Most teachers have been asking for more resources for decades, warning of the consequences of not doing so. It seems a little on the nose to ignore their warnings and when the consequences manifest opt to blame something else entirely.
What’s especially interesting is that a lot of teachers take a paycut [1] to go teach in private school partly because the kids are better adjusted, rich kids have more comprehensive childcare and don’t need to rely on screens/social media for the gaps in parenting.
For a taste of all these details, go on r/Teachers
[1]: https://www.ccu.edu/blogs/cags/2011/12/teaching-in-private-s...
There is correlation between socioeconomic status and academic performance, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all. Schools serving lower socioeconomic populations should have vastly higher resources to address the additional challenges. One of those resources, is the number of teachers.
A teacher taking a paycut for a different job is not because they want less money, it is because the ratio of what they are paid to the work that is asked of them is better in the lower paid job. That is exactly a resource issue. If you pay a teacher 20% more and ask them to do a job that takes two teachers, then it is unsurprising that they will go for a job that more reasonably asks of them proportional to what they are paid.
It’s money sure, and some teachers who don’t care can keep going. But most who do, would be happy to switch to a place where they can make a difference.
This is all a separate conversation to school resources is my point.
Somehow the much greater oppression of women in the Islamic world doesn't make the Islamic world prosperous.
Or nursing, or a fair number of other career tracks. Perhaps as important, there were plenty of smaller and family-owned firms. In many of those, talented women could get quite a ways ahead - though perhaps with less public acknowledgement than is currently fashionable.
> Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry.
Your HS teachers were in the 0.001%? No 2X, 3X, or even 25X to teacher salaries could replace a meaningful fraction of today's teachers with such people - because, by definition, the supply does not exist.
The teachers didn’t start being bad at teaching. The parents got bad at parenting in an environment where everything is working against them.
Teachers, more of them, with more training is one of the main things that is needed. Increase the amount of one on one time. Adjust the curriculum to what each student needs. Measure the improvement in individual students, not the improvement in the mean of the lot of them.
Only teach things after the principles that they depend upon have been learned.
But you know what teachers got? Respect. Teachers were part of the elite that ran the village.
As a corollary, the variation that people personally experience at small scales (e.g. high-school teachers comparing the various students they encountered throughout their career) is dominated by changes in class composition. Some years, there are just randomly more bad students than in others. When the students seem to be getting worse over time, the teacher might attribute this to societal decline; when the students seem to be getting better, they credit their skill at teaching instead.
Thus things are constantly getting worse and the sky is falling, yet somehow it never makes contact with the ground, and when you compare with ancient records, it's more or less where it has always been.