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.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
/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.
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.
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.
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...
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.