> Trying to keep up with everyone - who came on the bus but is leaving early with their parents, who came with their parents but is riding back on the bus - especially with a large group.
It may be difficult to keep track of kids, but even so, the answer to that difficulty is not to do things that make the kids' lives overly burdensome just because that makes the teachers' lives a little better. You can find a way to compromise. If you have enough resources to take a group of kids to a choir competition in the first place, then you have enough resources to figure out some way that the kids are not stranded at the competition with no way to productively use that time until some mandated school transportation takes them home.
The point is that simply mandating a solution like "no one can leave early" is lazy and represents a failure to empathize with the kids or their parents. I agree with you it will have to be some type of compromise -- you can't give every single child or every single parent some customized, preferential treatment. But what the schools do is not at all like a compromise. It's much more of a mandated policy, and they threaten and coerce parents into scared obedience by subtly threatening to take it out on your child via grades, political favors (like who gets which role in a school musical) and so forth. So if you raise an issue and say that some policy is simply going too far (like forcing kids to be at the school by 5:15 am) you're actually putting your own kid at risk even just by making waves.
> As far as the homework, what would you have them do? They already have do much material to cover for standardized tests that they can't thoroughly cover any topics they way they need to. They know it and they don't have a choice. They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
This part really frustrates me. For one thing, the volume of homework and the speed with which you cover material are not at all the same thing. You can cover a lot of material without giving hardly any homework, or you can cover very few different topics while laying the homework on heavily. Measuring progress as "amount of homework completed" is a horrible idea. It's essentially like utterly giving up the idea of teaching people and admitting you're just going to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
Also, there are at least a few studies out there which suggest that kids get up to three times as much homework as the state guidelines tend to recommend. High volume of homework is not really a symptom of guidelines. Covering crappy topical subjects, or expecting too many subjects to be covered in a year, those can be the fault of the guidelines. Evaluating students on nonsensical rubrics can be a problem with guidelines.
But making sure kids learn effectively with a reasonable amount of homework is perhaps the primary job of the teacher, regardless of the guidelines. What I mean is: conditional on some set of topics given from guidelines on high, the teacher's job is to then clamp the homework level at or below a reasonable amount and then evoke learning. Levering up the amount of homework doesn't somehow magically evoke learning, and often hinders it.
> They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
Yes they absolutely can, and many teachers do, and they absolutely should, even in the presence of state guidelines. If adding more homework volume only exacerbates a problem of not really understanding something, then it cannot be a solution. Keeping homework at the same level, or even speeding it up, would only make things worse. It's like throwing gas on the fire.
I agree with you that teaching is not effectively rewarded in US culture. Four of my aunts were school teachers and another relative is an inner city principal in Ohio. I've heard it all. I absolutely agree we should have a culture change that affords more pay, respect, and status to effective teachers at all levels.
But at the same time, there are a lot of underqualified teachers who resort to cramming more homework as a crutch tactic. The worst part about this is that they refuse to be reasonable or to compromise when proactive parents try to play a role in their child's education. It's usually contentious and aggressive, and school administrators are forced to back the teacher even when teacher policies are clearly destructive. The whole thing turns into a hugely contentious shit show, and instead of parents sitting back and just accepting some line about just dealing with it, it's perfectly reasonable for them to expect there will be compromise that is based on their own inputs and values.