds. 2) Schools often have lopsided resourcing for various special education concerns. There's significant resources available for kids who struggle in math and reading but if a student's needs are social, speech, etc (eg: kids on the autism spectrum) the support isn't as widely available. If your child is well-behaved and academically strong but has support needs elsewhere they're not going to bend-over backwards despite whatever a state law may say. But it's not all bad. I've also noticed: Bullying seems to be taken WAY more seriously these days. To the point where the kind of stuff that I'm not sure would've even gotten recognized as bullying when I was in school gets clamped down by schools. However, for schools that are more permissive with devices, as I've understood it, much of this bullying just gets pushed online. I think allowing kids to have devices in school is probably the worst thing for education. And this is 100% on the parents for forcing schools to tolerate this. And I think any politician that tried to run on getting devices out of schools would probably get run out of town.

red-iron-pine 2y ago
this mirrors my experience. the OMG DEI IS RUNING SCHOOOLS WAHHHHHH posts are either in San Francisco or are shills. Maybe NYC or greater DC; big city wankery. In all of the cases I saw the diversity and such was limited mostly to the same "golden rule" stuff we got when I was a kid. a lot of the learning materials tended to have characters with different skin colors, but that's just in the "Jamal has 4 bananas, and decides to give 2 away, how many does he have left?" sense -- trivial stuff. My main concern is the screen time and chromebooks, and plain ole student to teacher ratio.

freitzkriesler2 2y ago

Best decision I ever made was pulling my kids from k-8 and homeschooling them due to psychological bullying by peers. By the time they made it into high school, they were well adjusted, studied, had great physical prowess, and somehow managed to become very popular. I attribute this to avoiding the "socialization" aka bullying that goes on in elementary and middle school. Subject wise my kids went faster too but that's just a consequence of the Prussian style schooling.

underseacables 2y ago
Same. We pulled our four kids out in 2021 and they go to a local homeschooling group half the day. Class size is less than ten and they are excelling across the board. It seems to have taken a lot of social pressure off of them, they seem more "willing to be taught" than they ever were in public schools. My oldest is in 9th grade and she has opened up in so many positive ways. The downside is that my wife works part time from home, so our income is a little less, but we won't go back. Public schools are just too dangerous.

overrun11 2y ago

There's a fringe political theory popular among those influential in education policy that smart students need to be artificially constrained for the good of society. This view is deeply unpopular with the general public both right AND left. Is it any wonder people are losing trust in this system?

lupire 2y ago
Right or wrong, these policies only affect the outliers, and so won't show up on broad statistics. For the large majority of people, quality of gifted education isn't their concern.
- jinushaun 2y ago
  The extrapolation is that this policy drags everyone down instead of lifting anyone up. Gifted kids are just the canary in the coal mine

lupire 2y ago

If, hypothetically, USA has an unequiratblemsociety that left half the county behind, then we'd expect half the country to say that moving toward equity is moving in the direction.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> unequiratblemsociety Um... I presume that autocorrect got you, but I can't tell what you were trying to say here. Also, "moving toward equity is moving in the direction"? What direction? The right one, or the wrong one?

friend_and_foe 2y ago

It is. And how could it not? It's mostly a single payer babysitting program. Teachers can't do anything about unruly children except call the police. A whole class has to slow down to accommodate the below average kids. We spend our first year in school playing around and singing the ABC song and drawing purple and green dinosaurs. Educational science has advanced far beyond the Prussian model, but we have to navigate a bureaucracy to change anything, there's no way to keep up. And their chant is "we can fix it for more money." We live in a time now that you can access any and all information that is known to the public on a whim for free. This is very new for us, so people don't know what to do with it. You can, right now, with just a laptop, give your kids an education that even 2 generations ago most people didn't even know enough to be able to dream about, for free. You can educate yourself on any topic to any degree of depth that you like. Institutional education is obsolete. People will be competent from now on to the degree their parents care to teach them. That is with or without public schooling. I'm putting together an education plan for my infant son, that I intend to release to the world once he has had a little go at it, for free. It uses FLOSS software and publicly available information, I'm going to rely heavily on Anki. I intend to teach him how to read starting at the age of 2, and I expect that by the time he is 5 he will have a handle on reading, a decent vocabulary, and basic arithmetic at least, I'm shooting for basic geometry as well. Writing and typing also. My goal is to have him educated at a high school level by the age of 12, with just 3 hours a day of "schooling." I'm pretty sure I can do it, the bar is very low.

lupire 2y ago
The only step in your plan that matters at all, is the hours per day of 1:1 tutoring.
- friend_and_foe 2y ago
  [flagged]

misiti3780 2y ago

They are going in the wrong direction - The simplesolution to this problem is create more charter schools and breaking up the teacher's unions. Until those things happen, nothing will change.