Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?
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This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
(last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
Schools across the U.S. are trying a 4-day week. Why? To retain teachers - https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the... - November 8th, 2023
Teachers are calling it quits amid rising school violence, burnout and stagnating salaries - https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/us/teachers-quitting-shortage... - May 31st, 2023
Four day school week? In rural Missouri, more districts see it as a way to recruit teachers - https://www.kcur.org/education/2022-06-11/four-day-school-we... - June 11th, 2022
Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
If the home situation is fucked up it doesn't matter how much money you throw at the schools.
This gets kinda tricky to analyze, and especially hard to compare to other countries, which may have very different ways of accounting for things.
That money goes to:
1) Salaries for school administrators.
2) Salaries for teachers.
3) Salaries for office support staff (e.g. secretaries)
4) Depending on how the accounting is done, that may include a fraction of the salaries of district admin (super and assistant superintendents, and Nb there can be several of the latter, even in smallish districts) and their office support staff.
5) Facilities construction and renovation, and/or servicing debt on bonds for past facilities construction and renovation.
6) Property and building maintenance. Mowing, fixing potholes and re-painting lines in parking lots, roof leaks, playground maintenance, whatever.
7) Transportation for students (e.g. busses). This can get pretty expensive in sparsely-populated areas.
8) Extracurriculars, including supplemental pay for coaches and sponsors, and maybe an equipment budget.
9) Supplies for "specials" classes, including stuff like band instruments and maintenance of those instruments (lots of places you bring your own, but that's not true for all instruments, often the really big ones, especially, will be school-provided) and art supplies and all that.
10) Electronics and computer services. Powerschool licenses, laptops, "smart" projectors, all that stuff.
11) Special educators and paraprofessionals who will have much smaller student-counts they're responsible for than classroom teachers. This can get as low-count as a dedicated para for a single student, following around and helping them all day.
12) ESOL services. Districts with lots of students speaking English as a second language (if at all...) bear higher costs.
13) Special services for kids who can't fit into the mold of ordinary school. This can look like a district budget paying for transportation to and from a fairly distant magnet or private school, which school will probably cost a lot more than ordinary public schools because they'll have far lower student-to-staff ratios.
14) School lunches, and maybe breakfasts. The food, the staff to serve it, health code compliance and appliance maintenance, all that. IDK if the spending figure would include money students put into accounts for their kids to use for this purpose, but lunches are often subsidized to at least some degree, if not 100%.
15) Other support staff and services (nurses, counselors and psychologists, librarians, janitors)
16) Other supplies. Books, paper, toner, et c.
(and probably more stuff I'm forgetting about)
The result is that actual spending for a given student, if we restricted it to only the things they're directly benefiting from, can be a ton lower than average per-student spending. Meanwhile, some students soak up well over $100k in spending per year, all on their own.
Also, it's easy to pick out some of the above that might plausibly not count as part of the school's budget, in, say, another country that simply made different choices about what budget each thing belongs in, or might just naturally have far lower costs due to geography or demography or whatever.
TL;DR average spending per-student doesn't tell you a lot on its own, and you definitely can't usefully compare one school to another based on such a figure without gathering a lot more context.
Teachers are not underpaid. We live in a free market society and they have extensive collective bargaining agreements. If anything, they’re overpaid vs a totally free market.
Those who can and want to use those same talents in a different progression are free to do so. Nobody is forced into the progression (okay maybe grad students but that’s something else…).
> I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount. In a few of our local districts, on average teachers are making $130k/yr if you scaled their pay to a normal 48 week career schedule. This is on top of gangbusters benefits.
Beyond that, once you get a few years into it and have your scaffolding built, you can kinda just cruise control for the rest of your career with only minor changes.
Yes, the job is challenging and stressful, but lowkey most $130k/yr jobs are.
The real devotion of teaching is being willing to have so much unproductive time which would be filled in a different higher paying career.
There are some huge outliers like California but most states teachers are just treading water. I know this in my state because I was trying to get accredited earlier this year.
Teachers in my district take extra work for the district doing maintenance and tutoring and drive doordash to pay their bills during that time.
If there’s plenty of people willing to do the job, that’s simple supply and demand.
“I think educators should be paid more” or “I want us to pay them more” does not mean they’re underpaid.
2) People often talk about wanting the median teacher quality to be higher, and to be able to fire more bad teachers. A nigh-necessary early step toward addressing that complaint is to increase pay. A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
This would be a fine argument if we could somehow align incentives, fire low performing teachers, and rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
Why can't we fire them? The typical answer is "unions" but a bunch of states de facto don't have teachers' unions (as far as unions with any ability to collectively bargain or meaningfully protect teachers from firing), and still have to retain all but the very worst teachers... because the supply of good teachers is too low. These same states tend to have poor educational outcomes, further suggesting that ability to fire, on its own, isn't helping much.
> rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
This, unfortunately, turns out to be a really hard problem. It's been sincerely attempted in a bunch of ways and they've all turned out to suck, is the short history of the notion.
A teacher with 20yr of experience in my district makes $5,000-$10,000 less than the state median wage.
And their retirement actually sucks.
~40 percent of pregnancies annually are unintended in the US (per the Guttmacher Institute), so lots of folks parenting who didn't want to or didn't intend to parent. As unintended pregnancies are driven down over time (via education and contraceptives), this should reduce aggregate load off the system of people who do not want to or cannot parent effectively. We avoid, to the best of our ability, people who don't want kids having them, we get parents to success to the best of our ability with the kids that are here today (because there is no other option). We can predict future demand for systems needed to support children based on the US projected fertility rate curve (US total fertility rate stands at ~1.58 as of this comment, and will continue to trend down into the future: https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...).
Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says - https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate... - April 9th, 2026
> There are approximately 7.3 million standalone single mothers and about 15.7 million single-mother family households in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data tracking. Roughly 23% of children under 18 in the U.S. live with a single mother.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-economic-status...
> More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate
https://fortune.com/2026/06/28/student-parents-workforce-tal... | https://archive.today/NZQRZ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 (0 comments)
> The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/24/kindergar... | https://archive.today/Fm1nG | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 (1 comment)
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... (~60% of US households consist of adults with no children in them)
(think in systems, and overlay this issue with how many K-12 schools are closing across the US every year due to structural demographics and total fertility rate decline)
Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S: Limited funds and low enrollment forced districts to close more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/07/20/school-c... | https://archive.today/4r4uo - July 20th, 2026 ("We call it the big shrink," said Marguerite Roza, who tracks school funding as director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Enrollment at public schools is declining, partly because there are fewer kids in the U.S.")
> Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further reducing the number of kids at some schools.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...
(TLDR pay teachers a living wage, get class ratios to whatever the science says is best before diminishing returns to optimize for student success, and continue solving for avoiding unwanted children with education and contraceptives; k-12 schools, as well as colleges [https://college-cuts.com/], will continue to close well into the future due to structural demographics, optimize accordingly)
Being a parent is a big responsibility, and (barring rare exceptions) you don't become one unintentionally.
Unfortunately, I see plenty of people out in the wild who act like their kids' behavior is none of their business. There was a time when parents unable to control their children would be asked to leave public establishments, but now, everyone is supposed to stand by impotently, and anyone who dares speak up is accosted by the bad parent(s).
/s
Remember: schools don't have tribunals to judge which student was or wasn't actually guilty of what, to which extent, with which attenuats if any, etc., to then decide who was going to be beaten and how much. The teacher merely looked at you, decided you were guilty because you didn't look into his eyes while he was speaking (autistic children were typical cases of this), and decided to traumatize you for life, fully unjustly.
When modern schools do the same but in the opposite direction, unjustly punishing teachers, that simply shows they haven't changed one iota from what they have always been.
I'm guessing you're supporting when a loving parent smacks their kid in outlier circumstances.
Your comment includes the abusers.
No different than any other employer-employee relationship - the school has a responsibility to protect itself. Teachers have rights too, if she believes her employer contributed to harm or has taken retaliatory action against her she can bring her own suit.
It's wrong. We need to stand up for educators and healthcare providers.
A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.
highly recommend you watch it.
They are generally less friendlier than all the other foreigners I met, closed to outsiders, and somewhat racist (I asked a group of Koreans if I could join their game of Basketball, but they said they preferred to play by themselves. No Chinese ever said anything like that, nor any other foreigners I had joined to play with).
Also, they are quite a violent people. My classmates and I nearly came to blows over the window in the class; I wanted to open it because the indoor air was stale and probably toxic, but he didn't want the window open (for whatever reason, though the weather wasn't cold). Another non-Asian foreigner got into a fight with a Korean puncturing his eardrum which resulted in deafness. Outside the university, too, when they get drunk they become aggressive and seek fights. I guess it must be all the stress they're to put up with in their Dystopian country?
If they mean explicitly stationed armed and vested police officers in level 1 trauma centers, absolutely.
Personally, I'm in favor. An ED deals with a lot of situations that would normally be met with force by law enforcement, every average Tuesday.
Having someone who's trained and comfortable with hospital procedures, staff, and "normal" there can mean avoiding prematurely escalating a confrontation and knowing when to immediately escalate to prevent injury or loss of life.
As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?
That sympathy towards the aggregate seems to be a byproduct from apathy about fixing the underlying issue -- government ensuring positive social outcomes broadly across the population.
Post-90s US conservatism made it verboten to talk about the government's responsibility to create healthy social environments, especially for poor children, so there's no response portion of the conversation.
And because we can't talk about the home situation of the child who assaulted this teacher, in the sense of policy towards fixing that, the two political parties are left debating whether or not we feel sympathy for the assaulter.
... with true sympathy for teachers, front line medical professionals, and other social first responders lost in the shuffle.
If there was an inkling of a plan to strengthen the social safety net (e.g. funding mental healthcare for kids, recapitalizing shared public spaces, strengthening SNAP, universal kindergarten, mandating more parental leave), then we could face the problem honestly instead of treating teacher assaults as an awkward inconvenience of dysfunctional social policy.
Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.
I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".
They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.
I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.
+1 of providers eating the cost of care due to insurance misfilings (e.g. failure to secure prior auth when the patient's plan required it, which for-profit plans are increasingly using as a disingenuous bullshit way to legally and effectively limit payouts for care that should be covered)
It might come off a little impersonal, but unfortunately one wrong word in the wrong place can give someone an entire case when maybe they didn't have one before, unfortunately.
Are you sure you wanted to point me to some Facebook post, which is the nr. 1 result for me?
Try this https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-a-virginia-district-fa...
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
Our world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare.
I don't anticipate change until this fresh supply dries up and people start asking why.
Of note that Kafka-esque is predicated on an impenetrable morass of regulations and procedures.
Imho, we've overly and prematurely optimized to address negative outcomes without remembering that adding red tape also decreases the efficiency of delivering good outcomes.
It'd be nice to see a lot of professions move back towards 'we'll regularly audit to see if there are problems, then address them if they appear' postures.
Time spent in pre-compliance when there would have been no problem is simply lost efficiency.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
Yes, conservatives are trying to make it go up, but statistically speaking, they are not succeeding.
The underlying basis for current "conservatives inspire more violence" is largely drawn from clips taken from the manosphere-podcast realm. There is an amount of war hawks always being on the right that predates all of this.
I've seen similar from the left wing, though they don't have good podcast game or modern communication generally.
I grew up around the Dick Cheney type back when northern virginia was a red area in an even redder state. I recall almost no fights between students, much less anyone attacking faculty. Hitting a teacher would have gotten you sent to some alternative school with armed guards.
They have a whole effort around conservative activism through school board membership. They love their book bans.
> exercise violence in a very civilized way
there is nothing civilized about violence
In the last 10-15 years, traditional conservatives have largely been pushed out of school administration, even in places like my current county, which was a Romney 2012 county. Groups like Moms4Liberty have zero influence on how schools discipline kids.
> there is nothing civilized about violence
Violence against potential threats is necessary for the maintenance of civilization. But violence against elders within your community, which is what we’re talking about here, is completely unacceptable.
Manosphere is just the same thing, but more open and direct rather then hidden. Dominance and subjugations are the one and only way to be manly, caring about others is not. Caring is accepted only as part of leaderships role. It is philosophy that alienates. It also leads to violence, partly because you have no real solution to "others dont really accept your dominance" situation and partly because resulting relationships are unsatisfactory anyway.
They aren't, because it isn't [0]. Violence in school systems has been on the decrease since the 1990's, with the notable exception of a spike during the COVID epidemic.
If my data is wrong, please cite proof that there is "increasing violence in school systems", and while you're at it, "school systems that are overwhelmingly run by liberals".
Pretty odd language for someone who claims they don't want it to be "a political thing".
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=increasing+violence+in+US+sc...
And this is ignoring the unsubstantiated claim that school systems are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
Are you actually trying to argue that they're not? When was the last time you were in a K-12 school? Neo-pride flags everywhere. Also, at the very least, it's a female-dominated field and women tend to be extremely left-leaning.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship...
I wouldn't call 51-44 "extreme leaning".
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.
Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.
Also, you might not be on the right website.
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution. It takes an endless amount of time before it's clear "problem is the parent" and by the time that is decided they're gone and on to the next parent who submitted their 6th absurd complaint this year and everyone starts over wagging fingers at the teacher's.
However, my district also had a school specifically for troublemakers (with fences and extra security and all of that) so the other schools wouldn't have to deal with them.
Although for self-selected friends my personal saying is that "All the smartest left school at 15". My other friends are academically educted which doesn't smarten up anyone.
You seem to have a severe deficit of compassion. Also a deficit of strategic thinking.
Some significant fraction of those "delinquent kids" are that way due to some generational cycle of poor treatment and/or bad circumstances. If, as you advocate, little attempt is made to break those cycles, you'll just leave the problem to fester and get worse.
Also you're advocating punishing kids for being the victim of their own circumstances, which is just heartless.
The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.
FYI, you're not a decent person, you're a problem person. You lack compassion.
If someone beats you and leaves you for dead in a ditch, when the paramedics find you, what should they say? It pretty obvious: "a dollar spent helping this guy could be used to help someone better, leave him for dead."
The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.
I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.
This is hacker news, most of us are anonymous. People say all sorts of vile things on here. Come on, Ambolia, have the courage of your convictions.
In any case, his caution birthed a comment tree that's normally verboten.
Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?
From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know
And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.
Today I learned that the Icelandic keyboard has a dedicated key for typing þ
Alternatively you have fat fingers and use Linux (is there a correlation?) and you hit AltGr+T. From Wikipedia about British keyboard:
Using the AltGr key on Linux produces many other characters and symbols, e.g. ¹²³€½{[]}@łe¶ŧ←↓→øþæßðđŋħjĸł«»¢“”nµΩŁE®Ŧ¥↑ıØÞƧЪŊĦJ&Ł<>©‘’Nº×÷· (If reconfigured as a compose key, an even larger repertoire is available)
If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.
Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.
"weird" is two years ago. Time to update your firmware.
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate currently, it’s currently his vibes based hypothesis that he’s afraid to openly state.
I get what you’re saying. Even if we already punish black kids at a higher rate, it’s not high enough, because they could be committing offenses at and even higher rate than that. And we can’t possibly know that, because everyone is afraid of the DEI man, so they only report white offenses in school.
That’s why my solution was brilliant, we side step all that by putting them in jail from the start, and they work their way out from first principles.
This is at a tipping point.
I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers. Other commenters are blaming parents, and sure we should incentivize and facilitate better parenting, but in the short term what is more successful at reducing violence is expelling violent students.
Society at large has tools and systems in place to better deal with a violent person, student or otherwise.
really? for minors?
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
By learning, for likely the first time in their lives, that actions have consequences.
This is obviously not the case.
Violent behavior obviously has to be sanctioned and hopefully corrected, but excluding children from education is not especially helpful there and has insanely costly side-effects.
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I'm not advocating against this. But keeping their education timeline somewhat on track is highly preferrable in my view (inserting "fixed delinquents" into classes of younger children seems very undesirable to me).
> And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I honestly don't see how this could ever apply.
You have basically an average >$200k investment from the parents alone, plus all the direct/indirect subsidies starting with day care. Between low-wage working adult and "worthless person" there is at least a $50k/year swing in expected value to society every year they work, too.
Even if your success rate of "fixing" child delinquents is laughably low (say 15%), and costs you like $100k per attempt it is easily worth it; its not even close.
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
That's letting things go way too far. If an incorrigible can be identified, whether that be via their bad behavior, phrenology and/or an excess of melanin, we can weed them out by age nine or ten, sterilize them to make sure they don't pollute our society even more, separate them from the decent, hardworking folks and, if they won't work for the benefit of the society that's footing the bill for their palatial accommodations, summary execution would certainly be warranted.
The above is satire and quite disgusting. The sad part is all of you (and you know who you are) who nodded along with the above paragraph and thought, "Finally! someone is making sense and telling the truth!" are far too many and far too pleased with your hatred and disdain for your fellow humans. Have you no vestige of humanity within you? Shame on you!
Some neofascists like eugenicist talking points?
You lost me at "incorrigible" and honestly just mentioning phrenology will get every non-moron to just dismiss any argument.
Do you believe that my argument is on a slippery slope towards eugenicist nonsense? I disagree on that and would argue the reverse; children are too valuable to immediately "discard" (by exclusion from education) because of delinquency.
I said:
>The above is satire and quite disgusting
about my statement. And I followed it up with:
>The sad part is all of you (and you know who you are) who nodded along with the above paragraph and thought, "Finally! someone is making sense and telling the truth!"
Do you fit into that category? If not, then my bile wasn't directed at you. Or did you miss that part?
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Oh good, wxw disagrees. They've supplied zero supporting arguments, making discussion impossible, but at least Hacker news knows wxw's position.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x2PsFWrwCDI
I know its a single data point, but I think those situations would happen a lot less if students had access to the right support.
Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.
This is the same with healthcare and schools. We let the system be run by a bunch of short-term get rich quick charlatans who get in the way of more long-term prosperity for everyone. It's easier to measure the immediate cost, so we cut there and ignore the long-term expense it creates.
What's worse is that there are many examples for the US to learn from abroad but generations of propaganda have lead us to believe that our deficiencies are what makes us exceptional.
A ugly way to say that our society has limited resources.
Working hours especially are a zero-sum choice.
We require some way to choose between different usages of people's time. All choices are suboptimal. Our societies have slowly developed something that mostly works.
Money as a topic is distracting: instead think about how we allocate the lives (time) of people: especially when trading one person's life/work against another's rights.
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
just sit kids in front of well written books and the job is done.
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
We've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
What I'm aiming to say is that given more time and space a lot of people who aren't good parents could be better parents. Some of them certainly would be.
There used to be more space for parents in society (or at least a parent in a middle class double parent household), and we can have more space for this now without some tradwife reductionist nonsense. We have more resources than ever to help parents be good parents but they're very unevenly distributed. Resources for poor parents often focus on getting poor parents a job and childcare rather than spending time with kids, for example.
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
To be honest, in the Netherlands there are more and more teachers dropping out because of stress and burnout, largely due to increasing criticism and demands from parents. But I haven't yet heard of cases of actual violence.
And sometimes those are police officers, who then get blamed for metrics we don't like. So we cut back on policing and now it'll be somebody else who gets the short end of the stick.
I finished my career in the UK, where a third of all teachers leave the profession within five years. I started that career in Australia, where half of all teachers leave the profession within five years. It's not a 'calling' or a 'vocation', it's just the post-university equivalent of a gap year.
It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.
This was a disaster for schools; many students who would have been expelled were kept around disrupting teachers and students who had to bear their presence in classrooms, hallways, fighting each other, bullying students and teachers.
For about 5 years after this went into effect, my local school district that also allowed open enrollment around this time got an influx of students with bad behavior from previous schools enrolling and not being expelled for fighting and other repeated misbehavior and disruptions. There was huge wave of teachers and families leaving and enrolling in the rural school close by so both could actually do teaching and learning without interference. The schoolboard had a lot turnover until the now head got elected promising to drastically curtail open enrollment and apply whatever discipline policy they could get away with to revoke open enrollment rights from non-residents due to bad behavior.
Here is a great account [1] from a teacher about her experience in schools where discipline was severely limited and prevented expulsion of disruptive and violent students, and the obvious consequences to the degraded learning environment that resulted.
[0] https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/let...
[1] https://quillette.com/2019/02/10/public-educations-dirty-sec...
Is it reasonably expected? Yes, definitely, if that means "much more likely than violence against non-teachers": a random K-12 teacher in the USA is ~2.5-7x more likely to be assaulted than a random person in the USA.
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
Not that she'd stand a chance against a group of determined post pubescent males.
It wasn’t republicans that trashed California public schools in the name of ‘racial equity.’
Additionally, there's no world in which they want these parents to actually succeed. If there's ever a scenario where someone tries to improve the lives of these people, conservatives will argue that they do not deserve it because they don't contribute to society like conservatives do.
Liberals believe in intersectionalism, and that marginalized groups need unique affordances. This means accepting that if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher, it may be because of poverty and racism and we should understand the issue in that context.
In a world where we solve racism, poverty, and lack of access to education do we expect white kids to now be committing way more crimes than non-whites?
I must have missed that part of Voltaire. Its progressives (socialists) that believe in intersectionalism and they don't agree with liberals on almost anything. If you think otherwise, you just don't know what any of those terms actually mean.
In her case, she's a brown woman teaching brown and black kids. She used to think the police were being racial in their interactions. Now she's like... Well they are hurting people and we can't help if the races of the perpetrators just so happen to be whatever
A whole slew of things she just changed her mind on essentially. She felt lied to by the progressive establishment. Moreover when she tried to do something or complain to the union, she was basically thrown under the bus. So her final bit of union sympathy also left her.
https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
What does that mean. Is it a diagnosis or a term schools use for some students but not others? Don't all students need emotional support?
Without trying to be funny, it reads like a student who's job it is to support another student's emotions. That can't be right though, is it?
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
tl;dr yes, also water is now even wetter.
I'm old enough to have adult children, although I never did have kids of my own.
My parents would have gone to school in the knowledge that if they acted up, words would be had with their parents, and there would be consequences.
At some point, something changed, and we decided that teachers were there to be put in their place by parents, and if a teacher suggested a child was doing something wrong the parent would expect to challenge that and the teacher would be put in their place.
We're now in a situation where children being taught sometimes think its their right - perhaps even obligation - to not be instructed in appropriate behaviour, and so feel free to react the way that they do.
There's a microcosm natural experiment for this in the Pennines, the North of England. There's a small town called Hebden Bridge, which for a while had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the UK. Some thought it was related to the environment - it sits in a valley, the persistent low grey cloud can make it feel claustrophobic - but I think another theory holds up: parents there didn't bother parenting. A community was drawn to the town by adults who were in essence, hippies: they believed in freedoms their parents didn't including for their children.
That meant that many of the kids growing up there did so in an environment without real structure, and became adolescent in an environment with easy supply to plentiful drugs and a relaxed attitude to its use.
I'm not a parent, that was an active choice I made, and so I wouldn't deign to tell parents how to bring up their children, but I would suggest parents look at the data: children thrive with structure and rules and gentle consequences for non-compliance (the naughty step, etc.), and recognition of genuinely outstanding behaviour (winning things, not participating in them). They struggle to develop as emotionally secure people without those. Hell, I'm a data point there - took me years to realise I needed therapy, and years more to benefit from it. As the old poem starts: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don't mean to, but they do."
Anyway, teachers play a part in that journey, but they can't do the whole thing, and the sooner parents (and society in general), restore the respect to the profession it once had, the better. Are all teachers good? No, but they are professionals who have more data on more children than any parent, so maybe just respect that.
A friend of mine is on their way to becoming a teacher and already teaching at a school for one year part-time.
He tells tales about his children mostly from low income families, where school is the only structure they have as their families are completely dysfunctional. Thorn apart by the family trying or not trying to integrating into German society as well as themselves.
When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
Could be. A lot of kids only have so much good behavior for a day... act out at school or at home, pick one.
But also, the student who has to live with expectations at school may set expectations at home, and that may be seen as worse behavior by the parents.
But IMO the other issues such as the geography, unemployment, gentrification etc play a part
It's a strange place for parents to be so free about drug usage given the climate, location, geography and economy.
Gentle Parenting is full of uncertainties. There are times when you need to skip the gentle crap and be a parent.
It works on a small scale, where parents are dedicated to the cause, but it falls apart as soon as it hits genpop: someone watches a TikTok summary and thinks they’re an expert.
You know, ==your budgets are your values==
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Potentially, yes. Doubly so when those terrible teachers are kept in those roles year after year. The whole system defends and backs these teachers, even knowing they create horrible outcomes and dread for everyone.
> We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Nope. We all dont. It also depends on if you went to a "good public school" or a "bad public school", or rather worse or well funded.
> Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
True. But saying bad words is *not* violence. However threatening violence is absolutely actionable.
> Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Again, this is looking at individual choices over what im arguing as a system based failure. The whole way the system is constructed is a failure to students and teachers both.
Look at how schools are funded. Property tax. Means poor property locations get shittier schools, worse teachers, low funded classrooms. And this also shows the students' housing is also likely just as poor. Food insecurity, whole lot of trickle down poverty effects. I came from a poor funded rural school. I had no choice in that matter.
[1]https://research.skeptic.com/content/files/2025/02/Research-...