Comment by walledstance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walledstance | Hacker News Reader

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I have taught for multiple years in a southern state in the US within Behavior Support units for the "emotionally disturbed or distracted students." These classes range from neurotypical, ADHD, autism spectrum, to learning disabilities. These students being the so called "bullies and disruptive kids" many people in this thread have directly judged as poor ROI and "not worthwhile."

Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.

I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.

I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.

:Continued below:

Continued from above:

Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.

Continued from above again:

Admin churn and policy changes have a direct and deleterious impact on teacher, student, and school performance. I can't focus on teaching academics if I am supposed to reteach classroom policy changes at random times throughout the year. Policy changes can take weeks to months to integrate into a classroom. Teachers who are whipped back and forth between admin and policy changes don't have a moment to settle in and focus on what they were hired for. Instead they juggle the ever changing classroom culture, incorporating morphing policy decisions about how their classroom should be run, and socially adjusting to staffing and admin changes. There is no time to settle in and so burn out and nihilistic expectations take shape in many teachers. This description is only a small part of the problem with admin and policy churn in school systems.

Parents and parenting styles are other pernicious issues that are extremely controversial. These issues directly affect students and indirectly affect teachers. Whether it hurts or not to admit, parents have power over the school system. Many people outside of the school system focus on teacher unions and large scale public school administration as a main pain point.

Yet when teachers and school administration are under threat from being sued due to happenings in class because parents don't like what occurrs, the school system adjusts to accommodate those parents' wishes. At some point the school system begins to become an inane policy labyrinth to avoid lawsuits. There are plenty of lawsuit examples if searched on any search engine. These lawsuits set precedents in our county for how policy will look in coming years. As for parenting styles, these are varied and diverse. Every household has their way of rearing children. Yet when you take diverse children and put them into a class of 20+ students and typically one teacher the varied rearing styles become a pain point when applying teaching standards. In one highschool class you can have students reading on a college level, while others are emerging eighth grade. Has the system failed them? Sure, the system didn't catch them in time before they moved on and moving them now would take months due to admin churn and County backlogs on the other hundreds of thousands of students issues weighing down a bloated inept system. Or maybe the previous school was worried that funding would be cut causing admin to push through many students that should have been retained because if not the "greater good" of hundreds of other students would be impacted by funding cuts. But it isn't just the school systems that have failed students, so have the parents. Sometimes students aren't held back because of parental intervention. These interventions can be lawsuits or putting up enough of a fight that the county relents and allows the student to progress. The latter has happened four times in my classes and many more times to my other teaching peers. When teachers hold students back and parents put up a fight by bringing in the county, the school's admin and teacher have to follow the county dictates, which almost always fall on the parents' side. A cause for this is teachers are not considered experts when it comes to education. There are a myriad of reasons for this ranging from poorly funded college education degree programs, to society's mistrust of experts, to a belief parents know their children the best. As exemplified by the recent pandemic and social media post hating "lazy teachers who want to get out work" , mistrust in teachers and their teaching abilities are pretty apparent.

You should write this up on Quora so it sticks around.

Are there studies that show a statistical relationship between admin churn and student performance?

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