US Education in rough shape as scores plummet

This is definitely a downside to the COVID response, but I do expect these scores to rebound at least somewhat if not fully as students go back to regular schooling.

 

Sorry but public schools have been in rough shape for years now. If you can afford it, get your kids into private school or home school them.

 

A large segment of the population has never valued education. This includes our representatives at every level. There are solutions, but said representatives don’t want to provide the necessary resources and salary increases. This is especially the case in the red states. Additionally, in some areas education has, like everything else in this country, become politicized. For example, there’s a shameless candidate for the school board in Polk County whose yard signs say “EDUCATE NOT INDOCTRINATE”. I know him. He wants just the opposite.

 

The RESPONSE to covid was the issue, not covid itself. Schools never should've been closed. That is a direct result of the teachers unions. Vote out anyone who was for school lockdowns come Nov.

 

This is of course deliberate

 

I don’t even actually believe it.

 

Yeah, you cant really sweepingly say public schools are bad or in rough shape, they aren't funded or supported the same everywhere. Which is true of private and charters too.

 

They definitely want to ax the Dept of Ed and billions in education funding. Rick Scott revealed it in a recent plan

 

The quality of public schools, and private ones, varies greatly from school to school. Also it varies within the school.
My son was in IB in high school and said it was lot more difficult than UF.

 

When I was in the honors program at UF, that is what all the guys from the IB schools said back then as well.

 

We have a teacher problem in this country. Significantly less teachers now than pre-pandemic. Taking on the teacher's union and making the problem worse is the opposite of genius.

What we should be doing is paying teachers more, and start treating them as educated professionals. Too many people simply don't value education, nor teachers, and treat teachers as slaves, or glorified nannies. This problem existed before COVID, and the pandemic only made it worse.

 

This begs the question as to where the responsibility lies.

State legislatures set education policies, curriculum, funding, materials to be used, and testing companies. Schools and particularly teachers have been easy targets of such attacks while being locked up in their classrooms unable to defend themselves.

Republican legislatures are like the Egyptian Pharaohs in the time of Moses when Pharaoh said the slaves had to make bricks without straw, they had to glean the stubble from the field at night, and the tally of bricks had to remain the same. They don’t fix the problem, they just make the job more difficult to do. A large part of the problem is all the ills of society have been laid at the school house door for schools to solve. Parents want to drop off a 5 year old, and pick up a fully physically and emotionally healthy, and highly educated 18 year old with no responsibility on their part.

All anyone has to do is look at the top ranking countries in education to see the priority in this country is not education, but how to siphon money from a multibillion dollar public education system into private hands.

 

certainly, the drumbeat of the teacher as the enemy has grown in just the last few years. The idea that teachers are convincing kids to change their gender, that they're trying to convince your kids that whites are evil, etc ...
They must be stopped!

Meanwhile, yes, it was inevitable that school closures would have a negative effect on education. I don't know what the best solution would have been.

 

I agree and would add that teaching is an art, and each student is a different material on which to create an educated work. However teachers are asked to be assembly line workers producing widgets with materials that may be defective. Sort of like being told to make a cherry pie but the cherries they’re given are sometimes good but sometimes rotten.

 

I don't blame teachers, but the teachers unions gave zero shits about kids. They used the pandemic as a money grab only. Until people admit that and get rid of those in charge we will have people questioning the learning environment in the US.

 

I agree, there are some bad ones out there.

 

Like any profession, not all teachers are great. But how do you measure how good a teacher is? Student achievement? That's biased. A teacher in a school in an upper-middle class area will have students significantly more prepared to learn than one in a lower class area. It would significantly skew results.

Most of the bad teachers don't really last that long. It's not like they are in the profession for the money.

 

I think that's only partly correct. I was on the Board and Executive committee of my daughter's private school in Atlanta for a number of years.

In trying to better understand the economic dynamics of public vs private school in the area, we (the Board) undertook a comparative study of school funding.

The simple fact was that each surrounding major metro County (Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett) spent MORE $$ per capita on educating students than the area private schools did (by about 20%, to my recollection, it's been about a decade), but

1. Public schools had significant layers of administration and middle management that sucked up a ton of money with little to no educational value; and

2. Private schools obviously had better wherewithal to conduct capital campaigns for targeted fund raising (facilities, etc.), which have languished badly at most public schools, especially in the inner city.

But from a raw operating $/student standpoint, the day to day operations of public schools were better funded on a $/student basis, which was surprising to me.