Posted by grantpitt 4 hours ago
At a broad policy level, government should focus its effort in other areas of basic NEEDS first. Stable jobs for parents, housing and food needs met, etc. Being a successful student when your families basic needs are not met is an uphill battle.
Selling a narrative that money can fix, getting funds, and then allocating funds is comically easy and less risky than trying to fix something broken. You're capturing sentiment into political momentum, when you're the one who allocates money you are very, very popular and interesting and can make many things happen.
You can do all of this and move on independently of any results in the problem statements that may or may not have been written to begin with.
Contrast that with telling people hard truths like deified educators aren't effectual, or that per-capita pupil spending doesn't correlate with outcomes, or how parents and home culture are stronger effects than whether you offer rich IEPs or adopted Common Core - you can be tarred and feathered for rocking the boat before you get to make any change.
It's not that anyone thinks we should give up on the children, it's that we should probably give up on direct democracy in some areas, and at best, these spending splurges are incompetence and at worst, outright wealth transfers to the PMC and NGOs or fraud.
Not that I agree with GP, but the problem is that no one (in positions of power in the educational system) is thinking of the children (in SFW ways, given the recent release of the Epstein files)
I think there's room for improvement on both sides; supporting families and students to create space and safety for them to learn and to improve teaching quality with evidence based training.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-common-core-failed/
Their class sizes are much higher - 40 kids for 1 teacher. But there is a lot more discipline, the teachers teach only a few classes, spending most of their time on curriculum preparation, and the children have 3 hours of vigorous exercise everyday.
I think that would solve a huge number of issues. Teachers and admins seem to have no ability to kick repeated problem students out. My wife works as a para professional sub at our local elementary school. Twice this week a special needs girl was having a meltdown in a hallway and they essentially had to "quarantine" it until she calmed down. Students and teachers had to take other hallways to get where they needed to go. These children have educational needs that public schools cannot provide, but the burden largely falls onto them as an incredibly expensive (to the tax payer) babysitting service. Get them and the slowest students out of the general pipeline. They have been clogging it up and holding everyone back far too long.
And no. I don't have an adequate solution to handle the bottom X% of students who are beyond help from the general system. I just know the system can't function effectively with them in it. There are all sorts of other systemic issues I've seen through her experiences. But this is a major one which impacts all of the students. Classes cannot move at the pace of the slowest and / or most disruptive student. The slowest students need to be left behind for others to thrive. If they cannot reach the already low minimum standards, they cannot advance in grades. If they cannot behave to the low minimum expectations, their parents need to find other accommodations.
>> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm
>> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence
I have a feeling many of my greatest teachers wouldn't take the same path today, a lot more burdens and enough other 'intellectual' jobs to go for.
- Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers.
- In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes.
- Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system.
Edit:
It will be really interesting to compare oregon public outcomes to something like this school in Austin https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-schoo...
In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.
Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.
The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.
The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.
"No child left behind" is a disaster.
I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.
Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.
She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.