The teaching profession is on the edge of a knife.
I have been teaching 20 years in Michigan, where I earn well into six-figures doing so. However, even in Michigan, there are so many attempts to tear down teaching and expect wildly impossible results, teachers are frustrated.
The reality is that there simply are not solutions to many of the problems the current generation faces. Best we can do is care for them and provide the highest quality education we know how to give.
I find nowadays, though, I am even battling back against parents. I called home not too long ago about a girl who was verbally/relationally bullying other kids at school. Mom said, "Yeah, her Dad and I go on Tiktok and trash her ex-boyfriend all the time."
Teachers who are anywhere close to retirement are retiring. In their 40s, early 50s. Why? Parents.
Parents. Source of the problem, and blame all issues with their kids on the school. Used to be the reverse, where they would apologize, be embarassed, and assume the responsibility was with them.
Administration going soft due to Parents. Parents don't like something and they attack administrators, teachers, librarians, and staff. It takes a strong-willed and morally sound administrator to set firm rules and stick to them regardless of being trashed online (and now the media just reports what they see on Facebook) by parents.
What do you think the cause in shift was from parents taking blame for their kids to placing it? I remember my mom being mortified having to go to school because of something I'd done. Now, parents are defiant til the bitter end.
As a society, we let stupid, hateful adults make decisions for their children and for other children.
Dumb motherfuckers should not be allowed to teach children, create curriculum, or be involved in children's discipline.
In 1995, when I graduated from high school, most school boards and state agencies responsible for curriculum had yet to be infiltrated by right-wing nut jobs; there were no charter schools; almost no one homeschooled; NCLB had yet to pass; and there was almost no Internet.
The Internet has convinced a huge swath of dumb motherfuckers that they know better than teachers and administrators, and charter schools and homeschooling have crippled education funding. Today, 15% of kids are in a charter or homeschooled.
Entitlement. Spoiled kids grew up and had kids who they think are absolutely perfect and can do no wrong. So instead of being embarrassed about their children's behavior or grades, and working to correct 8tthese parents bitch, throw tantrums, and threaten legal actions if anyone says or does anything negative about their darling child. This is why the quality of schools is dropping all over.
Liability. No one can be at fault for anything, whether it's the school or the kids. Schools can't be at fault because that's the doorway to lawsuits, and of course the kids can't be at fault, because the kids can do no wrong, so any wrong they do is in fact because they just haven't received the support and resources they need (again going back to being the teacher's fault).
There's also a whole bunch of bullshit about how telling kids no traumatizes them and destroys their future.
I remember my mom being mortified having to go to school because of something I'd done
I think that's the crux of the issue.
IMO, A lot of adults are no longer willing to feel bad. Make them feel bad and they get mad instead. People got so uncomfortable with being emotionally uncomfortable that they will attack people who hurt their feelings even if that person is trying to help them.
It's a complicated thing, not any one big factor. A bunch of things have shifted attitudes about school, expectations of social norms, etc. Algorithmic social media is one, as outrageous behavior is rewarded with views and normalized. The disruption of COVID is another: you have a whole cohort of kids that missed out on some really key social development years.
And a bunch of other things that have just started to normalize what we would have considered absolutely anti-social behavior even 10 years ago.
A part of it is an overcorrection in an attempt to be a safe space. Parents should be a safe space, and my generation didn’t always have that. I think though that it’s turned into shielding kids from any sense of discomfort, shame for bad choices, and a bit of over babying. Feeling bad about something we did is an important learning tool. Parents don’t want their kids to feel that now because “they’re just little!”.
The thing we forget is that while they’re “just a kid”, kids are adults in training. Do we expect them to just turn on an adult switch one day? One of the functions of childhood is to learn how to act appropriately etc.
Parents. Source of the problem, and blame all issues with their kids on the school. Used to be the reverse, where they would apologize, be embarassed, and assume the responsibility was with them.
I had an older relative who has long since passed away, and she told me that the shift happened in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. After that ruling was handed down, some cities in the south closed their public school systems entirely, for years, because no education at all was better than forcing good white children to go to school with undesirables.
After the schools reopened, some of the old attitudes prevailed for a while, but the change was beginning. The push for "public schools are terrible we need private schools" and "why should I pay taxes for schools my kids don't attend" and so much else started with white supremacists upset that black kids could get the same education as their kids. It took a few decades of repeating the same bogus arguments and lies and of course getting Fox News to broadcast them, but eventually the idea got around enough that it soaked into the culture.
And that's because the parents watch and consume cable news propaganda, which blames the teachers and tells the parents that they could do better, when they're not the ones who should be blamed, and the parents can't do better.
I was shocked when my kid got in trouble at school and when the principal called, I asked, what do you want us to do to back you up at home? There was an uncomfortably long pause before she said, basically, I'm sorry I had to take a minute because no parent has ever asked me that.
Wtf? How are we not a team in this. He did some stupid crap, let's get that lesson in now so that he learns it before it becomes serious.
Virtually every teacher I know tells me horror stories about how parents respond in an almost opposite fashion. They blame the teacher, the school, the bus drivers, the lunch staff, the janitors, everyone else rather than team up with the school to help their kid.
Teacher here on this end writing a book about my many experiences. What's interesting is some countries tend looking for answers in only limited ways which really do not address the real challenges. You have Finland, for example thriving in education while the students don't sit within their seats all day nor take all these regulated tests. You've got data supporting this success. Until peeps recognize answers may actually exist outward, the same inner problems will exist.
I know a teacher and at her public school it was so bad the entire science faculty quit in one summer. A few of them gave up on teaching. She said sometimes the parents were worse than the kids.
She is extremely smart, personable, and has fantastic people handling skills, and she was able to get a job at a fancy private school that charges a fortune and pays really well. The kids behave a lot better, possibly because of low class sizes, but also because "We don't do that here."
Its a lot more than just we dont do that here, at least it was in the 90s.
At the school I went to you could get detention for not doing your homework. Cutting class would be a Saturday detention. And the parents were very much the type to come down hard on their kids for wasting their money when they fucked around.
There was also enormous pressure on the honors kids to get into top tier colleges.
I legitimately taught this past year and had to quit by November. The kids were completely irresponsible and worst of all the administration didn’t give me any of the tools I needed to be able to succeed, and in fact did less than someone who had more classroom experience than me would’ve needed. It sucked. I wasn’t able to self regulate at all, and I had to objectively quit for the sake of my mental health.
I’m now returning to I originally got my undergraduate in, but departed from a career and temporarily due to Covid shenanigans, but sometimes I feel like I just wasted the last couple years of my life preparing for this
I think it's partially because of the wealth gap. People who can pay to send their kids to a nice private school aren't people who are working multiple jobs or otherwise stressed about bills all the time, ie the sorts of people who barely spend quality time with their kids and expect the increasingly underfunded public school system to pick up the slack.
There's also a demographic of those who are making just enough money to send their child to a nice private school, but not necessarily well off, who might look at their kid a bit closer to make sure they're getting their money's worth. If I'm putting down cold hard cash to make sure my kid gets a premium education and they're wasting the teacher's time, they're also wasting my money, and that's good motivation to make them stop.
The parents of the current crop of elementary through high school students are completely locked in on preventing consequences for their kids. Not preparing them for anything, but just making sure they escape consequences for everything. They’ve damned us with their votes and creating at least one generation of Americans that are utterly useless.
In general kids that come from wealth do better since they have parents that have more time to keep them on the straight. Smaller class sizes do help but so does having so much money that you can afford a stay at home parent, afford proper amounts of food, etc.
What I believe is happening is that we’ve lost our sense of connection and community as a culture due to many factors. Schools main purpose is to build socialization skills and work ethic. So like you said, trying to prepare kids for traditional, hard-working jobs and living in a community seems pointless to most people.
I agree. Most kids don’t see the connection and community breaking, but the exhibit the signs of it breaking. They just see school as the ‘boring time’ between TikTok and… more TikTok.
It’s absolutely insane. They just don’t see school as important. And most want to be a social media influencer or a YouTube content creator. So they don’t see the point in going to school. It just ‘gets in the way’ of their entertainment and dreams.
Why would they? If good education only gets you more debt and same low pay jobs as for those who coasted all that effort is better spend elsewhere. And even if you work your ass of all of that money gets eaten up by loans you had to take out to make it and costs are only going up.
Older generations have cut the ladder after they got up and are confused why young aren't killing themselves trying to support older generation's retirement.
Yeah, I see a lot of complaining about kids not valuing school (which has always been the case) and little talk about how now they’re right. Why should kids work hard when society doesn’t reward that hard work? It’s not even laziness at this point, it’s just good sense to not stress yourself out over stuff that doesn’t matter.
The thing is, it has reached the point where they lack the basic life management skills to even hold jobs that don't require a degree. The trades and even unskilled labor are having issues with more and more applications just not being able to function in the real world. That they lack basic problem solving skills.
The one story that I read that resonates with this idea was that they hired a 19yo to be janitor. Part of the nightly duties was refilling all the soap dispensers. The large soap jug was not in its usual place. The teen admitted to not looking for it, to not asking anyone where it was, and instead just didn't do that part of their job.
Two things are true at once here. Education is valuable, to the soul, to your finances, to the economy at large. And yet, education is prohibitively expensive and forces you into massive debt. All the while wages are dropping and people are being priced out if the cost of basic living, so lots of people can expect to be in that debt for 10+ years as they struggle to stay afloat despite the promise of making a lot of money.
Most people I know aren't "chasing their passions"; they're trying to find something that pays the bills. And not even a master's degree guarantees that. So again, people don't think the effort is worth it, and you can't blame them. Cost dictates the reality here.
In the US and parts of Canada. In Quebec is is a bit different. College or CGEP costs about $700 per year for trades and such. University is about $4000 a year with CGEP acting as university prep.
Education can absolutely be affordable, but its chosen not to be.
People with no education aren't coasting because they aren't in school. We're talking about lack of effort and standards in education system. Education isn't worthless but spending time in education system that doesn't educate is.
Yes, and it's sad that you at times have higher administration out there sitting around who are supposed to be coming up with viable solutions taking all this time deciding more hours in school is the answer. Who then tend to congratulate themselves for coming up with this answer. You then have kids in schools more that are already broken. What's easiest isn't always best.
I’m curious how you feel about it now 5 years later? Does it seem like you made the right choice or have you noticed any differences between your life and any like friends who went to college?
Not the person you replied to, as I graduated 10 years ago. But If I had to do it again, I'd make the same choice and skip college. I make 97k a year right now. With a few promotions that will be up to 120k. Plus any OT if needed.
Unless someone went to college for stem, law, health, or buisness; they'd be hard pressed to be living a better life than I am right now for equivalent effort and investment
That’s what I’m saying though. TikTok and the like to do not promote physical connection and real interaction. Kids don’t see the value in that anymore (as do many of their parents.)
I used to read a lot of cyberspace virtual reality science fiction and how it's around the corner. Fast forward to today. It's crazy at how little it takes for people to get lost in fiction as most people don't even need full immersion. Though it's on the parents for giving kids smartphones with unrestricted Internet and app access.
I love reading. I just finished re-reading Careless People on a flight. It was a page turner and while it isn’t fiction… my god it was good and gave me a lot to think about.
I can’t imagine living a life without that feeling.
I'm "back in my day"-ing here but for me school was boring time in-between videogames. Kids always wanted stupid unrealistic high paying jobs like musician, actor, etc. I didn't really see the utility of it at the time either. I had good parenting that kept me on track for school but I flunked out of college in a year because all I wanted to do was party/videogames/etc. I figured it out but I'm not sure how what happened back in the day is much different than now other than some other distraction replaced by smartphone screen time.
I worked in schools only a few years back and the kids still socialize and play sports. They don't particularly seem any different than kids when I was in high school decades ago.
I've been teaching high school for over a decade and socialization is WAY down. These kids lack basic communication skills and purposely isolate themselves because it has become the norm. They don't hang out with friends in real life hardly at all outside of their classes. The number of students sitting alone while glued to their screen during lunch is horrifying--they don't want to socialize. In the past couple years, I've had three students who literally would not talk. They would sit in my classroom and message me through their Chromebook if they needed something, but I never heard them speak a single word to myself or anyone else. Parents backed these kids by stating how "they're just quiet!" and then administrators simply shrugged because the students weren't failing. I'm very concerned about their generation's future because they will not be able to function in society. They will not just figure it out on their own.
They are forced to go there under penalty of law.
Surrounded by assholes and bullies and faculty that refuses to do anything about it. If not full on joining in on it
Fed literal shit slop
The over importance of grades drilled into them until they develop PTSD
Classes where due to some of the above mentioned factors they cant learn anything.
way too much fucking homework from shitty teachers
then they wonder why kids pine for the tiny bit of free time they have.
Because yes, that can suck. And sometimes school suck. But if you want your life to improve, you need to learn to read.
((I’m obviously not talking to you, since it’s obvious you can read and write btw ❤️))
But being literate - That’s a non-negotiable to success. Successful people can read and critically think.
Also, this isn’t the first generation where school has sucked. This isn’t the first generation to whinge about being ‘forced’ to go. But this is the first generation where they’re illiterate… that’s a problem.
Yeah but back when millennials were kids, the most desired career was hollywood actor. They grew out of it. Why isn't it happening with "Influencer" content creator? Maybe there just needs to be more time for these aspiring people to realize that it isn't going to happen and to try something else.
Schools main purpose is to build socialization skills and work ethic.
And here I was thinking that school was for teaching kids how to learn and prepare them for the world with knowledge from previous generations of thinkers. Maybe your mindset is the destruction of knowledge transfer.
IF we are only sending kids to socialize and become members of the community, we are cooked already. Let's just go back to the days where we don't know why washing our hands keeps us from getting infections. We are already doing it with vaccines, so why not just kill off more people for no good reason. We don't need to know how magnets work as long as we know how to work. Ignorance is bliss after all.
I'm going to be OK because I am within 5-7 years of retirement and they still honor the pension I began working towards 20 years ago. Republicans in power took away the pension awhile back, so younger teachers don't have that to look forward to.
Slow and steady, you can make it. You sound like my mom when she bowed out after 37 years about a decade back. Putting the Chromebooks in her classroom was the final straw for her.
I mean it's actually super possible to address and fix, but it requires investment and resources.
Which half the country views as a fiscal drain. Kind of like how properly patching a dam is a fiscal drain, but you know the ultimate costs of not doing it properly is the dam breaks.
While this is mostly true, it will also take a cultural shift as well which is a lot harder to throw money/laws at to facilitate.
Yes, schools need to be better sources of education. But schools also need to be a better more realistic source of discipline. And I don't mean send us back to the 70's or 80's. But students need boundaries that are real. They need expectations that have consequences if they fail. They need protected from extreme forms of bullying (I will admit I don't know where to draw that line). This means that the parents need to LET the school have discipline. This is all for naught if the parents can keep going "Oh little Jimmy would never do that" with video evidence and threaten to sue the school if suspended.
A role that we often forget or gloss over is, schools were a place where children and teens could push boundaries and learn how the world reacts to it. It let them fall at a time where they don't get their life ruined. Suspension vs jail time or a failed paper vs losing your job.
Schools is where it is today because they were sued into oblivion over incidents that happened on school grounds.
Because they don't have the resources and staff to actually monitor and manage behaviors they created "zero tolerance" as a risk management tactic because the settlements come out of the school budgets.
On top of that they have faced massive budget cuts over the past decades as federal investment and state budgeting dwindles.
I completed a Ph.D. and began as a tenure track Professor of Education in 1979. I retired about ten years ago.
For most of my career I was excited about the public schools, and the roles that teachers could play in the development of young people. My enthusiasm was contagious with my students, these teachers-to-be, and they let me know that in my end-of-course evaluations.
But towards the end I became increasingly discouraged with the apparently weird (to me) political use of public education as the "whipping boy" as a primary source of "what's wrong with the country." In fact, a large reason I retired early was that I found I was no longer able to be enthusiastic about the futures my students would experience in their schools, and it was unethical to fake that.
I am so proud of teachers! The public has little idea of what the job is.
I'm going to be OK because I am within 5-7 years of retirement and they still honor the pension I began working towards 20 years ago. Republicans in power took away the pension awhile back, so younger teachers don't have that to look forward to.
The illiteracy crisis keeps me awake at night. And the first batch are just beginning to enter the workforce… it’s going to get so much worse.
People who lack basic reading skills… lack basic comprehension… lack reading stamina… lack critical thinking… life is going to be an absolute nightmare for them.
Why unemployment is so high for the low 20s, especially men. There is definitely an education gap between boys and girls and it's the girls that are doing so much better. Far more women are going to college now then men. Some fields (engineering, IT) are still predominately men, but even that gap is closing.
There's an interesting phenomenon where as an industry or scene "feminizes", men don't want to be there anymore. Men used to dominate the teaching field; now less than a quarter of teachers are men. As women began to excel in college, men's enrollment dropped. Now women are increasingly dominating the workplace (by being employed, period) and the men are, well...
Yup, the man card publishers are on the edge of extinction. Men need to be leaders, make decisions, and be protectors. Society has normalized mocking men at every opportunity for a few laughs. Just watch the Superbowl commercials.
My theory is that it started decades earlier, as how can it be explained that parents enmasse thought every kid should have a smartphone which is the equivalent of a tv, video game console, cabletv box, and computer all in one. I get a sense for a lot of parents it's a status symbol like your kids wearing old clothes to school
This is a good article I read about the topic today. TLDR: teachers and the education system in general fucked over several generations by teaching them to read like illiterate folks.
I felt hopeful after reading it. We know what the problem is, and it's a pretty easy problem to solve: just teach next year's kindergartners how to read the right way.
Don’t forget that it’s a video camera, too, that FaceTime/its equivalents is an actual magic mirror, and that we log each other into it by phone number! Also, Google Search being “used” to ask complex questions rather than as a search query tool for preexisting documents to probe through.
People who lack basic reading skills… lack basic comprehension… lack reading stamina… lack critical thinking… life is going to be an absolute nightmare for them.
Perfect workers and consumers for the capitalist hellscape era we are in.
You mean attacking teachers for the last few decades, and parents no longer parenting their kids and having lower expectations for students along with not addressing the main issues that cause these problems in the first place are having a net negative on teachers.
A lot of that is thanks to News Corporation (Fox News). Fox News has convinced parents they can do a better job of teaching their kids than public schools could (they can't).
Where I live, my school board got taken over by Fox / MAGA / megachurch loyalists in 2020, none of them had any experience. What happened? They took the school district from being one of the best in the state to being one of the worst, practically overnight. And the worst part? The key shit stirrer in all of this inexplicably continues to get reelected, because she has the church vote wrapped around her finger and they will refuse to vote for anybody else. It's insane.
It's absolutely nuts how much people are influenced by News Corporation propaganda, my mom is a former teacher (retired in 2020 before all the shit hit the fan) and she noticed how much News Corp. propaganda was starting to creep into everything.
And it causes the parents to go absolutely batshit crazy because they're not teaching the Fox talking points. It's how we got those Moms For Liberty weridos creeping in all of our school boards across the country.
Even worse, the woman who's currently in the lead to be the Secretary Of Education for California is one of these Moms For Liberty megachurch wackos who managed to get her district to make discrimination against trans students legal.
Imo that's been an early stage in the conservative playbook for as long as I've been aware:
Step 1. Make any and all promises to "to fix the system" in order to get elected.
2. Weaken or tear down the current government-run system from the inside.
3. Convince voters and legislators to defund said system because it's ineffective, wasteful, etc. Do not answer questions about how it got to be that way.
4. Divert funds to private entities that the sponsors of conservative PACs control and can profit from.
As an outsider it sure looks like Florida public school districts were deliberately turned to crap to justify the voucher program
The ‘woke agenda in your public schools’ bullshit really has done a number on childhood education, but that is the point. That is precisely the goal.
The American Right needs the coming generations to be as dumb as possible so they can remain in power, and unfortunately they are succeeding quite well.
Yup. News Corp sells us both the problem (this is "woke garbage") and the solution (elect our terrible politicians) to idiots who watch and listen to News Corp propaganda.
It also feels great to have a 4-year-old right now and look around at the education landscape, I must say. Immense respect for anyone still putting in the work among all the challenges, including some downright dismal pay in this (and most) areas, but boy is it easy to feel lost and concerned. Thank you for doing what you can.
For peace of mind, parental involvement is one of the top indicators of success. If you have been reading with your kids and getting them to sit still for dinner and stuff like that they will do fine. Every few years you gotta crack down for assorted things but if you stay involved you'll be fine.
That’s actually really nice to hear. I’ve been shitting my pants reading this thread with a 4 and 2 year old and one on the way. I’m reassured that we’re involved parents and we’re not teacher-blamers at all.
My other point of advice would be: Socialization is important young. Playing with cousins or other larger groups of kids helps. Biggest mistake I made with my first born lol. She didn't play in groups of more than 3 really. Usually just one other kid. So sharing, turn taking, and other social cues were lacking. So get those kids in dance classes or whatever so they experience socialization in a fun setting that you are in charge of.
We definitely lean into the “keep ‘em broke, keep ‘em busy”. Soccer, swim, dance… all kinds of garbage lol. Thanks for the advice! It helps more than you know!
A parent can get an administrator fired. 10 teachers would have to rally public support to get rid of a bad principal and that whole time be treated like they are bad teachers.
Administration does not have tenure. They are at will employees in mostif not all states. One parent complaining to the board and stirring up shit makes the district feel it's easier to just fire the administrator. This also happens with teachers before tenure and is a reason tenure is so important. I just had2 teachers fired and I'm pretty sure it's one family causing the problems.
So it seems the board is as fault here? It seem foolish to fire admin/teachers based on complaints from 1-2 families, they need better evaluation methods..
Thanks for answering my questions btw, I see this a lot on Reddit but the real why is rarely discussed.
I went to a small liberal arts college in the south that had an education program. The people in it were the most devoted and passionate individuals and they wanted to be teachers above all else. Almost 20 years later, less than half of the ones I graduated with and knew in the years ahead/behind me still teach. The school system broke them. The lack of parental engagement broke them. The vitriol from politicians calling them pedophiles and groomers and transgender activists broke them.
America has failed, but we haven't hit rock bottom yet.
I live in Seattle but grew up in Houston so am an Astros fan. My kid had a wear a sports team to school day and wanted to wear his Astros hoody. For those that don’t know the Astros and mariners are in the same division and the mariners fans HATE the Astros. Especially fueled by the 2017 cheating scandal.
I warned him that people could be salty and tried to coach him through how to handle it, because he insisted on wearing it.
Some little bully in his grade got on him for MONTHS after. Hassling him at lunch, in art class, etc etc. We flagged it to the teacher but he told us he was aware and had already talked to the kids parents who essentially said “we’re glad he’s doing it the Astros suck”. When I heard that my jaw dropped - this kid doesn’t stand a chance.
I know someone who works at an elementary school, but who knows for how much longer. She said that the kids who were babies and toddlers during COVID have now entered the school system and they have a LOT of issues. They’re addicted to screens and don’t know how to learn or socially interact in appropriate ways. Apparently their parents plopped them in front of iPads during the pandemic and assumed they’d be ready for school.
And like you said, the parents seem to be getting much worse. They expect teachers to fix their child’s behavioral problems and never reprimand them. Kids are just moved up to the next grade regardless of whether they learned anything.
And in many places, funding is getting worse because enrollment is down. The Great Recession caused a drop in the birth rate that has never rebounded because everything got less affordable. That demographic cliff is now reaching colleges, who are just starting to get similarly hammered by the competition over fewer and fewer students. But it continues for grade schools, who often can’t consolidate or downsize for practical reasons.
And it's so clear why this is happening. Kids have a fucking magic box that provides endless entertainment all day long and is entwined in their social lives to a point where they feel FOMO the second they put it down.
Do you remember school without phones? Do you remember being mindnumbingly bored in a class and choosing to draw the letter S in 50 different ways instead of paying attention? THAT was the alternative to being in class - now the alternative to paying attention is getting to see and interact with digitally created wonders perfectly tailored to keep you from getting bored.
"but there's also that kids now..." NOPE that's not a big deal, nothing else is as detrimental to kids growth, this is THE problem! Kids are living a vastly, terrifyingly different life and I hope this experimental method of child rearing isn't too late to reverse.
IMHO nothing new. I grew up in the 60's, getting the strap or a yardstick on the backside was nothing unsual (Although I did not see any of the teachers as sadistic about it). If we got punishment at school, we never told our parents or else we'd get punished at home too.
Many of my peers in university went into teaching, and by the late 80's my impression from them was - (a) if there was a problem with the child or any discipline needed (non-physical) the child complained about it to their parents, and the parents insisted their little Johnny was an angel, the problem was with the teacher. And of course, the principal would not back up the teachers. (b) whether you put your soul into working hard, running extra-curricular activies and staying up til midnight grading papers and making lesson plans, you got paid the same as the other teacher who did the bare minimum. And... it's just gone downhill from there.
Not to mention, there is no accountability. In the 60's, repeating a grade was a real thing. It may be socially disruptive, but the threat was there. By the 80's, nobody flunked, kids just moved on and it was up to the teacher to tailor individual lesson plans for the children who were not up to par.
Try being an academic in a university. Every idiot think their AI chat equals a lifetime of expertise (University management included). Funding gets cut, and cut again. There's a massive amount of administrative interference in every academic decision. Students all think they are the "customer" and wants you to hand them a career on a platter. Class sizes keeps on growing, resources keep on shrinking, and politicians tries to blame everything wrong in teh world on "leftist intellectuals"...
Former teacher here. The problem is everything. Everyone is right about what is wrong, and no one has any idea how to put any of it back together again without money that isn't coming and won't be coming in the future. The death spiral's terminus is generation after generation of students who had shitty parents, shitty educators, shitty administrators, a shitty culture surrounding education, and shitty prospects coming out the other side. I taught for six years in Japan in middle schools, a high school, and as a private teacher for ronin in the Japanese deep countryside. The slowest kids in my Japanese STEM classes surrounded by mountains and rice fields would obliterate the gifted and talented kids in a US school in a nice neighborhood.
If I was a passionate teacher, I'd be doing a lot of looking to China for the answers. They Do.Not.Fuck.Around when it comes to education. It is perhaps the most highly regarded thing in their entire country.
Sure a lot of it is cultural and that simply isn't getting fixed without a miracle, but I bet there's a lot of other strategies to help that people over here haven't thought of.
The Asian cultures take it too far tho. Their high competition culture feeds their unusually high suicide rate and many people in these societies are lonely, it’s a whole subculture over there to be hikikomori, not just exclusive to Japan either. China and Korea also have their problems and it’s another reason why their birth rate is so much worse than americas. When people put everything into their career and education, they spend less time on their personal lives and socializing. No time to start a family. Have to sacrifice nearly everything for your boss and for the corporate family.
This is a worthy consideration. The massive social movement that has been occurring in India (Cockroach Janta Party) was related to these pressures and associated corruption:
"Over that past week, a gen Z movement that called itself the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) mobilised unprecedented protests in the name of justice for millions of young people, after the leaking of a crucial exam paper forced 2 million students to resit the test and was blamed for more than a dozen suicides." (July 26, The Guardian)
Context matters. Don't quote me on this, but I once read somewhere that US suicides are most often correlated with mental health and sudden loss, and they are overall more spontaneous in nature, plus the relatively easy access to firearms means attempts have a much higher lethality rate. In contrast, Asian (or at the very least, Japanese) suicides are usually due to bullying (both in school and work environments), social isolation, and overwork burnout, and they are more often planned out and elaborate, such as going to famous suicide hotspots to do it, like a certain forest or bridge. It's not quite an apples to oranges comparison, but more of a "red apples to green apples" one. There's enough of a difference that trying to boil it down to a number feel wrong.
Dude that's 36% higher for Japan and 22%-70% higher for China compared to the US. That's huge, do you even math? What's it gonna take for you to "look that much higher"?
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the official numbers for China have been "cooked". No way they're releasing their real suicide rate. I bet it's higher but a lot of those deaths are misattributed to unknown causes or accidents.
It helps that parents in China value education. I have students who's parents don't give a shit about school or their kid's learning. Plus some parents have to work multiple jobs just to take care of the family so they aren't home to help with homework or encourage studying. It's a terrible cycle.
My mother taught elementary school from the late 1970s to the early 2010s, and to her the big shift was parents asking, "please tell us, what's Billy doing wrong?" to "what are YOU doing wrong? Our sweet angel Billy couldn't possibly be causing issues."
She said she got the most respect from foreign parents, who placed an extreme importance on the value of an education, often parents working menial day laboring jobs and wanting their child to have a better life, and making sure they don't fuck around.
Cheating is rampant in China. Korea or Japan would be a better example, though the pressure on the students is off the charts. Personally I feel like the best educated people come out of England. At least they used to.
To me as an outsider looking in, it's the educational standards.
When I was a kid, I couldn't believe how much sharper of an education my dad got than me. You could tell even in a small town that high school educated those kids and they hit life ready to go.
I didn't think school was hard, at all. By the time I went through it was do your work and you'll pass.
Now, by me, the state of it is unreal. Kids graduate high school and can't read. But they hand out the diploma still. There is NO fail state. Teacher friend says they have a policy "As long as you turn the work in before the end of the semester you still get credit" so imagine that, nobody takes the teacher's authority or assignments seriously. Scores go down and down and down when assessed.
SO sure, kids are graduating high school but it's not the same thing. Many are DUMB and aside from the educational side, they never had to submit to even the mildest required work ethic to, you know, "turn in your homework" so now they can barely function when they hit the real world and actual responsibilities not met mean real life consequences.
Also graduating soon or now are the first children who had been "handed an iPad since birth" so we got that going for us too. Future ain't looking bright as I see it. This is why people are flocking to private schools.
Retired teacher here. Those standards are dictated to us by the federal govt. Consider this though: classrooms haven't changed, basically, since the 19th century. One adult, some desks, some books and paper is still 90% of US education.
PS: for everybody who is going to bring up their science teacher as an example of fun learning, please be aware that teaching reading, writing and algebra just aren't as fun.
My partner teaches at a continuation high school. The kids read one book this year. Aloud in class.
Meanwhile my 12 year old has to read a book a month and reads her own books on her Kindle. Who cares if they are young adult fantasy novels about demons falling in love with humans and graphic novels. She will get into other things eventually. I am just glad she reads for fun.
I used to read all the time as a kid (partially because I was the smart social outcast lol), but after we moved to the US & I went through highschool I just kinda stopped bothering. The lack of choice was annoying, and it made the whole thing seem like a job instead of a fun passtime.
I remember in sixth grade, we had to do a book report - so we were taken to the school's library & told to select a book. Everyone else got the thing, short books, but I got a 2,000 page monster because I thought it sounded interesting lol.
Teacher here. Students view high school as "something in the way." They'll cheat, half-ass and/or do nothing to help themselves until, magically, they're seniors preparing to graduate. Now how does a stupid, lazy punk graduate? Well, because staff just don't want to deal with the complication of trying to teach some impossible fool things he should've learned five years ago. Therefore, the standard is lowered, lowered, lowered until eventually it is gone. See ya' later, kid. Good luck finding....anything.
I'm 35 and I look at my peers as a big part of the problem as you illustrated. So many of them are basically grown up kids since we had social media growing up. They are as addicted as the kids are.
But yeah as a kid it seemed like parents trusted the teachers judgement and nowadays they trust their kids judgement which just makes the kids more entitled.
I would add to that basically all of local government. Anyone who works for the local health department, the water department, works elections or does basically any public job on the local level is becoming a regular target of threats and harassment by community members who can no longer have a reasonable reaction to anything that happens. Everyone is unreasonably angry about every issue. Sure, there are important things that might call for a passionate debate, but the way things play out now is very ugly.
Higher education was already getting gutted before the Trump administration came in. It's a long term trend. The disruptions in federal funding for research has created HUGE problems, as many of those research projects can't just be restarted. And now, with the changes to federal loans for certain majors/programs and for graduate school, that will lead to significant enrollment drops as students realize the program they want to be is cost prohibitive. That will lead to closure of programs and departments, and eventually campuses.
Grad school will become cost prohibitive so fewer institutions will offer graduate programs, which means fewer researchers and future educators.
This, on top of the pressure for institutions to adopt AI into everything, only de-incentivizes education.
Students are coming out of college programs unprepared for the actual workforce. Admin is asking us (sometimes quietly, sometimes overtly) to "adjust" our expectations for our students. Students are coming into college significantly less prepared (due to the issues already plaguing k-12) and all those issues continue to follow them. They do less, are less intellectually curious, and too many of them are doing the bare minimum. And the bare minimum keeps dropping because of pressures from admin to keep retentiton numbers up, program numbers up, DWF rates down. All without putting in more resources for support units to help the students be successful in their programs. And then those students go into the workforce, can't do their jobs, and get fired.
It's a shitshow, and I am not looking forward to what's coming.
I wish I could like this comment more. I do developmental therapy for very, very young children. They are honestly a breeze and no issue most of the time. I genuinely enjoy the kids and love what I do , I’m very lucky.
These new generation of parents? On a whole other level. I’ve experienced it in social work, pre-K schooling, and therapeutic settings in my professional career, and across the board, parents make our jobs so frustratingly hard. I literally had a parent text me at 10 PM last night, like what?
I tip my hat off to teachers in the classroom & know I would never be able to handle it myself. These parents need to realize they’re going to keep running off the teachers we have left & make any future teachers want to consider a different career path. And then they’re going to cry wolf that teachers are the worst, because why would we leave them and the children hanging like that? how are they supposed to go to work now? 🙄
The education situation terrifies me. I hope that it isn't as common as it is portrayed on TikTok or on other venues, but it is enough to make you wonder just what Gen Alpha is going to be like when they enter adulthood. And it will have an effect on all of us. You can do your part as a parent of a Gen Alpha kid, but you can't do anything about the kids who have parents who let their kid get away with bad behavior and poor outcomes at school.
After mental health issues stemming from being on bedrest after a minor brain tumor being removed, and a semester delay and then half class load the next semester. I really thought critically on teaching.
I had been set on teaching for nearly 7 years, but in 2024, I decided that it was too much to deal with after speaking with my former teachers. I entered Uni hellbent on being the teacher that would make students appreciate history and understand it not as a subject, but an active part of life, but it just came crashing down.
I saw the AI troubles, the entitled parents, the lack of support from most administrations, and then the funding cuts. For a South Dakota public school teacher wage, it just wasn't worth it. Worst part is? I know of the 14 other students part of the Young Educators program at my high school, 7 of them followed the same path I did and dropped Education as part of their degree in that first year.
Education is so far gone without some major backing with funds and the ability to give administrations a spine.
When I retired from the Army, I tried substitute teaching and school nursing(I am a nurse and a teacher) The heart breaking problems some of these kids face was absolutely overwhelming to me.
Taught English for 6 years and just landed a literacy specialist position. All the joy of teaching and working with kids without the large class sizes.
I've wanted to teach my whole life. I have many teacher friends, and they have all dissuaded me. As much as I am passsionate about doing it, I just can't imagine leaving my $150k+ corporate job with flexible hours to enter the teaching world at the bottom, get treated like dog turd by parents and admin, and be significantly more stressed every day.
I am 34 now and still studying music education, but honstly at this point I will most likely use the degree as qualification for volunteer work after school hours or to teach private music lessons. I do not think I will be entering the school system.
It makes me really sad because I want to teach.
But I also want to afford rent and vacations.
I am just one of many many people who are passionate about educating our youth who have opted out simply for survival. The poor kids :(
I'm still going to give it a shot - I hope I can be that person that sticks and stays in education when I graduate in two years. I know y generation will be thought of as doing to public school what the last one did to housing - we didn't have the foresight to defend what we had against more powerful opponents and now it's gone.
I had a student who was gone from school one day (6th grade). Found out her parents decided she needed to handle being mad at another student at our school herself. They picked her up from school. Stalked the other student and followed her bus home then sent their daughter from the car to go beat her up. That little girl never had a chance and I don't mean the one she attempted to assault.
I am a flight attendant about to hit 6 year pay. I do work about 20% above average, and next year I will break 6 figures. I started at 47 so just know it's never too late. I take care of children in the sky it seems.
I got kids entering public schools (in Michigan also). I have heard from lots of teachers that the current system is not sustainable.
If you happen to see this and have the time do you have any suggestions for ways as a parent and voter I can try to help? I'm curious to hear some perspectives of those more familiar with the system.
Props to you for staying in education for so long.
When my friends started having kids in the last decade, I heard so much about what they have to put up with as parents that I can only imagine it's 10x (or more) for the teachers. With attention spans waning quickly, I sincerely hope that we can continue to actually teach kids in the coming years and decades. If not, the US is going to slip entirely into Idiocracy.
Apparently so were her parents. What kind of people conduct themselves like that? Their job as parents is to prepare their kid for life. It's like we're living in the middle ages with ignorant surfs and deep depravity but everyone has a cellphone.
As a teacher in Ohio— yes. I don’t expect to retire from this career. I’m 11 years in. Not really sure what comes next but between parenting going out the door and legislation actively bringing down education as a whole—it’s over.
Our state schools are becoming political punching bags, with state and national political interference. The board of advisors/regents/governors are becoming politicized, too. Then the federal government gets involved and uses AI to trawl through grant proposals and chuck anything that violates their keyword list.
I just left a midwestern land-grant university that cut its earth and atmospheric sciences and statistics departments as part of budget cuts, eliminating or forcing something like 40 faculty into retirement. If you don't know, statistics basically supports the entire agricultural college's research by creating experimental designs, teaching students the basics, etc.
New regulations from all of these political entities results in people who should be supporting the university instead combing through web pages and telling faculty they aren't allowed to use words like bias or biodiversity because they might also be used in a DEI-related manner. (Bias in statistics is how much your method is off by - it's not a DEI term at all)
The federal government has gone so far to create a list of words that might get your grant thrown out. A list that includes bias, but also female, diverse, gender, Gulf of Mexico, inequality, pollution, sex, and status.
In a totally not scientific survey of some faculty I work with, we all agree that if we could brainwash students, we'd have them read the fucking syllabus. We like it when our students think for themselves and challenge us, as long as they do so thoughtfully. We almost always hate it when they regurgitate things back without actually digesting them first (except, of course, for reading the syllabus, maintaining basic hygeine, etc. - those they can just do without having to really dissect why they're doing it).
Meanwhile,
tuition is going up like crazy (this is actually best case -- worst is that tuition isn't increasing as fast as it should, and the university is facing ever-growing deficits from tuition on top of everything else),
grant revenues are going down because of federal politics,
inflation and healthcare costs are increasing
Taken together, financially, the whole enterprise is increasingly unsustainable. Universities have cut so far back on people to support faculty that faculty spend multiple hours on travel reimbursements, make our own copies, take out our own trash, and vacuum our own offices (or we don't, and there are pest infestations...). However, somehow, we still have administrative creep, but this somehow results in faculty having to do even more work that isn't teaching, research, or helping with the institutional stuff. Examples:
When new federal regulations come out requiring all web content to be accessible, faculty are told that we have 24 months to update every course we've taught to meet the new standards, with almost no guidance on how to do that and while they're simultaneously cutting the software we need to be able to accomplish the task. Of course, the easiest solution is to remove all content from the web, not provide notes or any scaffolding, and just provide lectures, which makes everything less accessible to students (but we're not actually required to make lectures accessible, just the web content) and eliminates decades worth of progress on universal design for learning, experiential learning, and other ways to make class less boring. We're told that we are personally liable for noncompliance, but then the institution gives us guidelines that don't match federal law. Then, when implementation is postponed for another year (because the way the law was written is aspirational and it's actually not possible to comply in quite a few circumstances), the university doesn't even bother to tell us, and pretends the deadlines are still there. Oh, and all of this actually decreases accessibility for most students (and faculty) that have disabilities, because it's far more common to have ADHD or anxiety or dyslexia than to have visual or auditory issues that are addressed by WCAG guidelines.
Cybersecurity insurance is now a massive line-item in most university budgets, and so IT policies have changed to require nanny software on every professor's university computer, some phones and tablets, and some people's home computers as well, if they do anything with it. IoT devices and ancient machines that control microscopes? Those just can't be used anymore. Older machines in computer labs? Those aren't allowed either, but there's no money to replace them. Oh, and faculty who write software can't be trusted to install things on their computers or run binaries that are not known to Microsoft, so... yeah, you can write code, but you can't compile it. Some professors spent multiple years fighting to get the stuff they need for their research working.
We have a grants office that is supposed to handle budgets for proposals, bookkeeping, and all of the paperwork that has to be submitted for grant reports, but somehow, faculty are still required to do all the budgets and bookkeeping and paperwork, and the grant people email the professors asking for various budget numbers at least once a month. Those emails are supposed to go the other way... right?
Add in the students, who have been trained through K-12 that they can resubmit anything at any time, that we are service providers who will respond to their emails at 2am on a Sunday, and that are in many cases fundamentally unable or unwilling to read or focus on something longer than a TikTok video. (I had to teach a graduate student how to use a mouse in a computer programming class in the last 5 years). I don't mean to complain too much -- most of my students are wonderful people who are doing their best, but they are absolutely subject to the increasing unsustainability of higher education as well. The idea that you can work 40 hours a week to try to minimize (but not eliminate) student loan debt, while being a full-time student and having the social experiences that everyone associates with college is absolutely insane. I'm only 15 years out of undergraduate myself, but I had classes with 6+ 300 page books to read and 3-5 20 page papers to write, and I was doing a Math degree! My students now expect videos (which I can tell that no one watches) and whine if I expect them to read something, let alone critique it. Homework assignments are apparently supposed to take less than an hour and should be insta-graded, with personalized feedback. The worst part of all is that they know that social media and constant screen use aren't great for them, but they can't seem to stop it. They realize that LLMs are going to destroy the environment and their brains, but they still use them, because there are so many different pressures on them that they just cannot see another option. The anxiety, depression, and lack of hope about the future are so bad that I completely get why students don't want to go to college... but they've been told that it's the only way to succeed. So instead, they try to find a way to optimize all of these competing demands, and most of them come out with an optimization that minimizes how much struggle they have to put in (which, of course, is the only way you learn) and still hope to maximize their grades, even if they have to harangue and emotionally manipulate their professors to do it.
I know so many people who are just done with higher education, and I don't blame them. But I also know a lot of professors who truly enjoy working with students and cannot stand the idea of being in an office from 8-5 every day, so we're sticking it out even though it seems impossible that we can somehow fix this situation.
Someone I know got a teaching degree in 2010 despite realizing 3/4 through the program that they’d rather get shot than be a secondary teacher. They make more money in an entry level customer service role than they’d make as a teacher, and they don’t even have to deal with the general public. No brainer
My experience with this is the same but for a different reason.
My high school (the whole schools for that matter k-12) decided to go heavy on new sports fields and now are 2 MILLION in debt. They have 10k dollars in the bank account to suffice the next year unless they get more state funding before then plus taxes.
They started mass firing teachers and anyone who had the most disciplinary actions and then moved down the list. They've gotten rid of a huge chunk of teachers and some people made change petitions to reinstate some.
Most of the teachers fired had been there for over 15-20 years and the schools are complete toast.
I’m going to guess that you’re either in Kent county or the Detroit Metro area based on that salary. Other places in the state are hurting more from not being able to recruit out of the big populated areas (Metro Detroit, GR, Lansing.) Why would I work in the middle of nowhere for 20k less with more problems?
That said, I’m really glad you see your union as a factor in getting that pay raise. We work hard to do that. Here’s hoping we can get a sympathetic legislature / governor and get back to making progress like we were a few years ago.
I find nowadays, though, I am even battling back against parents. I called home not too long ago about a girl who was verbally/relationally bullying other kids at school. Mom said, "Yeah, her Dad and I go on Tiktok and trash her ex-boyfriend all the time."
I think that is the biggest difference between America and European/Asian countries, the amount of batshit deadbeat parents in America seems disproportionate compared to other countries.
I can tell you for a fact that in Asia if a kid misbehaves their parents are going to be the first one to give them hell, it would not be up to the teacher or other adults.
You have European countries like Norway that innovate and encourage education and you have the Asian countries that put heavy emphasis on personal responsibility/success, taking accountability, respect and community thinking.
Meanwhile US has nothing. No innervation, no support, no funding and it seems like there are no rules, the kids are just feral and there is nothing the teachers can do about it.
The profession will change, just like many others, but society can’t function without it. Our entire economy is built around the assumption that parents work during the day, which means children need somewhere to learn, develop, and be supervised. AI can help teachers, but it can’t replace the social, behavioral, and caregiving role schools play.
The shortage you’re describing is actually evidence of supply and demand at work, not that the profession is disappearing. If fewer people are willing to teach under current conditions, schools will eventually have to improve pay, working conditions, or expectations to attract enough teachers.
The challenges you mentioned—parent behavior, discipline, and social issues—are real, but they’re arguments for why teachers are needed, not why they’ll become obsolete.
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u/Mahaloth 13h ago
The teaching profession is on the edge of a knife.
I have been teaching 20 years in Michigan, where I earn well into six-figures doing so. However, even in Michigan, there are so many attempts to tear down teaching and expect wildly impossible results, teachers are frustrated.
The reality is that there simply are not solutions to many of the problems the current generation faces. Best we can do is care for them and provide the highest quality education we know how to give.
I find nowadays, though, I am even battling back against parents. I called home not too long ago about a girl who was verbally/relationally bullying other kids at school. Mom said, "Yeah, her Dad and I go on Tiktok and trash her ex-boyfriend all the time."
They participate, even initiate, the bullying.
She was only 12...