September 13, 2023

"I don’t know how this would ever happen or what would have to happen to get this to change, but just as a whole, the parents, the community in general, just need to trust the teachers."

Said Allie Pribula, who taught elementary school in Pennsylvania from 2019 to the end of the last school year, quoted in "No One Wants to Be a Teacher Anymore. Can You Blame Them?" (NYT).
[There's a] crisis of teachers quitting because they were pushed to their limits by children’s pandemic-related behavioral and emotional setbacks, staffing shortages that forced them to take on roles beyond their normal remit, including lunch and bus duty, and... culture war vitriol.... [And f]ewer college and university students want to become teachers, and the new teacher pipeline is drying up....

68 comments:

Crimso said...

Gee, I wonder what could have caused parents to no longer simply trust all teachers (assuming they ever actually did).

gspencer said...

Teaching per se is a rather enjoyable and rewarding experience.

And one that can never be experience in a public school in today dysfunctional American society, principally most of your day involves the doing or undoing of things unrelated to teaching per se.

Skeptical Voter said...

Our two daughters went through the local public schools K-12 in the late 70s and 80s. They had some wonderful teachers (and also some who were not so much). They got a decent education and went on to college. My wife and I believed in the public school system; we could easily have sent our children to private schools. I spent 32 years as a volunteer serving on the civil service commission for our local school district--because I believed in public schools and because I also believe in giving back to my neighbors and community.

These days I look at my local school district--and the school board that governs it--and think that if I had school age children, sending them to the local public school would constitute child abuse. Woke activists of various stripes, and the teachers union and its political agenda mean that K-12 students in our district get indoctrinated, but not educated.

And that is a shame, because one of the prime duties of any society--of any age or location--was and is to educate its youth. A good and effective teacher is a jewel. An indoctrinator--not so much.

CJinPA said...

I served on a PA school board for eight years. Teachers are like Congress, in that most people like their own Congressman/woman (and re-elected them over and over) but give low marks to Congress as a whole. Parents generally like their kids' teachers.

I can say in my experience with the 10th largest school district in PA (out of 500), "culture war vitriol" has NO direct impact on the lives of average teachers. It just doesn't reach them. It barely reaches the average school board meeting.

I suspect this is the NYT doing what it does, shaping the article into a predetermined narrative.

Yinzer said...

We USED TO trust the teachers. They have abused that trust and will have a hard time earning it back. If I had kids in a public school now, I would attend every board meeting. I never felt the need to do this when my kids were in school.

stutefish said...

At this point I think it's on the teachers' unions and the rest of the educational community to establish standards of transparency, accountability, and parental engagement that encourage and earn such trust.

Parents don't trust teachers because teachers keep trying to wall parents off from the education of their children.

Conservatives don't trust teachers because teachers keep trying to be leading indicators in the culture wars, instead of trailing indicators.

Citizens don't trust teachers because public school educational outcomes cold suck, and because unions protect teachers from the consequences of their bad behavior.

Imagine a Catholic priest saying "the parents, the community in general, just need to trust the clergy." Trust is earned. You want a line of social credit? Try not having the social credit score of a no-talent assclown.

CJinPA said...

BTW the teacher cited taught for THREE WHOLE YEARS. Plenty of teachers burn out in that time, without a pandemic or "cultural vitriol."

PM said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Joe Smith said...

Trust but verify.

When you start teaching things that make my 13-year-old daughter want to amputate her breasts, we will have an issue...

PM said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
BUMBLE BEE said...

Trust NOTHING...

https://youtu.be/o6t31R4tI10

tim maguire said...

Not super surprised. Despite all the criticism (fair and otherwise) about the state of education today, most teachers are dedicated people doing good work. They don't want to be involved in the culture war any more than we want them to be.

Until we get smart about schools--focus on the core curriculum, fire all the DEI bureaucrats, free the teachers to discipline disruptive students, outlaw teacher's unions, etc.--it will get worse.

Birches said...

El Oh El

rcpjr said...

We did that and discovered that there are a lot of degenerate teachers who care more about indoctrination than actual education, so the trust ship has sailed. In God we trust; all others must show proof.

Roger Sweeny said...

As a former teacher:

A lot of blame has to go to the people who run schools, and the people who come up with the policies (in ed schools and state education departments).

1. Your job as a teacher gets much tougher and unpleasant if some students continually disrupt things. But teachers are expected to deal with any student who pollutes the learning environment. Sending a student out to the principal's office will often simply result in his coming back a little later.

2. Teachers are expected to deal with students with wildly different levels of preparation. Social promotion leads to ninth graders who can hardly read or figure. Tracking is considered a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing. So some education preparation programs actually tell you to work up three different lesson plans, for the middle majority, the bright bored, and the lagging (often bored in a different way, and more inclined to vent their frustration). My department chair said, "Teach to the 30th percentile."

3. There is a lot of bureaucratic Mickey Mouse, required tasks that don't help students learn, irrelevant and/or useless professional developments, reporting requirements that take up time and energy.

rcpjr said...

We did that for decades and have repeatedly discovered many degenerate teachers preying on kids or more interested in indoctrination than education, so the trust ship has sailed. In God we trust; all others must show proof.

M said...

“ culture war vitriol”

It is the teachers and administration that are pushing radical LGBTQ propaganda on people’s kids. And like all Leftists they push everything to the furthest extent possible and then act like that is the norm and pretend to be confused why anyone is upset. Homosexuality and gender bending do not belong in schools AT ALL. If young adults or teens feel “different” than the norm there are massive amounts of LGBTQ propaganda on the internet for them to reach out to. We do NOT need it in our schools at all. Especially the grooming tactics being used on elementary age kids.

dbp said...

"No One Wants to Be a Teacher Anymore. Can You Blame Them?"

Yes, I do blame them. Every part of their job that they don't like is a direct and predictable result of how they've been running public schools. The problem dates back at least decades but only became impossible to ignore once the Covid response opened parent's eyes to what was going on.

Kai Akker said...

Which step in the grief process is "resignation"? Or is her reaction still denial and anger? Her account is so clueless; she has missed the larger phenomenon. Her real complaints are intensely stupid. But, ignoring those, I'm sure some teachers found the work during the pandemic extremely difficult, but who dictated those terms? Without going all bananas about what teacher unions did to public education, the good part is that the monopoly system is breaking up, piece by piece. And this article is just more evidence of that.

It will still take a while, but new models are appearing. Are they appearing fast enough? I don't know. But also, maybe a new kind of person will become a teacher. I thought some of the bright younger people who found the businesses at which they worked failing during the pandemic would take advantage of the situation to become each the teacher of five, six or seven children of nearby parents. A mini-school, a tutorship arrangement. With zilch overhead, a lot of possibilities arise. The one big problem to the process of renewal is the huge sunk costs of the public system, especially the endless benefits of healthcare and pensions that will be liabilities for a couple-three decades still ahead.

Jeff Vader said...

Perhaps mainstreaming problem kids and then totaling removing discipline wasn’t such a great idea

Amadeus 48 said...

If this keeps up, the whole country will be like Chicago. Nobody learns much, but the teachers are all rated outstanding.

mezzrow said...

"the new teacher pipeline is drying up."

This is said as if it is a bad thing. Having traveled through that pipeline myself, I believe that pipeline houses the problem. Remove the filtering process that removes those who do not conform ideologically to remaking society in a single direction and you may find the teachers you need. You have the teachers you wanted to have right now.

How is that working? Those who lose the mandate of heaven are the last to know it is gone.

Once the trust was there. Now it isn't. Why? What happened?

Banzel said...

Many districts also now require them to be social workers in regards to gender and sexuality issues. Presume there will be a harmful parental reaction and act in the parent's stead. Districts and teachers need to rediscover and stop transgressing this professional boundary. If there is actual harm or abuse report it and let the social workers do their thing.

Leland said...

In other news, the home-schooling business is booming. Perhaps the teachers ought to have listened to the concerns of parents and the general community.

Hassayamper said...

This is an easy fix. Education degrees are a joke, the education schools are more interested in socialist indoctrination than imparting any useful knowledge, and education majors are the intellectual dregs of any university. This cannot be disputed by any serious person whose livelihood is independent of the education cartel and teachers' union.

Teaching can be done at least as adequately by anyone with a bachelor's degree, maybe after a month or two of instruction in classroom management. The pupils would be better educated than they are now. It would also have the happy effect of driving much corrosive left-wing wokery right out of the schools, and breaking the back of the monstrously worthless and evil teachers' unions.

Big Mike said...

”… but just as a whole, the parents, the community in general, just need to trust the teachers.”

Get a time machine and go back forty or fifty years. When you get there educate new teachers on how to teach boys instead of pushing Ritalin. Go back to 2010 and explain that Common Core math is bunk, and that reinventing Roman numerals under the guise of “friendly numbers” is ridiculous. Go back to the start of the pandemic and explain that doing everything in their power to destroy trust in the K-12 teaching profession and destroy respect for the teachers themselves will only lead to heartache later. Had no teacher ever learned about sowing and reaping? Apparently Allie Pribula hadn’t.

From where I sit, as the grandfather of two precocious toddlers, the best that the teachers can do right now is to open themselves up to parents. Stop trying to sabotage boys. Encourage children who are curious. Genuinely deserve trust and respect by proving every day with every child that you’re there for the kids to assist them to learn, and that you will hide nothing from parents when it comes to their kids. A small start, but the alternative is that things will only get worse.

n.n said...

Secular trust or faith is lost with exercise of liberal license.

Temujin said...

No one wants to be a teacher anymore. Why? Because they're suddenly held to account? Not just the talk about porn or no porn for kids. That aside. The kids aren't learning. And it's been going on for years. And with each year kids in the US fall further and further behind other industrialized/technology driven nations. And until covid, only a handful of people were talking about the fact that kids cannot read, add, or compose paragraphs using proper English.

Covid opened a lot of eyes. I know well before covid we were hearing teachers complaining about having to 'teach to the test', and yes- that's a viable complaint. But...why aren't the kids learning? And why have we continued to slough off the classics in favor of what's new and hot? The fundamentals in all topics are being buried under. So covid opened a lot of parents eyes. They got to see what was actually being taught, and how it was being taught. And very few were impressed. Many were disgusted.

And so...people are questioning, rightfully so, who is teaching my kid and what are they teaching them? Teachers don't want that kind of scrutiny.

Ice Nine said...

>"...but just as a whole, the parents, the community in general, just need to trust the teachers,"<

Yeah, thanks, but we already tried that. Fool me once...

Well, wait -- get your leftist loons and your union under control, and we might consider it again. *Might*.

Wa St Blogger said...

...but just as a whole, the parents, the community in general, just need to trust the teachers.""

Tell you what, sunshine, get rid of the teachers and administrators who demonstrate contempt for the values of the parents of the students whom you teach and you might regain the trust you crave. If you want to make teaching a noble profession again, support the people you supposedly serve, don't dis-respect them. Your organizations' (unions, boards and administrators) put their needs above the needs of their clients. Don't expect your clients to hold you in high esteem.

Inga said...

“Last year, The Washington Post tallied more than 160 educators who had been fired or resigned in the prior two years due to “culture war” issues. There are reports of harassment and threats emanating from school board meetings.”

Nope, can’t blame them.

Aggie said...

But isn't this a natural consequence when half the parents don't want you to be teachers, either?

The Teacher's Union is a natural blame target for all of this disgust, because its spokesperson spent the entire pandemic spouting nonsense about their professional hazards, being exposed to children, while the rest of the service industry (police, fire, ambulance, nursing, food service, sanitation, landscaping, etc etc etc) carried on without a peep. And then, as a topper, started broadcasting their uber-progressive stances on gender and sexual perversions in the Elemntary School classrooms on up.

Don't Start Nuthin', Won't Be Nuthin'.

rcocean said...

Sorry Teachers have lost the trust of parents for a reason. You don't get to subvert the parents beliefs and impose your own, and maintain the trust.

BTW, there a LOT of reasons why teachers are not getting enough recruits. First, School violence. Adminstrators are now taking the position that the child is always right, and that they can act up in class, and evn abuse and assault teachers, and nothing will be done.

Nobody wants to be a target.

Second, not every teacher, or wannabe teacher, is a brain-washed libtard. And they no desire to teach "the party line" to kids or to work in PC/SJW enviroment where one mistep will lead to dismissal.

And here's some blunt talk, there's the matter of race. Large numbers of whites have no desire to teach in inner-city schools, and many that do, change their minds and leave after a couple years. There's not enough "teachers of color" to fill the gap.

And finally, teacher are - or used to be - civic minded. Selfish people can make more $$ doing something else. But guess what? Libtards have destroyed any sense of patriotism or community. And religious leaders seem to be on mission to destroy religion. So, people are becoming more selfish and less civic Minded. So, less teacher recruits.

when my mother went to school in the 40s, kids stood at their desks and Said "Good morning Miss so-and-so" when she entered the room. act out and you whacked with a ruler. Act out again and you got sent to principle's office. And if it went on, you got kicked out.

We don't need to go back to that, but there's no reason why anyone but a saint, a boob, or a libtard whould be a teacher these days.

Rick67 said...

This caught my attention because (1) my wife retired early as a public classroom teacher right about when the pandemic started and (2) several of my parishioners are public school teachers. We heard from these teachers about how stressful and chaotic was the effort to switch from in-person to online teaching. My wife heard from former colleagues and felt like she got out just in time.

Teaching (at least in Louisiana) became much more stressful and difficult partly because of education reforms about 12-13 years ago.

Despite my close connection to many teachers I can't agree with "just trust the teachers". It's increasingly clear the education system in this nation has been largely captured by socialists. Karlyn Borysenko managed to infiltrate the Socialism 2023 conference in Chicago this month. She guessed half those present were teachers and reports that the conference was heavily focused on education. Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association, spoke for a few minutes on schools as "centers of socialist organizing". Talks advocated for more creative ways to train children to become little revolutionaries.

Education is how Marxists solve the "problem of reproduction".

Free Manure While You Wait! said...

Those are union jobs. What is the union doing to help its members?

Wendy said...

I can believe it and this is a trend that is not new but was accelerated by the pandemic POLICIEs, and cultural warfare.

My parents were teachers (now retired) and these are some aspects that they have talked about throughout my childhood, specifically the lunch and bus duty. Honestly, those duties should be part-time and not require any type of degree. Not everything in a school needs to be or should be run by people with education degrees, using teachers to cover study halls (in Jr and Sr high school), lunch duty, and bus duty is a misuse of resources and expensive one at that.

However, the behavior is out of control and that sits on the parents. Highly disruptive kids are problematic but if there is no discipline and control at home there will be none in the school either. The anti-socialization of pandemic policies and the institutional fear that was instilled in and out of school did not help things at all. I would say what we are seeing is a disconnect between chronological age and emotional age, which is not a new phenomenon but one that many parents in the adoption community are familiar with. I saw it firsthand pre-pandemic, and when the pandemic hit I saw it happening to a lot of families and kids, and it is not being addressed on a societal level. These problems will be here for quite some time.

On the cultural front, some segments of society are asking teachers to do more than just teach the basics. We need to go back to the basics, facts, and very few feelings. Beyond the basic be kind everyone is different in some way but in most ways, we are the same, feelings shouldn't be a part of school. It sounds harsh and there is really no clean way to completely remove them but they should be as much in the spotlight as they are.

FullMoon said...

"Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century."
Gee, I wonder why?
She also mentions fear of violence. Have to agree there. No respect and few consequences.

Reddit is full of teachers whining about how tough it is. Some have legitimate complaints, like getting beat down in the hallway. Most are crying about mean parents wanting to be involved.

Gusty Winds said...

Teachers and their unions pushed for school closings and lockdowns. They more than any other profession as a group helped fuel the COVID panic. I saw young female teachers on community boards asking for lawyer recommendations to draft a will...in case they had to go back to school on site. Meanwhile...all the ditchdiggers were working on site. Get over yourself.

...pushed to their limits by children’s pandemic-related behavioral and emotional setbacks, staffing shortages that forced them to take on roles beyond their normal remit...

They created these conditions with their panic liberal bullshit. Now they are quitting. Good. Let there be a teacher shortage. Then perhaps people who are knowledgeable in a subject can teach, instead of some generic "education major" who doesn't know the subject outside the textbook.

Mr. T. said...

No, teachers need to REGAIN the trust of parents of thr public after pissing it away with the aid of the teacher unions for the last 30 years.

Gusty Winds said...

Why should a community "just trust the teachers"?? We pay them. We fund EVERYTHING and are their employers. They want the inmates to run the asylum without answering to their real employers...the local tax payers.

And where do liberal white women want to teach? In nice, conservative, safe, supported, and well funded school districts like the ones in Waukesha County, WI. But they want the autonomy to fill the library with "how to give your best buddy a blow job" books. They want to march kids around in rainbow parades.

They want to teach kids that their Dads, Uncles, Brothers, and Grandfathers are part of the evil patriarchy.

Any liberal Teacher that quits in a conservative community is an improvement to the school district. Places like Waukesha and Arrowhead School Districts elected school boards that aren't putting up with their shit anymore.

Fine. Quit. Another wants your position. Go teach in Milwaukee or Chicago Public Schools. Have fun. Heroes work there.

JAORE said...

No one wants to be a cop either.

Perhaps we need to tone down the knee jerk demonizing a bit.

Or direct some of the ire away from the front line people and towards the managers.

Saint Croix said...

We're with the union.

Trust us!

The earth is about to blow up.

Tranny dance in the quad.

Let us know if you need drugs or help running away from your family.

And here's how you can help blot out the sun.

Mark said...

'No one wants to be a cop either.'

Somehow busting police unions is not the universally suggested solution as it is for teachers, despite them protecting bad employees just like the teacher unions.

MayBee said...

The pandemic-created behavioral issues are a big problem. Kids have decided nothing matters.

Jersey Fled said...

Maybe Sweden has the right idea.

https://apnews.com/article/sweden-digital-education-backlash-reading-writing-1dd964c628f76361c43dbf3964f7dbf4

gahrie said...

As I public school teacher myself, I can't express this strongly enough....

DO NOT TRUST TEACHERS, OR ANYONE, TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT YOUR CHILDREN!

chickelit said...

Immigrant children will step up to meet demand. In many communities, immigrant children are a majority anyways. Reproduction is a job too many legacy Americans refuse to do.

Patrick Henry was right! said...

There's been a "teacher shortage" for fifty years. It's a con for higher pay. When the teacher college cartel is broken up, then come see me. I tried for ten years to get a teaching job with a BA and a JD. No local board would hire outside the teacher college cartel.

Big Mike said...

At 1:47 I wrote:

“From where I sit, as the grandfather of two precocious toddlers …”

As of a couple minutes ago this needs to read:

“From where I sit, as the grandfather of two precocious toddlers with another grandchild on the way …”

No word yet on gender.

The Godfather said...

I have no objection to unionization of teachers -- like other employees, teachers have the right to be represented in negotiations with their employers -- and they often needed it. But unions have no business imposing subject matter standards on public schools. WE THE People own the public schools. If the schools are teaching the wrong stuff, the parents have every right to object.

Prof. M. Drout said...

MANY of my former students are public school teachers. I see what they post on FB all the time. The things that cause them to quit teaching are NOT involved parents. Universally it is bad administration: time-wasting, one-size-fits-all, useless paperwork, mandatory "trainings" that don't have anything to do with teaching, immensely complicated disciplinary proceedings that eat up all a teacher's time, arbitrary treatment of teachers, etc., etc., etc.
Probably a close second is idiotic curricula that are constantly changing. No one talks about "Common Core" any more, and even Bill Gates admitted that it was a failure, but it's still around, eating up time and forcing teachers to use awful materials. Take a look at a Common Core math textbook sometime: it will CAUSE you to have ADHD in probably less than 15 minutes. NO ONE can learn from this crapola.
What we are learning that hard way is that you can't replace professional judgment with algorithms and "best practices" (which never are), but we've lowered professional standards so much that we probably can't just start "trusting" the people who are in the professions. We desperately need some way to identify the excellent ones--and the bad ones--and treat them appropriately.

Mason G said...

"like other employees, teachers have the right to be represented in negotiations with their employers"

That works when the employers are the ones footing the bill for whatever contract they end up agreeing to. This is not the case with regards to public education, however. The government makes the agreement while the taxpayers cover the cost. And the union makes donations to the politicians they're "negotiating" with.

What could possibly go wrong?

MayBee said...

Congratulations, Big Mike!!!

Josephbleau said...

Even in the early seventies women's opportunities were, Nurse, Secretary, or Teacher. This led to having women teachers that were extremely smart, who would now be Doctors, Lawyers, Executive VPs of HR (Ha ha, no they would be CEO's), etc. My 5th grade teacher probably had an IQ of 160.

That really inspired me as a kid, to have that kind of mental horsepower focused on me. But no more, the 95% CI of teachers is probably 95 to 105 now.

gilbar said...

back in the '90's.. gilbar desperately trying to score with a co-ed..
The co-ed says, indignantly: "do You REALIZE? that GARBAGE MEN make MORE than teachers????
gilbar (realizing he's getting Nowhere) says: "Maybe YOU should become a Garbageman?"
to which the co-ed replies: "GROSS! i would NEVER do such a disgusting jobs as that!!!"

If teaching ISN'T easy money.. Why do SO MANY girls pick it as a career?
(afterall.. EVEN GARBAGEMEN make more money!)

Rich said...

The major problem with public education is that we are unwilling to separate the feral, unparented, disruptive, and otherwise unteachable kids from the kids who are there to learn. This is the secret of private education/high-performing charters and is far more important to outcomes than the wealth/educational attainment of the parents. Teachers have never been the problem with our educational system and legions more would flock joyfully to the public schools if they had a reasonable chance of spending a significant fraction of the day in functional, orderly classrooms filled with attentive children.

Biff said...

I don't doubt that the pandemic made things worse, but let's no pretend that things were fine before the pandemic.

A data point: Several years before the pandemic, Yale created a program to make it easier for mid/late career people with appropriate real-world experience to become teachers of subjects where it has been difficult to recruit qualified teachers.

On paper, it was a pretty solid deal: participants would spend 18 months (IIRC) getting an Ivy League masters degree in education, a Connecticut teaching certificate, with all tuition waived and a $25k/year stipend.

The only catch was that participants had to teach three years (IIRC) in the New Haven public schools.

The program was eliminated after just a few years because of disappointing enrollment. My recollection is that Yale never met its admissions goals in any year the program was in place.

(I apologize for the "IIRCs." Yale trumpeted the program when it was launched, and I even considered entering it when I had one of my periodic moments of career change ennui, but the various news articles about the program and its demise seem to have disappeared beyond my reach in the Google memory hole.)

Paul said...

I do support the cops.. that does not mean I will blindly trust them.

I support the teachers... that does not mean I will blindly trust them.

I support my government... BUT THAT DAMN SURE DOES NOT MEAN I will blindly trust them.

All school boards should be elected by the parents of the kids in school a that time!


Yancey Ward said...

"No word yet on gender."

You will only have to wait 16 years or so to find out.

Yancey Ward said...

With the joke out of the way, congrats on the good news.

Tina Trent said...

Blame the schools that train the teachers. They were infiltrated and ideologically captured by radical Marxists and literal Maoists decades ago.

AERA, the American Educational Research Association, the largest and most influential association of teacher-educators, elected Bill Ayers as their National Vice President of Curricular Studies for a decade.

That is pretty much the most powerful position in the country in terms of deciding what K-12 schoolteachers are trained to teach.

The terrorist cop killer Ayers is a rock star to aspiring teachers. At the one AERA conference I observed, flocks of plump teacher trainees in drop-waist dresses followed him swooning and knelt at his feet for his "fireside chat."

This is what is teaching your children's teachers. And others need not apply.

Rusty said...

If there is one thing public education has taught me is that of the two people who wished not to be in the class room the teacher wanted out worse than me. 95% of K through 9 don't belong there.

Static Ping said...

If you want to deal with a teacher shortage - dubious that it exists, but let's assume - then you relax the licensing standards. Given that the current licensing standards for teachers are illogical, this can be done without negatively impacting education.

Currently, teachers need to get a college degree and then need to get more education to advance. Generally, education degrees are the least rigorous degrees this side of the "X Studies" degrees. Basically, you get an education degree, which is highly dubious to actually be useful, and essentially a light version of whatever focus the teacher has (mathematics, English, etc.) The education part could be replaced with vocational training for less money and time; given that on-the-job training is the most important part of learning how to be a teacher, this makes sense. For the subject being taught, there are many people out there that have the expertise - far more than the licensed teachers - through a lifetime of experience, that would like to be teachers and would make good teachers, but don't want to bother going to school to get the necessary credentials.

The problem is the teachers union wants power, and the current system is to their liking.

mikee said...

Get back to teaching the reading, the writing, the arithmetic, and stop the social engineering, and see what happens.

takirks said...

Nobody wants to participate in a failed system.

And, the system has failed. Harder and harder, the more resources we give it.

Want people to be teachers? Stop failing; do your damn jobs, and quit with the proselytizing. For anything. Teachers are not supposed to be brainwashing their charges.

guitar joe said...

There's plenty of stuff with which I'd have disagreement with folks here, but I am with them in their skepticism about the abilities of teachers. I went to Catholic school for 7 years. The nuns cared, the school was in touch with my parents when my grades started to slip. Could be different now, but when I transferred to public school in 1969, I noted that I was being taught things the nuns already taught me and that few teachers and no admin staff cared either way about my performance in class. My parents found out how I was doing when they got my report card. I love how so many progressives my age sang, "Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone" with Pink Floyd, but now tell me how noble teachers are. And teachers delayed even longer any return to school during the pandemic because they didn't want to return to work, not because of any health and safety issues. Education degrees, even at the doctoral level, are as easy to get as psych degrees, maybe easier.

Jim at said...

All school boards should be elected by the parents of the kids in school a that time!

Oh, so those of us who don't have kids in the schools should just keep forking over our money with no say in how it's spent?

LibertarianLeisure said...

I work in an Elementary school. It is not so much a teacher shortage, but more the teacher supportive roles that districts have shortages,but instead in the roles of the educational technicians, substitute teachers, bus drivers, classroom aides, recess and lunchroom aides, custodians. Schools require many roles to function daily.

Another telling component in schools is this: please find graph showing exponentially increased administrative positions as opposed to student amount growth and added teacher statistics, not even close.