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Comment by bijowo1676 | Hacker News Reader

I have a kid who just graduated elementary and is about to enter Middle school.

Your post actually explains why every single classmate of my daughter has enrolled in private middle school ($50k+ tuition), despite being in the best school district (Palo Alto School District).

Apparently public middle schools are really bad in California, but you can still find decent high and elementary schools

All top private middle schools in the bay are oversubscribed and cannot accomodate everyone, and require ridiculous exams and admission process that rivals Ivy League, situation is really bad, and demand for good teachers is infinite

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What happened was there were a lot of boomers that taught my generation in the bay area. So when I was in high school around 94-98 the teachers were typically 40-50ish year old boomer generation. These people were pretty good at teaching. Mostly white. As generation X started getting into the game, and bureaucratic processes the introduced "core" and "new math". Both pretty bad. I was in the middle of the transition so I did get pre-new-math as well.

What happened next? Well pretty much all of us got jobs at Google, Apple and other places. The only way for any of us to have stayed in teaching would have been major compromises. We decimated the teaching industry because it didn't realize the salaries these companies were waiting to pay us. They had no chance.

This situation rhymes with manufacturing jobs in the midwest.

Industrial and manufscturing jobs were offshored to Asia and Americans had zero chance to be price competitive relative to East-Asian labor

The diff is that Midwest didnt have Apple and Google to fall back on, they only had fentanyl to cope with their situation.

But now the situation is so bad, you cant even find talent in US even if you are willing to pay for it. Asian countries have better integrated supply chains that make manufacturing two to three orders cheaper than in US.

And nobody knows how to solve it, but there is only one solution.

End the USD as a global reserve currency, so that manufacturing in US has more power again, relative to financial industry. I dont see any other option long term

I like the girl but I can't help but dislike what her and her social circle are doing to schools. I go to their social events after hours for happy hour or family events and I honestly don't think these people are capable of molding the youth into anything but lame 'nice' kind stupid people. Yes, being nice and kind are important, sure. But you get major problems when these teachers can not inspire or provoke thought. And they can't, because they are honestly borderline retarded. Half the kids are just nodding along, and the other half realize by around 7th grade that their teachers are stupid and start really mistreating them and ignoring them. Its a mess.

> re---ed.

Please stop saying say. It's almost as bad as the n-word. There are a lot of neurodivergent people around here.

I personally like saying the word, but I'll admit this is one of the worse examples I've used in a while. Because I genuinely was trying to imply they were dumb, which makes it a more serious use of the word.

Personally I can't imagine saying that word in reference to anyone with a true disability. In my social circles, retarded is reserved for people acting in dumb ways due to really bad social skills or often even self centeredness or laziness. Using it in regards to the teachers was probably too close to a serious use of it and I shouldnt have. Sorry.

You may not imagine saying it, but we've all heard it plenty of times that we're not exactly going to assume it comes from a good place.

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