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

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.

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.

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.

Is it any wonder people are losing trust in this system?

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of course its going in the wrong direction.

Here’s the second highest post of all time 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.

Until those things happen, nothing will change.

> 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.)

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.

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.