What the New, Low Test Scores for 13-Year-Olds Say About U.S. Education Now
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Say what you want about the alternative power structures in other countries, they deserve all the criticism they get for some very real reasons, but sometimes being able to unilaterally force through changes seems really appealing.
But the bigger issue is definetly the salaries - School Districts are at the mercy of local tax regimes and a bit of federal and state funding.
Due to this, salaries remain low as it's politically untenable to give meaningful raises.
Add to that, a College Degree for Educators is expensive (around $70-100k in tuition alone) given the salaries ($30-70k starting depending on the school district)
You get what you pay for I guess
Would love to read this in full.
Without reading it though, my personal hunch as to why this is happening is a perfect storm of a generation of teachers conditioned by the idiotic NCLB act mixed with a generation of kids who were given their stressed-out parent's smart phone to play around with before they could even speak.
Plus, over that same time period, so many have left teaching as a profession because the conditions are simply awful - no support from ever-growing administration, criminally low pay, awful health care, terrible parents, distracted kids, and a teach-to-the-test mentality that has come full circle to become the enemy it sought to defeat.
That's to also say nothing of the fact that certain academic subjects are hyper-politicized for absolutely no reason, which in the age of social media keyboard warriors and divisive politics backed by big donors (whose interests absolutely do not run parallel with the country's best long-term interests) makes things even worse for teachers.
No wonder our educational system is failing.
We really need to rethink our educational policies as a society, and what we need to do to get to where we need to be.
HN, feel free to take a crack at what we need to do to get this country's education system back on track. If you folks can't solve it, I really doubt our representatives in various state houses and in DC can do so.
Deriving a general algorithm for forming the second link from the first is left to the reader, whose test scores are assumed to be nonzero ;)
Don't forget idiotic teacher unions
I'm all for teachers unionizing and fighting for better pay, better funding, and things that actually have a demonstrable better outcome for students AND teachers.
I get that teachers get attacked by politicians, especially by those on the far right whose goals for education are limited to using education as a vessel to promote the bible. Fuck those people. But I don't like how the union doesn't always act in the best interests of teachers, students, and the education of our youth.
Having a collective bargaining agreement where one side of the table isn’t on the hook for the actual bill invariably ends up with self preserving administrative bureaucracy.
I don't see the distinction. What's the difference between public and private sector employees?
> one side of the table isn’t on the hook for the actual bill
So you're actually against unions in general?
Public sector union contracts are negotiated with elected officials. Parties in power make concessions to those unions to gain the electoral support of their members using tax dollars as the funding source. Once granted, it's nearly impossible to walk away from a bad deal. We end up with unfunded obligations as the bill tossed to future generations. They're effectively buying votes with your tax dollars.
And that's just the money angle. On the service front, they make non-monetary concessions like the inability to fire bad teachers without going through an all but impossible multi-year process.
> So you're actually against unions in general?
Not at all. Private sector companies pay their own bills. They're free to enter whatever agreements they'd like because tax payers are not on the hook for the results. If they enter an unsustainable agreement, the company will simply go bankrupt. If they think it's advantageous to enter a collective bargaining agreement then they're free to do so.
The government has a lot of power and can push them around, like by passing legislative orders for them to go back to work in spite of collective bargaining agreements not being ratified.
You have to get rid of credentialism and entitlement for the too-involved ones, and convince them that their child will only get out of school what they put in.
The not involved enough ones are probably even harder, you have to convince them that something can change if the kids put in the work after so many years of it really not mattering that much, since the kids with the too-involved parents are just doing still-that-much-more and are doing things you don't have the money or time to do to pad the college resume.
If you don't convince those groups, you don't have a chance of enforcing things policy-wise on those parents.
And showing up on college campuses, at job interviews, etc.
Or aggressively policing curriculum, especially of the "you were perfectly happy and trusting of the officials you elected until it was your kid" variety.
If you don't let your children learn from their mistakes, or be exposed to things you don't like, as children it's just going to happen with more severe consequences as adults.
It also adds another pain point to the job of being a teacher, which is just gonna drive more people away and harm education in that way.