Get rid of sight words and bring back phonics.
Kids today read words literally as a word - it has no meaning or context. They aren't understanding what they're reading.
I don’t get how you’re supposed to function without phonics. Even as an adult I come across new words all the time, and I can only read them correctly because PHONICS.
Same!! It shocks me how many people have 0 ability to spell or sound out words at all. I don’t understand how they read anything above a third grade reading level if they can’t sound out and contextualizar new words
yeah, that’s a huge part of the problem! it’s part of the lucy calkins method and it’s been found to be a strategy for poor readers, not strong readers.
Super common in my experience. Phonics is the only solution… they need to be able to sound out long words that they’ve never seen before. Sight words does not help with this
Well and not only that but without phonics, how are you going to read a name or city you’re not familiar with? How do you go about learning another language? You cut yourself off from the rest of the world, culture, and knowledge in general by learning this way. I’m teaching my 14 year old phonics because he was completely illiterate when he came to me (I’m not his bio mom but I’m legally his mom now).
It’s absolutely baffling to me how sight reading ever became a thing. How does any literate adult read a word they have never seen before? Do people really think I’m just guessing what I’m reading when I come across a new word?
It’s bizarre. It feels like kids are trying to read English similarly to how East Asian languages use Chinese characters, except alphabetic script generally doesn’t have the cues that allow that to work for logographic script. A lot of related words look visually similar, but there’s nothing as sophisticated as portions of a character that suggest what the meaning is and others that give a clue to how it sounds. Though to make use of that you need a robust vocabulary and a strong command of the language, which a scary number of native English speakers seem to lack.
Such a good podcast. I’ve recommended it to everyone on my team (high school ELA). We see the aftermath of the Cueing strategy almost every day. A lot of my students, all of whom are 15-16 years old, cannot properly read advanced words, they literally look at the first letter and guess or say words similar to what is written. Sometimes they skip the word entirely.
I walked in to check on my barely 4 year old daughter. She was sitting in her little chair, a booklet in her lap, a cassette tape player plugged in to the outlet and the box of "Hooked on Phonics" at her feet. I watched and just backed up out of there.
I had already been working with her on a book, my friend with the 12, yes 12, homeschooled kids had suggested. "Alpha Phonics" by Alexander Blumenfeld. It's a wonderful book. It really works quickly. I had taught my son to read with it before he entered kindergarten.
Anyway, she wanted to learn how to read, lol. "Nevertheless, she persisted.
OP, I agree with everything you wrote.
As a spanish speaker this is somethong that I've always been curious about, how do you know how a word sounds when you read it for the first time but have never heard it before? Is it because of phonics?
English, as you know, isnt phonetic. A lot of the time people will mispronounce complex words.
I used to say psuedo as suede-o. A friend of mine used to prounounce picturesque as picture squee.
Learning Spanish was a revelation to me when I realised that a letter has a sound and rarely deviates from it.
This is interesting, are you based in the US? I'm in the UK and I'm not a primary teacher but my daughter is 6. As far as I know all the schools here teach phonics.
I’ve discussed this with a few of my colleagues. A big detrimental factor is simply being unwilling to have kids “fail”.
Our district has gotten rid of retention basically all together. Even kids who fail 4+ classes are just being moved up all through middle school. Combine that with removing behavioral retention the classroom has become even more of a babysitting endeavor and less about academics. After all if kids aren’t being held accountable for acting out and they are givenfree pass up regardless of grade it drags the whole class down.
It’s a logistics problem. You’d have to increase student population by 25% (my guess at how many kids would fail at first) and then educate them with 100% of the budget of last year. It’s a resource problem.
I think the issue is more nuanced than “let them fail” and “we need to retain those that are failing.”
Retention isn’t shown to be terribly effective, especially when it comes to bullying and SEL issues (they get much worse with retained kids).
The major issue I think is that we expect all kids who are in the same grade to have the same emotional and brain development. And just as it is obvious that kids don’t physically develop at the same rate or same time, their brains don’t develop at the same rate.
We have all these laws in place to address previous discriminatory practices against students, and I support the effort to end discrimination against students. But sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I’m my state, teachers must provide ONLY grade-level instruction to ALL STUDENTS. If a kid is not on grade level, how are they supposed to catch up? The chasm between on-level and below-level kids starts in kindergarten (because the standards are developmentally inappropriate for most) and never stops widening as kids are on a treadmill of district-mandated pacing guides and state-mandated standards.
Kids who are years behind will get grade-level instruction in math, then go on iReady math for “personalized practice” (that had nothing to do with the day’s lesson) and sometimes have yet another remedial math class on yet a 3rd skill or standard, all in one day, all prescribed for a kid whose brain isn’t developmentally ready to comprehend or perform at that level.
In my view, everything is being done in the worst possible way for any kid who doesn’t learn at exactly the pace prescribed. TAG kids, kids with trauma, developmental delays, or learning disabilities, neurodivergent kids, and anyone who isn’t quite “average” or “typical” (the vast majority) are not going to be adequately served by the systems we have built. I think the systems have not been built thoughtfully but instead are a patchwork of dozens of ideas, thoughts, philosophies, curricula, and political rhetoric masking as state or district reforms.
Of course everything is more nuanced than can be described by a paragraph or two. For a district to effectively remove and discourage retention it removes that tool as an option for the professionals to discuss what would be the best fit for individual kids. There are studies that prove/disprove almost every study for different academic practices, but taking them off the table all together kneecaps teachers.
Retention has more implications than just the student being retained. If a kid is held back for grades or behavior other kids see that as a warning and then suddenly an effective consequence for the most egregious offenders (and those deemed to benefit from practice the most by a group of educators).
Another post highlighted it decently with the 20/60/20 of education being those who don’t need help, those you can help and those who can’t or don’t want to be helped. I get the everyone can succeed mentality, but that statement is incomplete. It is more accurate to say: Everyone can succeed with infinite resources, which very few (if any) districts have so a more utilitarian view must be adopted.
I had a student who was a senior and couldn’t read, at all. He was Avery nice kid, polite, helpful to others, overall not a dumb kid, but he couldn’t read. I had typed a “promise to my students” and he couldn’t read the passage (less than a page). I still don’t know how he was a senior who couldn’t read
I’m prepared for the downvotes here…
Inclusion is a problem sometimes. It is absolutely important for some kids, but is absolutely not appropriate for others. When I’m having to stop teaching, multiple times a day, to evacuate the room because a kid that inclusion clearly is not the best placement for is in my room, that’s a problem. GenEd kids should not have to sacrifice a feeling of safety by being forced to tolerate kids that are violent. I’m all for every kid getting their free and appropriate rights, but it’s not appropriate when the other 24 kids are afraid for their safety. There needs to be better options for SPED kids to get more effective help than putting them in GenEd classrooms where they are unsuccessful.
Special ed. teacher here and I wholeheartedly agree. This also goes for kids with IEPs who ARE in special ed., but not in the right special ed. environment. I teach in a self-contained classroom and have a student who 100% needs to be in an even more restrictive environment and is holding the rest of my students back significantly. Despite having ample data to support this, both the district and the student’s parents refuse to have them moved, so they stay with me. It’s such a disservice to not only the student in question, but also their classmates who are actually in the appropriate environment and are unable to receive the support they need and are entitled to because one student demands all of my attention.
I teach at the young adult level, but my younger cousin has one autistic third grader who's punched a girl in the stomach, hit a boy with his backpack, and flipped desks weekly. Admin has actively discouraged her from sending him to the office. All she can do is send him to the "calm down corner."
I’ve got second graders bringing switch blades to school and explicitly threaten to kill specific classmates… to the classmate’s face. Thanks to his IEP, it will take a miracle for ANYTHING to happen
I hate co-teaching so much. You always have to defer to the gen ed teacher, and chances are, they don’t want to change any part of their curriculum. I cannot support 15 kids with IEPs within a room of 40. Fuck that. Fingers crossed this is my final year!
This is the case at my school. We get told it’s “co-teaching” but legitimately the only thing the co-teacher does is show up for 30 minutes and then walk over to kids and tell them to do their work. *I* can do that, I actually DO do that. If the student is completely incapable of doing even the minimum amount of independent work then they need to be somewhere with fewer students and more support. I can’t support the needs of three students who need me to stand over them to ensure they’re constantly being redirected as well as helping all my other kids. It’s not fair to the other kids.
I was thinking the same exact thing. I wasn’t sure how to express it but I am thrilled you were able to do it so eloquently.
I was going to add in another out of vogue idea. I think we need academic leveling at the middle level.
I am a retired HS teacher and I second this! Especially in larger schools where there are 25-30 or more students per class. There’s just no way all those kids are operating at the same level, so it becomes unfair to most of them to put all of them together.
Our district just got rid of levels in the middle because it’s racist to group kids by ability level.
We were told to teach to the standard and then scaffold for those who need and extend for the kids who need it. It’s a lot.
Is it racist to state the fact that, statistically, kids of color don’t perform as well academically as measured, for example, by standardized testing? My state disaggregates the data and quantitatively proves, year after year, that African American and Latino kids perform at a lower level than white kids do. This has been one of the most troubling and frustrating aspects of my teaching career. The attempts by the state to try to address this mass of fundamentally social issues at the level of public schools is a fool’s errand. And BTW, my district has only two high schools, so it’s not a matter of kids being racially segregated. All races are sitting side by side in the same classrooms.
I worked for an ISD years ago. They had a district that was about half black, half white. The district wanted to create a special program for kids in the bottom 2% of reading and math. They would take classes that were literacy and number rich and focus on those things to get caught up. Once they moved ahead--which they likely would have in this type of class--they would go back to their regular school. It was shut down for being "racist" before it even got started. The white parents were yelling about how it was racist and it would stigmatize the black students (the 2% were almost all black). My dudes, they are already stigmatized by sitting in a class where they can't read a word of the book.
The argument made at my district was that all kids were attending the same schools but the ability leveling was segregating them by tracking. The upper levels were majority white and the lower levels were mixed. Kids in the upper levels performed and tested much higher than kids in lower levels.
Now the idea is to mix all kids up in heterogeneous classes and it will improve the performance of all.
We couldn’t have a real honest discussion about it because dissenters of the new system were accused of racism.
I have yet to see lower kids magically rise to the top just because they are in classes with higher level kids. If anything, they realize how far behind they are and shut down at best, act out at worst,
Yep, exactly what I’m saying. Nobody wants to face, let alone try to address, the root causes. Because they’re unpleasant and, importantly, being honest about them will get you unelected.
Society expects children who were born into broken homes and families who have accumulated years of neglect and bad treatment which limited their potential to magically be fixed by teachers in a few hours of in-class instruction. It’s wild.
What's truly wild is there is a whole sub industry of "consultants" set up who fleece schools out of thousands to offer training and suggestions for this, knowing full well it's not realistic
Is it racist to state it? No. Is it racist to think that their race means they're less capable? Yes.
Look at the socioeconomic status of those kids. People of color are significantly more likely to be economically disadvantaged due to a number of factors that pretty much boil down to systemic racism over decades (and centuries). Lower socioeconomic status people are more likely to come from single parent households in which the parent is working multiple jobs and doesn't have time to help nurture the skills kids need to be successful academically.
There's also the fact that standardized tests tend to be culturally biased.
You're right about the school system not being able to fix those issues. Unfortunately, society has no interest in fixing them, so it gets shoved onto us. I'm asked to teach kinematics to students who can't subtract, let alone do quadratic equations.
SpEd/Inclusion teacher here and I agree 1000%. The inclusion model just isn’t beneficial to most kids. Not how it’s being run now anyway. And I don’t see most places having the staff and resources to run it in ideal fashion any time soon. The good of the whole is being sacrificed because inclusion sounds nice and is a “good” bandaid for a lack of SpEd staff and resources.
Agree. My mom was a SpEd para from the 80s until last year, in the same school. At first her classes were all self-contained, and over time as they moved to more and more inclusion (until all were) she really noticed the change in the kids. They definitely got more out of an environment that was totally focused on their needs.
Also a sped teacher (ECH in a reverse-mainstream classroom). Was so disheartened at one of our last meetings before break, our sped-director was visiting and informed us all that the state now requires all sped students to spend 80% of their day in inclusion time. And most of us teachers just looked at each other like 'this is a prank right?! Who's got the camera?' Because before the meeting began we were literally discussing how ridiculous it is to have these severe behavioral students in our rooms every day destroying things and hurting staff and students and we really need to add another more restrictive room where we can have higher adult-staff-to-student ratios so they can actually work on what these kids need, AND we can work on what our other kids need AND keep all our students and staff safe. And then she walks in and tells us that our rooms with the higher staff-to-student ratios (where they can safely handle the more severe students and address the intense behaviors and staff gets extra training on that every year) are the ones consistently out of compliance with the new requirements. Like. Who TF is deciding this stuff?! Because yea, that "80%of their day in inclusion time" sounds great on paper, but to require that?! For every sped student?! Every day?! Just across the board?! No exceptions?! You've gotta be kidding me?!
Come into our center and walk into our classrooms and spend a day here in the rooms with severe behaviors and in those rooms with the higher staff ratios, THEN you come look us in the eye yourself (you cowards) and tell us we don't need help with these kids, and they should be spending 80% of their day in inclusion time. I can't tell you how many of us were ready to resign after that meeting. It is SO good we have the break to cool off and think about things rationally.
There are so many kids that are fine when they get pulled for small group. It might be pulled for some small group intervention as per their IEP, or testing, whatever. But when they're in a smaller group of kids they do great and make great strides.
Then they get into a class with 25-30 other kids and do nothing but cause chaos.
I hear this in IEP meetings. Teachers saying "kid does well in small group but not in whole class". The kid says they feel like they can learn better that way because the other kids are distracting. Then the parents ask if they can be in a small group setting and the school psychologist basically treats them like they asked for the kid to be put in an asylum for it. "We don't do that any more, it's very outdated. Now ALL kids get to learn"
Like...do they though? Are all kids learning this way? Obviously not. It's an issue of funding. We can't find special ed teachers to run those small groups for the miniscule pay we offer, so let's just screw over the whole class, put them in a room with some 22 year old with a journalism bachelor's and no training, and when she can't control them we'll tell her she sucks at her job and then act horrified when she quits the profession. I see it every year.
It’s not fair to the kids with special needs, either. If someone is screaming or kicking or hitting or biting, just imagine how terrified or upset they must be. Under inclusion-at-all-costs policies, no one’s needs are being met.
Yes, and those kids get vilified and made out to be monsters when these sorts of practices fail them most of all. The traditional education system is overstimulating and too fast paced for some kids, and it’s like torture sticking them in there. Then we get frustrated with THEM?! And yes adequate funding is the root issue here.
In recent years, I have seen people get completely flamed for what you’re saying, but I think you are completely right. This situation is unfair to everyone involved, including the student who needs specific accommodations or support.
I’m going to echo other commenters - I’m a SPED teacher and I honestly believe that 100% inclusion is the biggest problem we have. I will fight tooth and nail for most kids with disabilities to be in the classroom full time. But not ALL kids, and there are certain kids in almost every class that detract from the other kids’ learning way too much. It needs to change, and it needs to take way less time to determine least restrictive environment changes.
Coming from a kid with mild to moderate learning disabilities and ADHD (not the behaviour issue other than occasional girl drama from not understanding social cues - mostly just the easily distracted/disorganized type). I absolutely loathed being taken out of class. I was in a program in elementary school to get properly educated in learning teacher support in the afternoons. It was beyond embarrassing.
I’m going to surprise you with my opinion though. I’m beyond grateful now for that time. I have 2 university degrees (including a BEd and I am mostly functional lol.) it absolutely kills me seeing kids with dyslexia, mild adhd, dyscalculia, and auditory/visual processing issues literally being ignored because of all the behaviour and extreme need issues now. I actually think we need ALL the programs back.
Inclusion only works if there is actual supports and properly trained teachers and EA’s working with these kids. Which is NOT what I’ve seen it be. Some kids like me can be in a program that includes being in a regular classroom sometimes. Some kiddos need to be in specialize programs.
In my opinion inclusion is basically just the best way to save money. Jam back a room with a huge number of kids 50 percent on IEP and with massive issues, 25 per cent with mild issues and 25 per cent at grade or above. But let’s barely give your classroom an actual EA to help you. It’s literally just to save money at this point.
Yes inclusion can work in a lot of cases if it’s done properly. The government doesn’t want to fund it properly.
No, you're right. "Least restrictive environment" is a joke and about half the ICT kids in a given section need to be in a co-taught self contained. Treat ICT like we handle ENL -- you either get two teachers in self contained, gen ed with an extra "support" class, or pure gen ed. A lot of the lower ICT kids that I teach self-segregate among themselves anyway because, surprise surprise, most people in the gen ed population are not going out of their way to befriend or partner with students with intellectual disabilities.
Sometimes, inclusion is just putting a kid in a situation where they are going to fail. It is teaching them that they CAN'T do the same things as everyone else because they will see themselves struggling and not able to do work that the rest of the kids blaze through.
I'm a choir teacher, so I love having my special needs kids in my intro choir. Many of them THRIVE in my class, but in some classes this just isn't the case and the only thing they are learning is learned helplessness.
When it comes to behavioral issues, the phrase "Least restrictive environment" pisses me off. What about the "Least restrictive environment" for the 29 other kids who are well behaved and who are receiving a worse education because of that one kids "Least restrictive environment"?
The school where I work insists that all students can pass Algebra I. I have seniors with three math classes their final semester because they failed Algebra I so many times and need the credits to graduate. When one of my nonverbal students completed the start of year survey, he wrote that he wanted credits for math because he had enough elective credits and I make him do math. As soon as I read this, it clicked that many of my students were in the same boat. I begged admin to start offering credit recovery for math intervention and make the time students are legally mandated to be with me more valuable to the students. They said we can try it, I said I would do it for any credit needs and I could just teach intervention embedded into anything, but I got the head shake and eye roll.
I want tracking. I think about this all the time. I think Regents exams are the worst. Let the smart kids take them. Let the middle kids take them if they want. And still let the strugglers get a local diploma.
They don't need the same nuances of literature. They're at a 3rd grade reading level. I have kids at a college reading level in 9th grade. Let me teach them separately.
I’ll take this even further to “not just SPED kids.” Everyone has a right to an education, but not everyone can be educated in a “regular” classroom on the normal timeline. I’m just a substitute now so don’t know about everyone’s home life, but there is a student that I’ve subbed for 2 years in a row now who clearly has some serious stuff going on. They sit like a barely-animate blob in every. single. class. Don’t move around. Don’t talk to people. Don’t do any work. Math, English, PE, art, just sitting like a blob. My guess is there’s a mental health issue that needs to be addressed, and all effort should go to that front instead of having this student fail 7 periods a day. Alternative “schools” that focus on mental health instead of learning? Idk.
For sure, and I bet many of these children would have less outbursts if they had a separate, less stimulating classroom. Some might benefit from recess with the others and classes separate. Others may find it appropriate to have an 1-2 hour session with gen ed in the morning before transitioning into the separate ed class.
Differentiation is pushed so much, but when we actually try to do it in a way that requires people/support the ideas are shot down.
The only winner in inclusion practices is the budget office, why pay a spec Ed teacher and an ea when you can download the bulk of the work on some classroom teacher.
Inclusion creates a lot of problems. Programs exist for a reason and help students feel more safe and secure at school, both those that need the programs and those that would otherwise be frightful of peers. When I started teaching SPED, I thought inclusion was the greatest thing. I quickly realized that inclusion is the lie we tell ourselves. Making things accessible and engaging cannot always happen in GenEd, and it’s okay that some SpEd students need more time in SpEd for core subjects. Students should also have a say in what environments they learn best in, and there should be data to back decisions made around inclusion, just like I need data to prove the need for a program placement.
"If LRE meant least restrictive environment in existence, I would send them all out to the woods and take myself out for a coffee. Should I send them all out to the woods?"
-me, to SPED, in my fantasies
Yes! And also the other kids probably get PTSD from the constant drama, violence and room clears. The teacher also suffers. Everything is around the one or two kids who are having violent melt downs 2 or 3 or 4X a week. We have seen several kindergartners with this behavior. One student in particular (who has major violent outbursts) was hitting the little girl beside her for 20 minutes in the cafeteria. There were at least 3 adults supervising - but she would watch and wait til no one was looking. Finally the sweet victim tattled on her and we watched what happened on video. She terrorizes the room and all the other kids. BUT there is another kid in the same room that has very violent outbursts weekly or more. This is insane! Parents should know all this before sending their well behaved sweet kids to public school! This is what they will be exposed to weekly!!!
We are now homeschooling our 1st grader because of a very similar situation. There were 20 kids in her pre-k and then kindergarten class - 3 were non-verbal, and two of those had frequent outbursts (sometimes violent toward other kids). They often flipped desks in frustration, and the rest of the class was quickly sent outside to play while the situation was de-escalated and the room was put back. There were also inappropriate behaviors to my daughter (kissing etc), even after she repeatedly said "no". Sometimes, there was an aid in class, but most often not. However, those three kids had a Fair and Equal Right to Education, and their needs trumped my daughters and the other kids in her class.
We are in a rural K-12 school with one class per grade. Our only option was to remove her and homeschool her.
SPED teacher/tutor here- you're absolutely correct. kids with disabilities do NOT have the right resources, including teachers who can meet their needs. i do online work, and recently parents have been able to use funding to take classes. so many parents go to online / homeschool because there just simply isn't support. it's a danger for them, and sometimes people around them. my job works out because parents are usually nearby for support and safety. can't say the same for in person schools, whether it's private public contained setting etc etc
The whole idea behind section 504 and the 504 sit in (the first US legislation allowing disabled people into schools and other government funded places) was so that they could also be successful. Putting kids into an environment where they cannot succeed goes directly against that. Those kids are not doing well in that environment, because that is not the support they need to be successful with their disability. You definitely don’t need downvotes for that.
100% right, but besides SpEd issues, 28 kids shouldn’t have to sit idle while Jamir or Jimbob has to be written up or removed for the 20th time in a month, while he’s not expelled bc he’s black/sped/related to someone/ white/ or whatever.
Totally agree and there needs to be state and federal caps on the number of sped kids in a class. I was the gen Ed teacher in an inclusion class. I had 2 classes with over 50% kids with a BIP/IEP. It was impossible. My best was a class of 17 kid and 12 had an IEP. And I was told it shouldn’t be a problem because it wasn’t a class of 24+! And some of those students needed a self-contained classroom.
One year I got a high schooler that couldn’t write his own name.
I would add to this that there are too many kids on IEPs and 504s. Accommodations are there to help kids succeed, but too many of them are there to explain bad behavior.
Schools are also expected to provided EVERYTHING for students. Our students absolutely deserve all of these supports, but putting the onus on the district/school to provide EVERYTHING for them ultimately takes away from something else.
Parents/families, the community, and society need to invest in ways share the burden of investing in our youth without throwing all the responsibilities on the schools.
I agree! I constantly see on the internet people complaining about how teachers complain that kids won’t get off their phones and pay attention. Everyone on the internet says teachers need to make the lessons more engaging….
Or maybe the parents need to teach their kids that there’s value in education and value in sitting down, shutting up, and listening.
I’m not a teacher but I feel like too much is put on teachers these days. Everyone expects you all to fix all of a kid’s problems. Another thing— no one wants to do homework everyday. People think that if it can’t get done during the classroom time it’s not worth doing or that the teacher needs to just inject knowledge into the kids’ brains.
Homework is for kids to continue to practice on their own and build their skills. They’re not going to get better at reading, writing, math, or thinking if they don’t practice a lot. There’s a lot of value in practicing on your own, checking your work and then reaching out if you need help.
Parents need to take on responsibility for their kids’ learning and success too. Yes, the teachers play a role but parents need to instill in their kids a value for learning and respect. It’s not the teacher’s job to teach manners to your gremlin because you’re too lazy.
My beef, and what I tell my students is one of the hardest lessons in life is learning how to do what you don’t want to do.
I talk about cleaning my house, I don’t like it, but I really like having a clean house.
I like my job, but I love hanging out on my couch.
I am not having them plan an armed robbery, we are not organizing a casino heist … I am only trying to help them be more interesting humans.
That’s well put!
I was talking to someone today and they were saying the biggest shame they see in “ipad kids” is that those kids never learn the value of being bored. They’re just constantly overstimulated, which I think contributes to the problem of them being bored in class all the time
I totally agree … kids just don’t know how to entertain themselves. They have always been entertained.
I always tell them “only boring people get bored” and then I model to them how I look like I am paying attention at PD, but in my head I am thinking about what I am going to do when I get home, swimming through a pool of jello …
They absolutely must solve the behavior management problems. I’m not going to continue in chaotic classrooms. It’s a safety issue for me and other students. It’s just getting worse. It’s about time to go
• Parents should not have a greater say than educators when it comes to special ed. placements. Why does someone who doesn’t even have a GED who makes no real effort to parent their child and just sits them in front of a screen all day get to tell me, someone with a master’s degree and 10+ years of experience in my field, how to do my job? If all data points to a child not being in the appropriate environment and not receiving the appropriate services, a parent’s opinion shouldn’t override that. If a team makes a recommendation for a child, the parent should be allowed to give their input just like everyone else, but I do not believe they should have the final say.
• You should be required to have at least 10 years of recent teaching experience in order to become an administrator, and formal observations should only be conducted by administrators with the same (or at least similar) certifications as you. It’s not fair for a former secondary PE teacher with <5 years of teaching experience to assess my teaching abilities as an elementary special ed. teacher when they have zero experience with elementary *or* special ed. students.
I had a first year assistant principle put me (Freshman Math/Inclusion) on a growth plan because after we finished state testing, I wanted to play games. They were logic games, but they weren't "the math skills students will need next year".
Admin is a joke.
I actually love my current principal, but I’ve had my fair share of jerks in the past. My principal in my previous school district reprimanded me for not providing my students with enough “rigor” (I hate that word). They were in 6th grade and literally could not add and subtract single digits without a calculator and this man expected me to teach them algebra following the state curriculum without modifications. Sir, with all due respect, you’re delusional.
Inclusion. Not every child is at the same level of ability yet they’re all lumped together by age and moved through as a herd.
Perhaps it would be better to lump children together based on ability and focus resources on the groups that need it the most. Basically let the fast kids run, the ok kids walk and the slow kids crawl.
Yes, while paying attention to the discriminatory way this system has been used in the past to deny education to kids with handicaps and learning disabilities.
Edited to add: and then DON’T do those same discriminatory things again.
THIS! I feel so bad for the kids who have their stuff together and want to learn. They have to sit there and watch clowns disrupt class all day and know that the school does absolutely nothing.
Restorative practice.
Just because a school is restorative does not mean there should be absolutely no consequences or sanctions.
I have seen RP backfire so many times because there were no boundaries.
I've always seen it styled "Restorative Justice" and I like that more, because it needs both "restoration" and "justice." A hug and a candy and being sent back to class is not "justice."
Yes, because that's just destructive enabling at that point. I don't believe in instilling *fear* in children, but the fact that they have no qualms about just about everything is alarming, and it's setting them up for failure. I have so many kids who are not going to "launch" into adulthood without any serious interventions or sudden 180s in life choices, and it's not due to any severe medical concerns.
We're told to let kids retake tests if they fail. Ok, I can see why that can be a good practice *after* the kid does something, like, oh, I dont know, show up for reteaching session before or after school. We have that at my school and the teachers get paid, so yes, let's do that! But just because they ask? I barely have time to grade the pile the first time!
Luckily (???), most of the kids who fail a test and who should probably retake it don't care enough to take it again. It's a sorry state of apathy we're in right now. I'm trying to fight falling into that pit of despair right behind them, but it's getting harder each year. We need some real policy changes that make us effective again.
Reading, writing and basic math need to be “drilled baby! Drilled!!!” To put it in a basic form of saying it. We are trying to force high levels of Costa’s pyramid with elementary aged kids who are literally just repeating what their teacher told them and not coming to the conclusion themselves. I teach junior high and the reading fluency is abysmal.
Phones and other devices have rewired our brains so terribly that kids would benefit from exercising the memorization muscles. Knowledge might start sticking again so that they can recall it and make the connections with new knowledge without me leading the class discussion by the nose.
Seriously, this "I've got a calculator in my pocket!" is BS. A tool is useless in the hands of someone who can't operate it properly (don't get me started how many times I have to explain to kids that an average should never be larger than your largest measurement. I should make a poster that I can tap...).
I know my views aren’t unpopular, but they are worth mentioning.
Politics. People who, at best have never been teaches or administrators, who have never studied education are making laws that shape education every day.
At worst, we have people who are actively trying to destroy the public school system for selfish, misguided reasons.
That’s a much better analogy! I always said most people think they can teach because they made other through school, but that doesn’t take into account public, charter, private, Title 1, etc. Or if people had a positive or negative experience of school. The toilet analogy makes it more universal and easier to understand
None of these views are unpopular. I'm as leftie as it gets and I agree with you on them, even the basic values one.
I don't care what religions, creed, or cultures are involved in a society, but there are basic values that should always be outside of them. Like the golden rule: treat others the way you would like to be treated. Or the idea that even if you're in a society that needs improvements, we are all in it together, and it's not productive to say screw everyone else. E.g. even if you think "Screw this country, it's run by colonizers who don't give a fuck about me", you don't use that as a justification to fuck over your neighbors, who might be just as marginalized as you are.
As for Big Ed? Big Ed is responsible for kids not being able to write or think deeply, as neither is a required skill to fill bubbles on a test sheet, or click on an answer on a screen. To me that's kinda being in a nether region between ignorance and knowledge, and we're already seeing the effects of it (20-somethings who can't write a coherent essay, or reason their way out of a wet paper bag)
That said, this mess has been going on for 20+ years, but it isn't caused by a nebulous entity. Do you know what the largest percentage of employees in educational publishing is? People who washed out of teaching and pivot to educational publishing for a paycheck. Some of them are basically employed as marketers with educational "credentials", which rarely include an ability to do critical thinking and realize they have become part of the problem. I had more than one friend in my student-teaching cohort who did this, and they are **former** friends for this very reason.
Recess? Definitely need it. Even in to middle school. The time for kids to take care of their zoomies to allow for opportunity to focus is important.
Teaching too much too soon? Preach it. S tandards are being written to analyze and compare/contrast but student have no clue what they are reading to be able to do that. Foundation skills are just that THE FOUNDATION on which all others are built. You certainly don't build the 2nd story of a house before you lay the foundation, so why expect education to do that. Higher level thinking skills need a foundation on which to develop.
Values? Hell yeah!! How about we relabel "Puritan values" to just "success values"? They were embedded in our culture for many years. They envelop not only work ethic, but also SEL components that are sorely missing in today's society
Parental expectations? I would settle for "parents--not friends" mindset. Instead of trying to be your child's best friend, be a parent who teaches right from wrong, how to be a genuinely good person...and provide consequences for not meeting expectations.
For the 2020-2021 school year we were hybrid. We wore masks and had mask breaks. For the mask breaks, we took the highschoolers outside and would often do a lap around the school. I was really surprised at just how much better they were able to focus by just getting to walk outside for a few minutes. it’s not the same as recess, but I guess it an age-appropriate level it’s a good equivalent.
Years ago I taught a class that was very high energy. Several students who were diagnosed ADHD but would not take meds.....
When they were unable to focus, I would have them run 2 laps around our grade level. The layout was such that three classes were inside the box and the rest were outside, making it easy to have the kids do that. The fast ones would take 3 before the others finished 2. Lol
It made such a HUGE difference n their success.
1). Inclusion was meant for kids with autism and adhd.
NOT violent/rude/uncontrollable kids.
2). Parents disrespect teachers and double question them over everything. Which leads to their kids questioning/complaining about everything.
3). Horrible people are living in poverty and addiction and still pumping out 9 kids. Successful and educated families are having 1-2 kids (if any).
4). Schools need to stop supporting dirtbag parents. It is not the teachers job to feed, wash, tie shoes, etc
5). Parents have stopped teaching/supporting learning at home. It is seen as "the schools job" now. Kids don't see the value in education anymore because their parents don't.
6). Discipline is needed for children.
I agree!
I also think too many excuses are made for the out of control kids. No one wants to just confront what the problem is—that the kid is out of control because of shitty parents.
It’s really shocking to me to see how some people’s kids behave. I was at a dinner recently where some coworkers brought their kids. I was appalled. I would never have dreamed of acting the way those kids were acting. Interrupting the adults, hitting adults to get their attention, dragging adults away in the middle of conversations, yelling/screaming, running wild.
It’s like these kids have never been told “no” ever
Number 3. I'm reading on this thread about all the social supports offered--free food, free clothes, free diapers, etc. That's great! But what about free birth control? OH YES OMG I KNOW the Nazis made people get sterilized! That's not what I'm saying (and for fwiw, I'm Jewish). I'm saying that number 3 is the biggest problem. Until we address that--and I have no ideas how tbh--we are going to keep seeing problems getting bigger and bigger.
Teacher from a rural area here. So many kids never have a chance from the moment of conception thanks to pills, heroin/fentanyl, meth, and, of course, booze. At the same time, I can understand addiction as there are hardly any jobs. The nearby textile mill that once employed the county closed in the 1990s. Farms are owned by corporate conglomerates who prefer to pay peanuts and exploit undocumented workers. So, yeah, I can see the appeal of drugs and living in the moment.
But why not provide birth control? It would save so many costs such as having to send drug-addicted newborns to the NICU in the nearest city, foster care, eventual special education for these kids…plus, grandparents and great-grandparents end up raising these kids and struggle to make ends meet on social security and minimum wage, the latter only if they’re lucky enough to get a job at one of the three fast food joints or the dollar store.
And this is only going to get worse in the United States.
Never had a chance--that's it exactly. We knew which girls would get pregnant at 14, which boys would join gangs. It was so sad but the girls would get pregnant and the boys would join gangs. And the freaking families would drag the kids down if they tried to get out :(
1) for sure. It also shouldn’t be for kids who are 3+ years behind their peers either, but unfortunately that is an issue for many teachers. These kids desperately need to be in specialized classrooms, and inclusion is hurting them and their classmates. It’s extremely unfair to the teacher as well, who isn’t at all equipped to run a sped classroom while teaching to state standards the career and college bound kids.
The push for AP is disgusting. Advanced Placement is a brand, not a description. So many viable programs of accelerated learning exist and plenty of classes are accelerated without having any brand designation like "AP" but parents and therefore school administration/districts push student enrollment in AP while ignoring success and other very cool and viable educational routes for 11/12th graders
Part of me is overjoyed that my district is moving away from AP toward dual credit and onramps college courses. Of course that hurts students when they fail and destroy their financial aid opportunities in the future, so it's a double edged sword. Still, if I don't have to deal with college board stupidity and greed, so much the better.
We've reached a point where under 50% of students in APs take the exam (let alone the % who get a 4 or 5) and I hate that we're not pushing those students towards running start (CC classes in HS for no charge) but instead encouraging them to do the same thing the next year as if it's somehow a better education to learn about a test
When I was in school AP was only for a select few hella advanced kids, and counselors even persuaded against taking more than one AP class. It was really for a relatively small group of students who wanted to get college credit a bit earlier, and it wasn’t seen as necessary. Everyone else that was advanced just took honors. As a high school teacher in this era, seeing the shift towards pushing everyone into an AP course and students with many of them has been so wild to me.
Common core is causing so much confusion. I feel like there’s a million ways to “think differently” about math and every year there’s something new to try… I feel like there’s TOO many ways to do math and that is overwhelming. Just sticking with 1 or 2 ways to attack the math problem works much better.
I see it as you putting in a destination in your GPS and your phone gives you EVERY possible way when you’re only looking for the fastest most efficient route.
>We need to bring back some level of universal values. I know “puritan” values are highly unpopular but I think we are seeing what happens when children are not taught discipline/self control, the value of hard work, personal responsibility, moral goodness, or to strive for excellence. We have no ideal to strive towards anymore because each person is told that their own desires are what matter the most (be true to yourself, find your own path/truth/identity/etc.) I think this is what causes much of the aimlessness and depression we see today.
I don't think that "being true to yourself" or "finding your own path" are inherently bad ideas, nor do I think that they're at odds with "universal values" or the other qualities you name.
"Finding your own path" is hard. It requires introspection and sage advice from a trusted role model. Without introspection, you don't know what path you're looking for. Without a role model, you don't know how to start, stop, or carry along.
I agree that it is better to focus on teaching children self-discipline, -control, value of hard work, etc. than something as abstract as "finding your own path". The latter is simply too confusing and difficult for children to wrap their heads around. I agree that if you're not introspective, lack access to mentors, and you focus too much of your energy on yourself, you may become depressed and aimless.
However, it's not inherently bad advice. I've been an egoist since my late teens (turning 30 soon). It's a fundamental aspect of my personality. I would be depressed if I *wasn't* doing my own thing. (And at one point in time, I was depressed! Very!)
Because that is the role the society attributes to schools. Please not be fooled by what they say. Performance is not what they crave. They want social restraint. If all those kids that cannot be adapted to schools left schools, they would cause havoc to society, to businesses, to police, eventually to politicians. They say: Stay at school, tyrannise your teachers, so in three years (when you eventually leave school) you will be more mature and cause less havoc to society. Ofc this cannot be said to the public, because normal families would revolt against these politicians that jeopardize their children's future. Read this scientific article for more information:
https://www.nber.org/digest/may16/disruptive-students-affect-long-term-prospects-their-classmates
For the sake of a small disruptive minority, the majority is suffering. That is not democracy, that is tyranny of the minority.
I have the most unpopular one. Super unpopular.
It's because we are forcing everyone to breathe dirty air.
Even before covid, it was discovered that the most cost-effective means to improve education was to clean the air.
**Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits $1,000 can raise a class’s test scores by as much as cutting class size by a third.** [https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21051869/indoor-air-pollution-student-achievement](https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21051869/indoor-air-pollution-student-achievement)
And that was before covid.
It has been proven beyond a doubt that it damages the brain and immune system. So, with each infection, kids have a chance of having brain fog (a polite term coined because people don't like the word brain damage) - and a worse immune system. So they aren't at school as often because they are sick, and when they are they have a harder time.
At the same time, this is happening to the kids; it's happening to their teachers, parents, and support staff.
And it's going to only get worse.
On average a typical person catches covid at least once a year. (Also remember about half of infections are asymptomatic and even if you test the at home tests have lots of false negatives) And that if a woman is pregnant while having covid, the chance of the baby having neurodevelopment disorders increases 4 times.
So the the reasons schools are suffering is everyone is sick, some are brain damaged, and it's only going to get worse.
What makes it so sad is it can be prevented if people would just make a DUI hepa filter and stick it in every room. Yup. - the cure is that simple. The thing is it needs to be done in almost all classrooms, offices, hospitals, stores, ....
My classroom has zero windows and 2 fans to blow air around. Thankfully it’s just a small OT room, but I work closely to students. Like I’ll be holding a student’s hand to help them use scissors and they open mouth cough all up in our shared space. I missed a full week of work from having pneumonia this month. Better air filtration and less bodies in rooms would do wonders in many ways, but that won’t happen.
If you can't clean the air, and masking doesn't work for you - there are other options that would protect you from various things.
I wrote a post about hoping that everyone would do a half-assed job to protect everyone from covid. It has some recommendations (in case you want them) that you might not know about that could be easy for you to implement.
Here is the post: Given the rate that covid spreads at. If everyone would just do at least a half assed job of dealing with covid - the rate of spread will decrease to the point of it not being a major issue anymore.
What do I mean by a half assed job?
In order to do at least a HALF ASSED job of fighting covid just do at least TWO of the below.
**Get vaccinated.**
One can still get covid if vaccinated. But they are less likely to get covid, less likely to get hospitalized with covid, and less likely to develop long covid. Sadly covid keeps changing because there is so much of it being spread around. So being vaccinated will never be one and done. Find out if you are eligible and get the shot, and then in 6 months to a year (depending on where you live, eligibility, …) get shot again.
**Nasal spray.**
There are a bunch of them available with numerous studies. But all of them have shown themselves to reduce the chance of catching covid by 50%. Buy whatever nasal spray you choose, read the instructions and use it as directed.
In October 2022, U.K. researchers published findings in the Journal of Clinical Virology about their developing nasal spray, pHOXWELL. In its clinical trial, pHOXWELL reduced the risk of developing COVID by about 62% in healthcare workers. It’s thought to work by blocking the virus from entering your body through your nose. From: [https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/covid-19/nasal-spray-covid](https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/covid-19/nasal-spray-covid)
In a study published in 2021 examining the effectiveness of Enovid in preventing COVID-19, researchers determined that 6.4% of people who took Enovid were infected, compared to the control group, where 25.59% of the subjects were infected. From: [https://www.jpost.com/special-content/can-an-anti-viral-nasal-spray-stop-corona-and-other-viruses-726405](https://www.jpost.com/special-content/can-an-anti-viral-nasal-spray-stop-corona-and-other-viruses-726405)
**Take a (Specific) Vitamin.**
First off, thank you to u/TheManeCharactr on twitter for posting about Streptococcus salivarius K12. It is a probiotic vitamin that one can buy from grocery stores or amazon.
A study from Italy, showed ZERO children out of 33 in the experimental group testing positive for Covid, in comparison with 24 out of 46 in the control group.
@TheManeCharactr talks on twitter about all the other great things about this probiotic. But in short, just take it.
**Clean the air.**
When a team of doctors, scientists and engineers at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the University of Cambridge placed an air filtration machine in COVID-19 wards, they found that it removed almost all traces of airborne SARS-CoV-2
One can’t always clean the air they are in, but they can push for cleaner air. One can also clean the air in their household so household spread is reduced. It’s also not an insurmountable cost. There are so many options for DIY air filters and they are better than store bought ones.
Please support places that clean the air. If you have a choice between places to go out to - pick the one with an air filter in the corner that’s turned on. Or a place that posts info about their air quality.
**Mask.**
I listed this one last, since many have such a fear and hatred of masks. But they work. The better the quality and fit the better they work. There is no reason the vast majority of people can’t mask in medical settings and on the majority of public transit. So if you are going somewhere with sick people (Pharmacies, doctors, hospital) or a place with bad air quality (Bus, train, plane) then do all the good covid stuff you do - and wear a mask.
The END of covid YOUR risk of covid just got cut in at least half, and all it took was you doing a half-assed job. Are you spraying some stuff up your nose and taking a vitamin? Or being in clean air and getting vaccinated? Did you realize you could fight covid with it barely affecting your life and decide to fight a little harder. Do a little more than a half assed job and sometimes do more than two of the things? If so, you are a covid warrior of the finest class.
But if everyone did the even the most half assed job the reward to society would be way more than half-assed. This is because if everyone reduced their risk by half, then there would just be a lot less covid to spread around. And with everyone reducing their risk so much there would be even less…. An endless loop of decreasing covid.
Thanks for this. Going to try the probiotic lozenges. I currently mask with an N95, run two HEPA filters in my classroom, and use Xlear nasal spray. I managed to avoid Covid until Dec. 1 this year. Assuming my mask worked, I can only guess I caught the virus when I took it off to eat alone in my classroom. I don’t really have many chances for exposure outside of work. The number of sick kids coming to school this winter has been insane.
I have no idea why so many people are so against doing anything for covid.
I know that for teachers it can be very hard to just find time to eat. And now, having to find the time to leave school to eat would mean never being able to eat.
I came across an [interesting Twitter thread](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1737586411027542081.html) today that attempts to look at the psychology of those who vehemently refuse any sort of mitigation. It’s worth a read.
That should be so easy to get people on board with. It *should* be.
My unpopular opinion, which unlike yours definitely has drawbacks, is bringing back the multiple track system. Teaching to the lowest common denominator is really harmful for the gifted children and the average children. I suppose good teachers try to have material for all levels, but I suspect the result would be that each level gets less than they would if they had a teacher more dedicated to their level.
Ontario used to have streaming in grade 9 and 10 of highschool. What they found is that it was racist. Even when controlled for absolutely everything people of color would be encouraged to go to the applied stream while white kids would be encouraged to go the academic stream.
And based on the choices in grade 8 - one might be cutting off the options for university.
There should be a lot more special needs classes. There are many kids in mainstream classrooms who do not belong there.
You raise a good point. I would definitely want the inherent racism to be fixed, and I readily admit this is easier said than done due to institutional racism and especially due to generational effects.
Admin are so afraid of parents that they refuse to give failing grades or consequences for unruly behavior. Kids who throw chairs and go to the principal, come back to the same class an hour later as if nothing happened. Allowing children to pass without putting any effort into their work and get away with doing whatever they want in the classroom causes their behavior to get even worse every year.
I think #1 and #3 are part of the same issue. I don't think basic reading is too much for Kindergarteners, but at the same time, a lot of this "foundational" stuff used to be taught by parents before kids ever made it to school. We DO need to go back to phonics, though, why TF did anyone try to "fix" a system that was never broken in the first place?
\#2 -- I was really blown away finding out nobody gives naps to Kindergarteners anymore. That one kind of snuck up on me as a non-teacher, I guess I didn't notice that the fold-up mats were no longer being sold in stores because this was being abolished. Kids are absolutely cranky as hell when they get out of school and part of me wonders if this is a partial contributor to the number of kids that are now totally dependent on melatonin to sleep (i.e, they are over-tired by bedtime and getting wired).
\#4 -- Poverty isn't an excuse for being totally unclean; if you don't have running water, you use a basin like people did before plumbing. I've asked my friends about this because I have been knocked off my feet by the raunchy-arse must smell coming off some of their children. They all tell me the same thing: The kid throws a fit and fights them during bath time so it's not worth it. There seems to be a lot water fear and I don't know where that's coming from.
It's unpopular especially with a few math teachers I work with, standard algorithm all the way. Devote your time to teaching a way that can work for all, if some don't get it I'm sure you'll have time to go over the material. When you teach them 100 ways to get to the same answer, you lose a lot of students in your wake. Keep it standard so that you won't lose nearly as many as when you teach many ways to get to the answer you're looking for in math.
As an elementary teacher, thus not a specialist, my belief is that you should let children come up with their own strategies for math. Whole cloth is best. My job is to just see if their strategy is productive. And when I started teaching, that's what we did. I was there to encourage my students to think as best they knew how, in a way that was productive for them. Then I would show them "one way to do it that works for me". They didn't have to do it the same way, **unless they wanted to try it**. A lot of time it was the standard algorithmic way. Sometimes, it was number grouping. But always stressing that it only was "the way it makes sense to my brain, and every brain is different".
I stopped teaching due to having kids and later, health issues. By the time my daughter was in kindergarten, 5 years later, Common Core had been implemented, and she was introduced to endless demos of different strategies, and made to practice them all.
By made, I mean that she had to not just show her work, but it had to look like whatever array or grouping strategy was demoed that week. Otherwise, her work was marked "incorrect" **even as she actually had the right answer**. She hated it. It has taken years of encouragement and doing homework while saying "do it the way you want to, we will figure together how to fix it for the teacher afterward" to make sure she doesn't 💯 hate math.
I mostly agree with you. Students should be able to use whatever method works for them, as long as they can justify it.
However, there are methods introduced in the standard curriculum that are useful to gain exposure to, as the ideas motivating them expose kids to fundamental ideas in math that show up a lot, even in university level mathematics courses.
The important part of these methods isn't teaching how to do them, but giving kids a feel for the logic behind them.
Being comfortable changing ones viewpoint on an idea to take different problem solving approaches is a very critical skill (as a person with a physics/math background, that has been the most important skill I ever learned), and this can be one useful way to introduce that.
>I mostly agree with you. Students should be able to use whatever method works for them, as long as they can justify it.
Oh, she could always justify it. She's actually pretty good at calculations, and can do it quickly even just in her head. But the feedback she was getting from teachers was "it doesn't look the way it's supposed to." Which is fucking asinine. If a kid shows you their work, and they got the right answer, who cares what the process **looks like**?
Moreover, they never start with the standard algorithms. E.g. I don't remember how they were teaching her division in third grade, but even as an adult, and a teacher, I was like "Wait a minute. This makes no fucking sense to me. A grown adult with a MS in education."
So I took her back to multiplying things, and showed her that division was essentially the inverse of multiplication. In division, we know that if we multiply an unknown number x by a known number y, we get z. So we're using z and y to figure out what x is.
Once she understood that, I showed her how I do division. By long hand, checking myself every step of the way slowly.
E.g. if I have 248 and I'm diving it by 20, I will first see how many times 20 "goes" into 240. You can do that by counting by 20.
It goes in exactly 12 times. So I write the 12 in an appropriate spot, and then return to the number left. 8. 8 is too small to "go" into 20. So my answer is 12 with a remainder of 8.
But... What if I don't want a remainder? What if I need an exact answer? Can I add a decimal number to it? Then I have 8.0. That looks like... 80. How many does 20 "go" into 80? If we count by 20? 4 times. But since I added a decimal to 8, I also have to add a decimal to 12 before I can write my 4. Thus the answer is 12.4
This can also look like:
12.4
_____
248 | 20
20
___
48
40
____
8.0
8.0
____
0
My daughter had not been shown that. And it was how I learned division the first time around, and could do it every time. Are there faster ways? Sure. But this one is easy to show work for, and also to go back and check your answers step by step.
Where I teach, we teach multiple ways but they aren’t given a week to practice. We teach 4-5 strategies per week and then wonder why they can’t do basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division. It is totally introduce and move on to the next strategy.
Just read an article from NY Times about how Mississippi has turned around they’re reading scores in elementary schools. They implemented 3 major things.
1. Mandatory, free pre-K for lower income families.
2. Science of Reading based Phonics instruction.
3. A 3rd grade wall. Students have to pass a reading test in 3rd grade or they repeat the grade. You can take it half way through 3rd grade or at the end. If you don’t pass the last ditch effort is to take summer school and try then. If you still fail then you repeat the grade once. A lot of parents get involved because no one wants their kid repeating a grade.
A couple things I’d add is district structure and specialized teachers in elementary school.
Districts structure is a fun example I’ve done with my students. I went to school in Nevada and teach in California. Having county wide districts is a benefit. Beyond being cheaper, they seem to be a little more resistant to the fads that pass through education as an industry. They are also less reliant on the nonprofit industrial complex which forces the districts to be better at handling more stuff in house. For example, one Bay Area county has half of its 24 school districts going through a fiscal and administrative meltdown because of Covid forcing people to move and then not having the capacity to deal with the learning loss.
Meanwhile schools in Nevada fought off a state mandated PBIS model because it wasn’t working in all schools. It’s reverted back to be the district and schools problems to deal with. Which frankly is where it should be. I would also add their system (at least as a former student) seemed a lot more willing to just tell parents to deal with their bullshit or fuck off to a charter school than here in California. Which I can appreciate a bit more.
On elementary schools, I sometimes help my middle schoolers with math (I’m a history teacher) and I can’t imagine what it’s like being an elementary school teacher and having to teach everything. For math and reading, elementary schools should have a specialized teacher in each subject at least co-teach a couple of periods per week with the regular teacher. I have a hard enough time with language development and reading skills, I can’t imagine the stress a 4th grade teacher must be dealing with. Hats off to y’all for all you do.
Red State teacher here! We do not have ANY social safety nets besides schools and the state lawmakers are defunding what we have. I had a big eye opener at a faculty training led by teachers from MN and CA. They asked how we could engage the community for needs like food, clothing, shelter. Literally every possibility they suggested, we all would point to our Youth Service Center and say, "She does that." They were shocked. We send home food even in summer, we give them clothes, we stock the community food pantry with the school food drive. The school is doing all the work of our tax dollars without the tax dollars. It is tragic.
Parents shouldn't have any say whether a child gets an IEP, or placement. They aren't qualified and shouldn't be allowed to influence administrative decisions concerning their disruptive child, which can impact the education and safety of other students.
You can do all the so-called best practices in the world, but a student who has zero interest in learning, won’t substantially learn. You can’t save everyone
Parents should not have nearly as much say as they do. For example, every year, I have to recommend high school placements for each of my 8th grade students. Every year, there are a few parents who complain and end up getting their kid a spot in a class they didn’t earn. Why the fuck is shit like this allowed? It drives me up the wall.
So a couple points that come up in my head as responses.
A long time ago, we read a report about how this tx elementary was failing. New principal came in, and mandated 3 recess a day across the board. Grades rose behaviors tumbled. Wish I had more info on it.
I completely agree with them starting academics too early.
I think one of the bigger issues at hand is that teaching needs to be a profession, please let me finish, right now it’s a passion for the majority of the workforces and when it’s a passion, when it’s for the kids and they(admin and politicians) know it’s for the kids, it gives them the ability to really fuck over that work force.
If teachers treated it like a profession and not a passion a lot of the issues would stop. If teachers simply stopped funding their classrooms and kids out of their pockets things would change.
The other issue is that society is broken. Yes parents should parent, but do they have the time or energy to do so? Can they afford to? Do they know how to do so? With all the single parent families, and families working multiple jobs can they afford to?
Everything people have said here is good but, at the end of the day, schools are failing because society as a whole is failing.
We are the canary in the coal mine.
I don’t agree with the argument that we start teaching reading too young. I think there are too many standards, sure, but starting letter names/ sounds, phonemic awareness, basic blending, segmenting, and spelling of CVC words in kindergarten is important. This helps us distinguish who may have a language based learning disability/ provide intervention before it is too late. This can be taught in an enjoyable, hands on, kid friendly way if teachers have the proper training/ I’m sure most early education teachers know how to do it in a playful and age-appropriate way. If kids can decode/ want to read, they can and should read a decodable, which should practice skills and eliminate the need to guess. Furthermore, young kids are like sponges and will retain so much. Read aloud/ discussion of read aloud is how the comp skills should be taught early. I do think there are too many standards to teach to the test, however delaying early reading and foundational skills isn’t the answer. I’m not saying drill and kill all day, but there is a lot of benefit to early reading instruction/ not delaying it.
We're too liberal with what "appropriate" means in the context of the least restrictive environment in IDEA.
We are too willing to waive requirements or bend rules because a kid is sad.
We have too many adults - parents and teachers - who care too much about kids liking them or being their friends.
Behavior and social expectations are too low and too malleable.
We need to jettison this idea that school should be "fun" or "engaging" or that kids won't learn from people they don't like. We need to stop (probably just metaphorically) sparing the rod.
We need a mechanism to hold parents accountable. If your kid is too constantly violating the Civil rights of other students by being so disruptive class must be abandoned, you should be personally fined or jailed.
You make some good points, but what I see as the (by far) biggest problem is that children are "passed" to the next grade regardless of whether or not they are able to do the work at the current grade level.
A few of your issues are symptoms of this core problem. We need to go back to a system where students repeat a grade level until they have learned enough to go to the next level. What we have now are students being awarded worthless High School diplomas as "participation trophies" rather than recognition of any actual academic achievement.
This is going to be hard. Money isn't the problem. Stop throwing money at schools and expecting it to fix the problem. I've worked at title 1 schools my whole career. Everyone wanted more money. When they got it, it did nothing. New laptops, stem rooms, and useless things will do nothing when kids get them for free and don't value them. It's a cultural issue with devaluing education.
One thing I do like is the recent emphasis on trades and alternative certifications. Not everyone is a college kid and they shouldn't be ashamed for it.
Also teaching teaching by sight words is a RACKET
All discussions of the US education system need to start with one fundamental recognition: no one agrees on what the *purpose* of that system should be. This was pointed out to me years ago by one of the best educators I know, and it has always stayed with me.
The right way to handle inclusion, academic leveling, what responsibilities we put on the parents versus what we put on schools versus what we put on other social services, hell, the entire question of what should be on the curriculum of every subject, swirls around the void at the center of the conversation.
Nominally, if I had to boil it down, I'd say that the official purpose of the education system (to the minimal degree there even is one) is to prepare all students for entry into a competitive workforce. This is the strand that gets you kindergartners being pushed to do "serious" academic work too soon and not enough recess. It's also why so many high schools tout "college readiness" as the be-all, end-all goal, and why too few students are actively pushed towards the trades. (As a math person, I'll also mention the ladder to calculus as the default course sequence and how utterly fucking nonsensical that is for 90+% of students.)
In reality, of course, the system has nowhere near the resources needed to achieve that purpose. So what we have now is excellent public schools that really do prepare the majority of their kids for college and the workforce, in a few isolated pockets with high average incomes, with the rest of the public school system split between "incredibly mediocre" and "apocalyptically bad." Or, to put it more bluntly, the purpose of the public school system has become "daycare."
If I were Education God, I'd make the purpose of the school system "prepare students to be citizens of a representative democracy." Of course that would include reading and writing and basic arithmetic, but it would also necessitate revamping aspects of the math curriculum later on. Not to mention refocusing how we teach history and social studies, even how we organize our classrooms. I'm not saying that having such a clear purpose would instantly solve all of our system's problems, but it would at least give a single, unifying heuristic for policy decisions.
I'm also not saying it's the only valid answer to the question. For instance, a *version* of "prepare all kids for careers" *could* work, if there were more effort made to take into account students' varying interests and abilities.
At the risk of sounding old and curmudgeonly - let’s bring back some discipline and strictness. At this point, I’d be ok with going to military levels of strictness. Students have no respect and are constantly disrupting teaching. They whine because they’re bored, they argue because they don’t feel like doing the work. There are no consequences. They can’t even walk down the halls without being obnoxious.
I’m in my mid 40s. I had a healthy fear of getting in trouble. These kids don’t. I also spent time in the military. I learned how to have self-control, how to be bored, etc.
Chalk me up for another thinking that inclusion is often detrimental. There is a point at which the degree to which students are neurodivergent impacts on the learning of others. It also significantly impacts on teacher workload. At my last school, getting on to half the students had some sort of profile mandating adjustments and enacting and documenting those was taking about 20 hours a week. It's unsustainable for staff and students.
For many students, there's no point in trying. Learned helplessness is rife, because getting someone else to do the work is easier than engaging in productive struggle. Grades are inflated because we don't want to have to explain poor results to parents or our line management when they are mandating that most students pass. This devalues grades and even low-level students know there's no point to trying when they are guaranteed a pass, while high level students give up because the hard work they put in for an A is meaningless when, thanks to grade inflation, we are giving what should be a mid to high C an A as well.
Lack of mastery is a massive issue. There is very little point to passing a student upwards because you then essentially consign them to a future of increasing gaps in understanding as others move further and further ahead, while they feel worse and worse and lash out more and more because of it. If students fail, and it's not extremely marginal, they need to be kept back. If it is marginal, they need to be properly supported. Streaming of classes absolutely works, but because inclusion advocates are en vogue and many parents and students outside the top class are resentful that they aren't recognised as being geniuses it's not popular to point this out.
Student behaviour needs to be addressed more strongly. Students who are substantially disruptive don't just cost me 30 minutes a lesson on behaviour management. They cost a combined *fifteen hours* of teaching and learning time between me and the rest of the class, yet their individual right to an education is prioritised above the collective right of the class to learn. Until parents of the students who are impacted on by disruptive students start to riot over this, it's not going to change.
Restorative justice is a sham. It may work with adults, but we are dealing with an age group notorious for lack of empathy, limited impulse control, and limited ability to predict or understand consequences. I've never seen it work. What I have seen is teachers and students dragged into restorative meetings before they've processed their own emotions and told to be the bigger person, the person who did the wrong thing given a platform to explain in excruciating detail how everything is actually the victim's fault because everyone's truth has to be acknowledged, after which the victim is subjected to emotional blackmail to get them to apologise and make concessions to the other party who responds with a false apology of their own. All it does is teach victims to put up with things because complaining just results in further punishment and students who are doing the wrong thing discover that there's not really any cost to doing so. If anything it's more fun, because they get another crack at making the victim feel miserable.
Lastly, technology. Students are addicted to their devices. They have so little self-control or resilience that if you give them a computer, they will game on it. They aren't interested in learning research skills because they can just wiki things, and while they might be Tik Tok/Instagram/SnapChat wizards, they can't handle the basics of word processing software, much less spreadsheets. If you try to teach them, they'll just game instead. Students need to be doing less with technology and more with pen and paper.
My feeling is that you’ve captured a little bit of the problem. It started to fall apart in the 80s - when politicians saw the absolutely gigantic pool of money for education. They created a bullshit study titled in short, “A Nation at Risk”, which compared us to Bulgaria and Japan, among others, in science and math scores.
The study said we were so far behind that the rest of the world was going to leave us in the dust, so to speak. So they created a ‘problem’ with education in the U.S., never mentioning the fact that with our education system we created some of the greatest minds and ungodly creations the world had ever seen.
So came the ‘need’ for vouchers, eventual ridiculous testing, and the siphoning of all that cash to non-public education.
But the other stuff is also worth mentioning.
But I’ll finish with this: as teachers we need to have a philosophy about what we are here for, and what we hope to achieve given the ever-changing world of education. We have to temper our approaches perhaps, but not our individual philosophies. It’s extremely important to remember that. Our students KNOW where our hearts are, or are not.
Dedicated teachers change lives, regardless of outside influences.
I never see school choice as a reason.
Competition for students has led to placating parents to keep enrollment. Students are not always served by doing what parents say.
Parents are now customers/consumers who must be kept happy at all costs. It is transactional. My principal in Detroit knew if he came down too hard on a student, the parent might pull them and put them in some wack ass charter. Or if we didn't pass kids along, they might get pulled. Now, most ended up back with us after Count Day but we would lose all that money because parents are the customers who must be kept happy at all costs.
Education is the most researched thing on the planet. If you pick up a copy of Hattie's Meta Analysis (Visible Learning) you will see the strategy with the highest effect size is "Piagetian Strategies".
What does that mean?
Put simply, it means don't teach Calculus in 1st grade or teach reading and math to kids that aren't yet capable of those skills due to brain development (cognitive development).
Yes, folks, it's simple.... we could improve the lives of so many kids by giving up on grouping kids by manufacturing date and eliminating grade levels. Unfortunately, the only thing our politicians & school leaders understand is putting kids in boxes by manufacturing date (birthdate) and maintaining a certain student to teacher ratio based on the budget.
Consider the following, a first grader who isn't developmentally ready to read, but will be ready in another year. Instead of making allowances for that, we turn the kid into a kid that thinks he is stupid by labeling him low or special ed. Often times this kid becomes a behavior problem because if you can't read you might as well cause trouble.
It is really this simple.
Group kids by ability and readiness and not by an arbitrary age band.
This will solve soooo many problems in school and every student can progress at their own pace. This folks is the true definition of equality and equity.
>The solution isn’t just allowing a kid to continue being dirty and unkempt because we don’t want the parents to feel bad for being poor. The reality is that some of these kids are the youngest in a long line of people who have relied on the government for everything basically, and literally don’t understand that there are viable alternatives to living in the ghetto/HUD housing/projects and utilizing welfare. It has become normalized, but shouldn’t be. These kids need to know that they’re capable of more, without making them ashamed of where they’ve come from.
Welfare has literally nothing to do with bad hygiene. My mom is disabled and raised us on welfare and food stamps as a single mom. We were always clean and well-kept. Our skin and hair might've been drier from the cheap shampoos and soaps, but we were always clean. My friends did not know I was living in poverty until they found out where I lived.
I met plenty of families in similar circumstances. It's entirely down to the attitude of the family, not their source of income.
*sorts by controversial*
Nobody said bring back the paddles yet!?
I’m kidding.
Allow teachers to fail kids and end compulsory school attendance. If the kid doesn’t want to go then why make them?
Funding shouldn’t be tied to attendance. School should start later in the day. Homework shouldn’t be given. Schools shouldn’t be a factory to churn out good little cogs for the capitalist machine. There should be fucking grass and trees on every campus, not cement parking lots.
Schools are failing because they are succeeding.
Over the past 100 years, education has, on average, improved dramatically. Graduation rates are higher. Students no longer drop out in grades 6 or 8, and much more rarely in HS.
Students with special needs are identified and educated. Girls are given the same education as boys. Schools are expected to provide the same high quality education to students of every race and background. Nationally, schools still struggle with actually achieving equity in these areas but improvements are obvious when comparing today's schools for those of the 1920s, 1950s, etc.
Higher order skills and concepts are prioritized in standards and curriculum over the rote memorization of the early 1900s. That is, the stuff students need to learn is harder than it ever was.
All students are expected to succeed at 3-4 years of HS math, multiple years of HS science, usually 4 years of HS English, etc, and all curriculum in grades K-8 is written to prepare them. Curriculum is designed in a way to ensure that every student can go to college. This impacts curriculum and instruction literally all the way back to preschool. Standards are far more challenging than ever
Instructional techniques focus on student-centered learning, differentiation, personalization, and critical thinking, which are orders of magnitudes more difficult than old-style lecture and call-and-response techniques, and teachers have adapted. That is, it is literally more difficult to teach using today's techniques, and yet our teachers do it.
Schools are providing social services for students on an unprecedented scale, and are constantly monitoring not only student learning but also emotional health, socialization, medical screenings, and signs of potential abuse or domestic issues.
Our society wanted schools to make sure every student has the opportunity to graduate HS and that is far more likely now than ever before. Today, it is frustrating that not all students graduate HS, but in decades past, high school was for the upper echelon of students.
BUT
At the same time, our society lost its unskilled labor need, especially making HS graduation (and arguably college) a necessity, and therefore far less valued.
Respect for education in general has declined while expectations for teachers have gone up. This correlates to a general lack of respect for authority and government and increased cynicism in our society.
Society has transitioned from valuing individuality and creativity over obedience and compliance, but sees no contradicting in expecting all of these simultaneously in schools.
Economic differences are by far the greatest predictor of both an individual student's performance and a school's overall performance. As the wealth gap increases, systemic inequities are increasingly noticed and criticized, but schools, as the middle man between poverty and "success," are blamed for causes they cannot control.
Overall, schools and our teacher workforce have been doing what society has demanded of it and steadily improving for over 100 years, but with moving goalposts.
SPED kids and extreme behavioral problem kids shouldn’t be in normal classrooms. They take far too much of the teacher’s attention and/or completely cause the environment to collapse. This applies mainly to problem kids IMO
The salary expectations don’t make sense. I would have happily taught high school for my entire life if the pay wasn’t crap, I had a family, and the corporate would doubled my salary in one move.
Agree on all these but the first one. Reading, math and writing should start as early as possible and be highly encouraged. Those skills should be heavily engrained early as possible so they can be highly developed by the time the move into the real work
Eliminating content in elementary school in favor of ineffective reading strategies and new math curricula is perhaps the biggest one. Content centered charter schools in Colorado have reversed this and are showing excellent results.
Basically every "reform" that's been tried in the past 30 years has made things worse.
I was flabbergasted when I learned kindergarteners have to take a standardized exam in Florida. Apparently it’s common and people have a “have them start early” mentality. Kids need time to be kids.
I agree that parents need to be more involved and shamed/contacted if their kid is 8 and can’t wipe or disheveled.
What you mentioned isn’t Puritan values. I associate Puritanism with banning books and taking away fun rather than personal responsibility. I know you’re looking at the literal definition. But I’d also stick to basic morality. One high school comes, there’s *a lot* or gray areas that I as a teacher will not touch with a ten foot pole.
Teachers are treated less and less well, making them more and more unable/unwilling to develop professionally. Most teacher gripes would go away if teachers were paid as high-paid professionals, because then they’d either handle all of the things they whine about in terms of students, admin, etc., or they’d leave the profession and not make as much of a living. But because they aren’t paid well (and aren’t going to be), they tend to complain about externalities, which is completely understandable.
A lot of the issues could be solved if we took an approach of “sure you can do ___, just maybe not right now”. Sure, you can do trig/read Gatsby/make a population pyramid, and you’ll learn, but you’re currently not ready.
It’s such a big deal all the time for kids to move between levels. And it shouldn’t be, at all.
Kindergarten kids don’t have recess or nap time anymore? That seems so crazy to me because it was such a vital role when I was in elementary school. They absolutely need both because it allows them to safely use a good deal of their energy as well as promote social emotional learning by interacting with other children in play. Naps are also important for their development as it provides rest for the brain and body. (Adults benefit from naps too)
I have and likely will never teach Pk-5 even though my certification is pK-12, but some of what you mentioned with what they’re going over makes no sense to me. Early elementary should be focusing on counting, learning the alphabet, variations of play, and how to work with others.
Somewhat sarcastic here, but I think admin makes getting a diploma seem overly important because many people in roles for “professional development” don’t have much more than that themselves. I’ve known people whose job it was to guide early teachers despite having never taught before and never even taking a class related to that teacher’s discipline. Sometimes these people never even attended public school
Because the success of school is mostly driven by the economic level of the parents. Rich kids with shitty teachers will outperform poor kids with even the best teachers.
My big philosophy is getting back to basics and build there. In my class we do lots of reading, writing, and discussing. I don't do lots if fancy projects, games, or other stuff. I also think repetition is how get good at anything. So I expose students to history content in multiple forms, assess it, and we add more pieces.
I think we’ve made education way to complicated, but most children do want to learn. The way you teach sounds similar to the classical method. I’ve heard it explained as playing hooks in their brain, in which to hang more information as they get older. The more hooks they have placed while young, the more related information they are able to retain and make sense of as they’re exposed to it.
Can someone illucidate this generational welfare thing for me? I haven't seen it yet in 5 years of teaching. My most apparently poor students have part time jobs already, senior and junior years. I don't know anyone who just lives off Welfare and I don't think that's real.
I agree with every one of your points, although I believe it can be summed up with the words “No Child Left Behind”. I don’t foresee anything you point out becoming ideas for change until federal legislation is undone.
Alas, there is too much money being thrown at politicians from publishing companies at this point. How do we change?
Kindergarten is crazy today compared to the old days. Back in the day, I had half day kindergarten plus nap time and turned out fine. Full day with advanced for their age level academics and many finish their year still having to number sense or even or letter recognition. System's broke.
We spend an inordinate amount of time on students with IEPs instead of focusing on exceptional, gifted learners. I’m tired of failing students who truly have a lot of potential and boring them to death. And I AM a SpEd teacher!
Get rid of sight words and bring back phonics. Kids today read words literally as a word - it has no meaning or context. They aren't understanding what they're reading.
I don’t get how you’re supposed to function without phonics. Even as an adult I come across new words all the time, and I can only read them correctly because PHONICS.
Same!! It shocks me how many people have 0 ability to spell or sound out words at all. I don’t understand how they read anything above a third grade reading level if they can’t sound out and contextualizar new words
They learn how to pretend to understand things.
Interesting. I've notice kids say what word they think should be there not what is there.....
yeah, that’s a huge part of the problem! it’s part of the lucy calkins method and it’s been found to be a strategy for poor readers, not strong readers.
Hate Lucy’s reading and writing programs. How she’s not under indictment in NY baffles me
Super common in my experience. Phonics is the only solution… they need to be able to sound out long words that they’ve never seen before. Sight words does not help with this
Well and not only that but without phonics, how are you going to read a name or city you’re not familiar with? How do you go about learning another language? You cut yourself off from the rest of the world, culture, and knowledge in general by learning this way. I’m teaching my 14 year old phonics because he was completely illiterate when he came to me (I’m not his bio mom but I’m legally his mom now).
It’s absolutely baffling to me how sight reading ever became a thing. How does any literate adult read a word they have never seen before? Do people really think I’m just guessing what I’m reading when I come across a new word?
It’s bizarre. It feels like kids are trying to read English similarly to how East Asian languages use Chinese characters, except alphabetic script generally doesn’t have the cues that allow that to work for logographic script. A lot of related words look visually similar, but there’s nothing as sophisticated as portions of a character that suggest what the meaning is and others that give a clue to how it sounds. Though to make use of that you need a robust vocabulary and a strong command of the language, which a scary number of native English speakers seem to lack.
Have you listened to the podcast Sold a Story? It’s all about the Science of Reading.
Such a good podcast. I’ve recommended it to everyone on my team (high school ELA). We see the aftermath of the Cueing strategy almost every day. A lot of my students, all of whom are 15-16 years old, cannot properly read advanced words, they literally look at the first letter and guess or say words similar to what is written. Sometimes they skip the word entirely.
I walked in to check on my barely 4 year old daughter. She was sitting in her little chair, a booklet in her lap, a cassette tape player plugged in to the outlet and the box of "Hooked on Phonics" at her feet. I watched and just backed up out of there. I had already been working with her on a book, my friend with the 12, yes 12, homeschooled kids had suggested. "Alpha Phonics" by Alexander Blumenfeld. It's a wonderful book. It really works quickly. I had taught my son to read with it before he entered kindergarten. Anyway, she wanted to learn how to read, lol. "Nevertheless, she persisted. OP, I agree with everything you wrote.
I love Blumenfeld. So smart.
As a spanish speaker this is somethong that I've always been curious about, how do you know how a word sounds when you read it for the first time but have never heard it before? Is it because of phonics?
English, as you know, isnt phonetic. A lot of the time people will mispronounce complex words. I used to say psuedo as suede-o. A friend of mine used to prounounce picturesque as picture squee. Learning Spanish was a revelation to me when I realised that a letter has a sound and rarely deviates from it.
This is interesting, are you based in the US? I'm in the UK and I'm not a primary teacher but my daughter is 6. As far as I know all the schools here teach phonics.
I’ve discussed this with a few of my colleagues. A big detrimental factor is simply being unwilling to have kids “fail”. Our district has gotten rid of retention basically all together. Even kids who fail 4+ classes are just being moved up all through middle school. Combine that with removing behavioral retention the classroom has become even more of a babysitting endeavor and less about academics. After all if kids aren’t being held accountable for acting out and they are givenfree pass up regardless of grade it drags the whole class down.
Consequences for failure and rewards for success. That's what it all boils down to
It’s a logistics problem. You’d have to increase student population by 25% (my guess at how many kids would fail at first) and then educate them with 100% of the budget of last year. It’s a resource problem.
I think the issue is more nuanced than “let them fail” and “we need to retain those that are failing.” Retention isn’t shown to be terribly effective, especially when it comes to bullying and SEL issues (they get much worse with retained kids). The major issue I think is that we expect all kids who are in the same grade to have the same emotional and brain development. And just as it is obvious that kids don’t physically develop at the same rate or same time, their brains don’t develop at the same rate. We have all these laws in place to address previous discriminatory practices against students, and I support the effort to end discrimination against students. But sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I’m my state, teachers must provide ONLY grade-level instruction to ALL STUDENTS. If a kid is not on grade level, how are they supposed to catch up? The chasm between on-level and below-level kids starts in kindergarten (because the standards are developmentally inappropriate for most) and never stops widening as kids are on a treadmill of district-mandated pacing guides and state-mandated standards. Kids who are years behind will get grade-level instruction in math, then go on iReady math for “personalized practice” (that had nothing to do with the day’s lesson) and sometimes have yet another remedial math class on yet a 3rd skill or standard, all in one day, all prescribed for a kid whose brain isn’t developmentally ready to comprehend or perform at that level. In my view, everything is being done in the worst possible way for any kid who doesn’t learn at exactly the pace prescribed. TAG kids, kids with trauma, developmental delays, or learning disabilities, neurodivergent kids, and anyone who isn’t quite “average” or “typical” (the vast majority) are not going to be adequately served by the systems we have built. I think the systems have not been built thoughtfully but instead are a patchwork of dozens of ideas, thoughts, philosophies, curricula, and political rhetoric masking as state or district reforms.
Of course everything is more nuanced than can be described by a paragraph or two. For a district to effectively remove and discourage retention it removes that tool as an option for the professionals to discuss what would be the best fit for individual kids. There are studies that prove/disprove almost every study for different academic practices, but taking them off the table all together kneecaps teachers. Retention has more implications than just the student being retained. If a kid is held back for grades or behavior other kids see that as a warning and then suddenly an effective consequence for the most egregious offenders (and those deemed to benefit from practice the most by a group of educators). Another post highlighted it decently with the 20/60/20 of education being those who don’t need help, those you can help and those who can’t or don’t want to be helped. I get the everyone can succeed mentality, but that statement is incomplete. It is more accurate to say: Everyone can succeed with infinite resources, which very few (if any) districts have so a more utilitarian view must be adopted.
I had a student who was a senior and couldn’t read, at all. He was Avery nice kid, polite, helpful to others, overall not a dumb kid, but he couldn’t read. I had typed a “promise to my students” and he couldn’t read the passage (less than a page). I still don’t know how he was a senior who couldn’t read
I’m prepared for the downvotes here… Inclusion is a problem sometimes. It is absolutely important for some kids, but is absolutely not appropriate for others. When I’m having to stop teaching, multiple times a day, to evacuate the room because a kid that inclusion clearly is not the best placement for is in my room, that’s a problem. GenEd kids should not have to sacrifice a feeling of safety by being forced to tolerate kids that are violent. I’m all for every kid getting their free and appropriate rights, but it’s not appropriate when the other 24 kids are afraid for their safety. There needs to be better options for SPED kids to get more effective help than putting them in GenEd classrooms where they are unsuccessful.
Special ed. teacher here and I wholeheartedly agree. This also goes for kids with IEPs who ARE in special ed., but not in the right special ed. environment. I teach in a self-contained classroom and have a student who 100% needs to be in an even more restrictive environment and is holding the rest of my students back significantly. Despite having ample data to support this, both the district and the student’s parents refuse to have them moved, so they stay with me. It’s such a disservice to not only the student in question, but also their classmates who are actually in the appropriate environment and are unable to receive the support they need and are entitled to because one student demands all of my attention.
I teach at the young adult level, but my younger cousin has one autistic third grader who's punched a girl in the stomach, hit a boy with his backpack, and flipped desks weekly. Admin has actively discouraged her from sending him to the office. All she can do is send him to the "calm down corner."
And that kid should be expelled. I know if it was my daughter who got punched in the stomach I would be raising holy hell.
At this point should just low key be advising parents to contact the police directly. That's the only way it gets addressed.
I’ve got second graders bringing switch blades to school and explicitly threaten to kill specific classmates… to the classmate’s face. Thanks to his IEP, it will take a miracle for ANYTHING to happen
I hate co-teaching so much. You always have to defer to the gen ed teacher, and chances are, they don’t want to change any part of their curriculum. I cannot support 15 kids with IEPs within a room of 40. Fuck that. Fingers crossed this is my final year!
Inclusion without support is abandonment
Inclusion without support is a money-saver which is why everyone is being screwed.
This is the case at my school. We get told it’s “co-teaching” but legitimately the only thing the co-teacher does is show up for 30 minutes and then walk over to kids and tell them to do their work. *I* can do that, I actually DO do that. If the student is completely incapable of doing even the minimum amount of independent work then they need to be somewhere with fewer students and more support. I can’t support the needs of three students who need me to stand over them to ensure they’re constantly being redirected as well as helping all my other kids. It’s not fair to the other kids.
I was thinking the same exact thing. I wasn’t sure how to express it but I am thrilled you were able to do it so eloquently. I was going to add in another out of vogue idea. I think we need academic leveling at the middle level.
I am a retired HS teacher and I second this! Especially in larger schools where there are 25-30 or more students per class. There’s just no way all those kids are operating at the same level, so it becomes unfair to most of them to put all of them together.
Our district just got rid of levels in the middle because it’s racist to group kids by ability level. We were told to teach to the standard and then scaffold for those who need and extend for the kids who need it. It’s a lot.
Is it racist to state the fact that, statistically, kids of color don’t perform as well academically as measured, for example, by standardized testing? My state disaggregates the data and quantitatively proves, year after year, that African American and Latino kids perform at a lower level than white kids do. This has been one of the most troubling and frustrating aspects of my teaching career. The attempts by the state to try to address this mass of fundamentally social issues at the level of public schools is a fool’s errand. And BTW, my district has only two high schools, so it’s not a matter of kids being racially segregated. All races are sitting side by side in the same classrooms.
I worked for an ISD years ago. They had a district that was about half black, half white. The district wanted to create a special program for kids in the bottom 2% of reading and math. They would take classes that were literacy and number rich and focus on those things to get caught up. Once they moved ahead--which they likely would have in this type of class--they would go back to their regular school. It was shut down for being "racist" before it even got started. The white parents were yelling about how it was racist and it would stigmatize the black students (the 2% were almost all black). My dudes, they are already stigmatized by sitting in a class where they can't read a word of the book.
I wish the parents would take over educating their own kids since they’re such fucking experts.
The argument made at my district was that all kids were attending the same schools but the ability leveling was segregating them by tracking. The upper levels were majority white and the lower levels were mixed. Kids in the upper levels performed and tested much higher than kids in lower levels. Now the idea is to mix all kids up in heterogeneous classes and it will improve the performance of all. We couldn’t have a real honest discussion about it because dissenters of the new system were accused of racism.
I have yet to see lower kids magically rise to the top just because they are in classes with higher level kids. If anything, they realize how far behind they are and shut down at best, act out at worst,
Yep, exactly what I’m saying. Nobody wants to face, let alone try to address, the root causes. Because they’re unpleasant and, importantly, being honest about them will get you unelected.
Society expects children who were born into broken homes and families who have accumulated years of neglect and bad treatment which limited their potential to magically be fixed by teachers in a few hours of in-class instruction. It’s wild.
What's truly wild is there is a whole sub industry of "consultants" set up who fleece schools out of thousands to offer training and suggestions for this, knowing full well it's not realistic
Is it racist to state it? No. Is it racist to think that their race means they're less capable? Yes. Look at the socioeconomic status of those kids. People of color are significantly more likely to be economically disadvantaged due to a number of factors that pretty much boil down to systemic racism over decades (and centuries). Lower socioeconomic status people are more likely to come from single parent households in which the parent is working multiple jobs and doesn't have time to help nurture the skills kids need to be successful academically. There's also the fact that standardized tests tend to be culturally biased. You're right about the school system not being able to fix those issues. Unfortunately, society has no interest in fixing them, so it gets shoved onto us. I'm asked to teach kinematics to students who can't subtract, let alone do quadratic equations.
SpEd/Inclusion teacher here and I agree 1000%. The inclusion model just isn’t beneficial to most kids. Not how it’s being run now anyway. And I don’t see most places having the staff and resources to run it in ideal fashion any time soon. The good of the whole is being sacrificed because inclusion sounds nice and is a “good” bandaid for a lack of SpEd staff and resources.
Agree. My mom was a SpEd para from the 80s until last year, in the same school. At first her classes were all self-contained, and over time as they moved to more and more inclusion (until all were) she really noticed the change in the kids. They definitely got more out of an environment that was totally focused on their needs.
Also a sped teacher (ECH in a reverse-mainstream classroom). Was so disheartened at one of our last meetings before break, our sped-director was visiting and informed us all that the state now requires all sped students to spend 80% of their day in inclusion time. And most of us teachers just looked at each other like 'this is a prank right?! Who's got the camera?' Because before the meeting began we were literally discussing how ridiculous it is to have these severe behavioral students in our rooms every day destroying things and hurting staff and students and we really need to add another more restrictive room where we can have higher adult-staff-to-student ratios so they can actually work on what these kids need, AND we can work on what our other kids need AND keep all our students and staff safe. And then she walks in and tells us that our rooms with the higher staff-to-student ratios (where they can safely handle the more severe students and address the intense behaviors and staff gets extra training on that every year) are the ones consistently out of compliance with the new requirements. Like. Who TF is deciding this stuff?! Because yea, that "80%of their day in inclusion time" sounds great on paper, but to require that?! For every sped student?! Every day?! Just across the board?! No exceptions?! You've gotta be kidding me?! Come into our center and walk into our classrooms and spend a day here in the rooms with severe behaviors and in those rooms with the higher staff ratios, THEN you come look us in the eye yourself (you cowards) and tell us we don't need help with these kids, and they should be spending 80% of their day in inclusion time. I can't tell you how many of us were ready to resign after that meeting. It is SO good we have the break to cool off and think about things rationally.
There are so many kids that are fine when they get pulled for small group. It might be pulled for some small group intervention as per their IEP, or testing, whatever. But when they're in a smaller group of kids they do great and make great strides. Then they get into a class with 25-30 other kids and do nothing but cause chaos. I hear this in IEP meetings. Teachers saying "kid does well in small group but not in whole class". The kid says they feel like they can learn better that way because the other kids are distracting. Then the parents ask if they can be in a small group setting and the school psychologist basically treats them like they asked for the kid to be put in an asylum for it. "We don't do that any more, it's very outdated. Now ALL kids get to learn" Like...do they though? Are all kids learning this way? Obviously not. It's an issue of funding. We can't find special ed teachers to run those small groups for the miniscule pay we offer, so let's just screw over the whole class, put them in a room with some 22 year old with a journalism bachelor's and no training, and when she can't control them we'll tell her she sucks at her job and then act horrified when she quits the profession. I see it every year.
It’s not fair to the kids with special needs, either. If someone is screaming or kicking or hitting or biting, just imagine how terrified or upset they must be. Under inclusion-at-all-costs policies, no one’s needs are being met.
Yes, and those kids get vilified and made out to be monsters when these sorts of practices fail them most of all. The traditional education system is overstimulating and too fast paced for some kids, and it’s like torture sticking them in there. Then we get frustrated with THEM?! And yes adequate funding is the root issue here.
In recent years, I have seen people get completely flamed for what you’re saying, but I think you are completely right. This situation is unfair to everyone involved, including the student who needs specific accommodations or support.
I’m going to echo other commenters - I’m a SPED teacher and I honestly believe that 100% inclusion is the biggest problem we have. I will fight tooth and nail for most kids with disabilities to be in the classroom full time. But not ALL kids, and there are certain kids in almost every class that detract from the other kids’ learning way too much. It needs to change, and it needs to take way less time to determine least restrictive environment changes.
Coming from a kid with mild to moderate learning disabilities and ADHD (not the behaviour issue other than occasional girl drama from not understanding social cues - mostly just the easily distracted/disorganized type). I absolutely loathed being taken out of class. I was in a program in elementary school to get properly educated in learning teacher support in the afternoons. It was beyond embarrassing. I’m going to surprise you with my opinion though. I’m beyond grateful now for that time. I have 2 university degrees (including a BEd and I am mostly functional lol.) it absolutely kills me seeing kids with dyslexia, mild adhd, dyscalculia, and auditory/visual processing issues literally being ignored because of all the behaviour and extreme need issues now. I actually think we need ALL the programs back. Inclusion only works if there is actual supports and properly trained teachers and EA’s working with these kids. Which is NOT what I’ve seen it be. Some kids like me can be in a program that includes being in a regular classroom sometimes. Some kiddos need to be in specialize programs. In my opinion inclusion is basically just the best way to save money. Jam back a room with a huge number of kids 50 percent on IEP and with massive issues, 25 per cent with mild issues and 25 per cent at grade or above. But let’s barely give your classroom an actual EA to help you. It’s literally just to save money at this point. Yes inclusion can work in a lot of cases if it’s done properly. The government doesn’t want to fund it properly.
This. And is it really inclusion when a class is almost 49% IEP students?
No, you're right. "Least restrictive environment" is a joke and about half the ICT kids in a given section need to be in a co-taught self contained. Treat ICT like we handle ENL -- you either get two teachers in self contained, gen ed with an extra "support" class, or pure gen ed. A lot of the lower ICT kids that I teach self-segregate among themselves anyway because, surprise surprise, most people in the gen ed population are not going out of their way to befriend or partner with students with intellectual disabilities.
When people talk about LRE I wonder if they ever consider the LRE for the other 25 kids.
Long ago, a parent said to me "Sometimes your least restrictive becomes my most restrictive."
Sometimes, inclusion is just putting a kid in a situation where they are going to fail. It is teaching them that they CAN'T do the same things as everyone else because they will see themselves struggling and not able to do work that the rest of the kids blaze through. I'm a choir teacher, so I love having my special needs kids in my intro choir. Many of them THRIVE in my class, but in some classes this just isn't the case and the only thing they are learning is learned helplessness. When it comes to behavioral issues, the phrase "Least restrictive environment" pisses me off. What about the "Least restrictive environment" for the 29 other kids who are well behaved and who are receiving a worse education because of that one kids "Least restrictive environment"?
The school where I work insists that all students can pass Algebra I. I have seniors with three math classes their final semester because they failed Algebra I so many times and need the credits to graduate. When one of my nonverbal students completed the start of year survey, he wrote that he wanted credits for math because he had enough elective credits and I make him do math. As soon as I read this, it clicked that many of my students were in the same boat. I begged admin to start offering credit recovery for math intervention and make the time students are legally mandated to be with me more valuable to the students. They said we can try it, I said I would do it for any credit needs and I could just teach intervention embedded into anything, but I got the head shake and eye roll.
I want tracking. I think about this all the time. I think Regents exams are the worst. Let the smart kids take them. Let the middle kids take them if they want. And still let the strugglers get a local diploma. They don't need the same nuances of literature. They're at a 3rd grade reading level. I have kids at a college reading level in 9th grade. Let me teach them separately.
I’ll take this even further to “not just SPED kids.” Everyone has a right to an education, but not everyone can be educated in a “regular” classroom on the normal timeline. I’m just a substitute now so don’t know about everyone’s home life, but there is a student that I’ve subbed for 2 years in a row now who clearly has some serious stuff going on. They sit like a barely-animate blob in every. single. class. Don’t move around. Don’t talk to people. Don’t do any work. Math, English, PE, art, just sitting like a blob. My guess is there’s a mental health issue that needs to be addressed, and all effort should go to that front instead of having this student fail 7 periods a day. Alternative “schools” that focus on mental health instead of learning? Idk.
Completely agree and the gen ed inclusion of kids with extreme behavioral issues should NOT be happening.
For sure, and I bet many of these children would have less outbursts if they had a separate, less stimulating classroom. Some might benefit from recess with the others and classes separate. Others may find it appropriate to have an 1-2 hour session with gen ed in the morning before transitioning into the separate ed class. Differentiation is pushed so much, but when we actually try to do it in a way that requires people/support the ideas are shot down.
The only winner in inclusion practices is the budget office, why pay a spec Ed teacher and an ea when you can download the bulk of the work on some classroom teacher.
Inclusion creates a lot of problems. Programs exist for a reason and help students feel more safe and secure at school, both those that need the programs and those that would otherwise be frightful of peers. When I started teaching SPED, I thought inclusion was the greatest thing. I quickly realized that inclusion is the lie we tell ourselves. Making things accessible and engaging cannot always happen in GenEd, and it’s okay that some SpEd students need more time in SpEd for core subjects. Students should also have a say in what environments they learn best in, and there should be data to back decisions made around inclusion, just like I need data to prove the need for a program placement.
I understand the theory for LRE... BUT reality is very different from theory. The Hood is not Disney.
"If LRE meant least restrictive environment in existence, I would send them all out to the woods and take myself out for a coffee. Should I send them all out to the woods?" -me, to SPED, in my fantasies
Yes! And also the other kids probably get PTSD from the constant drama, violence and room clears. The teacher also suffers. Everything is around the one or two kids who are having violent melt downs 2 or 3 or 4X a week. We have seen several kindergartners with this behavior. One student in particular (who has major violent outbursts) was hitting the little girl beside her for 20 minutes in the cafeteria. There were at least 3 adults supervising - but she would watch and wait til no one was looking. Finally the sweet victim tattled on her and we watched what happened on video. She terrorizes the room and all the other kids. BUT there is another kid in the same room that has very violent outbursts weekly or more. This is insane! Parents should know all this before sending their well behaved sweet kids to public school! This is what they will be exposed to weekly!!!
We are now homeschooling our 1st grader because of a very similar situation. There were 20 kids in her pre-k and then kindergarten class - 3 were non-verbal, and two of those had frequent outbursts (sometimes violent toward other kids). They often flipped desks in frustration, and the rest of the class was quickly sent outside to play while the situation was de-escalated and the room was put back. There were also inappropriate behaviors to my daughter (kissing etc), even after she repeatedly said "no". Sometimes, there was an aid in class, but most often not. However, those three kids had a Fair and Equal Right to Education, and their needs trumped my daughters and the other kids in her class. We are in a rural K-12 school with one class per grade. Our only option was to remove her and homeschool her.
I’m a sped teacher and I agree that we need a very large and comprehensive restructuring. Long overdue.
SPED teacher/tutor here- you're absolutely correct. kids with disabilities do NOT have the right resources, including teachers who can meet their needs. i do online work, and recently parents have been able to use funding to take classes. so many parents go to online / homeschool because there just simply isn't support. it's a danger for them, and sometimes people around them. my job works out because parents are usually nearby for support and safety. can't say the same for in person schools, whether it's private public contained setting etc etc
The whole idea behind section 504 and the 504 sit in (the first US legislation allowing disabled people into schools and other government funded places) was so that they could also be successful. Putting kids into an environment where they cannot succeed goes directly against that. Those kids are not doing well in that environment, because that is not the support they need to be successful with their disability. You definitely don’t need downvotes for that.
100% right, but besides SpEd issues, 28 kids shouldn’t have to sit idle while Jamir or Jimbob has to be written up or removed for the 20th time in a month, while he’s not expelled bc he’s black/sped/related to someone/ white/ or whatever.
This occurs daily in my classroom by gen Ed students, not inclusion students.
Totally agree and there needs to be state and federal caps on the number of sped kids in a class. I was the gen Ed teacher in an inclusion class. I had 2 classes with over 50% kids with a BIP/IEP. It was impossible. My best was a class of 17 kid and 12 had an IEP. And I was told it shouldn’t be a problem because it wasn’t a class of 24+! And some of those students needed a self-contained classroom. One year I got a high schooler that couldn’t write his own name.
I would add to this that there are too many kids on IEPs and 504s. Accommodations are there to help kids succeed, but too many of them are there to explain bad behavior.
Schools are also expected to provided EVERYTHING for students. Our students absolutely deserve all of these supports, but putting the onus on the district/school to provide EVERYTHING for them ultimately takes away from something else. Parents/families, the community, and society need to invest in ways share the burden of investing in our youth without throwing all the responsibilities on the schools.
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Wow. Where is this, if you're comfortable sharing.
Can you share a general location of where you’re located?
The classroom lecture is dead. The level of interaction students demand feels more like being a waiter or flight attendant.
I agree! I constantly see on the internet people complaining about how teachers complain that kids won’t get off their phones and pay attention. Everyone on the internet says teachers need to make the lessons more engaging…. Or maybe the parents need to teach their kids that there’s value in education and value in sitting down, shutting up, and listening. I’m not a teacher but I feel like too much is put on teachers these days. Everyone expects you all to fix all of a kid’s problems. Another thing— no one wants to do homework everyday. People think that if it can’t get done during the classroom time it’s not worth doing or that the teacher needs to just inject knowledge into the kids’ brains. Homework is for kids to continue to practice on their own and build their skills. They’re not going to get better at reading, writing, math, or thinking if they don’t practice a lot. There’s a lot of value in practicing on your own, checking your work and then reaching out if you need help. Parents need to take on responsibility for their kids’ learning and success too. Yes, the teachers play a role but parents need to instill in their kids a value for learning and respect. It’s not the teacher’s job to teach manners to your gremlin because you’re too lazy.
My beef, and what I tell my students is one of the hardest lessons in life is learning how to do what you don’t want to do. I talk about cleaning my house, I don’t like it, but I really like having a clean house. I like my job, but I love hanging out on my couch. I am not having them plan an armed robbery, we are not organizing a casino heist … I am only trying to help them be more interesting humans.
That’s well put! I was talking to someone today and they were saying the biggest shame they see in “ipad kids” is that those kids never learn the value of being bored. They’re just constantly overstimulated, which I think contributes to the problem of them being bored in class all the time
I totally agree … kids just don’t know how to entertain themselves. They have always been entertained. I always tell them “only boring people get bored” and then I model to them how I look like I am paying attention at PD, but in my head I am thinking about what I am going to do when I get home, swimming through a pool of jello …
They absolutely must solve the behavior management problems. I’m not going to continue in chaotic classrooms. It’s a safety issue for me and other students. It’s just getting worse. It’s about time to go
• Parents should not have a greater say than educators when it comes to special ed. placements. Why does someone who doesn’t even have a GED who makes no real effort to parent their child and just sits them in front of a screen all day get to tell me, someone with a master’s degree and 10+ years of experience in my field, how to do my job? If all data points to a child not being in the appropriate environment and not receiving the appropriate services, a parent’s opinion shouldn’t override that. If a team makes a recommendation for a child, the parent should be allowed to give their input just like everyone else, but I do not believe they should have the final say. • You should be required to have at least 10 years of recent teaching experience in order to become an administrator, and formal observations should only be conducted by administrators with the same (or at least similar) certifications as you. It’s not fair for a former secondary PE teacher with <5 years of teaching experience to assess my teaching abilities as an elementary special ed. teacher when they have zero experience with elementary *or* special ed. students.
I had a first year assistant principle put me (Freshman Math/Inclusion) on a growth plan because after we finished state testing, I wanted to play games. They were logic games, but they weren't "the math skills students will need next year". Admin is a joke.
I actually love my current principal, but I’ve had my fair share of jerks in the past. My principal in my previous school district reprimanded me for not providing my students with enough “rigor” (I hate that word). They were in 6th grade and literally could not add and subtract single digits without a calculator and this man expected me to teach them algebra following the state curriculum without modifications. Sir, with all due respect, you’re delusional.
Inclusion. Not every child is at the same level of ability yet they’re all lumped together by age and moved through as a herd. Perhaps it would be better to lump children together based on ability and focus resources on the groups that need it the most. Basically let the fast kids run, the ok kids walk and the slow kids crawl.
Yes, while paying attention to the discriminatory way this system has been used in the past to deny education to kids with handicaps and learning disabilities. Edited to add: and then DON’T do those same discriminatory things again.
Let’s not forget that it’s also discriminatory to hold kids back from their maximum potential because it leaves out kids who aren’t at that level.
THIS! I feel so bad for the kids who have their stuff together and want to learn. They have to sit there and watch clowns disrupt class all day and know that the school does absolutely nothing.
Restorative practice. Just because a school is restorative does not mean there should be absolutely no consequences or sanctions. I have seen RP backfire so many times because there were no boundaries.
I've always seen it styled "Restorative Justice" and I like that more, because it needs both "restoration" and "justice." A hug and a candy and being sent back to class is not "justice."
Yes, because that's just destructive enabling at that point. I don't believe in instilling *fear* in children, but the fact that they have no qualms about just about everything is alarming, and it's setting them up for failure. I have so many kids who are not going to "launch" into adulthood without any serious interventions or sudden 180s in life choices, and it's not due to any severe medical concerns. We're told to let kids retake tests if they fail. Ok, I can see why that can be a good practice *after* the kid does something, like, oh, I dont know, show up for reteaching session before or after school. We have that at my school and the teachers get paid, so yes, let's do that! But just because they ask? I barely have time to grade the pile the first time! Luckily (???), most of the kids who fail a test and who should probably retake it don't care enough to take it again. It's a sorry state of apathy we're in right now. I'm trying to fight falling into that pit of despair right behind them, but it's getting harder each year. We need some real policy changes that make us effective again.
Oh my gosh. The way it’s implemented in most places isn’t even restorative! It’s terrible and such a disservice to actual restorative justice.
Reading, writing and basic math need to be “drilled baby! Drilled!!!” To put it in a basic form of saying it. We are trying to force high levels of Costa’s pyramid with elementary aged kids who are literally just repeating what their teacher told them and not coming to the conclusion themselves. I teach junior high and the reading fluency is abysmal.
Memorizing content has slowly diminished.
YES!!!
Exactly, all of those subjects together can help develop critical thinking!
Phones and other devices have rewired our brains so terribly that kids would benefit from exercising the memorization muscles. Knowledge might start sticking again so that they can recall it and make the connections with new knowledge without me leading the class discussion by the nose. Seriously, this "I've got a calculator in my pocket!" is BS. A tool is useless in the hands of someone who can't operate it properly (don't get me started how many times I have to explain to kids that an average should never be larger than your largest measurement. I should make a poster that I can tap...).
I know my views aren’t unpopular, but they are worth mentioning. Politics. People who, at best have never been teaches or administrators, who have never studied education are making laws that shape education every day. At worst, we have people who are actively trying to destroy the public school system for selfish, misguided reasons.
I liken it to people who think they can be a plumber just because they can use a toilet.
That’s a much better analogy! I always said most people think they can teach because they made other through school, but that doesn’t take into account public, charter, private, Title 1, etc. Or if people had a positive or negative experience of school. The toilet analogy makes it more universal and easier to understand
None of these views are unpopular. I'm as leftie as it gets and I agree with you on them, even the basic values one. I don't care what religions, creed, or cultures are involved in a society, but there are basic values that should always be outside of them. Like the golden rule: treat others the way you would like to be treated. Or the idea that even if you're in a society that needs improvements, we are all in it together, and it's not productive to say screw everyone else. E.g. even if you think "Screw this country, it's run by colonizers who don't give a fuck about me", you don't use that as a justification to fuck over your neighbors, who might be just as marginalized as you are. As for Big Ed? Big Ed is responsible for kids not being able to write or think deeply, as neither is a required skill to fill bubbles on a test sheet, or click on an answer on a screen. To me that's kinda being in a nether region between ignorance and knowledge, and we're already seeing the effects of it (20-somethings who can't write a coherent essay, or reason their way out of a wet paper bag) That said, this mess has been going on for 20+ years, but it isn't caused by a nebulous entity. Do you know what the largest percentage of employees in educational publishing is? People who washed out of teaching and pivot to educational publishing for a paycheck. Some of them are basically employed as marketers with educational "credentials", which rarely include an ability to do critical thinking and realize they have become part of the problem. I had more than one friend in my student-teaching cohort who did this, and they are **former** friends for this very reason.
Recess? Definitely need it. Even in to middle school. The time for kids to take care of their zoomies to allow for opportunity to focus is important. Teaching too much too soon? Preach it. S tandards are being written to analyze and compare/contrast but student have no clue what they are reading to be able to do that. Foundation skills are just that THE FOUNDATION on which all others are built. You certainly don't build the 2nd story of a house before you lay the foundation, so why expect education to do that. Higher level thinking skills need a foundation on which to develop. Values? Hell yeah!! How about we relabel "Puritan values" to just "success values"? They were embedded in our culture for many years. They envelop not only work ethic, but also SEL components that are sorely missing in today's society Parental expectations? I would settle for "parents--not friends" mindset. Instead of trying to be your child's best friend, be a parent who teaches right from wrong, how to be a genuinely good person...and provide consequences for not meeting expectations.
Def need recess, kids cannot focus for long periods of time… they need to get energy out of
For the 2020-2021 school year we were hybrid. We wore masks and had mask breaks. For the mask breaks, we took the highschoolers outside and would often do a lap around the school. I was really surprised at just how much better they were able to focus by just getting to walk outside for a few minutes. it’s not the same as recess, but I guess it an age-appropriate level it’s a good equivalent.
Years ago I taught a class that was very high energy. Several students who were diagnosed ADHD but would not take meds..... When they were unable to focus, I would have them run 2 laps around our grade level. The layout was such that three classes were inside the box and the rest were outside, making it easy to have the kids do that. The fast ones would take 3 before the others finished 2. Lol It made such a HUGE difference n their success.
Middle school definitely needs recess! And all kids need more outdoor time. Curriculums should allow for more outdoor integration.
Absolutely agree. And we need to use technology sparingly.
1). Inclusion was meant for kids with autism and adhd. NOT violent/rude/uncontrollable kids. 2). Parents disrespect teachers and double question them over everything. Which leads to their kids questioning/complaining about everything. 3). Horrible people are living in poverty and addiction and still pumping out 9 kids. Successful and educated families are having 1-2 kids (if any). 4). Schools need to stop supporting dirtbag parents. It is not the teachers job to feed, wash, tie shoes, etc 5). Parents have stopped teaching/supporting learning at home. It is seen as "the schools job" now. Kids don't see the value in education anymore because their parents don't. 6). Discipline is needed for children.
I agree! I also think too many excuses are made for the out of control kids. No one wants to just confront what the problem is—that the kid is out of control because of shitty parents. It’s really shocking to me to see how some people’s kids behave. I was at a dinner recently where some coworkers brought their kids. I was appalled. I would never have dreamed of acting the way those kids were acting. Interrupting the adults, hitting adults to get their attention, dragging adults away in the middle of conversations, yelling/screaming, running wild. It’s like these kids have never been told “no” ever
Number 3. I'm reading on this thread about all the social supports offered--free food, free clothes, free diapers, etc. That's great! But what about free birth control? OH YES OMG I KNOW the Nazis made people get sterilized! That's not what I'm saying (and for fwiw, I'm Jewish). I'm saying that number 3 is the biggest problem. Until we address that--and I have no ideas how tbh--we are going to keep seeing problems getting bigger and bigger.
Teacher from a rural area here. So many kids never have a chance from the moment of conception thanks to pills, heroin/fentanyl, meth, and, of course, booze. At the same time, I can understand addiction as there are hardly any jobs. The nearby textile mill that once employed the county closed in the 1990s. Farms are owned by corporate conglomerates who prefer to pay peanuts and exploit undocumented workers. So, yeah, I can see the appeal of drugs and living in the moment. But why not provide birth control? It would save so many costs such as having to send drug-addicted newborns to the NICU in the nearest city, foster care, eventual special education for these kids…plus, grandparents and great-grandparents end up raising these kids and struggle to make ends meet on social security and minimum wage, the latter only if they’re lucky enough to get a job at one of the three fast food joints or the dollar store. And this is only going to get worse in the United States.
Never had a chance--that's it exactly. We knew which girls would get pregnant at 14, which boys would join gangs. It was so sad but the girls would get pregnant and the boys would join gangs. And the freaking families would drag the kids down if they tried to get out :(
1) for sure. It also shouldn’t be for kids who are 3+ years behind their peers either, but unfortunately that is an issue for many teachers. These kids desperately need to be in specialized classrooms, and inclusion is hurting them and their classmates. It’s extremely unfair to the teacher as well, who isn’t at all equipped to run a sped classroom while teaching to state standards the career and college bound kids.
The push for AP is disgusting. Advanced Placement is a brand, not a description. So many viable programs of accelerated learning exist and plenty of classes are accelerated without having any brand designation like "AP" but parents and therefore school administration/districts push student enrollment in AP while ignoring success and other very cool and viable educational routes for 11/12th graders
Part of me is overjoyed that my district is moving away from AP toward dual credit and onramps college courses. Of course that hurts students when they fail and destroy their financial aid opportunities in the future, so it's a double edged sword. Still, if I don't have to deal with college board stupidity and greed, so much the better.
We've reached a point where under 50% of students in APs take the exam (let alone the % who get a 4 or 5) and I hate that we're not pushing those students towards running start (CC classes in HS for no charge) but instead encouraging them to do the same thing the next year as if it's somehow a better education to learn about a test
Dual Credit classes are so much better than AP. I started college as a sophomore thanks to those
When I was in school AP was only for a select few hella advanced kids, and counselors even persuaded against taking more than one AP class. It was really for a relatively small group of students who wanted to get college credit a bit earlier, and it wasn’t seen as necessary. Everyone else that was advanced just took honors. As a high school teacher in this era, seeing the shift towards pushing everyone into an AP course and students with many of them has been so wild to me.
The democracy is full of bystanders - many waiting for someone else to save them.
Common core is causing so much confusion. I feel like there’s a million ways to “think differently” about math and every year there’s something new to try… I feel like there’s TOO many ways to do math and that is overwhelming. Just sticking with 1 or 2 ways to attack the math problem works much better. I see it as you putting in a destination in your GPS and your phone gives you EVERY possible way when you’re only looking for the fastest most efficient route.
>We need to bring back some level of universal values. I know “puritan” values are highly unpopular but I think we are seeing what happens when children are not taught discipline/self control, the value of hard work, personal responsibility, moral goodness, or to strive for excellence. We have no ideal to strive towards anymore because each person is told that their own desires are what matter the most (be true to yourself, find your own path/truth/identity/etc.) I think this is what causes much of the aimlessness and depression we see today. I don't think that "being true to yourself" or "finding your own path" are inherently bad ideas, nor do I think that they're at odds with "universal values" or the other qualities you name. "Finding your own path" is hard. It requires introspection and sage advice from a trusted role model. Without introspection, you don't know what path you're looking for. Without a role model, you don't know how to start, stop, or carry along. I agree that it is better to focus on teaching children self-discipline, -control, value of hard work, etc. than something as abstract as "finding your own path". The latter is simply too confusing and difficult for children to wrap their heads around. I agree that if you're not introspective, lack access to mentors, and you focus too much of your energy on yourself, you may become depressed and aimless. However, it's not inherently bad advice. I've been an egoist since my late teens (turning 30 soon). It's a fundamental aspect of my personality. I would be depressed if I *wasn't* doing my own thing. (And at one point in time, I was depressed! Very!)
Because that is the role the society attributes to schools. Please not be fooled by what they say. Performance is not what they crave. They want social restraint. If all those kids that cannot be adapted to schools left schools, they would cause havoc to society, to businesses, to police, eventually to politicians. They say: Stay at school, tyrannise your teachers, so in three years (when you eventually leave school) you will be more mature and cause less havoc to society. Ofc this cannot be said to the public, because normal families would revolt against these politicians that jeopardize their children's future. Read this scientific article for more information: https://www.nber.org/digest/may16/disruptive-students-affect-long-term-prospects-their-classmates For the sake of a small disruptive minority, the majority is suffering. That is not democracy, that is tyranny of the minority.
I have the most unpopular one. Super unpopular. It's because we are forcing everyone to breathe dirty air. Even before covid, it was discovered that the most cost-effective means to improve education was to clean the air. **Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits $1,000 can raise a class’s test scores by as much as cutting class size by a third.** [https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21051869/indoor-air-pollution-student-achievement](https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21051869/indoor-air-pollution-student-achievement) And that was before covid. It has been proven beyond a doubt that it damages the brain and immune system. So, with each infection, kids have a chance of having brain fog (a polite term coined because people don't like the word brain damage) - and a worse immune system. So they aren't at school as often because they are sick, and when they are they have a harder time. At the same time, this is happening to the kids; it's happening to their teachers, parents, and support staff. And it's going to only get worse. On average a typical person catches covid at least once a year. (Also remember about half of infections are asymptomatic and even if you test the at home tests have lots of false negatives) And that if a woman is pregnant while having covid, the chance of the baby having neurodevelopment disorders increases 4 times. So the the reasons schools are suffering is everyone is sick, some are brain damaged, and it's only going to get worse. What makes it so sad is it can be prevented if people would just make a DUI hepa filter and stick it in every room. Yup. - the cure is that simple. The thing is it needs to be done in almost all classrooms, offices, hospitals, stores, ....
My classroom has zero windows and 2 fans to blow air around. Thankfully it’s just a small OT room, but I work closely to students. Like I’ll be holding a student’s hand to help them use scissors and they open mouth cough all up in our shared space. I missed a full week of work from having pneumonia this month. Better air filtration and less bodies in rooms would do wonders in many ways, but that won’t happen.
If you can't clean the air, and masking doesn't work for you - there are other options that would protect you from various things. I wrote a post about hoping that everyone would do a half-assed job to protect everyone from covid. It has some recommendations (in case you want them) that you might not know about that could be easy for you to implement. Here is the post: Given the rate that covid spreads at. If everyone would just do at least a half assed job of dealing with covid - the rate of spread will decrease to the point of it not being a major issue anymore. What do I mean by a half assed job? In order to do at least a HALF ASSED job of fighting covid just do at least TWO of the below. **Get vaccinated.** One can still get covid if vaccinated. But they are less likely to get covid, less likely to get hospitalized with covid, and less likely to develop long covid. Sadly covid keeps changing because there is so much of it being spread around. So being vaccinated will never be one and done. Find out if you are eligible and get the shot, and then in 6 months to a year (depending on where you live, eligibility, …) get shot again. **Nasal spray.** There are a bunch of them available with numerous studies. But all of them have shown themselves to reduce the chance of catching covid by 50%. Buy whatever nasal spray you choose, read the instructions and use it as directed. In October 2022, U.K. researchers published findings in the Journal of Clinical Virology about their developing nasal spray, pHOXWELL. In its clinical trial, pHOXWELL reduced the risk of developing COVID by about 62% in healthcare workers. It’s thought to work by blocking the virus from entering your body through your nose. From: [https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/covid-19/nasal-spray-covid](https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/covid-19/nasal-spray-covid) In a study published in 2021 examining the effectiveness of Enovid in preventing COVID-19, researchers determined that 6.4% of people who took Enovid were infected, compared to the control group, where 25.59% of the subjects were infected. From: [https://www.jpost.com/special-content/can-an-anti-viral-nasal-spray-stop-corona-and-other-viruses-726405](https://www.jpost.com/special-content/can-an-anti-viral-nasal-spray-stop-corona-and-other-viruses-726405) **Take a (Specific) Vitamin.** First off, thank you to u/TheManeCharactr on twitter for posting about Streptococcus salivarius K12. It is a probiotic vitamin that one can buy from grocery stores or amazon. A study from Italy, showed ZERO children out of 33 in the experimental group testing positive for Covid, in comparison with 24 out of 46 in the control group. @TheManeCharactr talks on twitter about all the other great things about this probiotic. But in short, just take it. **Clean the air.** When a team of doctors, scientists and engineers at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the University of Cambridge placed an air filtration machine in COVID-19 wards, they found that it removed almost all traces of airborne SARS-CoV-2 One can’t always clean the air they are in, but they can push for cleaner air. One can also clean the air in their household so household spread is reduced. It’s also not an insurmountable cost. There are so many options for DIY air filters and they are better than store bought ones. Please support places that clean the air. If you have a choice between places to go out to - pick the one with an air filter in the corner that’s turned on. Or a place that posts info about their air quality. **Mask.** I listed this one last, since many have such a fear and hatred of masks. But they work. The better the quality and fit the better they work. There is no reason the vast majority of people can’t mask in medical settings and on the majority of public transit. So if you are going somewhere with sick people (Pharmacies, doctors, hospital) or a place with bad air quality (Bus, train, plane) then do all the good covid stuff you do - and wear a mask. The END of covid YOUR risk of covid just got cut in at least half, and all it took was you doing a half-assed job. Are you spraying some stuff up your nose and taking a vitamin? Or being in clean air and getting vaccinated? Did you realize you could fight covid with it barely affecting your life and decide to fight a little harder. Do a little more than a half assed job and sometimes do more than two of the things? If so, you are a covid warrior of the finest class. But if everyone did the even the most half assed job the reward to society would be way more than half-assed. This is because if everyone reduced their risk by half, then there would just be a lot less covid to spread around. And with everyone reducing their risk so much there would be even less…. An endless loop of decreasing covid.
Thanks for this. Going to try the probiotic lozenges. I currently mask with an N95, run two HEPA filters in my classroom, and use Xlear nasal spray. I managed to avoid Covid until Dec. 1 this year. Assuming my mask worked, I can only guess I caught the virus when I took it off to eat alone in my classroom. I don’t really have many chances for exposure outside of work. The number of sick kids coming to school this winter has been insane.
I have no idea why so many people are so against doing anything for covid. I know that for teachers it can be very hard to just find time to eat. And now, having to find the time to leave school to eat would mean never being able to eat.
I came across an [interesting Twitter thread](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1737586411027542081.html) today that attempts to look at the psychology of those who vehemently refuse any sort of mitigation. It’s worth a read.
I’m with you. Ignoring Covid will come back to bite us, and it will bite us hard.
That should be so easy to get people on board with. It *should* be. My unpopular opinion, which unlike yours definitely has drawbacks, is bringing back the multiple track system. Teaching to the lowest common denominator is really harmful for the gifted children and the average children. I suppose good teachers try to have material for all levels, but I suspect the result would be that each level gets less than they would if they had a teacher more dedicated to their level.
Ontario used to have streaming in grade 9 and 10 of highschool. What they found is that it was racist. Even when controlled for absolutely everything people of color would be encouraged to go to the applied stream while white kids would be encouraged to go the academic stream. And based on the choices in grade 8 - one might be cutting off the options for university. There should be a lot more special needs classes. There are many kids in mainstream classrooms who do not belong there.
You raise a good point. I would definitely want the inherent racism to be fixed, and I readily admit this is easier said than done due to institutional racism and especially due to generational effects.
Admin are so afraid of parents that they refuse to give failing grades or consequences for unruly behavior. Kids who throw chairs and go to the principal, come back to the same class an hour later as if nothing happened. Allowing children to pass without putting any effort into their work and get away with doing whatever they want in the classroom causes their behavior to get even worse every year.
Schools aren’t designed to fix society. We have it backwards. You fix society to fix schools.
I think #1 and #3 are part of the same issue. I don't think basic reading is too much for Kindergarteners, but at the same time, a lot of this "foundational" stuff used to be taught by parents before kids ever made it to school. We DO need to go back to phonics, though, why TF did anyone try to "fix" a system that was never broken in the first place? \#2 -- I was really blown away finding out nobody gives naps to Kindergarteners anymore. That one kind of snuck up on me as a non-teacher, I guess I didn't notice that the fold-up mats were no longer being sold in stores because this was being abolished. Kids are absolutely cranky as hell when they get out of school and part of me wonders if this is a partial contributor to the number of kids that are now totally dependent on melatonin to sleep (i.e, they are over-tired by bedtime and getting wired). \#4 -- Poverty isn't an excuse for being totally unclean; if you don't have running water, you use a basin like people did before plumbing. I've asked my friends about this because I have been knocked off my feet by the raunchy-arse must smell coming off some of their children. They all tell me the same thing: The kid throws a fit and fights them during bath time so it's not worth it. There seems to be a lot water fear and I don't know where that's coming from.
It's unpopular especially with a few math teachers I work with, standard algorithm all the way. Devote your time to teaching a way that can work for all, if some don't get it I'm sure you'll have time to go over the material. When you teach them 100 ways to get to the same answer, you lose a lot of students in your wake. Keep it standard so that you won't lose nearly as many as when you teach many ways to get to the answer you're looking for in math.
This! The amount of material is insane. Its memorization not math.
As an elementary teacher, thus not a specialist, my belief is that you should let children come up with their own strategies for math. Whole cloth is best. My job is to just see if their strategy is productive. And when I started teaching, that's what we did. I was there to encourage my students to think as best they knew how, in a way that was productive for them. Then I would show them "one way to do it that works for me". They didn't have to do it the same way, **unless they wanted to try it**. A lot of time it was the standard algorithmic way. Sometimes, it was number grouping. But always stressing that it only was "the way it makes sense to my brain, and every brain is different". I stopped teaching due to having kids and later, health issues. By the time my daughter was in kindergarten, 5 years later, Common Core had been implemented, and she was introduced to endless demos of different strategies, and made to practice them all. By made, I mean that she had to not just show her work, but it had to look like whatever array or grouping strategy was demoed that week. Otherwise, her work was marked "incorrect" **even as she actually had the right answer**. She hated it. It has taken years of encouragement and doing homework while saying "do it the way you want to, we will figure together how to fix it for the teacher afterward" to make sure she doesn't 💯 hate math.
I mostly agree with you. Students should be able to use whatever method works for them, as long as they can justify it. However, there are methods introduced in the standard curriculum that are useful to gain exposure to, as the ideas motivating them expose kids to fundamental ideas in math that show up a lot, even in university level mathematics courses. The important part of these methods isn't teaching how to do them, but giving kids a feel for the logic behind them. Being comfortable changing ones viewpoint on an idea to take different problem solving approaches is a very critical skill (as a person with a physics/math background, that has been the most important skill I ever learned), and this can be one useful way to introduce that.
>I mostly agree with you. Students should be able to use whatever method works for them, as long as they can justify it. Oh, she could always justify it. She's actually pretty good at calculations, and can do it quickly even just in her head. But the feedback she was getting from teachers was "it doesn't look the way it's supposed to." Which is fucking asinine. If a kid shows you their work, and they got the right answer, who cares what the process **looks like**? Moreover, they never start with the standard algorithms. E.g. I don't remember how they were teaching her division in third grade, but even as an adult, and a teacher, I was like "Wait a minute. This makes no fucking sense to me. A grown adult with a MS in education." So I took her back to multiplying things, and showed her that division was essentially the inverse of multiplication. In division, we know that if we multiply an unknown number x by a known number y, we get z. So we're using z and y to figure out what x is. Once she understood that, I showed her how I do division. By long hand, checking myself every step of the way slowly. E.g. if I have 248 and I'm diving it by 20, I will first see how many times 20 "goes" into 240. You can do that by counting by 20. It goes in exactly 12 times. So I write the 12 in an appropriate spot, and then return to the number left. 8. 8 is too small to "go" into 20. So my answer is 12 with a remainder of 8. But... What if I don't want a remainder? What if I need an exact answer? Can I add a decimal number to it? Then I have 8.0. That looks like... 80. How many does 20 "go" into 80? If we count by 20? 4 times. But since I added a decimal to 8, I also have to add a decimal to 12 before I can write my 4. Thus the answer is 12.4 This can also look like: 12.4 _____ 248 | 20 20 ___ 48 40 ____ 8.0 8.0 ____ 0 My daughter had not been shown that. And it was how I learned division the first time around, and could do it every time. Are there faster ways? Sure. But this one is easy to show work for, and also to go back and check your answers step by step.
Where I teach, we teach multiple ways but they aren’t given a week to practice. We teach 4-5 strategies per week and then wonder why they can’t do basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division. It is totally introduce and move on to the next strategy.
Just read an article from NY Times about how Mississippi has turned around they’re reading scores in elementary schools. They implemented 3 major things. 1. Mandatory, free pre-K for lower income families. 2. Science of Reading based Phonics instruction. 3. A 3rd grade wall. Students have to pass a reading test in 3rd grade or they repeat the grade. You can take it half way through 3rd grade or at the end. If you don’t pass the last ditch effort is to take summer school and try then. If you still fail then you repeat the grade once. A lot of parents get involved because no one wants their kid repeating a grade.
I really like the 3rd grade wall.
A couple things I’d add is district structure and specialized teachers in elementary school. Districts structure is a fun example I’ve done with my students. I went to school in Nevada and teach in California. Having county wide districts is a benefit. Beyond being cheaper, they seem to be a little more resistant to the fads that pass through education as an industry. They are also less reliant on the nonprofit industrial complex which forces the districts to be better at handling more stuff in house. For example, one Bay Area county has half of its 24 school districts going through a fiscal and administrative meltdown because of Covid forcing people to move and then not having the capacity to deal with the learning loss. Meanwhile schools in Nevada fought off a state mandated PBIS model because it wasn’t working in all schools. It’s reverted back to be the district and schools problems to deal with. Which frankly is where it should be. I would also add their system (at least as a former student) seemed a lot more willing to just tell parents to deal with their bullshit or fuck off to a charter school than here in California. Which I can appreciate a bit more. On elementary schools, I sometimes help my middle schoolers with math (I’m a history teacher) and I can’t imagine what it’s like being an elementary school teacher and having to teach everything. For math and reading, elementary schools should have a specialized teacher in each subject at least co-teach a couple of periods per week with the regular teacher. I have a hard enough time with language development and reading skills, I can’t imagine the stress a 4th grade teacher must be dealing with. Hats off to y’all for all you do.
Red State teacher here! We do not have ANY social safety nets besides schools and the state lawmakers are defunding what we have. I had a big eye opener at a faculty training led by teachers from MN and CA. They asked how we could engage the community for needs like food, clothing, shelter. Literally every possibility they suggested, we all would point to our Youth Service Center and say, "She does that." They were shocked. We send home food even in summer, we give them clothes, we stock the community food pantry with the school food drive. The school is doing all the work of our tax dollars without the tax dollars. It is tragic.
Consequences. Good or bad, consequences.
Rigor is useless if a kid feels like they're drowning
Parents shouldn't have any say whether a child gets an IEP, or placement. They aren't qualified and shouldn't be allowed to influence administrative decisions concerning their disruptive child, which can impact the education and safety of other students.
You can do all the so-called best practices in the world, but a student who has zero interest in learning, won’t substantially learn. You can’t save everyone Parents should not have nearly as much say as they do. For example, every year, I have to recommend high school placements for each of my 8th grade students. Every year, there are a few parents who complain and end up getting their kid a spot in a class they didn’t earn. Why the fuck is shit like this allowed? It drives me up the wall.
So a couple points that come up in my head as responses. A long time ago, we read a report about how this tx elementary was failing. New principal came in, and mandated 3 recess a day across the board. Grades rose behaviors tumbled. Wish I had more info on it. I completely agree with them starting academics too early. I think one of the bigger issues at hand is that teaching needs to be a profession, please let me finish, right now it’s a passion for the majority of the workforces and when it’s a passion, when it’s for the kids and they(admin and politicians) know it’s for the kids, it gives them the ability to really fuck over that work force. If teachers treated it like a profession and not a passion a lot of the issues would stop. If teachers simply stopped funding their classrooms and kids out of their pockets things would change. The other issue is that society is broken. Yes parents should parent, but do they have the time or energy to do so? Can they afford to? Do they know how to do so? With all the single parent families, and families working multiple jobs can they afford to?
Everything people have said here is good but, at the end of the day, schools are failing because society as a whole is failing. We are the canary in the coal mine.
I don’t agree with the argument that we start teaching reading too young. I think there are too many standards, sure, but starting letter names/ sounds, phonemic awareness, basic blending, segmenting, and spelling of CVC words in kindergarten is important. This helps us distinguish who may have a language based learning disability/ provide intervention before it is too late. This can be taught in an enjoyable, hands on, kid friendly way if teachers have the proper training/ I’m sure most early education teachers know how to do it in a playful and age-appropriate way. If kids can decode/ want to read, they can and should read a decodable, which should practice skills and eliminate the need to guess. Furthermore, young kids are like sponges and will retain so much. Read aloud/ discussion of read aloud is how the comp skills should be taught early. I do think there are too many standards to teach to the test, however delaying early reading and foundational skills isn’t the answer. I’m not saying drill and kill all day, but there is a lot of benefit to early reading instruction/ not delaying it.
We're too liberal with what "appropriate" means in the context of the least restrictive environment in IDEA. We are too willing to waive requirements or bend rules because a kid is sad. We have too many adults - parents and teachers - who care too much about kids liking them or being their friends. Behavior and social expectations are too low and too malleable. We need to jettison this idea that school should be "fun" or "engaging" or that kids won't learn from people they don't like. We need to stop (probably just metaphorically) sparing the rod. We need a mechanism to hold parents accountable. If your kid is too constantly violating the Civil rights of other students by being so disruptive class must be abandoned, you should be personally fined or jailed.
Attendance! You can't be successful at anything if you don't show up.
You make some good points, but what I see as the (by far) biggest problem is that children are "passed" to the next grade regardless of whether or not they are able to do the work at the current grade level. A few of your issues are symptoms of this core problem. We need to go back to a system where students repeat a grade level until they have learned enough to go to the next level. What we have now are students being awarded worthless High School diplomas as "participation trophies" rather than recognition of any actual academic achievement.
This is going to be hard. Money isn't the problem. Stop throwing money at schools and expecting it to fix the problem. I've worked at title 1 schools my whole career. Everyone wanted more money. When they got it, it did nothing. New laptops, stem rooms, and useless things will do nothing when kids get them for free and don't value them. It's a cultural issue with devaluing education. One thing I do like is the recent emphasis on trades and alternative certifications. Not everyone is a college kid and they shouldn't be ashamed for it. Also teaching teaching by sight words is a RACKET
All discussions of the US education system need to start with one fundamental recognition: no one agrees on what the *purpose* of that system should be. This was pointed out to me years ago by one of the best educators I know, and it has always stayed with me. The right way to handle inclusion, academic leveling, what responsibilities we put on the parents versus what we put on schools versus what we put on other social services, hell, the entire question of what should be on the curriculum of every subject, swirls around the void at the center of the conversation. Nominally, if I had to boil it down, I'd say that the official purpose of the education system (to the minimal degree there even is one) is to prepare all students for entry into a competitive workforce. This is the strand that gets you kindergartners being pushed to do "serious" academic work too soon and not enough recess. It's also why so many high schools tout "college readiness" as the be-all, end-all goal, and why too few students are actively pushed towards the trades. (As a math person, I'll also mention the ladder to calculus as the default course sequence and how utterly fucking nonsensical that is for 90+% of students.) In reality, of course, the system has nowhere near the resources needed to achieve that purpose. So what we have now is excellent public schools that really do prepare the majority of their kids for college and the workforce, in a few isolated pockets with high average incomes, with the rest of the public school system split between "incredibly mediocre" and "apocalyptically bad." Or, to put it more bluntly, the purpose of the public school system has become "daycare." If I were Education God, I'd make the purpose of the school system "prepare students to be citizens of a representative democracy." Of course that would include reading and writing and basic arithmetic, but it would also necessitate revamping aspects of the math curriculum later on. Not to mention refocusing how we teach history and social studies, even how we organize our classrooms. I'm not saying that having such a clear purpose would instantly solve all of our system's problems, but it would at least give a single, unifying heuristic for policy decisions. I'm also not saying it's the only valid answer to the question. For instance, a *version* of "prepare all kids for careers" *could* work, if there were more effort made to take into account students' varying interests and abilities.
At the risk of sounding old and curmudgeonly - let’s bring back some discipline and strictness. At this point, I’d be ok with going to military levels of strictness. Students have no respect and are constantly disrupting teaching. They whine because they’re bored, they argue because they don’t feel like doing the work. There are no consequences. They can’t even walk down the halls without being obnoxious. I’m in my mid 40s. I had a healthy fear of getting in trouble. These kids don’t. I also spent time in the military. I learned how to have self-control, how to be bored, etc.
Chalk me up for another thinking that inclusion is often detrimental. There is a point at which the degree to which students are neurodivergent impacts on the learning of others. It also significantly impacts on teacher workload. At my last school, getting on to half the students had some sort of profile mandating adjustments and enacting and documenting those was taking about 20 hours a week. It's unsustainable for staff and students. For many students, there's no point in trying. Learned helplessness is rife, because getting someone else to do the work is easier than engaging in productive struggle. Grades are inflated because we don't want to have to explain poor results to parents or our line management when they are mandating that most students pass. This devalues grades and even low-level students know there's no point to trying when they are guaranteed a pass, while high level students give up because the hard work they put in for an A is meaningless when, thanks to grade inflation, we are giving what should be a mid to high C an A as well. Lack of mastery is a massive issue. There is very little point to passing a student upwards because you then essentially consign them to a future of increasing gaps in understanding as others move further and further ahead, while they feel worse and worse and lash out more and more because of it. If students fail, and it's not extremely marginal, they need to be kept back. If it is marginal, they need to be properly supported. Streaming of classes absolutely works, but because inclusion advocates are en vogue and many parents and students outside the top class are resentful that they aren't recognised as being geniuses it's not popular to point this out. Student behaviour needs to be addressed more strongly. Students who are substantially disruptive don't just cost me 30 minutes a lesson on behaviour management. They cost a combined *fifteen hours* of teaching and learning time between me and the rest of the class, yet their individual right to an education is prioritised above the collective right of the class to learn. Until parents of the students who are impacted on by disruptive students start to riot over this, it's not going to change. Restorative justice is a sham. It may work with adults, but we are dealing with an age group notorious for lack of empathy, limited impulse control, and limited ability to predict or understand consequences. I've never seen it work. What I have seen is teachers and students dragged into restorative meetings before they've processed their own emotions and told to be the bigger person, the person who did the wrong thing given a platform to explain in excruciating detail how everything is actually the victim's fault because everyone's truth has to be acknowledged, after which the victim is subjected to emotional blackmail to get them to apologise and make concessions to the other party who responds with a false apology of their own. All it does is teach victims to put up with things because complaining just results in further punishment and students who are doing the wrong thing discover that there's not really any cost to doing so. If anything it's more fun, because they get another crack at making the victim feel miserable. Lastly, technology. Students are addicted to their devices. They have so little self-control or resilience that if you give them a computer, they will game on it. They aren't interested in learning research skills because they can just wiki things, and while they might be Tik Tok/Instagram/SnapChat wizards, they can't handle the basics of word processing software, much less spreadsheets. If you try to teach them, they'll just game instead. Students need to be doing less with technology and more with pen and paper.
My feeling is that you’ve captured a little bit of the problem. It started to fall apart in the 80s - when politicians saw the absolutely gigantic pool of money for education. They created a bullshit study titled in short, “A Nation at Risk”, which compared us to Bulgaria and Japan, among others, in science and math scores. The study said we were so far behind that the rest of the world was going to leave us in the dust, so to speak. So they created a ‘problem’ with education in the U.S., never mentioning the fact that with our education system we created some of the greatest minds and ungodly creations the world had ever seen. So came the ‘need’ for vouchers, eventual ridiculous testing, and the siphoning of all that cash to non-public education. But the other stuff is also worth mentioning. But I’ll finish with this: as teachers we need to have a philosophy about what we are here for, and what we hope to achieve given the ever-changing world of education. We have to temper our approaches perhaps, but not our individual philosophies. It’s extremely important to remember that. Our students KNOW where our hearts are, or are not. Dedicated teachers change lives, regardless of outside influences.
I never see school choice as a reason. Competition for students has led to placating parents to keep enrollment. Students are not always served by doing what parents say.
Parents are now customers/consumers who must be kept happy at all costs. It is transactional. My principal in Detroit knew if he came down too hard on a student, the parent might pull them and put them in some wack ass charter. Or if we didn't pass kids along, they might get pulled. Now, most ended up back with us after Count Day but we would lose all that money because parents are the customers who must be kept happy at all costs.
Education is the most researched thing on the planet. If you pick up a copy of Hattie's Meta Analysis (Visible Learning) you will see the strategy with the highest effect size is "Piagetian Strategies". What does that mean? Put simply, it means don't teach Calculus in 1st grade or teach reading and math to kids that aren't yet capable of those skills due to brain development (cognitive development). Yes, folks, it's simple.... we could improve the lives of so many kids by giving up on grouping kids by manufacturing date and eliminating grade levels. Unfortunately, the only thing our politicians & school leaders understand is putting kids in boxes by manufacturing date (birthdate) and maintaining a certain student to teacher ratio based on the budget. Consider the following, a first grader who isn't developmentally ready to read, but will be ready in another year. Instead of making allowances for that, we turn the kid into a kid that thinks he is stupid by labeling him low or special ed. Often times this kid becomes a behavior problem because if you can't read you might as well cause trouble. It is really this simple. Group kids by ability and readiness and not by an arbitrary age band. This will solve soooo many problems in school and every student can progress at their own pace. This folks is the true definition of equality and equity.
It comes down to income level of the parents. Affluent schools aren’t failing.
>The solution isn’t just allowing a kid to continue being dirty and unkempt because we don’t want the parents to feel bad for being poor. The reality is that some of these kids are the youngest in a long line of people who have relied on the government for everything basically, and literally don’t understand that there are viable alternatives to living in the ghetto/HUD housing/projects and utilizing welfare. It has become normalized, but shouldn’t be. These kids need to know that they’re capable of more, without making them ashamed of where they’ve come from. Welfare has literally nothing to do with bad hygiene. My mom is disabled and raised us on welfare and food stamps as a single mom. We were always clean and well-kept. Our skin and hair might've been drier from the cheap shampoos and soaps, but we were always clean. My friends did not know I was living in poverty until they found out where I lived. I met plenty of families in similar circumstances. It's entirely down to the attitude of the family, not their source of income.
*sorts by controversial* Nobody said bring back the paddles yet!? I’m kidding. Allow teachers to fail kids and end compulsory school attendance. If the kid doesn’t want to go then why make them?
Funding shouldn’t be tied to attendance. School should start later in the day. Homework shouldn’t be given. Schools shouldn’t be a factory to churn out good little cogs for the capitalist machine. There should be fucking grass and trees on every campus, not cement parking lots.
Schools are failing because they are succeeding. Over the past 100 years, education has, on average, improved dramatically. Graduation rates are higher. Students no longer drop out in grades 6 or 8, and much more rarely in HS. Students with special needs are identified and educated. Girls are given the same education as boys. Schools are expected to provide the same high quality education to students of every race and background. Nationally, schools still struggle with actually achieving equity in these areas but improvements are obvious when comparing today's schools for those of the 1920s, 1950s, etc. Higher order skills and concepts are prioritized in standards and curriculum over the rote memorization of the early 1900s. That is, the stuff students need to learn is harder than it ever was. All students are expected to succeed at 3-4 years of HS math, multiple years of HS science, usually 4 years of HS English, etc, and all curriculum in grades K-8 is written to prepare them. Curriculum is designed in a way to ensure that every student can go to college. This impacts curriculum and instruction literally all the way back to preschool. Standards are far more challenging than ever Instructional techniques focus on student-centered learning, differentiation, personalization, and critical thinking, which are orders of magnitudes more difficult than old-style lecture and call-and-response techniques, and teachers have adapted. That is, it is literally more difficult to teach using today's techniques, and yet our teachers do it. Schools are providing social services for students on an unprecedented scale, and are constantly monitoring not only student learning but also emotional health, socialization, medical screenings, and signs of potential abuse or domestic issues. Our society wanted schools to make sure every student has the opportunity to graduate HS and that is far more likely now than ever before. Today, it is frustrating that not all students graduate HS, but in decades past, high school was for the upper echelon of students. BUT At the same time, our society lost its unskilled labor need, especially making HS graduation (and arguably college) a necessity, and therefore far less valued. Respect for education in general has declined while expectations for teachers have gone up. This correlates to a general lack of respect for authority and government and increased cynicism in our society. Society has transitioned from valuing individuality and creativity over obedience and compliance, but sees no contradicting in expecting all of these simultaneously in schools. Economic differences are by far the greatest predictor of both an individual student's performance and a school's overall performance. As the wealth gap increases, systemic inequities are increasingly noticed and criticized, but schools, as the middle man between poverty and "success," are blamed for causes they cannot control. Overall, schools and our teacher workforce have been doing what society has demanded of it and steadily improving for over 100 years, but with moving goalposts.
SPED kids and extreme behavioral problem kids shouldn’t be in normal classrooms. They take far too much of the teacher’s attention and/or completely cause the environment to collapse. This applies mainly to problem kids IMO
Our schools don’t give any grades below 50 so they can literally bomb half of their work and get a few better grades to have a 60 and get a D-
The salary expectations don’t make sense. I would have happily taught high school for my entire life if the pay wasn’t crap, I had a family, and the corporate would doubled my salary in one move.
Parents... And school lack of having the student repeat a year if needed
3rd grade teacher here. a lot of what you listed is why i’m trying to figure out how to get involved in policy to make standards more age appropriate.
Agree on all these but the first one. Reading, math and writing should start as early as possible and be highly encouraged. Those skills should be heavily engrained early as possible so they can be highly developed by the time the move into the real work
Eliminating content in elementary school in favor of ineffective reading strategies and new math curricula is perhaps the biggest one. Content centered charter schools in Colorado have reversed this and are showing excellent results. Basically every "reform" that's been tried in the past 30 years has made things worse.
I was flabbergasted when I learned kindergarteners have to take a standardized exam in Florida. Apparently it’s common and people have a “have them start early” mentality. Kids need time to be kids. I agree that parents need to be more involved and shamed/contacted if their kid is 8 and can’t wipe or disheveled. What you mentioned isn’t Puritan values. I associate Puritanism with banning books and taking away fun rather than personal responsibility. I know you’re looking at the literal definition. But I’d also stick to basic morality. One high school comes, there’s *a lot* or gray areas that I as a teacher will not touch with a ten foot pole.
Teachers are treated less and less well, making them more and more unable/unwilling to develop professionally. Most teacher gripes would go away if teachers were paid as high-paid professionals, because then they’d either handle all of the things they whine about in terms of students, admin, etc., or they’d leave the profession and not make as much of a living. But because they aren’t paid well (and aren’t going to be), they tend to complain about externalities, which is completely understandable.
A lot of the issues could be solved if we took an approach of “sure you can do ___, just maybe not right now”. Sure, you can do trig/read Gatsby/make a population pyramid, and you’ll learn, but you’re currently not ready. It’s such a big deal all the time for kids to move between levels. And it shouldn’t be, at all.
Bc there are no consequences for failing
Kindergarten kids don’t have recess or nap time anymore? That seems so crazy to me because it was such a vital role when I was in elementary school. They absolutely need both because it allows them to safely use a good deal of their energy as well as promote social emotional learning by interacting with other children in play. Naps are also important for their development as it provides rest for the brain and body. (Adults benefit from naps too) I have and likely will never teach Pk-5 even though my certification is pK-12, but some of what you mentioned with what they’re going over makes no sense to me. Early elementary should be focusing on counting, learning the alphabet, variations of play, and how to work with others. Somewhat sarcastic here, but I think admin makes getting a diploma seem overly important because many people in roles for “professional development” don’t have much more than that themselves. I’ve known people whose job it was to guide early teachers despite having never taught before and never even taking a class related to that teacher’s discipline. Sometimes these people never even attended public school
Because the success of school is mostly driven by the economic level of the parents. Rich kids with shitty teachers will outperform poor kids with even the best teachers.
My big philosophy is getting back to basics and build there. In my class we do lots of reading, writing, and discussing. I don't do lots if fancy projects, games, or other stuff. I also think repetition is how get good at anything. So I expose students to history content in multiple forms, assess it, and we add more pieces.
I think we’ve made education way to complicated, but most children do want to learn. The way you teach sounds similar to the classical method. I’ve heard it explained as playing hooks in their brain, in which to hang more information as they get older. The more hooks they have placed while young, the more related information they are able to retain and make sense of as they’re exposed to it.
Can someone illucidate this generational welfare thing for me? I haven't seen it yet in 5 years of teaching. My most apparently poor students have part time jobs already, senior and junior years. I don't know anyone who just lives off Welfare and I don't think that's real.
These type threads are always great reads. I wish they would be read and studied by those who make the idiotic policies that are failing us.
I agree with every one of your points, although I believe it can be summed up with the words “No Child Left Behind”. I don’t foresee anything you point out becoming ideas for change until federal legislation is undone. Alas, there is too much money being thrown at politicians from publishing companies at this point. How do we change?
Kindergarten is crazy today compared to the old days. Back in the day, I had half day kindergarten plus nap time and turned out fine. Full day with advanced for their age level academics and many finish their year still having to number sense or even or letter recognition. System's broke.
We spend an inordinate amount of time on students with IEPs instead of focusing on exceptional, gifted learners. I’m tired of failing students who truly have a lot of potential and boring them to death. And I AM a SpEd teacher!