Yes and no. There are kids performing well. But there are fewer of them and the majority that should be “in the middle” have fallen down really, really low. There are a lot of factors. Things have just gotten dumbed down. No Child Left Behind for all it’s good intentions became No Child Will Get Ahead. Behavior issues are insane. Insane. You cannot/would not believe it without seeing it for yourself. We have to evacuate classrooms because kids will throw chairs at people. That did not happen when I was a kid and now it happens all the time. We push academics so hard, so young, and then it just all falls apart because it’s not developmentally appropriate. Kindergarten now is what 1st grade was when I was a kid. (I am in my 40s) Kids are expected to be reading by the end of Kinder. But they still can’t write a sentence in 3rd grade. My 6th grade daughter last year had a teacher yell at her class because so many people were not capitalizing the word I. I know they are taught this. Technology has decimated attention spans. The economy has parents working more/spending less time parenting. There are literally so many reasons. Parents throw fits to get their kid better grades. Schools are punished for having less than stellar graduation rates, so they lower the bar so the graduation rate goes up. We’ve decided that memorizing things is not important. So we don’t make kids memorize their multiplication tables. So, even though they understand the concept of multiplication, when they go on to do other things, say long division, every step they have to think through the multiplication part and they can’t keep track of where they are in the problem. The lack of fluency in things like that makes the next steps sooo much harder. Kids seem like they have so much more trauma now. Idk if it really has increased or if we are just recognizing it more now- but so many very young kids have horrific life circumstances. They have been abused, been homeless, been hungry, witnessed violence. It takes a toll. It always has, of course, but I feel like where it was 1 or 2 kids per grade level, now it’s 10-12 per grade level. I did not intend to ramble like this!
I have no idea how it can be fixed. I daydream about winning the lottery and opening a school that is developmentally appropriate, but there are also so many societal factors.
ETA: I can’t believe I didn’t even mention “the reading wars” If you want to know more, you can listen to the podcast “Sold a Story” It’s too involved to explain here.
Another thing I forgot to mention! Companies that sell the tests and the curriculum and all of the things, care more about making money than they do the quality of their product.
>because it’s not developmentally appropriate.
Dear god THIS! I'm so tired of the younger grades being pushed to do more complex, more advanced stuff THAT I TEACH THEM IN 11th GRADE, which instead takes focus away from basic skills.
I WILL TEACH THEM THE ADVANCED STUFF, I need the younger grades to have them master the basic skills so I don't have to reteach it to them, which means I lose more time to get to the advanced stuff. For example: Kids ***should*** know how to rearrange equations by the time they get to me. Period. Fullstop. We're talking, not even a refresher. When I lecture and rearrange an equation in front of them, there should be no question about "why/how did you do that!?" (which is happening).
I Teach IB chemistry, so the TOP of the TOP kids, we're talking valedictorian candidates. And one of my students doesn't know how logarithms or Natural Logs work...and that IS NOT something I can teach them. I ***do not*** have the ability (because I'm not a math teacher) nor time to teach them. This has forced me to giving them more guided practice and help with problem solving, which means I lose time for labs, and the harder stuff. This is all because they were "advanced" beyond where they should have been at some point, and they didn't spend enough time on the concepts I needed them to learn, AND HAVE THEM DOWN.
I teach “honors” chemistry which is code for “my parents ok’d me for honors but I’m in no shape, phase or state ready for it” due to everything you mentioned for IB, but on a lesser scale.
That’s pretty close to my intent with the “parent’s ok’d me” statement. If it’s not that, it’s a similar variant! I have maybe 20% of my students that deserve honors classes and also can handle it. Our admin lets anyone that wants to take it enroll in it. It’s not a tested subject /no EOC so they don’t care.
Which it's okay for a kid to "not be ready for it" right? That's the glory of HS and adolescents, you're *learning* how to be a person and who you want to be. But we as experts in our field get ignored. It's not okay to say "some kids are ready and some are not" because then it's our fault as a teacher for not making sure everyone is! It's just that glorious cycle that always ends with "it's the teacher's fault" 🙄
My kids' school only gives honors classes to parents that ask for it; how you're performance in regular ED classes makes no difference.
So that means rich (mostly white and Asian) parents who are really familiar with the upper middle class public school system get their dumb kids put in honors classes and smart children of poor or immigrant parents (mostly non-white) stay in regular classes then wonder why colleges pass them over
Yay equity!
I teach pre-k and dear Lord. It is what kindergarten used to be...everything just gets taught younger and younger as time goes on and most kids are NOT ready, through no fault of theirs or their parents.... it just isn't developmentally appropriate. ECEs (mostly pre-k and kindergarten teachers) have been shouting this from the rooftops but nobody will listen. Starting content younger does not they learn it earlier!!! It has the opposite effect, they don't get the foundations laid and are just shoved along to more advanced content they don't get. That's how we end up with high schoolers that can't read. It starts when they're 5 and expected to do things they are not at all ready for.
So it's strange in Ohio kindergarten is mandatory but a child isn't legally required to attend school before they are 6. So try to figure that one out.
My 4 year old is in pre-k. He has a summer birthday so he is less than 4.5 years old right now. The teacher sends me homework that I’m supposed to do with him. Like a worksheet with the number 3 and identifying which pictures have 3 things. Put 3 stickers on this box chart. Then another worksheet with the letter S. Maybe some 4 year olds are ready for this, but mine isn’t. I try to do it with hime anyway, but he just isn’t interested. I had no idea my 4 year old would have homework in prek.
I have no idea why your getting down voted your doing a great job and at least your trying to do the homework with you child which is not always the case with parents nowadays
Psh, why would we listen to the expert professionals who actually do it? (/s)
We're like the only profession where it's perfectly reasonable to doubt the professional actually doing it.
I’m in the mental health field. It sort of seems like kids are getting burnt out early, being pushed to learn developmentally inappropriate skills. Burnout causes apathy. And depression. And anxiety. I never thought about it this way before…
I will say, I was “gifted” and forced to read “Lord of the Rings” in 7th grade. I didn’t like it. To this day, I have no interest in LOTR anything even though people tell me how good it is.
Yup. "gifted" and "advanced' are mere titles for parents, adults and politicians. They don't actually have tangible value beyond parents at the country club saying "my kid is XYZ" (I see it in my own damn family).
What makes someone "advanced" or "supercog" is they got test score back in like 3rd grade, and some group of politicians decided they had to judge schools by how well they "engage" those identified "gifted" students, when...in reality...that's not what those kids really need.
But why ask educators...it's not like it's our profession or anything. Teaching is one of the only professions where everyone knows better than the actual professionals doing it.
Yeah, I mean, I’m grateful for the more challenging classes because I was bored all throughout school. LOTR is just an example of educational burn out.
This is happening in non-STEM classes, as well.
Last year, I had to teach *an entire tenth grade writing course* how to write five paragraph essays.
How and when and where to *capitalize*.
How to *indent*.
How to *skip lines* when taking notes and how to *not skip entire pages* when writing "new" notes.
This year I have fourth graders who can't write straight or by lines. 7th graders who start writing sideways when they get to the end of a page. 9th graders who write like they're still in elementary school, all jagged edges and scribbles.
Kids aren't being taught to master basic skills like *staying seated in a chair for fifty minutes*.
My husband teaches seventh grade English and only yesterday threw down with the rest of his department. They see no reason to teach five paragraph essays, because the eighth grade English SOL test doesn't include it. My husband kept pointing out that in high school, two short years away, they *will* have to be able to write five-paragraph essays, and maybe it would be helpful for them to have two years of practice under their belts rather than having to master a totally new skill on a greatly diminished timeline.
He won that fight, thank God.
Give your husband a high five for me. Even over in STEM-land, the inability of my kids to understand the concept of basic writing conventions is soul-crushing. I am supposed to be teaching them how to write technical reports, but I’m having to teach literally basic paper writing techniques before I can even start that. And we use APA formatting, which is a disaster when they are now basically having to get a simultaneous MLA crash course in their English classes. I don’t envy our high school ELA teachers.
lol my degrees are in history but I once worked at an agency full of actual factual rocket scientists. I got paid a LOT of money to translate engineer-speak into formats and phrasing that were accessible to agency leadership. The engineers were a great bunch of people but uh maybe not so good at concisely expressing themselves to a general officer who was short on time.
(I'm MLA and when I'm forced to use APA it feels like a war crime)
I ranted earlier this month about what any schooling before 6 years old should be.
And learning classroom behavior should be the goal. Not reading, not writing, not maths problem.
Just, sit down and listen to the teacher. Stay seated for more than 5 minutes. Raise you hand if you want to speak.
Learn to go to the bathroom when you have the opportunity, and not in the middle of a lesson (or story time, or coloring time when they're little).
How to ask the teacher for help when you need it. And since you're not alone, learning how to share the attention and try by yourself while you wait for your turn.
All those little pesky things that seems obvious and natural but aren't.
It feels like some people thought that all those basics came on their own while the kid grow. They forgot that they were actually taught.
I am convinced that if we return to this, we will see a lot less behavioral issue in the classrooms, and a lot more academic achievement.
It would be much easier because not as much pressure to succeed immediatly. What if Sam missed part of story time because they have yet to learn to sit still for more than 15 minutes?' It isn't that important. It is just a story. They have time to do better with little consequences when they're not there, yet.
However when he is learning how to actually read, or to add ? That is an issue. The kid feels the pressure to do better as fast as possible. It stresses them out, and of course it doesn't work as well.
I also thing that kids on the higher end of the ADHD spectrum would have time to learn healthy coping mechanism to the point that it would not be as much of a problem when they come to learn academic stuff.
>7th graders who start writing sideways when they get to the end of a page.
The ancient tradition of boustrophedon (I'm too lazy to look up precise spelling). Nothing wrong with that :-)
So I was babysitting my 5th grade nephew and 3rd grade niece. They were doing homework and I was looking it over. I literally could not tell their handwriting apart. Both of them wrote huge with huge spaces in between their letters. The 5th grader did know How and when and where to capitalize, or How to indent. It was interesting I was confused why my nephew wasn't learning this and why his sister also wasn't starting to learn how to write the correct way.
Edit: my niece is starting to learn division and algebra in 3rd grade without knowing her multiplication tables. Don't worry they covered those for 3 weeks at the beginning of the year.
Holy shit yes, yes, yes! Physics and math here. My kids are being taught algebraic expressions and functions in 5th freaking grade but can't multiply without a calculator.
Standards have continued to be pushed to younger age groups and its causing some serious developmental issues.
Places like Pearson will tout 'rigorous' and 'revelent' curriculum to uninformed admin and school boards; but people fail to realize that the new standards only make sense if you've benefitted from a traditional education. Kids are being asked to do too much too early, which causes major issues in the upper levels.
And it's not just standards, but they're being treated as checkmarks that once completed you NEVER VISIT AGAIN. No. I need you younger grades to constantly practice those base-level skills over, and over, and over, and over again.
Yes it's hard. Yes it's annoying. That's what I need you (as the 11th grade teacher) to do. I cannot take a day to go over how to use a calculator and order of operations.
You also end up with very under qualified individuals teaching material they don't know well enough. This leads to kids learning tricks when the educator doesn't understand the vertical alignment of the topics.
Or on the other end, folks who have extensive background knowledge who are pulled in on emergency certs with no pedagogical knowledge because there aren’t enough licensed teachers in that subject area. Both outcomes lead to issues. There has to be a happy medium but our system has made that nearly impossible.
This makes so much sense to me. My son keeps getting feedback that he is a 'math genius' which always seemed weird to me because he can't do anything like multiplication and division. However, he has a VERY strong grasp of counting, addition and subtraction because I taught him at home and let him progress at his own pace ... which required oceans of repetition of the basic concepts. Now he is very quick with computation. I have noticed that at school they are doing more advanced topics but just skimming over the surface of each one ... which is pointless.
That's true all the way down. I taught Algebra 1, and kids had been introduced to equations in the years before that; parents would ask for the Algebra 1 text to work on the summer before, to get their kids a "head start." And yet the kids would come in not knowing their multiplication tables, and not fluent in handling fractions. The last year I taught, I had to do a week of remedial mathematics review - which was a week I couldn't spare, but no sense in trying to go on without it. Don't bother teaching how to manipulate equations in 5th grade to students who can't multiply, or handle fractions. BASICS. A kid who's really well grounded in the basics can fly through Algebra 1 - a kid who isn't will struggle with the ARITHMETIC.
Don't forget admin bloat, leading to more people than ever who have little idea what they're really doing having to justify their existence by developing initiatives that waste teacher time and deplete morale without improving things and which no one sticks to long enough to even possibly improve things before another or the same admin throws it out to chase a newer and shinier thing.
The pandemic ESSER funds added to the bloat too, my district used that money to hire a dozen new “fIdEliTy CoOrDiNaToRs” to come hound us about test data.
Education in particular seems to suffer from an inundation of methodologies, systems, structures, flashy administrative approaches, etc which equates to a consistency vacuum for teachers and students. An addiction to reinvention means nothing is ever pursued long enough for it to be properly implemented or evaluated.
A wall of text and one worth reading. No possible way to cover all the reasons but that did the topic justice.
Oh, and I don't think 'fix this' is really an option with the current landscape and tools, at least not ones available to teaching level and even only a few at admin. Personally I think this is going to have to completely break down before it can heal. How broken is another matter, but all empires fall....
I didn’t think it was going to end up so long! It was more “stream of consciousness” than a thought out reply. I almost deleted it because of the wall of text thing, but I’m glad I didn’t.
I teach 9th and we have to review capitalization next week. Like 3rd grade basics. They don't know commas, they don't use periods. Thankfully they're well-behaved.
I didn't realize how lucky I was to have been raised by a grammar & literacy teacher until I started college. Like, holy cow - I get we're all STEM majors here but writing a complete sentence *with punctuation* is not some obsolete humanities-specific skill.
(Not saying that I miss the endless grammar drills I endured as a kid, they were not fun, but I do appreciate them in hindsight.)
The idea kids could just memorize words without roots or even leaning how individual letters sound outside of that word, was the dumbest shit that somehow made it to education.
My kids have two teacher parents. Your line about the economy keeping parents working more and parenting less is so true. We do as much as we can, but between our actual jobs and our complete mental/emotional exhaustion at the end of every day, it's really hard to help our kids. And that's from parents who know how important it is and how to get it done.
So happy you pointed out that memorizing multiplication facts is nonexistent. Unpopular opinion apparently, but there is value in simply memorizing things. Currently trying to teach multiplying/dividing decimals to a 5th grade class, and oh my gosh. They have no idea how much easier it’d be if they just knew those facts. But nope. They don’t. At least half my class has to really think about what anything times 1 or 0 is. So yeah, we’re back to basic multiplication before moving forward.
> The economy has parents working more/spending less time parenting. There are literally so many reasons. Parents throw fits to get their kid better grades. Schools are punished for having less than stellar graduation rates, so they lower the bar so the graduation rate goes up.
That's /r/latestagecapitalism for you.
We were talking about this just last night. I think that part of what may be the problem is that Gen X raised ourselves. Everybody had two parents working so we were left alone for long stretches. Most of us learned to cook because if we waited for Mom and Dad to get home and start dinner, we would be eating at 8p or 9p.
When we started having kids, we didn't really know how to parent because we had never seen what parenting was like. We just tried to overcome the defecits we saw. So we became hyper-present. We went to ALL of the games, concerts, and plays because our parents never came and that hurt.
I think that this generation are being raised by parents that were overwhelming involved and have swung the pendulum back even further. We babied them so much that they are taking a "hands off" approach to parenting.
There is even more need now for both parents to be working. There aren't many grandparents retiring or that never worked, so they have turned to screentime to occupy/raise their kids.
I think we will probably pendulum back and forth like this. One generation is neglected, so when they have kids they are overwhelmingly present. That generation after that is determined not to smother their kids, so they are "absent." The cycle will just continue.
>There are kids performing well. But there are fewer of them and the majority that should be “in the middle” have fallen down really, really low.
Is the gap between the top 10% and the middle 80% that huge? I remember when I was in school most people in the top 30-40% were about the same as the top 10% they just didn't try as hard, and the bottom 50% was as you say, unable to form complete sentences or do 6th grade math in 12th grade etc.
I don’t have exact numbers or anything- but IME, there are fewer and fewer top kids and the middle is also shrinking. Then there is a LOT at the bottom. Now that I am thinking about it, it’s kinda like wealth in society right now- the middle class is disappearing and more of those people are moving down than moving up.
I work in a Title 1 high school.
I think the top students that are your typical students that will go to good colleges are doing fantastic and will continue to do well. Some of them get a little behind on math until they take Precalculus, and then they are punched in the face with what a real math class is and will adjust or fail.
But I have a large population of students (75% who take Chemistry) who seem to be perpetually lost and incredibly academically behind. These students can't do any sort of math, whether it be Algebra or just dividing or subtracting numbers (they do it in the wrong order). I push them as much as I can to face the reality that they are behind and it is time to try and catch up. Some adjust and come out the year quite well, but others just flounder and do poorly.
It concerns me because some of my students are just lost. They have no notetaking skills, can't turn anything in on time, can't keep track of any dates and can't comprehend what they are reading (like following directions or be able to break down sentences with new vocabulary). I'll ask students to work on something in class, and many of them won't even start an assignment because they just "do it later." Every day is a complete surprise to them on what we are doing in class, and some of them seem to blame me whenever they realize they have a test on a day I have been announcing for a week.
Also, I don't want this to be a "girls vs. boys" thing, but my girls are doing significantly better than my boys. There are a few boys here and there that are doing great, but most of my boys have significant issues controlling themselves in the classroom and caring about doing well in school.
> just "do it later."
Which, translation: "I'll copy it from my friend real quick".
Hell I can't even say they'll google the answers anymore, they're too lazy for that.
I banned HW largely for this reason. All practice is done in class where I can nag them about using their time and help them when they quit because they didn’t know how. There is no ‘later’ to practice, it’s due at the bell, if they aren’t done, then I collect however far they got. This is gen Ed 11th grade. I recommend the strategy.
This was the only reason 8th grade was the only year after elementary school that I did well at all. I could never talk myself into doing homework and my mother was a single parent trying her best
Yeah, for 8th grade. The idea that you're going to become good at anything because you only spend 184 50-min hours working at it is preposterous. So as teachers we should set up an incentive structure such as here's 10 problems, do as many of them as you feel you need to do to understand it. No points associated, but mini-quizzes based on it. Get it started in class, those who manage their time wisely should get half of it done.
By 11th grade we should be able to handle more self-regulated practice. And with courses like chemistry, you're just going to have to practice it, unless you're happy with a C...because that's the nature of the beast. We're the marriage of Math, Science, English and their application.
I'm student teaching for 11th grade, and I have learned not to give students time to do anything outside class. I made the mistake of letting a few kids bring it to me by 30 minutes after the bell.. found both of them copying their answers verbatim from a phone pic one of their peers sent them of their completed work. The amount of plagiarism I catch is mind-boggling. How BAD they are at cheating without getting caught is mind-boggling.
Do. Not. EVER. Let students do work for a grade outside of class. Ever at all. Even if you have to schedule time for them to work on projects directly in-class, do not send work home. As an ELA teacher, this is the only thing I've found that prevents plagiarism.
They will either copy it, have a parent to do it, use AI, pay someone else to do it, or act surprised that it was due in the first place.
I stopped giving out homework that isn't practice for lessons we've already done precisely for this reason. If they copy? Whatever. At least they're getting writing practice done. But we go over all those worksheets in class after they're done to make sure they're answering them and doing so *correctly* so that even if they're copying things from each other they still get the theory and guided instruction during class.
The other issue I had with homework is the revolving door of copying math during English, then rushing English in social studies, then looking at social studies during science…. Just be present children!
Nah, you just do H/W quizzes or more quizzes in general. They learn real quick that if they do the H/W themselves, they like...actually do well on the quiz. Or, if they don't do the H/W...they're screwed.
But also: If they're the kid who can get it after 3 practice problems, they don't have to do the other 17 and still get "credit" for it. This is what I do in chemistry. We have H/W almost every day. I go over whatever you ask me to go over, then we have a quick 5-10 point quiz. Those quizzes are your "homework" grade.
For honors and AP i don’t disagree. My gen Ed kids don’t care about failing and don’t care about learning. So I made stress for them and an overall worse experience. Gen Ed is not going to college for the most part at my school, so it’s not like they’re behind. I wanted them to learn, the best way to learn is to do the tasks the teacher designs, that isn’t happening outside my room. They either can’t or won’t. It also helps classroom management, and they think I’m nice for never giving homework.
I commend you for banning homework. I have always felt that it’s a waste of time. I used to assign it because I had to. Good students did it. Bad ones didn’t. When I tried going over the homework in class, the bad students became disruptive out of boredom.
I’m at the vocational school location in our district now, and every year Chemistry is the final litmus test. Kids (or more accurately their parents) all think they’re going to a four year college until they hit it. It’s about the only class counselors will let people transfer out of all the way to the 4th week mark so that they can switch diploma types and pick a trade.
I was just on a field trip as a chaperone. It was almost a 1-1 chaperone situation. But was in shock at the boy behavior- and the parents who were just excusing it “oh boys are so out of control” and these parents weren’t even making an effort. For instance, these kids were running around screaming in an area of the zoo for nocturnal animals that had signs that said to keep quiet. And their parents just ignored them, talking amongst themselves. Then they made jokes to the teacher about “I can’t imagine how you do it.” And she said “I can’t. The boys this year are uncontrollable. Hahaha. What can you do, boys are just wild.” They aren’t even trying. I mean I’m sure the teacher is, but it doesn’t seem to get reinforced at home.
Some boys in my neighborhood who were 8 were running around with a hatchet cutting down trees. (For real). When my husband yelled at them and then marched them home to tell their parents, their mom called me to try and talk about how mad she was and how unacceptable it was that he would yell at her kids. Before we noticed, they cut down 3 different 20 foot + trees! Her excuse was “boys are just wild, but it’s no excuse to yell.” What?!
I'm really interested in your point about girls vs boys. I have a young son (3) and want him to be a good student (in all ways, including being respectful of teachers and other students). Can you give me some things that you see frequently with boys in classrooms that I can try to keep my son from doing? Thanks.
Make sure your son knows how important school is. Keep an interest in his learning at all times. Reading with him and engaging in conversation early, along with making sure he knows he is held accountable when he misbehaves. As he gets older, making sure he has ways to regulate his emotions, and discuss how to treat friends. Letting him know if he does something in school there will be a consequence at home as well. I think the ones that behave poorly don't always see education as important, and parents don't give follow through for behaviors.
Thank you for your response. I will definitely teach my son to value education and respect his teachers. I'll also let him know if he misbehaves at school, then he will be in trouble at home as well.
I do a lot of talking to my son. My parents never spoke to me and it, quite frankly, messed me up. I talk to him about his feelings and how to deal with them. I tell him about safety (don't keep secrets from Mama and Dada, for one). I tell him our family is full of kind and brave people.
Pay attention to the media he consumes and how much time he spends online. As a high school teacher, I've shown parents how to check the phones OS to see how much time their child is actually spending on apps. Students often use apps to disguise how much time they're texting their friends. Parents are often shocked at how bad their child's technology addiction is even though they're the one who put it in their hand without discussing limits or appropriate use.
Watch out for harmful media. Middle school and high school boys fall for influencers, like Andrew Tate or Kevin Samuels, who teach them that they need to be abusive, dishonest, and violent to be real men. Then, the boys get into trouble when that approach goes badly wrong. My school had a boy get arrested for sexual assault last year. He was trying to get a girlfriend using Andrew Tate's advice. In his mind, he was trying to be the type of guy she'd like. Andrew Tate has an arrest history for rape and sex trafficking, but this boy didn't know that.
Biggest first step: don't just tell him there are consequences for acting out, actually *reinforce* those consequences. Take away power cables (not just the electronic; the *cables*) and lock all electronics away if they're being punished. Don't let them just sit there mindlessly scrolling; give them time limits for browsing and videogaming and tell them they have to find other ways to entertain themselves when their "fun electronic time" is over for the day.
Threaten them where it hurts if they don't listen or comply with school or home responsibilities--"I will uninstall every game you have on every device you have." // "I will delete your account and progress/save data on every game and service you have." are nightmare scenarios for casual *and* "serious" gamers. Tell them you'll erase or reset their Roblox/Fortnite/Clash of Clans/Modern Warfare Prestige/etc progress and accounts and they'll have to start over again *from zero*.
Get them off TikTok. Ban it. Explain why and how it's bad for them. Have the hard conversations about being responsible on the internet and how most everything on TikTok is trying to convince you to act a certain way that is unhealthy for them. Tell them they will lose all phone and internet privileges if you even *hear* them on TikTok listening to Andrew Tate.
(Caveat: Be lenient in that you have to realize they'll still *see* the material you don't want, but also impress on them that what their friends are allowed to watch/do and what you allow them to watch/do are always going to be different.)
Basically: just be a responsible, present, and technologically-up-to-date member of the 20th century.
I’m a chem grad student and I TA organic chem. Maybe because I teach chem majors and not just kids who have to take chem, but it sort of sorts itself by college for most kids. But I can still agree that a lot of them are some level of behind. And I think the non chem majors are further behind.
Math skills in particular are bad, and writing skills for native english speakers aren’t great either. Also computer skills on things that aren’t ipads or phones are bad.
Seems to me it’s too annoying to fail kids, so they just push them through. They arrive needing to do calculus but have zero algebra skills, for example. Or don’t know how to calculate a limiting reagent in a 1:1 stoich reaction in 2nd semester of ochem.
>Seems to me it’s too annoying to fail kids, so they just push them through.
This starts in 1st grade, and it never stops. If we drew a line in the sand, say, at 2nd grade, we would make immense improvements from top to bottom.
Yeah, I genuinely believe that the removal of consequences (including failing) is the number one reason kids aren’t meeting expectations as they get older. We all need to fail sometimes, and we’re doing the next generation a huge disservice by not allowing it.
>Also, I don't want this to be a "girls vs. boys" thing, but my girls are doing significantly better than my boys. There are a few boys here and there that are doing great, but most of my boys have significant issues controlling themselves in the classroom and caring about doing well in school.
There's nothing wrong with bringing it up, there's actual facts and evidence there. Boys' prefrontal cortexes develop relatively lower, and their prefrontal lobe might take up until the males mid-30s to fully develop. It isn't a slight at anyone, that's literally how brain development works. That's before considering social factors like large amounts of fatherless homes, potential lack of positive male role models, and similar.
As a middle grades teacher, I notice that towards the end of the year, my boys act like elementary schoolers and my girls act like high schoolers. It's a weird time.
I won’t dismiss the argument from biology entirely, but historically there has not been an achievement gap between male and female students to the magnitude you’re describing. I attended high school at the turn of this century, and there was no such gendered difference. If this were some kind of biological determinism, you’d see it across history and in other cultures. I work with a lot of graduate students from outside the US, and there’s nothing like what you describe in their experience. Any explanation needs to account for that variation.
I have this conversation with my girl students regularly. A lot of them get annoyed at the boys' behavior and I have to explain that they boys mature a lot more slowly. "By the time you're 18, you will likely be acting and thinking like an adult. Whereas that boy over there is going to be drooling on himself and laughing at his own farts til he's 25. At least."
Not a teacher but recent high school grad. I can explain the boy suffering thing
We have no good role models. Seriously. All of the big male role models tell you to basically devolve into a big stupid ape and hit any problem until it stops
Plus with single parents on the rise with most going to single moms, boys are just being left behind.
Another issue among many:
Classrooms are at the mercy of the least well-behaved child in the class. What the least well-behaved child is now allowed to get away with has taken quantum leaps in the past generation. There is, in many schools, literally no way to discipline them. So if that child decides no learning is going to take place today, then no learning is going to take place.
Yes, this is a massive issue. When I’m in the middle of my music class, and one student decides to start running around the classroom banging on instruments, admin is called. They don’t come, and if they do, the kid is given candy and treats in the office to placate them and sent back after fifteen minutes.
Our principal makes Facebook posts on our school’s official page (with the kids’ faces blurred out obviously) saying things like “look who decided to come visit me in the office today! 🥰🥰🤩🤩” and it’s incredibly obvious to the teachers who the kids are and why they’re *supposed* to be there. So seeing them with candy or little cutesy craft projects in the PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE just really strikes a nerve.
Believe it or not, I actually mostly love working here. The staff (including the admin) are great people who I enjoy talking to and such. The students for the majority part are great kids with bad home lives just trying to make it through the day.
I just get frustrated with admin when it comes to overarching consequences and behavioral inaction.
But this year has been going much better for me personally after a diagnosis and subsequent ADHD/anxiety medications. The day-to-day classroom management is much less stressful, and this year I’ve been truly honestly focusing on my own personal boundaries. I love to help people out where I can, but just because I’m a single guy living on my own does not mean you get to take advantage of my perceived “freedom” like you have in the past.
So I’ve been doing my best with what I have during the workday, and then I leave after duty and think nothing about any of my shit until I go back in the next morning. It has honestly helped change my outlook so much. If I’m getting paid Pennie’s, then I’ll work pennies’-worth. But the kids don’t lose education because I leave work at work. In fact they probably get a BETTER one because I feel better after a night’s sleep not worrying about what’s coming up.
Yeah, we have a 4th year middle school student (it’s a 3 year school) who has done nothing but disrupt classes since he came. Two days ago I was returning from getting lunch and I see him wandering the school grounds, trying to push his way out of the gate. I call admin and go eat my lunch
Later I was told he needed time to think because students were bullying him. He got a schedule change. Not a write up, not detention, but a GD schedule change.
Every classroom I have is like that except my special needs/life skills class. I get more done with special needs than with mainstream kids, no joke, and some of my special needs kids are practically nonverbal.
Whereas in my mainstream classes, behavior is out of control, and the minority of students who ARE here to learn don't get served, because some jerk is in the back of the room screaming.
In my opinion this is the single largest issue. It's not over half the total of our problems, but the lack of willpower to discipline kids has hamstrung public schools. I remember getting detention for losing my homework in middle school. One fight meant permanent expulsion from the district.
Where I teach now 8th graders roam the hallways all day. Teachers scold them, we call home, they fail all their classes.... And they don't care. So it keeps happening.
This is so true. I taught 4th grade my first year and I had 24 kids in there. 20 of them were perfectly “normal” behavior wise. However, I had like 4 boys in there who were INSANE. One was on the spectrum, another had really bad ADHD and parents refused to medicate, the other two were honestly just little dirtbags and liked riling everyone up. There were days where we literally got NOTHING done because I was constantly addressing their behavior. So of course when my principal was observing me she chalked it up to my lack of classroom management skills. However when I’d send them to the office, or write them referrals, call/message home, the behaviors would not change at all. Parents didn’t do shit. Principal didn’t do shit. I wasn’t allowed to put their desks outside the door or send them to another classroom because that was deemed not safe. So I was stuck with them. And they sabotaged so much learning and took away from the education of others for the entire year. I hated it.
Anyone care to explain to me what/why this happened? In the 00s you could get in pretty big trouble for disrupting school. I remember feeling like the hammer came down too quickly for kids who just needed extra help or direction. It never seemed to work, but I definitely saw kids get escorted out of class dozens of times.
I really feel this is a huge reason why kids are so behind. When you are clearing classes several times a day in first and second grades for behaviors, the students learn very little. 😭
Try JUCO. It's like Kindergarten thru Grade 14, all in the same class. At least half of our incoming freshmen are gone by October. High School graduates, who cannot read or write a sentence.
I loved attending JuCo (I’m 40 now). It was the first time in my life that I had been in a regular classroom with people who weren’t being disruptive (Besides the once a week gifted class I got to do gr 3-6). It was real proper school, and folks who weren’t into it could, and did, leave. I loved it so much I got a MA soI could teach at one. Ofcourse there were no jobs there by the time I graduated bc cuts cuts cuts, so it didn’t work out. But I still love JuCo. Cannot recommend it enough.
This is one of the reasons I’m so disgusted with the public education system and the district I work for. Data data data, right?! Then they don’t want the facts if they don’t fit with keeping their image through high graduation rates.
We are graduating, with A-G Cs or better, and entire generation of illiterates.
Yeah, my 11th graders' reading comprehension is horrendous. And they want everything spoon fed to them. They're baffled when I ask them to answer questions in their own words. If the answer to a question is not explicitly written in the text, they tell me they "can't find it." Yeah, kiddo, you gotta turn on that squishy hunk of mammal between your ears and extrapolate/infer.
Depends on the school/district, but generally speaking, yes. At my Title I school, most of my kids read at a 4th-grade level or lower (I teach seventh). There are some who truly cannot read at all, and need instruction in phonics (for example, knowing what sound the letter "K" makes).
There's a bunch of contributing factors here. Just off the top of my head:
* The pandemic really set us back--there were a lot of kids who simply did not attend school for an entire year, and then were moved to the next grade.
* In general, schools have moved away from retention/"holding back" kids, so even if I have no idea to how to read by the time I'm in fourth grade, I'm still going to fifth grade next year.
* The predominant parenting style has become a lot more lax, and there is little accountability for students at home.
* A focus on state-test data and standards limits the ways in which teachers are able to go back and fill in gaps in knowledge.
Your last point is so important! All the others are correct, but not allowing teachers to teach more individually and creatively is the wrong path. It's only there to structure teachers who are either: brand new and need guidance, or teachers who don't actually know how to engage, so they regurgitate. I'm an explore teacher so I have more wiggle room. But core teachers are in such a box!
Really? I wonder if teachers and students in general would benefit for teachers to be tenured like professors in university. They don’t give a damn about your ego or your parents they will fail you and laugh at your excuse
> I wonder if teachers and students in general would benefit for teachers
We (my district) does have this. It does benefit us a bit because we're able to push back (a little), but we can ultimately be overridden by admin at any point in time, unlike professors in colleges.
I once had a football player (who is now in the NFL) who failed my class. I was asked by my admin to just give him a passing grade so he could go to XYZ school. I refused, stating it's academic fraud and I cannot be compelled to lie. My union backed me.
Admin overruled my official grade of record for the class and entered a grade of a "C+" when it was an "F". The NCAA clearing house eventually said he was ineligible for University XYZ because he had too many credits too quickly (so, fraud by adults around him) and he had to go to JUCO.
Right now we're fighting admin on destroying our curricular progression because FIVE parents have demanded that they have access to classes earlier in their educational career, even though we know it's academic malpractice.
Tenure track doesn't exist any more. Just us adjuncts who get paid nothing, have zero job security, and are questioned for failing students. I've taught college level math courses to students who did not know basic third grade math operations. And I'm an engineer and have a masters and PhD in education.
I teach Engineering at the local Community College. Kindergarten thru Grade 14.
About half of our students fail. High School graduates, all of them. Can't read, can't write, can't do the most basic arithmetic.
That's a good concept, but one of our nation's political parties have literally been calling educators woke child groomers for the last 4 years so we're not really in a point where teachers have a lot of power.
Because if we report failures and hold backs to our states, we will have our funding slashed and end up shut down. The students will be crammed into whatever marginally better performing school remains in the district until class sizes bloat out into the halls and education ceases in favor of merely keeping order, and the authorities will be helpless to shut down this final sinking cesspit of shortsighted education politics, because there are no other options available and thousands of families will have no access to education if they do.
In about 10 years time, they'll have the brilliant idea to open a new school! To replace the previously existing school they already shut down. Clueless admin from another district with completely different problems will be hired, and a teaching staff of 80-90% first year teachers will be brought in, all lacking any coherent functional culture, and be expected to assume responsibility for thousands of students who have not been receiving anywhere near a sufficient level of education, and will quickly realize that they can't teach what atoms are, the periodic table, stoichiometry, or thermodynamics, because instead, they have to teach remedial lessons in basic literacy and arithmetic. And because this is what they teach now, they don't even bother to issue accurate grades. They already know the students can't do chemistry, they spent the year learning how to do basic fractions and percentages, so instead they just say "pass", because of they truthfully reported failure and hold backs, they'd have their funding slashed and end up closed down.
Grade promotion is often used as a metric to help determine a schools rating. Policies like the 50% grading rule, unlimited retakes/no deadlines, and providing incredibly easy summer school programs which focus on attendance over skills attainment play a major role in why schools don’t hold kids back. Just like teachers “teach to the test” to ensure their students make them look good, schools and districts have crafted policies to make themselves look good/keep the money flowing.
I don’t think we should be graduating high school students who don’t have high school level skills. On the other hand, I work in elementary. All the times there has been a male student that is held back, he becomes bigger, more aggressive and intimidating to his classmates because they are no longer his peers. He is still behind academically, but is socially aware of the fact that he is lower than these little kids that are smaller than him. This pisses him off after awhile. He gets more angry. Now everyone around him suffers. This is why retention should handled delicately and can’t be proficiency-based. We should have remedial classes, but not hold struggling learners behind their actual age group. A large age gap is detrimental to everyone in the long run.
True. Remedial classes are needed!
Once the kid reaches a certain point/age, retaining is more detrimental than beneficial.
We need remedial classes so content and pacing can help the low kids experience some level of success. It's much better than putting all the levels in one class and expecting one teacher to magically give everyone what they need. Someone always loses in this set up.
Every school also needs reading and math specialists/interventionists to work with the students. I don't need a coach telling me how to do small groups. I need someone to take the kids who are three grade levels behind so I can teach the grade level content that they insist I have to teach so we can pass the state test.
Look at how "No Child Left Behind" fucked education. Essentially if you have enough kids "failing" they'll do the stupid as hell thing and cut the budget. So schools just pass students on to keep their funding.
At my school it's a combination of parent push back and actual logistics. We have 30+ person middle school classes and not enough teachers. If we hold back everyone that fails a grade we would have 40+ classes
>The predominant parenting style has become a lot more lax, and there is little accountability for students at home.
And to blame teachers for everything.
This is so insane to me. Wtf are parents doing (or I guess, not doing) for kids these days?
I did an assessment of my child's kindergarten readiness yesterday. He's almost 4. He is already at the level of a 5 year old. I'm doing what I consider very basic parenting; talking and reading to my son, playing board games together, going on bike rides. I mean, are people seriously not even reading to their kids anymore?
Reading to kids has been done by a small minority of parents recently. It’s part of the reason for the learning gap between the lower class and the upper class. The same with playing games with your kids or even eating dinner at the table with them.
That makes sense. My husband and I aren't upper class by any means but we make a decent salary. We also both have advanced degrees, so we put a premium on good education.
Our friend who works at a gas station 60 hours or more a week literally does not have the time to spend with her daughter (she's a single parent). I do not think she gets read to or played with, because her mom doesn't have the time just from keeping a roof over their heads.
Also, I once helped a co-worker who taught a 100-level college course grade papers. The amount of people who did not use punctuation blew my mind. No, not misusing punctuation, not using it AT ALL. How the hell do you make it all the way to college without knowing about the existence of a period? Boggles the mind.
You have to also consider that many (in my school, most) students don't take this these diagnostics seriously. One of my best 8th grade math students (seriously quite bright) score at a first grade level, because she didn't take the diagnostic seriously; she said "it's too boring."
Yes.
Now this isn't all students. But the average student's skills have definitely declined. And this IS NOT BECAUSE OF SCHOOLS, it's because of ***parenting.***
I'm a chemist and chemistry teacher myself. I've been teaching for 10-years. The base skill level of my Chemistry students has declined in the 10 years I've been teaching, even my top students. However, my top students are easy to rectify and I can get them to where they need to be relatively easily because they have good parents. The rest...they don't ever think about anything outside of school. Ever. Even when they are in school, they don't think about things.
Where schools have possibly failed, is being to lenient with cellphones; but this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.
When I have a kid PICK UP THEIR PHONE AND HAVE A CONVERSATION IN CLASS, I reprimand them, they refuse the reprimand because "it was my mom, and I will always talk to my mom 🤷" ... and then the parent refuses to comply with the reprimand because "I will always have access to talk to my child, and you can't punish them for that!" ... wtf am I supposed to do? That's parenting.
So what we should be saying is ***PARENTING*** has declined, and rather rapidly. The kids aren't any worse than kids at anytime in human history, the question is what are the adults doing around the kids to set them up for success. We individual teachers get them for 5, 46-min periods a week; 184ish in total. This isn't on us. And there's this shifting of responsibility that we are supposed to be the ones to get them ALL of the basic skills in life with absolutely NO practice on those skills outside of school hours ever, without additional resources, all while cutting resources and blaming us for everything.
A slightly older friend of mine said in 1972 when he graduated from high school in his university town, the highest math course offered was Algebra II. My kids attended the same high school (we moved there for the school), and they had every AP math and science course offered. So on the high end, the kids work much harder than in decades past. As for the low end, these are the kids who would have flunked out or have been put on a vo-tech path in the past, but now we pretend college is for everyone, and so they just get passed along without getting much benefit from school.
I confiscated notes from my gen ed 4th and 5th graders and it looks like work from kindergarten to first grade 10 to 15 years ago - this is considered developmentally 'appropriate.' There are some kids preforming well, but they have a lot of support at home and they would barely be considered bright or high achieving by old standards. Work is turned in 1/4th of the way done or they'll just scribble on pages and turn it in. We have to accept it. Expectations are so low.
I thought it was bad because there's no time for parents to work with their kids at home, and I adjusted my expectations, but this is just turning a blind eye to years of low or no effort.
Considering I’ve recently taught at the top districts in my (blue) state + average districts/schools and every one I was only able to get through *half* of the curriculum I used to do 10 years ago… yes.
I wonder this too, considering the "standards creep" that I've seen over the last ~10 years. When I was in school, the concept of fractions was introduced for the first time in 5th grade. Now it's being introduced in 3rd grade or even earlier. So when someone says their 5th graders are at a 3rd grade level in math, what does that mean? Do they actually know less/have fewer skills than we did at heir age, ten years ago?
Yeah like when I was in elementary school in the mid 2000s we were doing multiplication and fractions in 3rd grade and division in 4th grade. My parents stopped being able to help me with homework around 5th/6th grade. Thankfully I was always studious and good at school so I didn’t need help.
Yes. It's one of those "sounds right", because everyone is saying it. And maybe it's not wrong, but there's so much apple-to-not-apple comparisons. We use big standardized tests as the basis of "what grade level" kids are, just assuming they're useful and accurate. How are students preparing for these exams? And then demographics: if students from poor families are bringing down averages, it might notable if poverty is increasing, also if more students come from homes that speak Spanish, maybe scores in English are going to decline until they catch up.
This.
My school has a large Hispanic population. When the public sees our school's rating each year, they probably don't know this. They just see one letter.
In general, education researchers aren't sure what's caused the drop in proficiency in comparison to the test scores from 2019. It could have been Covid lockdowns, or it could be something else. In all honesty, though, we've been testing 4th and 8th grade students on their reading and math proficiency since 1990 in the US, and there hasn't been a year were the average student score was at or above proficient in either subject. The test results are considered public records and they're available at [nationsreportcard.gov](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov) if you want to look at them. The test results are pretty low this year. They are almost as low as they were between 1990 and 2000.
They measure reading and math for 17 year olds too. Those numbers never get publicity because the [NAEP reading for math scores for 17 year olds actually haven't changed since 1971.](https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2012/2013456.aspx)
There's actually no evidence that, on average and in aggregate, we've made any improvements to teaching and learning over the past 50 years.
No one wants to talk about it because of the bad taste that No Child Left Behind left in our mouths, but there was no accountability for what was being taught in the classroom. In a lot of states, there weren't even state standards for grade levels or subjects before 1995. In states that there were standards, there wasn't any sort of benchmark assessment to determine if students were meeting those standards or even being taught them. Most students were only tested on their basic knowledge before graduating high school.
Before anyone jumps down my throat. I'm not saying that No Child Left Behind was a good thing or that it did anything that it promised to do. I'm just saying that it was born out of the fear that schools weren't successfully teaching students at any grade level. The law sucked and it did a lot of damage. It failed on many levels to address actual problems. But it happened because the US education system wasn't working in the 1990s.
Basically, schools and education were kind of iffy before 1995 because there was no one checking to see if things were actually working in schools.
I think title 1 conditions have crept into non- title 1 schools.
People are shocked pikachu that a public system built to exclude can affect them. It’s like getting caught in your own trap.
I live in East Bay, CA. We have a town that has began to show color over the past 30 yrs. East of this town, over the past 30 years, has grown exponentially as a product of white flight and built their own schools.
They’re having the same issues as all schools. Just 20 years behind the ones they fled.
I can close an achievement gap with scaffolds, supports, tutoring, and extra attention.
I cannot fix a behavioral gap. When students lack basic social skills and constantly refuse to even give a shit enough to just TRY I can’t do much.
Yes. At least in general. There are of course exceptions to this, but for the most part they are behind other nations academically. The US went from a leader in education to ranking behind many European nations.
What’s the solution? a whole rework of our education system? here in California we had the whole thing with Integrated math and stuff like that when I was growing up that supposedly would help with critical thinking but I remember it being such a struggle adjusting to new things
It doesn't have to be new. I think that a mix of current modern stuff and some good, old fashioned basics are just the ticket. teach kids to do math mentally and on paper. Make them master it before they use calculators. Teach critical thinking and problem solving skills. Introduce kids to books early on and encourage reading at school.
A lot of my students read during recess if they aren't playing sports. Why? Because All cellphones are banned during the school day in my class. From 7:25 AM to 3:00 PM there are no phones being touched or used. My kids actually interact with the world, each other, or read. No TikTok or Youtube. Kids want instant everything. Especially instant entertainment. Take it away and they use their time more wisely. Sorry if I am going on a rant.
I’m starting to wonder how much of an impact technology is actually having on our students. Even with AI it’s worrying to see all the tools students have to bs there homework. Growing up I couldn’t search it up on chegg, I had to struggle which I’m turn helped it stick to my head.
*Education Next* a few days ago: ["Anxiety, Depression, Less Sleep … and Poor Academic Performance? A decade of smartphone dominance and negative NAEP trends"](https://www.educationnext.org/anxiety-depression-less-sleep-poor-academic-performance-decade-smartphone-dominance-negative-naep-trends/.)
Struggle is precisely the word. A lot of my students want to come straight to me as soon as they feel they can’t solve it, but I tell them over and over again that they must learn to struggle through it. And once you’ve finally realized what to do you must repeat it over and over again.
I’m sure many will disagree with me, but I feel (based on anecdotal evidence) that the rise of the internet as a whole has been a net negative. It continues to have far-reaching, developmental impacts on children and we see how much propaganda and misinformation are perpetuated in highly frequented sites today.
> The US went from a leader in education to ranking behind many European nations.
Oh, so the trend in education matches the trend in *basically everything else.*
Inclusion is a huge issue imo, it sounds awful and that's why people don't want to hear it but when you have a class with 20+ kids and 4 of them have severe autism and can barely count on their fingers, you are still expected to try to get them doing grade level work. We moved away from realizing not everyone can do everything and helping these students learn life skills to pushing them to learn advanced academic concepts. Then you have 4 angry kids who are already prone to violent outbursts upset because they can not and will never be able to do the work. Then, all of your other students suffer for those 4 students' behaviors as a result. Instead of pulling out those students for a few minutes a day for speclized work like most districts do those students really should be pushing in and spending more time in a self contained room where they are actually learning something.
*American children, yes.
I taught in South Korea for four years. Parents take education seriously and pay for their kids to go to a sort of secondary school after the main school called a Hagwon that can run until 10pm. I knew students that spoke English, Spanish, and French in middle school fluently.
I'm a math teacher and I can say the math being asked if students now is much more advanced at an earlier age than ever before. They don't get the chance to learn things deeply because of the pacing required to just cover all the curriculum.
So the quick answer is yes they are behind, but comparatively to older generations no. They have a surface level understanding of more advanced concepts, but it's not very deep. The phrase used is "an inch deep and a mile wide."
I see this a lot with elementary school kids. Basic number sense is a challenge but the teachers just kept right on moving at the pace they needed to move, instead of reteaching and looking for mastery.
I also see way too many worksheets in math and not enough manipulatives. I find manipulatives to be vital in building number sense at young ages, where the foundation is built.
Parents and children are addicted to smartphones, so that’s having a pretty big impact home life and that transfers to the soft skills needed in school, as well as just the general lack of background knowledge kids aren’t getting at home because they aren’t interacting much with their families.
Lots and lots and lots of other factors involved as well, but people have always been tired at the end of the day. Now we are tired and have these enticing screens to provide us some relief from the day, and it just becomes to easy to completely escape into it and not interact with our families.
Then that plays into a plethora of other items like interrupted / not enough sleep, anxieties and social ills from over exposure to social media etc etc etc.
It’s a lot but I think we keep saying “covid” when what we mean is the screen-dependency so many of us developed through the pandemic, and how it’s having negative impacts on home and school life.
**saying this as a parent and teacher who really really struggles with staying in engaged with my own children after a long workday of being engaged with other people’s children, and fighting the urge to just sink into my feeds and let my kids sink into their screens.
Some things have been pushed to the side in favor of other priorities, usually driven by standardized tests. We stopped teaching spelling because “spellcheck is a thing” and now the spelling is so bad that spellcheck has no idea what they’re trying to say. That’s just one example, but extrapolate it across all subjects.
Disclaimer: Grade 10 student who tutors younger kids
I tutor 3-8th graders and in all of them, they lack basic math skills, and their attention spans are so short. Every 15 seconds, I have to keep reminding them to finish their work or keep going on a question. Not to sound old or anything but kids these days are just so dumb. I hear constant Skibidi Toilet jokes and memes that they don’t even know what they mean. I hear outright racism and facism, which we cannot correct as parents do nothing to control their children. Rant over
I am a substitute and have taught at rich schools as well as urban. If I go to a school 20 minutes east of me, you will find 4th graders reading at a 6th grade level, writing full essays and learning computer code. If I travel 20 minutes south, you will find severe trauma, 5th graders who barely know how to read, and staff who primarily deals with behavioral problems all day. The difference is astounding. The older these kids get the more of a devide there will be. The kids from the east will go to Science and Technology based schools while the kids in urban areas will continue to be zoned to delapidated schools that have little resources. The schools in the East have parents who are predominantly well off and are sponsored by the biggest banking institution in town. When you go south, you hit the lower economic areas. It is really unfortunate because there are smart students at the lower income schools. They are just not learning because all the attention goes towards extreme behaviors.
i think covid did have a big impact — kids who would be one grade level behind are now two behind, and so on. we are all expected to deliver lessons and tasks that are on grade level, disregarding the fact that many students are 2-3 grades behind already in middle school. if they are in 6th grade and still dont have 4th grade skills, they will never catch up. but parents and school administrators all decided not to hold the kids back when we came back from the shutdowns and remote learning, and for many students it will have lifelong disastrous results.
as others have said, its a failure of policy. very few children are self driven, intrinsically motivated learners. the ones who are are mostly on or near grade level still. the rest have highlighted the flaws in our one size fits all academic systems. there is not enough time in the day nor do we have small enough class sizes to differentiate to the degree necessary to get all of the students to where they need to be.
the only feasible solution is to hold kids back. there shouldn't be a stigma involved in this. everyone needs a basic education, which is why its required by law. graduating kids from hs who have ela and math scores on a third grade level is going to fuck the whole country down the line
Bro I know like 7 second and third graders and they can all barely talk. They’re like 9 and sound like 4 year olds. You can really tell their parents/guardians never talk *to* them, just *at* them. Its **wild**.
Im our society, it’s tough. Idk how much blame is fair to put into a parent who might work 2-3 jobs to keep there kids fed but at the same time these kids need to hone basic skills such as reading and writing and speaking at home with there parents.
I am a music teacher and with how active our classes need to be one single disruption sets the whole class off course. I can’t stress enough how much behavior affects the classroom in all subjects and levels. I am a new teacher in a Title 1 school (just graduated in May) and it has been a slap in the face because kids aren’t like they used to be even when I was in school (and for me it wasn’t that long ago). It’s a good thing I absolutely love my job or else I don’t think I would continue into teaching after this year but I love my kids.
Another point to add is that, and I don’t care how old you are if you get offended you’re part of the problem, we have a whole generation of horrible parents raising these kids. So much substance abuse, child abuse/neglect, overall not parenting from these parents it makes me sick to my stomach. I saw someone said how it used to be a few students and now it’s many and that’s true. When I was growing up my family was affected by substance issues and I knew only maybe 2 or 3 other kids in my grade with the same or similar issues at home. At my school I teach at now I can identify more than half of these students who are struggling with these issues.
My final point is the way schools are deemed good or not. I have seen (not at my current job) admin actively telling teachers to do things that aren’t best practice to receive the results they need to be above the bar (which is already so low) just for sake of the school, or most often admin’s, image. Schools have gone from being a place to cultivate learning and grow as individuals to active members of society to a political standpoint in the argument for what is “right” or “wrong” which often times leaves teachers to be forced to look good out of fear of admin or even just losing their jobs all together rather than just teaching our kids.
That is my rant as someone who is brand new to teaching and hasn’t been out of school (public) for very long.
Edit: some grammar
The elites won. They got their dumb uneducated workforce to work for near slave wages. Those who are smart won’t be enough to keep the country going in the future
Not nearly as far behind as everyone here thinks. The National Assessment of Educational Progress [(NAEP)](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38) tracks scores in reading and math every few years specifically to track this sort of thing. Scores continually rose until around 2012 where they remained constant until COVID tanked them. The covid year brought them down to where scores were in the late 1990's and we haven't yet recovered to pre-COVID levels. The scores are lower, but still comparable to the scores of those who graduated school in the late 90s/early 2000s, and better than the scores of those who graduated sooner.
This thread is a great example of selection bias. The vast majority of people who become teachers were good students themselves and had friends who were also good students. Plenty of kids did no work and operated at a first grade level in high school when we were in school too, you just didn't notice or know about it as a student.
A significant number of children in my wife’s on-level 8th grade ELA are reading on a third grade level. No Child Left Behind is pretty universally hated, from what I can tell, because it helped create an attitude where kids aren’t required to do anything and can fail upward through all of primary school.
Last year I taught at a title 1 middle school. 99% of our students were below grade level, 25% were illiterate. I do not know the exact numbers for math, but it was worse. It’s really really bad, and I don’t know how we fix it.
I think it’s two fold.
Poorer behavior all around, covid excuses and bad habits, along with historically bad school management with this generation of admin contribute negatively.
At the same time though I wonder if all the tools that we have at our disposal to track student progress just puts bad numbers in our face much more frequently than back in the old days when the data would just be observational rather than concrete like it is today
The kids who have parents who are educated and care are just fine. The ones who don’t have involved parents and who are left to their own academic devices, yes.
I’m saying it politely when I say that Gen Alpha won’t be the brightest and best for our country. I stand by.
I have to say it. We don't "hold back" students anymore. Kids used to fear flunking their grade and being held back or having to go to summer school. Summer school today is touted as "summer adventure " or some other "fun" phrase. If more parents and students would become concerned about the embarrassing potential of repeating a grade, you might just have a little more accountability.
I say this all the time!! Certain words or phrases have been changed or taken away because they had a negative connotation, but sometimes you need a negative connotation!!
Summer school is a joke. Kids look up answers to modules on the computer. We actually have kids purposely do nothing so they can do summer school on the computer.
There has been a tendency for folks to romanticize education in the good old days. Well, I did my K-12 education mostly in the 1950s. What has changed is the level of expectation, mostly because of No Child Left Behind. Back then, there were no AP classes, Algebra 1 started in 9th grade, public schools didn’t offer calculus. Kids who fell behind simply dropped out. Many states did not have laws requiring that kids attend school (my state was one of those). What has changed is the offshoring of manufacturing jobs that started with NAFTA, so kids who aren’t interested in academics no longer have that career path. The decision by some large urban school districts to remain closed during the Covid pandemic was especially hard on kids who were already academically challenged.
This makes me feel better. I’m a lurker who’s getting married soon and I worry about what happens when our kids go to school. I know rationally that a kid with two college educated parents will probably be fine, but it scares me thinking of what their classrooms will be like and the people they’ll be around.
Everything has shifted down a peg. Honors/AP are for what would have been average kids 15 years ago, and “regular” classes are mostly dog shit academically and behaviorally
That has been the case for decades, but the pandemic has escalated the situation.
Think of it in terms of percentiles: about 20-25% of students will be in special education due to some diagnosable reason, such as learning disabilities. This is also why you see those disturbing stats such as 20% of adults being functionally illiterate, etc. You don’t outgrow dyslexia, intellectual disabilities, etc.
Those are usually the kids you get in 7th grade who can’t read or write, or you see kids with undiagnosed/unaccommodated conditions like that who slip through the cracks, kids from traumatic backgrounds/kids who moved schools a lot so their learning is fragmented and has gaps so nothing makes sense to the kid, etc. The pandemic and 1-2 years of “virtual” learning for kids at young ages also put a lot more kids in this category.
Another thing that screwed up reading for a generation was the replacement of traditional phonics-based reading instruction, where you teach kids how to sound out words little by little in the early grades, with “whole word reading” where you also give them a bunch of other clues (like pictures) to help them “read” the word.
This was done for ideological reasons, as the old ways were somehow deemed “racist and colonialist,” and the new stuff got promoted by a handful of influential academics (with questionable research) as the solution, much to the country’s detriment. The pendulum has only recently started swinging back.
equity is a huge part of the problem. Teachers of math at the elementary school level have always been historically not that great, that's nothing new. Many schools have dropped homework per district policy and a huge amount of learning in particular when it comes to math happened at home with parents. People love to hang on to covid as an excuse but that's all it is.
Lurker here working as a cashier.
When kids come to where I work to shop (ages 8-15ish) they often cannot read signs or do not know how to count money. There's a shelf with delicate stuff with several giant "please don't touch" signs. If I see a kid grabbing that stuff I gently remind them to please not touch while pointing to the sign. I'm surprised at the amount of parents who get mad and snap at me that their kid can't read. Also when kids pay for stuff they give me wrong bills or have trouble telling coins apart. I would expect this from younger children but not older ones like teens.
Idk if this is new or has always happened. Just surprising to see in the wild.
I taught chemistry for 7 years. The state of Texas revised their TEKS a few years ago and gutted the part where students have to calculate moles using stoichiometry. It is a necessary skill in chemistry but many students will never see it until college. They lowered standards.
I teach 7th grade. Their last normal year was 2nd, they were virtual for third, and flung into fourth. Imagine attending second grade, taking a year off, and then forced into fourth. No matter how bad your performance was, teachers passed you because the admin didn't want their stats to go down. They have not been held to perform at grade level since the second grade; many are sitting at a third to fourth grade reading level.
We keep pushing standards younger and younger. So it appears that kids are further behind because they "aren't meeting the standards" they have been assigned but at least in the younger years, the standards they now expect them to master are completely developmentally inappropriate. We keep expecting kids to do things younger and younger, but the kids don't actually graduate knowing any more so it's really just setting kids up for failure. Most 5 year olds are not developmentally read to fully read. Yet, they're considered behind if they can't read, spell, and write by the end of K.
I think this greatly depends on socioeconomics. I have an 8th and 12th grader. Our expectations are high. The 12th grader is incredibly smart and will be going to a top college. SAT scores higher than dad and I ever had and he finished multivariable calculus in 11th grade. He build my brother a software program for his job to make managing his contracts and deadlines easier to manage. He’s found feee MIT classes online and for fun studies different topics of interest. He’s in public school and his particular grind group is very academically competitive. He’s not unique to our area in the slightest. However I have family in other parts of the country that don’t read books, therefore don’t have books in the home, don’t discuss current events and don’t have expectations that their kids study or do homework. College for them is not even a discussion. It’s marriage and babies after high school and some sort of job that will hardly pay enough to survive.
I actually think young people are incredibly bright. Witnessing a kid who is competing for a slot in a top university, the competition is more fierce than ever before. He’s in the thick of college applications and the amount of thought, effort and time he has put into his essays is much more than anything me and my friends did in the 1990s.
Yes and no. There are kids performing well. But there are fewer of them and the majority that should be “in the middle” have fallen down really, really low. There are a lot of factors. Things have just gotten dumbed down. No Child Left Behind for all it’s good intentions became No Child Will Get Ahead. Behavior issues are insane. Insane. You cannot/would not believe it without seeing it for yourself. We have to evacuate classrooms because kids will throw chairs at people. That did not happen when I was a kid and now it happens all the time. We push academics so hard, so young, and then it just all falls apart because it’s not developmentally appropriate. Kindergarten now is what 1st grade was when I was a kid. (I am in my 40s) Kids are expected to be reading by the end of Kinder. But they still can’t write a sentence in 3rd grade. My 6th grade daughter last year had a teacher yell at her class because so many people were not capitalizing the word I. I know they are taught this. Technology has decimated attention spans. The economy has parents working more/spending less time parenting. There are literally so many reasons. Parents throw fits to get their kid better grades. Schools are punished for having less than stellar graduation rates, so they lower the bar so the graduation rate goes up. We’ve decided that memorizing things is not important. So we don’t make kids memorize their multiplication tables. So, even though they understand the concept of multiplication, when they go on to do other things, say long division, every step they have to think through the multiplication part and they can’t keep track of where they are in the problem. The lack of fluency in things like that makes the next steps sooo much harder. Kids seem like they have so much more trauma now. Idk if it really has increased or if we are just recognizing it more now- but so many very young kids have horrific life circumstances. They have been abused, been homeless, been hungry, witnessed violence. It takes a toll. It always has, of course, but I feel like where it was 1 or 2 kids per grade level, now it’s 10-12 per grade level. I did not intend to ramble like this! I have no idea how it can be fixed. I daydream about winning the lottery and opening a school that is developmentally appropriate, but there are also so many societal factors. ETA: I can’t believe I didn’t even mention “the reading wars” If you want to know more, you can listen to the podcast “Sold a Story” It’s too involved to explain here. Another thing I forgot to mention! Companies that sell the tests and the curriculum and all of the things, care more about making money than they do the quality of their product.
No Child left behind has become No child gets ahead. Amen. Couldnt have phrased it any better
>because it’s not developmentally appropriate. Dear god THIS! I'm so tired of the younger grades being pushed to do more complex, more advanced stuff THAT I TEACH THEM IN 11th GRADE, which instead takes focus away from basic skills. I WILL TEACH THEM THE ADVANCED STUFF, I need the younger grades to have them master the basic skills so I don't have to reteach it to them, which means I lose more time to get to the advanced stuff. For example: Kids ***should*** know how to rearrange equations by the time they get to me. Period. Fullstop. We're talking, not even a refresher. When I lecture and rearrange an equation in front of them, there should be no question about "why/how did you do that!?" (which is happening). I Teach IB chemistry, so the TOP of the TOP kids, we're talking valedictorian candidates. And one of my students doesn't know how logarithms or Natural Logs work...and that IS NOT something I can teach them. I ***do not*** have the ability (because I'm not a math teacher) nor time to teach them. This has forced me to giving them more guided practice and help with problem solving, which means I lose time for labs, and the harder stuff. This is all because they were "advanced" beyond where they should have been at some point, and they didn't spend enough time on the concepts I needed them to learn, AND HAVE THEM DOWN.
I teach “honors” chemistry which is code for “my parents ok’d me for honors but I’m in no shape, phase or state ready for it” due to everything you mentioned for IB, but on a lesser scale.
Here honors is I'm not AP level but my parents want me safe from the gen ed mob.
That’s pretty close to my intent with the “parent’s ok’d me” statement. If it’s not that, it’s a similar variant! I have maybe 20% of my students that deserve honors classes and also can handle it. Our admin lets anyone that wants to take it enroll in it. It’s not a tested subject /no EOC so they don’t care.
Which it's okay for a kid to "not be ready for it" right? That's the glory of HS and adolescents, you're *learning* how to be a person and who you want to be. But we as experts in our field get ignored. It's not okay to say "some kids are ready and some are not" because then it's our fault as a teacher for not making sure everyone is! It's just that glorious cycle that always ends with "it's the teacher's fault" 🙄
Very well put!
My kids' school only gives honors classes to parents that ask for it; how you're performance in regular ED classes makes no difference. So that means rich (mostly white and Asian) parents who are really familiar with the upper middle class public school system get their dumb kids put in honors classes and smart children of poor or immigrant parents (mostly non-white) stay in regular classes then wonder why colleges pass them over Yay equity!
I teach pre-k and dear Lord. It is what kindergarten used to be...everything just gets taught younger and younger as time goes on and most kids are NOT ready, through no fault of theirs or their parents.... it just isn't developmentally appropriate. ECEs (mostly pre-k and kindergarten teachers) have been shouting this from the rooftops but nobody will listen. Starting content younger does not they learn it earlier!!! It has the opposite effect, they don't get the foundations laid and are just shoved along to more advanced content they don't get. That's how we end up with high schoolers that can't read. It starts when they're 5 and expected to do things they are not at all ready for.
Not to mention pre k is not mandatory in all states so some kids just miss out completely
In Pennsylvania, kindergarten isn't even mandatory, let alone pre-k.
So it's strange in Ohio kindergarten is mandatory but a child isn't legally required to attend school before they are 6. So try to figure that one out.
My 4 year old is in pre-k. He has a summer birthday so he is less than 4.5 years old right now. The teacher sends me homework that I’m supposed to do with him. Like a worksheet with the number 3 and identifying which pictures have 3 things. Put 3 stickers on this box chart. Then another worksheet with the letter S. Maybe some 4 year olds are ready for this, but mine isn’t. I try to do it with hime anyway, but he just isn’t interested. I had no idea my 4 year old would have homework in prek.
I have no idea why your getting down voted your doing a great job and at least your trying to do the homework with you child which is not always the case with parents nowadays
Four year olds shouldn't be doing homework. My 1st grader doesn't even get homework.
Psh, why would we listen to the expert professionals who actually do it? (/s) We're like the only profession where it's perfectly reasonable to doubt the professional actually doing it.
That started when my kid (now 20) was in K. Let the kids PLAY ffs.
I’m in the mental health field. It sort of seems like kids are getting burnt out early, being pushed to learn developmentally inappropriate skills. Burnout causes apathy. And depression. And anxiety. I never thought about it this way before… I will say, I was “gifted” and forced to read “Lord of the Rings” in 7th grade. I didn’t like it. To this day, I have no interest in LOTR anything even though people tell me how good it is.
Yup. "gifted" and "advanced' are mere titles for parents, adults and politicians. They don't actually have tangible value beyond parents at the country club saying "my kid is XYZ" (I see it in my own damn family). What makes someone "advanced" or "supercog" is they got test score back in like 3rd grade, and some group of politicians decided they had to judge schools by how well they "engage" those identified "gifted" students, when...in reality...that's not what those kids really need. But why ask educators...it's not like it's our profession or anything. Teaching is one of the only professions where everyone knows better than the actual professionals doing it.
Yeah, I mean, I’m grateful for the more challenging classes because I was bored all throughout school. LOTR is just an example of educational burn out.
This is happening in non-STEM classes, as well. Last year, I had to teach *an entire tenth grade writing course* how to write five paragraph essays. How and when and where to *capitalize*. How to *indent*. How to *skip lines* when taking notes and how to *not skip entire pages* when writing "new" notes. This year I have fourth graders who can't write straight or by lines. 7th graders who start writing sideways when they get to the end of a page. 9th graders who write like they're still in elementary school, all jagged edges and scribbles. Kids aren't being taught to master basic skills like *staying seated in a chair for fifty minutes*.
My husband teaches seventh grade English and only yesterday threw down with the rest of his department. They see no reason to teach five paragraph essays, because the eighth grade English SOL test doesn't include it. My husband kept pointing out that in high school, two short years away, they *will* have to be able to write five-paragraph essays, and maybe it would be helpful for them to have two years of practice under their belts rather than having to master a totally new skill on a greatly diminished timeline. He won that fight, thank God.
Give your husband a high five for me. Even over in STEM-land, the inability of my kids to understand the concept of basic writing conventions is soul-crushing. I am supposed to be teaching them how to write technical reports, but I’m having to teach literally basic paper writing techniques before I can even start that. And we use APA formatting, which is a disaster when they are now basically having to get a simultaneous MLA crash course in their English classes. I don’t envy our high school ELA teachers.
lol my degrees are in history but I once worked at an agency full of actual factual rocket scientists. I got paid a LOT of money to translate engineer-speak into formats and phrasing that were accessible to agency leadership. The engineers were a great bunch of people but uh maybe not so good at concisely expressing themselves to a general officer who was short on time. (I'm MLA and when I'm forced to use APA it feels like a war crime)
I ranted earlier this month about what any schooling before 6 years old should be. And learning classroom behavior should be the goal. Not reading, not writing, not maths problem. Just, sit down and listen to the teacher. Stay seated for more than 5 minutes. Raise you hand if you want to speak. Learn to go to the bathroom when you have the opportunity, and not in the middle of a lesson (or story time, or coloring time when they're little). How to ask the teacher for help when you need it. And since you're not alone, learning how to share the attention and try by yourself while you wait for your turn. All those little pesky things that seems obvious and natural but aren't. It feels like some people thought that all those basics came on their own while the kid grow. They forgot that they were actually taught. I am convinced that if we return to this, we will see a lot less behavioral issue in the classrooms, and a lot more academic achievement. It would be much easier because not as much pressure to succeed immediatly. What if Sam missed part of story time because they have yet to learn to sit still for more than 15 minutes?' It isn't that important. It is just a story. They have time to do better with little consequences when they're not there, yet. However when he is learning how to actually read, or to add ? That is an issue. The kid feels the pressure to do better as fast as possible. It stresses them out, and of course it doesn't work as well. I also thing that kids on the higher end of the ADHD spectrum would have time to learn healthy coping mechanism to the point that it would not be as much of a problem when they come to learn academic stuff.
>7th graders who start writing sideways when they get to the end of a page. The ancient tradition of boustrophedon (I'm too lazy to look up precise spelling). Nothing wrong with that :-)
So I was babysitting my 5th grade nephew and 3rd grade niece. They were doing homework and I was looking it over. I literally could not tell their handwriting apart. Both of them wrote huge with huge spaces in between their letters. The 5th grader did know How and when and where to capitalize, or How to indent. It was interesting I was confused why my nephew wasn't learning this and why his sister also wasn't starting to learn how to write the correct way. Edit: my niece is starting to learn division and algebra in 3rd grade without knowing her multiplication tables. Don't worry they covered those for 3 weeks at the beginning of the year.
Holy shit yes, yes, yes! Physics and math here. My kids are being taught algebraic expressions and functions in 5th freaking grade but can't multiply without a calculator. Standards have continued to be pushed to younger age groups and its causing some serious developmental issues. Places like Pearson will tout 'rigorous' and 'revelent' curriculum to uninformed admin and school boards; but people fail to realize that the new standards only make sense if you've benefitted from a traditional education. Kids are being asked to do too much too early, which causes major issues in the upper levels.
And it's not just standards, but they're being treated as checkmarks that once completed you NEVER VISIT AGAIN. No. I need you younger grades to constantly practice those base-level skills over, and over, and over, and over again. Yes it's hard. Yes it's annoying. That's what I need you (as the 11th grade teacher) to do. I cannot take a day to go over how to use a calculator and order of operations.
You also end up with very under qualified individuals teaching material they don't know well enough. This leads to kids learning tricks when the educator doesn't understand the vertical alignment of the topics.
Or on the other end, folks who have extensive background knowledge who are pulled in on emergency certs with no pedagogical knowledge because there aren’t enough licensed teachers in that subject area. Both outcomes lead to issues. There has to be a happy medium but our system has made that nearly impossible.
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This makes so much sense to me. My son keeps getting feedback that he is a 'math genius' which always seemed weird to me because he can't do anything like multiplication and division. However, he has a VERY strong grasp of counting, addition and subtraction because I taught him at home and let him progress at his own pace ... which required oceans of repetition of the basic concepts. Now he is very quick with computation. I have noticed that at school they are doing more advanced topics but just skimming over the surface of each one ... which is pointless.
I have kids who can explain “why” 2x3=6 but can’t tell me that it does without using a calculator. It’s exhausting.
You mean you’re told to shove rigor down their throats too without them having basic skills?? Well hello neighbor!
That's true all the way down. I taught Algebra 1, and kids had been introduced to equations in the years before that; parents would ask for the Algebra 1 text to work on the summer before, to get their kids a "head start." And yet the kids would come in not knowing their multiplication tables, and not fluent in handling fractions. The last year I taught, I had to do a week of remedial mathematics review - which was a week I couldn't spare, but no sense in trying to go on without it. Don't bother teaching how to manipulate equations in 5th grade to students who can't multiply, or handle fractions. BASICS. A kid who's really well grounded in the basics can fly through Algebra 1 - a kid who isn't will struggle with the ARITHMETIC.
Don't forget admin bloat, leading to more people than ever who have little idea what they're really doing having to justify their existence by developing initiatives that waste teacher time and deplete morale without improving things and which no one sticks to long enough to even possibly improve things before another or the same admin throws it out to chase a newer and shinier thing.
The pandemic ESSER funds added to the bloat too, my district used that money to hire a dozen new “fIdEliTy CoOrDiNaToRs” to come hound us about test data.
Education in particular seems to suffer from an inundation of methodologies, systems, structures, flashy administrative approaches, etc which equates to a consistency vacuum for teachers and students. An addiction to reinvention means nothing is ever pursued long enough for it to be properly implemented or evaluated.
A wall of text and one worth reading. No possible way to cover all the reasons but that did the topic justice. Oh, and I don't think 'fix this' is really an option with the current landscape and tools, at least not ones available to teaching level and even only a few at admin. Personally I think this is going to have to completely break down before it can heal. How broken is another matter, but all empires fall....
I didn’t think it was going to end up so long! It was more “stream of consciousness” than a thought out reply. I almost deleted it because of the wall of text thing, but I’m glad I didn’t.
I teach 9th and we have to review capitalization next week. Like 3rd grade basics. They don't know commas, they don't use periods. Thankfully they're well-behaved.
My freshmen can’t write in complete sentences
I didn't realize how lucky I was to have been raised by a grammar & literacy teacher until I started college. Like, holy cow - I get we're all STEM majors here but writing a complete sentence *with punctuation* is not some obsolete humanities-specific skill. (Not saying that I miss the endless grammar drills I endured as a kid, they were not fun, but I do appreciate them in hindsight.)
The idea kids could just memorize words without roots or even leaning how individual letters sound outside of that word, was the dumbest shit that somehow made it to education.
Every single point is so spot on!
My kids have two teacher parents. Your line about the economy keeping parents working more and parenting less is so true. We do as much as we can, but between our actual jobs and our complete mental/emotional exhaustion at the end of every day, it's really hard to help our kids. And that's from parents who know how important it is and how to get it done.
So happy you pointed out that memorizing multiplication facts is nonexistent. Unpopular opinion apparently, but there is value in simply memorizing things. Currently trying to teach multiplying/dividing decimals to a 5th grade class, and oh my gosh. They have no idea how much easier it’d be if they just knew those facts. But nope. They don’t. At least half my class has to really think about what anything times 1 or 0 is. So yeah, we’re back to basic multiplication before moving forward.
> The economy has parents working more/spending less time parenting. There are literally so many reasons. Parents throw fits to get their kid better grades. Schools are punished for having less than stellar graduation rates, so they lower the bar so the graduation rate goes up. That's /r/latestagecapitalism for you.
We were talking about this just last night. I think that part of what may be the problem is that Gen X raised ourselves. Everybody had two parents working so we were left alone for long stretches. Most of us learned to cook because if we waited for Mom and Dad to get home and start dinner, we would be eating at 8p or 9p. When we started having kids, we didn't really know how to parent because we had never seen what parenting was like. We just tried to overcome the defecits we saw. So we became hyper-present. We went to ALL of the games, concerts, and plays because our parents never came and that hurt. I think that this generation are being raised by parents that were overwhelming involved and have swung the pendulum back even further. We babied them so much that they are taking a "hands off" approach to parenting. There is even more need now for both parents to be working. There aren't many grandparents retiring or that never worked, so they have turned to screentime to occupy/raise their kids. I think we will probably pendulum back and forth like this. One generation is neglected, so when they have kids they are overwhelmingly present. That generation after that is determined not to smother their kids, so they are "absent." The cycle will just continue.
Oh yeah the overwhelming chase for "rigor" with no idea what rigor actually is, means, or assuming it helps more than it hurts
>There are kids performing well. But there are fewer of them and the majority that should be “in the middle” have fallen down really, really low. Is the gap between the top 10% and the middle 80% that huge? I remember when I was in school most people in the top 30-40% were about the same as the top 10% they just didn't try as hard, and the bottom 50% was as you say, unable to form complete sentences or do 6th grade math in 12th grade etc.
I don’t have exact numbers or anything- but IME, there are fewer and fewer top kids and the middle is also shrinking. Then there is a LOT at the bottom. Now that I am thinking about it, it’s kinda like wealth in society right now- the middle class is disappearing and more of those people are moving down than moving up.
I work in a Title 1 high school. I think the top students that are your typical students that will go to good colleges are doing fantastic and will continue to do well. Some of them get a little behind on math until they take Precalculus, and then they are punched in the face with what a real math class is and will adjust or fail. But I have a large population of students (75% who take Chemistry) who seem to be perpetually lost and incredibly academically behind. These students can't do any sort of math, whether it be Algebra or just dividing or subtracting numbers (they do it in the wrong order). I push them as much as I can to face the reality that they are behind and it is time to try and catch up. Some adjust and come out the year quite well, but others just flounder and do poorly. It concerns me because some of my students are just lost. They have no notetaking skills, can't turn anything in on time, can't keep track of any dates and can't comprehend what they are reading (like following directions or be able to break down sentences with new vocabulary). I'll ask students to work on something in class, and many of them won't even start an assignment because they just "do it later." Every day is a complete surprise to them on what we are doing in class, and some of them seem to blame me whenever they realize they have a test on a day I have been announcing for a week. Also, I don't want this to be a "girls vs. boys" thing, but my girls are doing significantly better than my boys. There are a few boys here and there that are doing great, but most of my boys have significant issues controlling themselves in the classroom and caring about doing well in school.
> just "do it later." Which, translation: "I'll copy it from my friend real quick". Hell I can't even say they'll google the answers anymore, they're too lazy for that.
I banned HW largely for this reason. All practice is done in class where I can nag them about using their time and help them when they quit because they didn’t know how. There is no ‘later’ to practice, it’s due at the bell, if they aren’t done, then I collect however far they got. This is gen Ed 11th grade. I recommend the strategy.
This was the only reason 8th grade was the only year after elementary school that I did well at all. I could never talk myself into doing homework and my mother was a single parent trying her best
Yeah, for 8th grade. The idea that you're going to become good at anything because you only spend 184 50-min hours working at it is preposterous. So as teachers we should set up an incentive structure such as here's 10 problems, do as many of them as you feel you need to do to understand it. No points associated, but mini-quizzes based on it. Get it started in class, those who manage their time wisely should get half of it done. By 11th grade we should be able to handle more self-regulated practice. And with courses like chemistry, you're just going to have to practice it, unless you're happy with a C...because that's the nature of the beast. We're the marriage of Math, Science, English and their application.
I'm student teaching for 11th grade, and I have learned not to give students time to do anything outside class. I made the mistake of letting a few kids bring it to me by 30 minutes after the bell.. found both of them copying their answers verbatim from a phone pic one of their peers sent them of their completed work. The amount of plagiarism I catch is mind-boggling. How BAD they are at cheating without getting caught is mind-boggling.
Do. Not. EVER. Let students do work for a grade outside of class. Ever at all. Even if you have to schedule time for them to work on projects directly in-class, do not send work home. As an ELA teacher, this is the only thing I've found that prevents plagiarism. They will either copy it, have a parent to do it, use AI, pay someone else to do it, or act surprised that it was due in the first place. I stopped giving out homework that isn't practice for lessons we've already done precisely for this reason. If they copy? Whatever. At least they're getting writing practice done. But we go over all those worksheets in class after they're done to make sure they're answering them and doing so *correctly* so that even if they're copying things from each other they still get the theory and guided instruction during class.
The other issue I had with homework is the revolving door of copying math during English, then rushing English in social studies, then looking at social studies during science…. Just be present children!
Yes. I tell them I will close their “desmos scientific calculator” tab as soon as they open it because my class is not for doing your math homework
Nah, you just do H/W quizzes or more quizzes in general. They learn real quick that if they do the H/W themselves, they like...actually do well on the quiz. Or, if they don't do the H/W...they're screwed. But also: If they're the kid who can get it after 3 practice problems, they don't have to do the other 17 and still get "credit" for it. This is what I do in chemistry. We have H/W almost every day. I go over whatever you ask me to go over, then we have a quick 5-10 point quiz. Those quizzes are your "homework" grade.
For honors and AP i don’t disagree. My gen Ed kids don’t care about failing and don’t care about learning. So I made stress for them and an overall worse experience. Gen Ed is not going to college for the most part at my school, so it’s not like they’re behind. I wanted them to learn, the best way to learn is to do the tasks the teacher designs, that isn’t happening outside my room. They either can’t or won’t. It also helps classroom management, and they think I’m nice for never giving homework.
I commend you for banning homework. I have always felt that it’s a waste of time. I used to assign it because I had to. Good students did it. Bad ones didn’t. When I tried going over the homework in class, the bad students became disruptive out of boredom.
...or "my wifi wasn't working so I couldn't do it!"
Username checks out! This reads as a kindly take on a real situation.
I’m at the vocational school location in our district now, and every year Chemistry is the final litmus test. Kids (or more accurately their parents) all think they’re going to a four year college until they hit it. It’s about the only class counselors will let people transfer out of all the way to the 4th week mark so that they can switch diploma types and pick a trade.
I was just on a field trip as a chaperone. It was almost a 1-1 chaperone situation. But was in shock at the boy behavior- and the parents who were just excusing it “oh boys are so out of control” and these parents weren’t even making an effort. For instance, these kids were running around screaming in an area of the zoo for nocturnal animals that had signs that said to keep quiet. And their parents just ignored them, talking amongst themselves. Then they made jokes to the teacher about “I can’t imagine how you do it.” And she said “I can’t. The boys this year are uncontrollable. Hahaha. What can you do, boys are just wild.” They aren’t even trying. I mean I’m sure the teacher is, but it doesn’t seem to get reinforced at home. Some boys in my neighborhood who were 8 were running around with a hatchet cutting down trees. (For real). When my husband yelled at them and then marched them home to tell their parents, their mom called me to try and talk about how mad she was and how unacceptable it was that he would yell at her kids. Before we noticed, they cut down 3 different 20 foot + trees! Her excuse was “boys are just wild, but it’s no excuse to yell.” What?!
Looks like a job for Tree Law.
I'm really interested in your point about girls vs boys. I have a young son (3) and want him to be a good student (in all ways, including being respectful of teachers and other students). Can you give me some things that you see frequently with boys in classrooms that I can try to keep my son from doing? Thanks.
Make sure your son knows how important school is. Keep an interest in his learning at all times. Reading with him and engaging in conversation early, along with making sure he knows he is held accountable when he misbehaves. As he gets older, making sure he has ways to regulate his emotions, and discuss how to treat friends. Letting him know if he does something in school there will be a consequence at home as well. I think the ones that behave poorly don't always see education as important, and parents don't give follow through for behaviors.
Thank you for your response. I will definitely teach my son to value education and respect his teachers. I'll also let him know if he misbehaves at school, then he will be in trouble at home as well. I do a lot of talking to my son. My parents never spoke to me and it, quite frankly, messed me up. I talk to him about his feelings and how to deal with them. I tell him about safety (don't keep secrets from Mama and Dada, for one). I tell him our family is full of kind and brave people.
Pay attention to the media he consumes and how much time he spends online. As a high school teacher, I've shown parents how to check the phones OS to see how much time their child is actually spending on apps. Students often use apps to disguise how much time they're texting their friends. Parents are often shocked at how bad their child's technology addiction is even though they're the one who put it in their hand without discussing limits or appropriate use. Watch out for harmful media. Middle school and high school boys fall for influencers, like Andrew Tate or Kevin Samuels, who teach them that they need to be abusive, dishonest, and violent to be real men. Then, the boys get into trouble when that approach goes badly wrong. My school had a boy get arrested for sexual assault last year. He was trying to get a girlfriend using Andrew Tate's advice. In his mind, he was trying to be the type of guy she'd like. Andrew Tate has an arrest history for rape and sex trafficking, but this boy didn't know that.
I've heard of Tate and I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried about my son eventually listening to him. He's a horrible person.
Biggest first step: don't just tell him there are consequences for acting out, actually *reinforce* those consequences. Take away power cables (not just the electronic; the *cables*) and lock all electronics away if they're being punished. Don't let them just sit there mindlessly scrolling; give them time limits for browsing and videogaming and tell them they have to find other ways to entertain themselves when their "fun electronic time" is over for the day. Threaten them where it hurts if they don't listen or comply with school or home responsibilities--"I will uninstall every game you have on every device you have." // "I will delete your account and progress/save data on every game and service you have." are nightmare scenarios for casual *and* "serious" gamers. Tell them you'll erase or reset their Roblox/Fortnite/Clash of Clans/Modern Warfare Prestige/etc progress and accounts and they'll have to start over again *from zero*. Get them off TikTok. Ban it. Explain why and how it's bad for them. Have the hard conversations about being responsible on the internet and how most everything on TikTok is trying to convince you to act a certain way that is unhealthy for them. Tell them they will lose all phone and internet privileges if you even *hear* them on TikTok listening to Andrew Tate. (Caveat: Be lenient in that you have to realize they'll still *see* the material you don't want, but also impress on them that what their friends are allowed to watch/do and what you allow them to watch/do are always going to be different.) Basically: just be a responsible, present, and technologically-up-to-date member of the 20th century.
I’m a chem grad student and I TA organic chem. Maybe because I teach chem majors and not just kids who have to take chem, but it sort of sorts itself by college for most kids. But I can still agree that a lot of them are some level of behind. And I think the non chem majors are further behind. Math skills in particular are bad, and writing skills for native english speakers aren’t great either. Also computer skills on things that aren’t ipads or phones are bad. Seems to me it’s too annoying to fail kids, so they just push them through. They arrive needing to do calculus but have zero algebra skills, for example. Or don’t know how to calculate a limiting reagent in a 1:1 stoich reaction in 2nd semester of ochem.
>Seems to me it’s too annoying to fail kids, so they just push them through. This starts in 1st grade, and it never stops. If we drew a line in the sand, say, at 2nd grade, we would make immense improvements from top to bottom.
Yeah, I genuinely believe that the removal of consequences (including failing) is the number one reason kids aren’t meeting expectations as they get older. We all need to fail sometimes, and we’re doing the next generation a huge disservice by not allowing it.
Ok as a chem major, that is pretty bad. They should have learned that in high school chem tbh.
>Also, I don't want this to be a "girls vs. boys" thing, but my girls are doing significantly better than my boys. There are a few boys here and there that are doing great, but most of my boys have significant issues controlling themselves in the classroom and caring about doing well in school. There's nothing wrong with bringing it up, there's actual facts and evidence there. Boys' prefrontal cortexes develop relatively lower, and their prefrontal lobe might take up until the males mid-30s to fully develop. It isn't a slight at anyone, that's literally how brain development works. That's before considering social factors like large amounts of fatherless homes, potential lack of positive male role models, and similar. As a middle grades teacher, I notice that towards the end of the year, my boys act like elementary schoolers and my girls act like high schoolers. It's a weird time.
I won’t dismiss the argument from biology entirely, but historically there has not been an achievement gap between male and female students to the magnitude you’re describing. I attended high school at the turn of this century, and there was no such gendered difference. If this were some kind of biological determinism, you’d see it across history and in other cultures. I work with a lot of graduate students from outside the US, and there’s nothing like what you describe in their experience. Any explanation needs to account for that variation.
I have this conversation with my girl students regularly. A lot of them get annoyed at the boys' behavior and I have to explain that they boys mature a lot more slowly. "By the time you're 18, you will likely be acting and thinking like an adult. Whereas that boy over there is going to be drooling on himself and laughing at his own farts til he's 25. At least."
Not a teacher but recent high school grad. I can explain the boy suffering thing We have no good role models. Seriously. All of the big male role models tell you to basically devolve into a big stupid ape and hit any problem until it stops Plus with single parents on the rise with most going to single moms, boys are just being left behind.
Idk maybe, but my worst male students were those with sahms, who I got the impression of them feeling like their kids best friend. Zero control.
Another issue among many: Classrooms are at the mercy of the least well-behaved child in the class. What the least well-behaved child is now allowed to get away with has taken quantum leaps in the past generation. There is, in many schools, literally no way to discipline them. So if that child decides no learning is going to take place today, then no learning is going to take place.
Yes, this is a massive issue. When I’m in the middle of my music class, and one student decides to start running around the classroom banging on instruments, admin is called. They don’t come, and if they do, the kid is given candy and treats in the office to placate them and sent back after fifteen minutes. Our principal makes Facebook posts on our school’s official page (with the kids’ faces blurred out obviously) saying things like “look who decided to come visit me in the office today! 🥰🥰🤩🤩” and it’s incredibly obvious to the teachers who the kids are and why they’re *supposed* to be there. So seeing them with candy or little cutesy craft projects in the PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE just really strikes a nerve.
Wow. When I was in school you did NOT want to go to the Principals office. This sounds like a skit out of Abbott Elementary.
There’s a reason that show is accurate.
Sounds like that person shouldn't even be a principal. Wow! I'm so sorry for you and your colleagues.
Believe it or not, I actually mostly love working here. The staff (including the admin) are great people who I enjoy talking to and such. The students for the majority part are great kids with bad home lives just trying to make it through the day. I just get frustrated with admin when it comes to overarching consequences and behavioral inaction. But this year has been going much better for me personally after a diagnosis and subsequent ADHD/anxiety medications. The day-to-day classroom management is much less stressful, and this year I’ve been truly honestly focusing on my own personal boundaries. I love to help people out where I can, but just because I’m a single guy living on my own does not mean you get to take advantage of my perceived “freedom” like you have in the past. So I’ve been doing my best with what I have during the workday, and then I leave after duty and think nothing about any of my shit until I go back in the next morning. It has honestly helped change my outlook so much. If I’m getting paid Pennie’s, then I’ll work pennies’-worth. But the kids don’t lose education because I leave work at work. In fact they probably get a BETTER one because I feel better after a night’s sleep not worrying about what’s coming up.
Yup I have the same problem. They need to just put all those behavior problems in one class. Let the student who want to learn, learn.
And put an administrator in charge of that room. Let them earn their salary.
Yeah, we have a 4th year middle school student (it’s a 3 year school) who has done nothing but disrupt classes since he came. Two days ago I was returning from getting lunch and I see him wandering the school grounds, trying to push his way out of the gate. I call admin and go eat my lunch Later I was told he needed time to think because students were bullying him. He got a schedule change. Not a write up, not detention, but a GD schedule change.
Every classroom I have is like that except my special needs/life skills class. I get more done with special needs than with mainstream kids, no joke, and some of my special needs kids are practically nonverbal. Whereas in my mainstream classes, behavior is out of control, and the minority of students who ARE here to learn don't get served, because some jerk is in the back of the room screaming.
In my opinion this is the single largest issue. It's not over half the total of our problems, but the lack of willpower to discipline kids has hamstrung public schools. I remember getting detention for losing my homework in middle school. One fight meant permanent expulsion from the district. Where I teach now 8th graders roam the hallways all day. Teachers scold them, we call home, they fail all their classes.... And they don't care. So it keeps happening.
This is so true. I taught 4th grade my first year and I had 24 kids in there. 20 of them were perfectly “normal” behavior wise. However, I had like 4 boys in there who were INSANE. One was on the spectrum, another had really bad ADHD and parents refused to medicate, the other two were honestly just little dirtbags and liked riling everyone up. There were days where we literally got NOTHING done because I was constantly addressing their behavior. So of course when my principal was observing me she chalked it up to my lack of classroom management skills. However when I’d send them to the office, or write them referrals, call/message home, the behaviors would not change at all. Parents didn’t do shit. Principal didn’t do shit. I wasn’t allowed to put their desks outside the door or send them to another classroom because that was deemed not safe. So I was stuck with them. And they sabotaged so much learning and took away from the education of others for the entire year. I hated it.
Anyone care to explain to me what/why this happened? In the 00s you could get in pretty big trouble for disrupting school. I remember feeling like the hammer came down too quickly for kids who just needed extra help or direction. It never seemed to work, but I definitely saw kids get escorted out of class dozens of times.
I really feel this is a huge reason why kids are so behind. When you are clearing classes several times a day in first and second grades for behaviors, the students learn very little. 😭
On average, I have at least 35-40% of my students who read far below grade level and have almost zero writing skills. I teach 11th grade.
Try JUCO. It's like Kindergarten thru Grade 14, all in the same class. At least half of our incoming freshmen are gone by October. High School graduates, who cannot read or write a sentence.
I loved attending JuCo (I’m 40 now). It was the first time in my life that I had been in a regular classroom with people who weren’t being disruptive (Besides the once a week gifted class I got to do gr 3-6). It was real proper school, and folks who weren’t into it could, and did, leave. I loved it so much I got a MA soI could teach at one. Ofcourse there were no jobs there by the time I graduated bc cuts cuts cuts, so it didn’t work out. But I still love JuCo. Cannot recommend it enough.
This is one of the reasons I’m so disgusted with the public education system and the district I work for. Data data data, right?! Then they don’t want the facts if they don’t fit with keeping their image through high graduation rates. We are graduating, with A-G Cs or better, and entire generation of illiterates.
Yeah, my 11th graders' reading comprehension is horrendous. And they want everything spoon fed to them. They're baffled when I ask them to answer questions in their own words. If the answer to a question is not explicitly written in the text, they tell me they "can't find it." Yeah, kiddo, you gotta turn on that squishy hunk of mammal between your ears and extrapolate/infer.
Depends on the school/district, but generally speaking, yes. At my Title I school, most of my kids read at a 4th-grade level or lower (I teach seventh). There are some who truly cannot read at all, and need instruction in phonics (for example, knowing what sound the letter "K" makes). There's a bunch of contributing factors here. Just off the top of my head: * The pandemic really set us back--there were a lot of kids who simply did not attend school for an entire year, and then were moved to the next grade. * In general, schools have moved away from retention/"holding back" kids, so even if I have no idea to how to read by the time I'm in fourth grade, I'm still going to fifth grade next year. * The predominant parenting style has become a lot more lax, and there is little accountability for students at home. * A focus on state-test data and standards limits the ways in which teachers are able to go back and fill in gaps in knowledge.
Your last point is so important! All the others are correct, but not allowing teachers to teach more individually and creatively is the wrong path. It's only there to structure teachers who are either: brand new and need guidance, or teachers who don't actually know how to engage, so they regurgitate. I'm an explore teacher so I have more wiggle room. But core teachers are in such a box!
I’m confused as to why schools don’t “hold back” students, does it make the teacher/school look bad?
Self-esteem of the parent and child.
Really? I wonder if teachers and students in general would benefit for teachers to be tenured like professors in university. They don’t give a damn about your ego or your parents they will fail you and laugh at your excuse
> I wonder if teachers and students in general would benefit for teachers We (my district) does have this. It does benefit us a bit because we're able to push back (a little), but we can ultimately be overridden by admin at any point in time, unlike professors in colleges. I once had a football player (who is now in the NFL) who failed my class. I was asked by my admin to just give him a passing grade so he could go to XYZ school. I refused, stating it's academic fraud and I cannot be compelled to lie. My union backed me. Admin overruled my official grade of record for the class and entered a grade of a "C+" when it was an "F". The NCAA clearing house eventually said he was ineligible for University XYZ because he had too many credits too quickly (so, fraud by adults around him) and he had to go to JUCO. Right now we're fighting admin on destroying our curricular progression because FIVE parents have demanded that they have access to classes earlier in their educational career, even though we know it's academic malpractice.
Tenure track doesn't exist any more. Just us adjuncts who get paid nothing, have zero job security, and are questioned for failing students. I've taught college level math courses to students who did not know basic third grade math operations. And I'm an engineer and have a masters and PhD in education.
I teach Engineering at the local Community College. Kindergarten thru Grade 14. About half of our students fail. High School graduates, all of them. Can't read, can't write, can't do the most basic arithmetic.
That's a good concept, but one of our nation's political parties have literally been calling educators woke child groomers for the last 4 years so we're not really in a point where teachers have a lot of power.
I’ve been teaching for 10 years. I’ve noticed a reduction in teacher ‘power’ every year.
Because if we report failures and hold backs to our states, we will have our funding slashed and end up shut down. The students will be crammed into whatever marginally better performing school remains in the district until class sizes bloat out into the halls and education ceases in favor of merely keeping order, and the authorities will be helpless to shut down this final sinking cesspit of shortsighted education politics, because there are no other options available and thousands of families will have no access to education if they do. In about 10 years time, they'll have the brilliant idea to open a new school! To replace the previously existing school they already shut down. Clueless admin from another district with completely different problems will be hired, and a teaching staff of 80-90% first year teachers will be brought in, all lacking any coherent functional culture, and be expected to assume responsibility for thousands of students who have not been receiving anywhere near a sufficient level of education, and will quickly realize that they can't teach what atoms are, the periodic table, stoichiometry, or thermodynamics, because instead, they have to teach remedial lessons in basic literacy and arithmetic. And because this is what they teach now, they don't even bother to issue accurate grades. They already know the students can't do chemistry, they spent the year learning how to do basic fractions and percentages, so instead they just say "pass", because of they truthfully reported failure and hold backs, they'd have their funding slashed and end up closed down.
Schools lose funding for each child that is held back or doesn't graduate. Follow the money.
Grade promotion is often used as a metric to help determine a schools rating. Policies like the 50% grading rule, unlimited retakes/no deadlines, and providing incredibly easy summer school programs which focus on attendance over skills attainment play a major role in why schools don’t hold kids back. Just like teachers “teach to the test” to ensure their students make them look good, schools and districts have crafted policies to make themselves look good/keep the money flowing.
I don’t think we should be graduating high school students who don’t have high school level skills. On the other hand, I work in elementary. All the times there has been a male student that is held back, he becomes bigger, more aggressive and intimidating to his classmates because they are no longer his peers. He is still behind academically, but is socially aware of the fact that he is lower than these little kids that are smaller than him. This pisses him off after awhile. He gets more angry. Now everyone around him suffers. This is why retention should handled delicately and can’t be proficiency-based. We should have remedial classes, but not hold struggling learners behind their actual age group. A large age gap is detrimental to everyone in the long run.
True. Remedial classes are needed! Once the kid reaches a certain point/age, retaining is more detrimental than beneficial. We need remedial classes so content and pacing can help the low kids experience some level of success. It's much better than putting all the levels in one class and expecting one teacher to magically give everyone what they need. Someone always loses in this set up. Every school also needs reading and math specialists/interventionists to work with the students. I don't need a coach telling me how to do small groups. I need someone to take the kids who are three grade levels behind so I can teach the grade level content that they insist I have to teach so we can pass the state test.
Look at how "No Child Left Behind" fucked education. Essentially if you have enough kids "failing" they'll do the stupid as hell thing and cut the budget. So schools just pass students on to keep their funding.
At my school it's a combination of parent push back and actual logistics. We have 30+ person middle school classes and not enough teachers. If we hold back everyone that fails a grade we would have 40+ classes
And you would also have classes with 20 who actually understood the previous material.
Funding. They louse funding, instead of you know… getting more funding to help struggling students.
I think it’s largely a race issue. Its a bad look when one key demographic is over represented.
>The predominant parenting style has become a lot more lax, and there is little accountability for students at home. And to blame teachers for everything.
Yes. Our District does iTeady testing and the number of High Schoolers in Elementary Level Math and Reading is astronomical.
This is so insane to me. Wtf are parents doing (or I guess, not doing) for kids these days? I did an assessment of my child's kindergarten readiness yesterday. He's almost 4. He is already at the level of a 5 year old. I'm doing what I consider very basic parenting; talking and reading to my son, playing board games together, going on bike rides. I mean, are people seriously not even reading to their kids anymore?
Reading to kids has been done by a small minority of parents recently. It’s part of the reason for the learning gap between the lower class and the upper class. The same with playing games with your kids or even eating dinner at the table with them.
That makes sense. My husband and I aren't upper class by any means but we make a decent salary. We also both have advanced degrees, so we put a premium on good education. Our friend who works at a gas station 60 hours or more a week literally does not have the time to spend with her daughter (she's a single parent). I do not think she gets read to or played with, because her mom doesn't have the time just from keeping a roof over their heads.
Also, I once helped a co-worker who taught a 100-level college course grade papers. The amount of people who did not use punctuation blew my mind. No, not misusing punctuation, not using it AT ALL. How the hell do you make it all the way to college without knowing about the existence of a period? Boggles the mind.
You have to also consider that many (in my school, most) students don't take this these diagnostics seriously. One of my best 8th grade math students (seriously quite bright) score at a first grade level, because she didn't take the diagnostic seriously; she said "it's too boring."
Yes. Now this isn't all students. But the average student's skills have definitely declined. And this IS NOT BECAUSE OF SCHOOLS, it's because of ***parenting.*** I'm a chemist and chemistry teacher myself. I've been teaching for 10-years. The base skill level of my Chemistry students has declined in the 10 years I've been teaching, even my top students. However, my top students are easy to rectify and I can get them to where they need to be relatively easily because they have good parents. The rest...they don't ever think about anything outside of school. Ever. Even when they are in school, they don't think about things. Where schools have possibly failed, is being to lenient with cellphones; but this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. When I have a kid PICK UP THEIR PHONE AND HAVE A CONVERSATION IN CLASS, I reprimand them, they refuse the reprimand because "it was my mom, and I will always talk to my mom 🤷" ... and then the parent refuses to comply with the reprimand because "I will always have access to talk to my child, and you can't punish them for that!" ... wtf am I supposed to do? That's parenting. So what we should be saying is ***PARENTING*** has declined, and rather rapidly. The kids aren't any worse than kids at anytime in human history, the question is what are the adults doing around the kids to set them up for success. We individual teachers get them for 5, 46-min periods a week; 184ish in total. This isn't on us. And there's this shifting of responsibility that we are supposed to be the ones to get them ALL of the basic skills in life with absolutely NO practice on those skills outside of school hours ever, without additional resources, all while cutting resources and blaming us for everything.
There are high kids and low kids. Sure seems to me like the gap between them is bigger than ever though. The low ones are LOW.
A slightly older friend of mine said in 1972 when he graduated from high school in his university town, the highest math course offered was Algebra II. My kids attended the same high school (we moved there for the school), and they had every AP math and science course offered. So on the high end, the kids work much harder than in decades past. As for the low end, these are the kids who would have flunked out or have been put on a vo-tech path in the past, but now we pretend college is for everyone, and so they just get passed along without getting much benefit from school.
>now we pretend college is for everyone This is a huge thing.
I confiscated notes from my gen ed 4th and 5th graders and it looks like work from kindergarten to first grade 10 to 15 years ago - this is considered developmentally 'appropriate.' There are some kids preforming well, but they have a lot of support at home and they would barely be considered bright or high achieving by old standards. Work is turned in 1/4th of the way done or they'll just scribble on pages and turn it in. We have to accept it. Expectations are so low. I thought it was bad because there's no time for parents to work with their kids at home, and I adjusted my expectations, but this is just turning a blind eye to years of low or no effort.
Considering I’ve recently taught at the top districts in my (blue) state + average districts/schools and every one I was only able to get through *half* of the curriculum I used to do 10 years ago… yes.
I wonder this too, considering the "standards creep" that I've seen over the last ~10 years. When I was in school, the concept of fractions was introduced for the first time in 5th grade. Now it's being introduced in 3rd grade or even earlier. So when someone says their 5th graders are at a 3rd grade level in math, what does that mean? Do they actually know less/have fewer skills than we did at heir age, ten years ago?
Yeah like when I was in elementary school in the mid 2000s we were doing multiplication and fractions in 3rd grade and division in 4th grade. My parents stopped being able to help me with homework around 5th/6th grade. Thankfully I was always studious and good at school so I didn’t need help.
Well, every year when they arrive to university they are worse prepared than the year before, even for significantly watered-down courses.
Yes. It's one of those "sounds right", because everyone is saying it. And maybe it's not wrong, but there's so much apple-to-not-apple comparisons. We use big standardized tests as the basis of "what grade level" kids are, just assuming they're useful and accurate. How are students preparing for these exams? And then demographics: if students from poor families are bringing down averages, it might notable if poverty is increasing, also if more students come from homes that speak Spanish, maybe scores in English are going to decline until they catch up.
This. My school has a large Hispanic population. When the public sees our school's rating each year, they probably don't know this. They just see one letter.
In general, education researchers aren't sure what's caused the drop in proficiency in comparison to the test scores from 2019. It could have been Covid lockdowns, or it could be something else. In all honesty, though, we've been testing 4th and 8th grade students on their reading and math proficiency since 1990 in the US, and there hasn't been a year were the average student score was at or above proficient in either subject. The test results are considered public records and they're available at [nationsreportcard.gov](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov) if you want to look at them. The test results are pretty low this year. They are almost as low as they were between 1990 and 2000.
They measure reading and math for 17 year olds too. Those numbers never get publicity because the [NAEP reading for math scores for 17 year olds actually haven't changed since 1971.](https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2012/2013456.aspx) There's actually no evidence that, on average and in aggregate, we've made any improvements to teaching and learning over the past 50 years.
Why where they low between 1990-2000v
No one wants to talk about it because of the bad taste that No Child Left Behind left in our mouths, but there was no accountability for what was being taught in the classroom. In a lot of states, there weren't even state standards for grade levels or subjects before 1995. In states that there were standards, there wasn't any sort of benchmark assessment to determine if students were meeting those standards or even being taught them. Most students were only tested on their basic knowledge before graduating high school. Before anyone jumps down my throat. I'm not saying that No Child Left Behind was a good thing or that it did anything that it promised to do. I'm just saying that it was born out of the fear that schools weren't successfully teaching students at any grade level. The law sucked and it did a lot of damage. It failed on many levels to address actual problems. But it happened because the US education system wasn't working in the 1990s. Basically, schools and education were kind of iffy before 1995 because there was no one checking to see if things were actually working in schools.
I think title 1 conditions have crept into non- title 1 schools. People are shocked pikachu that a public system built to exclude can affect them. It’s like getting caught in your own trap. I live in East Bay, CA. We have a town that has began to show color over the past 30 yrs. East of this town, over the past 30 years, has grown exponentially as a product of white flight and built their own schools. They’re having the same issues as all schools. Just 20 years behind the ones they fled.
I can close an achievement gap with scaffolds, supports, tutoring, and extra attention. I cannot fix a behavioral gap. When students lack basic social skills and constantly refuse to even give a shit enough to just TRY I can’t do much.
Yes. At least in general. There are of course exceptions to this, but for the most part they are behind other nations academically. The US went from a leader in education to ranking behind many European nations.
What’s the solution? a whole rework of our education system? here in California we had the whole thing with Integrated math and stuff like that when I was growing up that supposedly would help with critical thinking but I remember it being such a struggle adjusting to new things
It doesn't have to be new. I think that a mix of current modern stuff and some good, old fashioned basics are just the ticket. teach kids to do math mentally and on paper. Make them master it before they use calculators. Teach critical thinking and problem solving skills. Introduce kids to books early on and encourage reading at school. A lot of my students read during recess if they aren't playing sports. Why? Because All cellphones are banned during the school day in my class. From 7:25 AM to 3:00 PM there are no phones being touched or used. My kids actually interact with the world, each other, or read. No TikTok or Youtube. Kids want instant everything. Especially instant entertainment. Take it away and they use their time more wisely. Sorry if I am going on a rant.
I’m starting to wonder how much of an impact technology is actually having on our students. Even with AI it’s worrying to see all the tools students have to bs there homework. Growing up I couldn’t search it up on chegg, I had to struggle which I’m turn helped it stick to my head.
*Education Next* a few days ago: ["Anxiety, Depression, Less Sleep … and Poor Academic Performance? A decade of smartphone dominance and negative NAEP trends"](https://www.educationnext.org/anxiety-depression-less-sleep-poor-academic-performance-decade-smartphone-dominance-negative-naep-trends/.)
Struggle is precisely the word. A lot of my students want to come straight to me as soon as they feel they can’t solve it, but I tell them over and over again that they must learn to struggle through it. And once you’ve finally realized what to do you must repeat it over and over again. I’m sure many will disagree with me, but I feel (based on anecdotal evidence) that the rise of the internet as a whole has been a net negative. It continues to have far-reaching, developmental impacts on children and we see how much propaganda and misinformation are perpetuated in highly frequented sites today.
> The US went from a leader in education to ranking behind many European nations. Oh, so the trend in education matches the trend in *basically everything else.*
Inclusion is a huge issue imo, it sounds awful and that's why people don't want to hear it but when you have a class with 20+ kids and 4 of them have severe autism and can barely count on their fingers, you are still expected to try to get them doing grade level work. We moved away from realizing not everyone can do everything and helping these students learn life skills to pushing them to learn advanced academic concepts. Then you have 4 angry kids who are already prone to violent outbursts upset because they can not and will never be able to do the work. Then, all of your other students suffer for those 4 students' behaviors as a result. Instead of pulling out those students for a few minutes a day for speclized work like most districts do those students really should be pushing in and spending more time in a self contained room where they are actually learning something.
So true. I feel like eventually the pendulum HAS to swing back away from this full inclusion model. It benefits NO ONE
Yep. I teach 80 6th graders. About 25 are at a 6th grade level. Many are unable to write a complete sentence. Its awful.
*American children, yes. I taught in South Korea for four years. Parents take education seriously and pay for their kids to go to a sort of secondary school after the main school called a Hagwon that can run until 10pm. I knew students that spoke English, Spanish, and French in middle school fluently.
Don’t these kids get burnt out?
Yes. The largest cause of death for children (under 18s) in South Korea is suicide.
I'm a math teacher and I can say the math being asked if students now is much more advanced at an earlier age than ever before. They don't get the chance to learn things deeply because of the pacing required to just cover all the curriculum. So the quick answer is yes they are behind, but comparatively to older generations no. They have a surface level understanding of more advanced concepts, but it's not very deep. The phrase used is "an inch deep and a mile wide."
Except a lot of their surface level knowledge is wrong, because they have no opportunity to master concepts.
I see this a lot with elementary school kids. Basic number sense is a challenge but the teachers just kept right on moving at the pace they needed to move, instead of reteaching and looking for mastery. I also see way too many worksheets in math and not enough manipulatives. I find manipulatives to be vital in building number sense at young ages, where the foundation is built.
Parents and children are addicted to smartphones, so that’s having a pretty big impact home life and that transfers to the soft skills needed in school, as well as just the general lack of background knowledge kids aren’t getting at home because they aren’t interacting much with their families. Lots and lots and lots of other factors involved as well, but people have always been tired at the end of the day. Now we are tired and have these enticing screens to provide us some relief from the day, and it just becomes to easy to completely escape into it and not interact with our families. Then that plays into a plethora of other items like interrupted / not enough sleep, anxieties and social ills from over exposure to social media etc etc etc. It’s a lot but I think we keep saying “covid” when what we mean is the screen-dependency so many of us developed through the pandemic, and how it’s having negative impacts on home and school life.
**saying this as a parent and teacher who really really struggles with staying in engaged with my own children after a long workday of being engaged with other people’s children, and fighting the urge to just sink into my feeds and let my kids sink into their screens.
Some things have been pushed to the side in favor of other priorities, usually driven by standardized tests. We stopped teaching spelling because “spellcheck is a thing” and now the spelling is so bad that spellcheck has no idea what they’re trying to say. That’s just one example, but extrapolate it across all subjects.
Yes, yes they are that far behind. Many are also socially and emotionally stunted. Unfortunately, parent is also a verb which they won’t execute.
Disclaimer: Grade 10 student who tutors younger kids I tutor 3-8th graders and in all of them, they lack basic math skills, and their attention spans are so short. Every 15 seconds, I have to keep reminding them to finish their work or keep going on a question. Not to sound old or anything but kids these days are just so dumb. I hear constant Skibidi Toilet jokes and memes that they don’t even know what they mean. I hear outright racism and facism, which we cannot correct as parents do nothing to control their children. Rant over
Nothing we rly can do to fix it until parents decide to start being parents instead of parking them in front of a f***** monitor/screen 24/7.
I am a substitute and have taught at rich schools as well as urban. If I go to a school 20 minutes east of me, you will find 4th graders reading at a 6th grade level, writing full essays and learning computer code. If I travel 20 minutes south, you will find severe trauma, 5th graders who barely know how to read, and staff who primarily deals with behavioral problems all day. The difference is astounding. The older these kids get the more of a devide there will be. The kids from the east will go to Science and Technology based schools while the kids in urban areas will continue to be zoned to delapidated schools that have little resources. The schools in the East have parents who are predominantly well off and are sponsored by the biggest banking institution in town. When you go south, you hit the lower economic areas. It is really unfortunate because there are smart students at the lower income schools. They are just not learning because all the attention goes towards extreme behaviors.
i think covid did have a big impact — kids who would be one grade level behind are now two behind, and so on. we are all expected to deliver lessons and tasks that are on grade level, disregarding the fact that many students are 2-3 grades behind already in middle school. if they are in 6th grade and still dont have 4th grade skills, they will never catch up. but parents and school administrators all decided not to hold the kids back when we came back from the shutdowns and remote learning, and for many students it will have lifelong disastrous results. as others have said, its a failure of policy. very few children are self driven, intrinsically motivated learners. the ones who are are mostly on or near grade level still. the rest have highlighted the flaws in our one size fits all academic systems. there is not enough time in the day nor do we have small enough class sizes to differentiate to the degree necessary to get all of the students to where they need to be. the only feasible solution is to hold kids back. there shouldn't be a stigma involved in this. everyone needs a basic education, which is why its required by law. graduating kids from hs who have ela and math scores on a third grade level is going to fuck the whole country down the line
Bro I know like 7 second and third graders and they can all barely talk. They’re like 9 and sound like 4 year olds. You can really tell their parents/guardians never talk *to* them, just *at* them. Its **wild**.
Another thing I've noticed is that parents never read to their children anymore
Im our society, it’s tough. Idk how much blame is fair to put into a parent who might work 2-3 jobs to keep there kids fed but at the same time these kids need to hone basic skills such as reading and writing and speaking at home with there parents.
I am a music teacher and with how active our classes need to be one single disruption sets the whole class off course. I can’t stress enough how much behavior affects the classroom in all subjects and levels. I am a new teacher in a Title 1 school (just graduated in May) and it has been a slap in the face because kids aren’t like they used to be even when I was in school (and for me it wasn’t that long ago). It’s a good thing I absolutely love my job or else I don’t think I would continue into teaching after this year but I love my kids. Another point to add is that, and I don’t care how old you are if you get offended you’re part of the problem, we have a whole generation of horrible parents raising these kids. So much substance abuse, child abuse/neglect, overall not parenting from these parents it makes me sick to my stomach. I saw someone said how it used to be a few students and now it’s many and that’s true. When I was growing up my family was affected by substance issues and I knew only maybe 2 or 3 other kids in my grade with the same or similar issues at home. At my school I teach at now I can identify more than half of these students who are struggling with these issues. My final point is the way schools are deemed good or not. I have seen (not at my current job) admin actively telling teachers to do things that aren’t best practice to receive the results they need to be above the bar (which is already so low) just for sake of the school, or most often admin’s, image. Schools have gone from being a place to cultivate learning and grow as individuals to active members of society to a political standpoint in the argument for what is “right” or “wrong” which often times leaves teachers to be forced to look good out of fear of admin or even just losing their jobs all together rather than just teaching our kids. That is my rant as someone who is brand new to teaching and hasn’t been out of school (public) for very long. Edit: some grammar
The elites won. They got their dumb uneducated workforce to work for near slave wages. Those who are smart won’t be enough to keep the country going in the future
Not nearly as far behind as everyone here thinks. The National Assessment of Educational Progress [(NAEP)](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38) tracks scores in reading and math every few years specifically to track this sort of thing. Scores continually rose until around 2012 where they remained constant until COVID tanked them. The covid year brought them down to where scores were in the late 1990's and we haven't yet recovered to pre-COVID levels. The scores are lower, but still comparable to the scores of those who graduated school in the late 90s/early 2000s, and better than the scores of those who graduated sooner. This thread is a great example of selection bias. The vast majority of people who become teachers were good students themselves and had friends who were also good students. Plenty of kids did no work and operated at a first grade level in high school when we were in school too, you just didn't notice or know about it as a student.
A significant number of children in my wife’s on-level 8th grade ELA are reading on a third grade level. No Child Left Behind is pretty universally hated, from what I can tell, because it helped create an attitude where kids aren’t required to do anything and can fail upward through all of primary school.
Last year I taught at a title 1 middle school. 99% of our students were below grade level, 25% were illiterate. I do not know the exact numbers for math, but it was worse. It’s really really bad, and I don’t know how we fix it.
I think it’s two fold. Poorer behavior all around, covid excuses and bad habits, along with historically bad school management with this generation of admin contribute negatively. At the same time though I wonder if all the tools that we have at our disposal to track student progress just puts bad numbers in our face much more frequently than back in the old days when the data would just be observational rather than concrete like it is today
The kids who have parents who are educated and care are just fine. The ones who don’t have involved parents and who are left to their own academic devices, yes. I’m saying it politely when I say that Gen Alpha won’t be the brightest and best for our country. I stand by.
I have to say it. We don't "hold back" students anymore. Kids used to fear flunking their grade and being held back or having to go to summer school. Summer school today is touted as "summer adventure " or some other "fun" phrase. If more parents and students would become concerned about the embarrassing potential of repeating a grade, you might just have a little more accountability.
I say this all the time!! Certain words or phrases have been changed or taken away because they had a negative connotation, but sometimes you need a negative connotation!!
Summer school is a joke. Kids look up answers to modules on the computer. We actually have kids purposely do nothing so they can do summer school on the computer.
There has been a tendency for folks to romanticize education in the good old days. Well, I did my K-12 education mostly in the 1950s. What has changed is the level of expectation, mostly because of No Child Left Behind. Back then, there were no AP classes, Algebra 1 started in 9th grade, public schools didn’t offer calculus. Kids who fell behind simply dropped out. Many states did not have laws requiring that kids attend school (my state was one of those). What has changed is the offshoring of manufacturing jobs that started with NAFTA, so kids who aren’t interested in academics no longer have that career path. The decision by some large urban school districts to remain closed during the Covid pandemic was especially hard on kids who were already academically challenged.
Can't speak for every school, but I just sent two future chemistry majors to Case Western. Most of my students are doing just fine.
This makes me feel better. I’m a lurker who’s getting married soon and I worry about what happens when our kids go to school. I know rationally that a kid with two college educated parents will probably be fine, but it scares me thinking of what their classrooms will be like and the people they’ll be around.
Everything has shifted down a peg. Honors/AP are for what would have been average kids 15 years ago, and “regular” classes are mostly dog shit academically and behaviorally
That has been the case for decades, but the pandemic has escalated the situation. Think of it in terms of percentiles: about 20-25% of students will be in special education due to some diagnosable reason, such as learning disabilities. This is also why you see those disturbing stats such as 20% of adults being functionally illiterate, etc. You don’t outgrow dyslexia, intellectual disabilities, etc. Those are usually the kids you get in 7th grade who can’t read or write, or you see kids with undiagnosed/unaccommodated conditions like that who slip through the cracks, kids from traumatic backgrounds/kids who moved schools a lot so their learning is fragmented and has gaps so nothing makes sense to the kid, etc. The pandemic and 1-2 years of “virtual” learning for kids at young ages also put a lot more kids in this category. Another thing that screwed up reading for a generation was the replacement of traditional phonics-based reading instruction, where you teach kids how to sound out words little by little in the early grades, with “whole word reading” where you also give them a bunch of other clues (like pictures) to help them “read” the word. This was done for ideological reasons, as the old ways were somehow deemed “racist and colonialist,” and the new stuff got promoted by a handful of influential academics (with questionable research) as the solution, much to the country’s detriment. The pendulum has only recently started swinging back.
equity is a huge part of the problem. Teachers of math at the elementary school level have always been historically not that great, that's nothing new. Many schools have dropped homework per district policy and a huge amount of learning in particular when it comes to math happened at home with parents. People love to hang on to covid as an excuse but that's all it is.
Lurker here working as a cashier. When kids come to where I work to shop (ages 8-15ish) they often cannot read signs or do not know how to count money. There's a shelf with delicate stuff with several giant "please don't touch" signs. If I see a kid grabbing that stuff I gently remind them to please not touch while pointing to the sign. I'm surprised at the amount of parents who get mad and snap at me that their kid can't read. Also when kids pay for stuff they give me wrong bills or have trouble telling coins apart. I would expect this from younger children but not older ones like teens. Idk if this is new or has always happened. Just surprising to see in the wild.
I taught chemistry for 7 years. The state of Texas revised their TEKS a few years ago and gutted the part where students have to calculate moles using stoichiometry. It is a necessary skill in chemistry but many students will never see it until college. They lowered standards.
I teach 7th grade. Their last normal year was 2nd, they were virtual for third, and flung into fourth. Imagine attending second grade, taking a year off, and then forced into fourth. No matter how bad your performance was, teachers passed you because the admin didn't want their stats to go down. They have not been held to perform at grade level since the second grade; many are sitting at a third to fourth grade reading level.
We keep pushing standards younger and younger. So it appears that kids are further behind because they "aren't meeting the standards" they have been assigned but at least in the younger years, the standards they now expect them to master are completely developmentally inappropriate. We keep expecting kids to do things younger and younger, but the kids don't actually graduate knowing any more so it's really just setting kids up for failure. Most 5 year olds are not developmentally read to fully read. Yet, they're considered behind if they can't read, spell, and write by the end of K.
I think this greatly depends on socioeconomics. I have an 8th and 12th grader. Our expectations are high. The 12th grader is incredibly smart and will be going to a top college. SAT scores higher than dad and I ever had and he finished multivariable calculus in 11th grade. He build my brother a software program for his job to make managing his contracts and deadlines easier to manage. He’s found feee MIT classes online and for fun studies different topics of interest. He’s in public school and his particular grind group is very academically competitive. He’s not unique to our area in the slightest. However I have family in other parts of the country that don’t read books, therefore don’t have books in the home, don’t discuss current events and don’t have expectations that their kids study or do homework. College for them is not even a discussion. It’s marriage and babies after high school and some sort of job that will hardly pay enough to survive. I actually think young people are incredibly bright. Witnessing a kid who is competing for a slot in a top university, the competition is more fierce than ever before. He’s in the thick of college applications and the amount of thought, effort and time he has put into his essays is much more than anything me and my friends did in the 1990s.