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[–] 22 points 3 days ago* (1 child)

(You should include the text for people with disabilities)

I’m as apathetic as the students
Teacher Support &/or Advice

We‘re not allowed to fail them. The lowest they can get is a 53.

I teach seniors. They need my class to pass. Admin has given thinly veiled threats about failing them. It looks bad for the school and affects funding and that’s all they care about.

They pass even if they don’t show up. One girl came to school only 2 months out of the 10 and passed with a B last year as a junior. I have her now and it’s the same bullshit.

“Rigor“ is a joke. They’re 3-4 grade levels behind and we often have to go over middle school level lessons, yet admin is down everyone‘s throat about rigor.

Discipline is a joke. They don’t do detention anymore, so the kids know that they can misbehave. They’re only suspend for serious offenses like drug use or fighting.

Parents are uninvolved and for some reason that’s the teacher’s fault. They never answer the phones for calls home about discipline, but come graduation time they’re yelling and screaming because their child has failed senior year(though not really, we just give them a packet of work at the end and then they pass 🙄)

Were given limited supplies and often have to purchase our own. We got a grant last year from the district and I purchased 3 toners since I want them to do handwritten work as often as possible because they use AI too much on their Chromebooks. All three were stolen by other staff members and no one is being held accountable.

There was never any real support when I stared out 2 yeas ago and although I love my fellow veteran teachers they’re just as stressed and busy to ever properly mentor me.

Everything is always broken and never gets fixed. Microwave, elevator(had to carry heavy supplies up three flights of stairs.), two windows broken in my classroom, three desk broken, etc. Since LAST year.

Grades are almost always fluffed. Every F turns in a D. Too many D’s need to turn into C’s.

There‘s a phone policy that’s hardly enforced. It up to teachers to deal with it.

My mental health and anxiety has worsen since I started teaching 2 years ago. I’m leaving classroom teaching permanently after this year.

I just needed to rant. Couldn’t even make it to the 5-year mark and became a statistic. Have a nice rest of your day!

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  • [–] 55 points 4 days ago (7 children)

    This is not new. When I was teaching elementary about 20 years ago I was told the same thing. I’ve had to change grades because someone never helped their child but had a big enough mouth to change the principal’s mind about the kid’s grades. After 25 years I burned out badly. I loved the job but hated the useless nonsense that stopped me from actually doing my job.

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  • [–] 33 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    This has been the end goal of the GOP for at least 40 years now. Defund public schools, send as much money to voucher programs so the "right" kids get proper Christian education on the taxpayer dime, and leave the general public too stupid and media illiterate to resist the propaganda channels that misinform and warp them until they fall right into Trump's lap.

    The rank and file Republican may be dumb, but never underestimate the party itself. There are patient and smart actors pulling the strings.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago

    While it's easy to blame the GOP here (and they do deserve it), it's important to note that (from what I understand) this is a nationwide trend. American oligarchs in general don't care about/actively despise education; the GOP is just somehow even worse about it than the competition.

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    [–] 28 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    I would’ve read this if it were text but I’m not going to keep zooming in and out to read some screenshot on mobile.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 days ago (6 children)
  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    Genuine question. I assumed you're talking about no child left behind. I know nothing about it. Can you summarize it?

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  • [–] 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    I'm not an educator, but most of my family is and no child left behind is an interest of my sister who is a teacher, and it goes like this:

    School funding is heavily driven by tax revenue of the surrounding areas, so more affluent districts could afford higher pay, more expensive materials, etc than a less wealthy district. This meant the quality of education varied wildly across state to state, city to city, district to district. The subjects taught and the full scope of each subject being taught was different as well. So you'd end up with entire groups of children not having been taught things needed to be a productive member of society

    No Child Left Behind sought to correct this.

    The idea was to create a standardized set of knowledge expectations across the US and used additional funding as a corrective function to underperforming schools. If a school was doing well by their students they got more money, if a school was not providing as good of an education, they'd lose money. Doing "well" was primarily measured by checking the students' knowledge of the listed standard topics.

    In practice what happened was standardized test scores got mathematically tied school funding. Average grades, number of students graduated, a few other metrics also got tied mathematically to funding.

    School districts could try their best, provide the best quality education possible, and then hope and pray that the students performed well... Or they could cook the books and change internal standards to ensure that by all the measured metrics they got the most funding they could

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  • [–] 6 points 3 days ago*

    It also served to open up school districts to private interests for budget shortfalls.

    Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for example gave huge sums of money to schools, but yhe money with stipulations and requirements from the schools. Worker training replaced the arts, etc.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    So winner takes all, essentially. So low testing schools, which are generally more poor fall even further behind. Wow.

    Also, this reminds me of Goodhart's law.

    Goodhart's law is an adage that has been stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2]

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  • Exactly

    There were some strong criticisms of NCLB when it was first created that correctly predicted this would happen.

    Another unintended consequence was the death of elective classes in all but the most affluent schools. Schools strapped for cash needed the extra money offered by NCLB so they diverted what little resources they had into classes that were measured through standardized testing. Shop, agriculture, civics, home economics, classes that actually helped students live a good life were axed in favor of more math and science since students generally performed lower in those subjects and were dragging scores, thereby funding, down

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  • [–] 32 points 4 days ago (14 children)

    If you ever think your country has some serious issues and it can't possibly be worse, take a look at the USA.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 days ago (11 children)

    Every country has issues they need to fix, and a ton of areas to improve. America is just excellent at being the absolute worst in every metric for some reason.

    Like, Australia looks like a Utopia in comparison but we have an insane housing crisis while our prime Minister does nothing (aside from buying a $4m beach side property during it), and our billionaires are fucking up the environment while the government lets them etc. America going full send into the dumpster doesn't negate other countries issues.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 days ago*

    Well, the USA also demonstrates that no western country has hit rock bottom yet - there's no reason why Australia or Germany can't sink to where the USA is today, with a couple of decades of continued or accelerated bad governance.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Your PM spent a measly $4 million on a house? That’s peanuts compared to what lower-level politicians in the US spend, because they’ve raided the coffers, done insider trading, and taken bribes to the point that they can buy shit like this.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (5 children)

    while our prime Minister does nothing

    Sorry boss Albo's government changed tax laws in May, and property prices have been reducing since then.

    Is there something else you wanted him to do?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    Wow he did one whole thing. And new home sales have dropped since he did that. He's also falling short of his new home build goals, and he's done nothing to fix rental prices.

    The suburb I'm in has land developers sitting on their hands releasing plots 10 at a time despite the land being ready, the houses that were $200k less than ten years ago are over $1m (not an exaggeration btw), and the rent is $800/week to live in them. And that's the ones that aren't airbnb. This suburb is 40% empty Airbnbs. And it's a common story across Australia, with easily solved problems. It'll just piss off some rich people but I do not give a single fuck about nimbys bitching and moaning when it's holding up the rest of the country.

    I'd like him to quit being a smug useless cunt and actually do some reform to fix things.

    I'm not saying it's his fault, these are mostly Howard era problems compounded over the years. But Labor is fucking useless and needs to pull their heads out of their assess. I mentioned albos beach front mansion because it shows he genuinely doesn't give a shit what people think. The optics are fucking terrible. He's using tax payer money to buy that shit, and flying off to meet with Tim Cook for whatever fucking reason rn instead of solving real problems.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    America is just excellent at being the absolute worst in every metric for some reason.

    The reason is greed. Every policy decision, every move to erode institutions, education, protections and quality life, every acquisition and consolidation is in favor of someone profiting. It's not enough that things ate sustainable; line must go up.

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    [–] 11 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    ChatGPT doesn't need to be accurate if people are unable to think for themselves. This is all on track for the "intelligence as a utility" future the LLM wankers have in plan for us

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    Altman has intelligence if you have coin

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago*

    Working as intended.

    The goal right now is not to produce future scientists, engineers, or the best and brightest.

    the goal right now is to produce barely functional simpletons that can only just barely manage to survive on their own. the kind of people that don't question, don't think, don't analyze, who don't do anything but believe what they're told by people they view as an authority figure.

    this is the end goal of decades of attacks on education.

    America spends more per student than most other countries yet churns out the worst possible results.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 days ago

    I worked in a place where you had to have parent permission to fail students.

    Also, “base-50” grading - all work, whether turned in or not, earns a 50.

    Online school is really a ticking time bomb though. Even before AI, it was basically kids spending an afternoon googling crap and getting credit for a full semester of high school.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago

    Reminds me of the novel 'Wilt'. He is a teacher at a vocational school, and he has to convey the joys of English Literature to classes called 'Meat 1' and 'Bricklayers 2'. Attendence is mandatory, but the course is not scored. And most students are bigger, stronger, and butcher (pun intended) than he.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    This policy has been the same in France for the past 20 (maybe 30?) years. Little angels are not allowed to fail and I don't know why. The violent reaction from parents is identical and some teachers are scared.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago

    That's just not true. Elementary school students only repeat a year in exceptional cases, because it has been scientifically proven that repeating a grade actually worsens performance at that age. They move up to the next grade, but their poor results are not swept under the rug. In middle and high school, however, repeating a year is certainly possible; I repeated a year in high school myself, and that wasn't thirty years ago. In middle school, you can fail the brevet exam. In a general high school track, you can be rejected or redirected to a technological high school, while students in a technological track can be sent to a vocational high school.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago

    Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago

    When I was in school, anything below 67% was failing, so that number on its own is a shocker. But, yeah, these young people are the future of their regions and countries and that seems like a very bad thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    The whole idea of the American education system of teachers grading their own students and essentially being able to just arbitrarily decide passes or fails is completely wild.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Wait, who should be grading the students?

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