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 deliberat

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.