It's not just public school, but in general many forms of social capital[1] have taken a huge hit and will take a while to recover. Other kinds of social interaction and organization have taken a hit. Whether its local tech meetups, your school's PTA, concerts, farmers markets, etc, society has taken a hit. We see the impact in heightened crime, panhandling, and other signs of social distress. Even these small, seemingly trivial, kinds of organized social interactions created community and a chance for people to actually care about the state of organized society.
Pre pandemic, I feel we were in a positive cycle of renewed cities, increased social capital. Now it feels like we're in a negative cycle of people avoiding each other, leading to negative feedback loops and lack of social support.
Yeah. I'll qualify what I'm saying by specifying I'm talking about the USA.
There used to be two good, big dev conferences a year in my metro area. Now there are zero. The meetup realized it's now or never for them and recently tried to get rolling again.
Regarding cities and urban areas, the social unrest of 2020 and its aftermath must also be taken into account.
Broadly speaking, there's two things going on. One, just getting out of the habit of regularly meeting and socializing has been detrimental to the social capital. Secondly, the national political dialogue ended, and in many cases people have applied this accordingly at a personal level.
I think the increased prevalence of work from home is a huge factor for meet ups and urban activities in general. If I'm already out and about and likely nearby it's an easier sell to get me to go to a meet up. It's harder if I'm being asked to head to a central downtown just for the meet up, but there aren't enough interested people in my suburb to support a more convient meetup.
I've certainly found that myself. Even pre-pandemic, I was mostly working from home (or traveling).
When I was in an office, even if an evening event was definitely out of the way (as was typical), the fact that I had to get in my car anyway meant that it wasn't that big a deal to go into the city. I find the bar for leaving my house to take an hour drive to an evening event is a lot higher and mostly I don't do it.
Perhaps. But shouldn't there be a lot of people living in the urban area anyway? If not, that's kind of a change from the booming urban neighborhoods of 2013-2019.
While many offices are not within city limits quite a few others are and pre-COVID there was certainly a lot of net commuting into cities for the workday. There's presumably less of that today in general and it's one thing to do an after-work event in the city if you're already there vs. having to go in.
An interesting illustration of this phenomenon is the movie “City Slickers.” I just watched it again the other day. Its depiction of New York City life was completely unrecognizable to me.
Maybe. Though I think classic ways of measuring social capital don’t capture things like meetups or conferences which became more prominent in the last 10-20 years
Meetups and conferences are a white collar professional thing. What fraction of the population goes to meetups and conferences, compared to the fraction of the population that used to go to church or union meetings or local fraternal lodges?
I have not noticed, but that sounds great. Getting waved through a stop sign is a peeve of mine. If we all just went in the order we got here, we'd all be done sooner than doing this pointless dance. I guess that makes me the problem.
It's dangerous. Just obey the standard right of way rules. I've had people try to wave me into their blindspot and certain death from a car coming 60mph in the lane next to them.
I agree. I believe that people should drive "selfishly" (i.e. going ahead of me when they have the right of way rather than offering to wait), because it makes traffic more predictable and therefore safer. I'd much rather wait a couple of seconds than have to guess at your intentions.
There’s literally rules about this That we were all (hopefully) taught in drivers ed. in the case of 2 drivers reaching a 4 way stop at the same time the driver on the right goes first. If the two are across from each other then in most cases there is no conflict. In the case of them turning towards the same lane, then right turns have precedence over left turns.
These situations usually play out awkwardly and are always challenging. The really inexcusable ones, though, are where people just randomly sort of decide to violate the rules out of a spirit of generosity or something like that, like they're doing you a favor.
They only play out awkwardly because one or both of the participants don't remember the rules.
And yes, I agree with the inexcusable example you gave -- it's like the person who stops dead to let some car left turn through traffic. "Oh they've been waiting a while and I'm not in a hurry today I'll be a nice person" Yeah that's great for you but you just caused a damn traffic jam behind you and maybe someone behind you WAS in a rush. You just inconvenienced upwards of a dozen+ people to help one person. You were a net loss on society's progress in that moment.
I mean, sure if you could rely on everyone clearly remembering and following the rules every time or you could understand that humans are fallible and sometimes a bit of communication smooths that over.
There are constantly people getting older. That’s the thing we have an infinite supply of.
They complain because 1) As someone who did it when they were younger, they expect all young people to do it for them now. 2) In general society is just not as polite to old people, and society notices you’re getting older much quicker than you do.
In America churches were historically the community center. Other counties have secularized in a way that replaced churches with something else: clubs, union halls, fraternal societies, etc.
In America we have replaced them with the Internet.
In America there used to be union halls, fraternal societies, and clubs. The decline in these things in the U.S. occurred with desegregation. I don’t know enough of social history to say desegregation was the cause but it certainly was a contributing factor. For instance, municipal pools used to be a thing and they were shutdown as a result of desegregation in many cities. Whatever the causes we see an increase in social isolation, a decrease in desire for municipal investment in community activities, a decline in men in universities, and other ill effects.
Shifting gender roles probably played a part as well.
I'm sure there are sitcom examples from the 50s/60s as well but look at even a show like The Flintstones. The guys are down at the lodge while the women look after the kids. Yes, it's just a cartoon, but that sort of working class lifestyle wasn't fabricated out of whole cloth.
My very limited exposure to such places in recent times--for a time I played in a work softball league at a Knights of Columbus location--was that they were very past their prime.
I joined a fraternal organization about 12 years ago (AF&AM) and the social and physical deterioration was blatantly obvious from the inside as well as the outside.
I wonder too if modern working couples makes a difference. Only a few decades ago the wife looked after the kids and fathers went to the bars, societies etc to hang out. During the day women met up in other venues.
What are some examples of the above in other countries?
eg in Europe I don't think much of that has happened along with their secularization – if anything I think its more cafes (of which the American versions suck cause they're never open past 9pm) and nightclubs...
Yup. All of humanity spent a year-plus with our media screaming at us to avoid every other human as a potential threat. Who could have known that could have lasting effects?
I was surprised to learn that the number of people who can only think in terms of single variables is staggering, and that the main variable they consider was what the last asshat on TV said it should be.
I don't know if anyone has experienced the same, but I haven't been to a wake or funeral since COVID started. People die, and then there's no visitation or funeral of any kind - I think the families do a cremation, and that's that.
It's a really cold feeling. It demonstrates to me why these rituals were important in the first place. It is like the person just disappears.
Murder rates are an important indicator because virtually no murders go unreported, while reporting of other violent crimes can vary. For example, as your source notes, NYC doesn’t even report violent crimes to the FBI:
> In the latest FBI study, around four-in-ten police departments – including large ones such as the New York Police Department – did not submit data, so the FBI estimated data for those areas
Their cite includes the national crime victimization survey which surveys a 100-200 thousand people and asks if they've been a victim of a crime. Theoretically that's independent of anything else and should accurately reflect the true crime rate. But these days I'm not sure how you can get an accurate sample.
That said, I think this somewhat misses the point. Large numbers of cities saw violent disturbances over the last couple years. Anecdotally, I've noticed an increase in street racing and those sorts of general jackassery. Technically I'm not the victim of a violent crime but there definitely seems to be more of an edge to life these days. Understandable that people feel less safe and violent crime technically not going up isn't much solace.
The national clime victimization survey excludes homicides. And even if you’re not the one killed, homicides have ripple impacts across the community. There was a teenager working as a cashier at the lunch place in my office. Really nice kid—I saw him several times a week. He was shot and killed in one of those random shootings that’s all too common in DC, and which became a lot more common since 2020.
For their 2021 (latest data), the FBI (which Pew references for the article) did not include data from California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. Unless I misunderstand that, we have no idea how much crime actually went up or down by those omissions alone.
It never hit 1990s levels (your own source shows this in its charts), and it's falling again. It shouldn't be that surprising that COVID and the ensuing disruptions caused some fluctuations.
2020 was at 7.8. As you note 2000 is as at 6 (2001 was 9/11 so that doesn’t really count for our purposes here). So that means 2020 was back at levels last seem before 2000, which is what I said. Specifically, it’s around the level in 1996, which was 7.4: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
The FBI’s 2021 statistics show a further increase from 2020. For 2022, New York City is down a bit from 2021, but you’re still talking about wiping out a decade of progress in lowering homicide rates: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_p...
I’m not trying to be confrontational, but I do need to say something on this comment and hopes for some good discussion.
How much of that is due to actual drops in crime levels and how much of it is due to decriminalization of offenses and a the resultant drop in crimes reported?
Both the Uniform Crime Reporting Program from the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey have methodological have problems. There isn’t even a consensus between when about what constitutes criminal activity. And in some jurisdictions, only incarceration worthy crimes are considered ‘crime,’ where as in others fined infractions like speeding in a vehicle count. To say nothing of the tendency of crime data to suddenly regress towards the mean, which has been a problem for researchers.
I am wary to accept short term crime statistics, because it’s so politicized. There’s a great discussion here, though it’s a tad dated:
Another angle: how much non-reporting is due to mistrust of police, and how much is due to police explicitly telling crime victims not to report or that a report will be useless, because they are trying to politically undermine a progressive DA?
But I think there need to be actual studies on reporting rates and reasons for non-reporting before too much pure speculation is applied to dismiss these statistics. People have been making arguments close to the above for years if not decades, at some point one would assume the reporting rate would stabilize.
> how much is due to police explicitly telling crime victims not to report or that a report will be useless, because they are trying to politically undermine a progressive DA?
I'll go ahead and suggest something like zero. This is a conspiracy theory.
I mean isn’t not prosecuting properly the same effect? If that’s the case I’d say sexual assault is often viewed as efffectively decriminalized.
I don’t know what I’d like to know on these subjects, to be perfectly honest. I’m still learning and didn’t wade into HN today to spread my perfect knowledge on the subject. Hope there is still room for that.
Here’s what got me thinking about the whole subject in the first place:
My observation is that there were a fair number of activities that had their own momentum of a sort. When that all screeched to a halt, it's a lot harder to restart them given that organizers and others have gone off to do other things, etc.
With respect to cities, in the US, a lot of cities (including those we consider elite today) were losing population until 20-25 years ago. There's no guarantee that the young college-educated demographic will continue to move into cities in greater numbers than their parents did.
My daughter attends a private school that stayed open through most of the pandemic. Lots of kids from public school transferred in. They aren’t leaving.
In addition to actually being open, the local public schools went all in with BLM.
That’s not bad by itself. But in practice it means the local school board is spending its time figuring out how to promote racial equity.
How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important.
Private schools and rich suburban school districts are flooded.
This could be my local school district (Seattle public school district). Lots of kids went private or were moved to the east side, blowing a hole in the budget (Washington state funds schools at the state level, so losing students loses money). There is a lot of emphasis on social justice, which while not bad in itself, can lead to fundamentals slipping, or advanced programs that richer families see as must haves. My kid just started in public school, so far so good, so I'm keeping an open mind.
I think it's not just BLM, but basically everyone was "too online".
If you were a teacher, you fell into progressively more extreme content streams.
If you were a parent, you read about teachers falling into more extreme content streams.
The actual classroom environment might not have changed one iota, but everyone spending all day reading about bogeymen online for two years seems to have soured the relationship.
> In addition to actually being open, the local public schools went all in with BLM.
As a homeschool family, I can tell you that this is a lot of it. It's not a new change, but having their kids' classroom streamed into their homes made a lot of conservative-leaning families realize that many public schools have chosen a side in the culture war, and it isn't theirs. I've heard it over and over.
You can expect to see school choice initiatives being pushed hard by this constituency.
> ...as it should be. If the privileged keep playing their privilege games while neglecting equity, society does not work.
Society isn't a game of wealth transfer. Equity is the goal for one ideology, not for the vast majority of Americans. It's fine for that to be your goal, but you should understand that it isn't for most others and that they're going to act accordingly. When you aim to take away from them and their children, even if it's well intentioned and justified by your belief system, many are going to flee.
The greatest societies, even or own if it can still be considered great, were not built on the lowest common denominator, they were built to push up, above and beyond, the best of the best.
you are badly over-generalizing; there was always strenuous conflict over slaves and slave labor. Specifically why it was "states" legally.
What is new to me is the extent to which indentured servitude was practiced in Central Asia; no doubt people brought their histories with them to the USA.
Privileged kids have options so they leave the school to somewhere else, causing less equity, not more.
Without a law to force those kids to stay where they are, what can society do? In that case, parents are much more interested in a "raise all boats" story rather than a "raise boats that were lower at the expense of boats that were higher."
Teachers' and their unions also became somewhat bad actors here too - undermining good faith attempts to resume classroom teaching and constantly moving goalposts well after the vaccine was available. It also pitted teachers directly against their local policymakers and voters.
The irony is that while everyone stayed home for a year and studied up on social justice, the lack of schooling will hit poorer families much worse. We were able to put our kid in a private school. Time will tell the lingering effects on less fortunate families.
Really telling is that almost no one is attending PTA meetings anymore (unless to yell at teachers or to yell at the people yelling at teachers). Anyone who actually cared about partnering with/challenging teachers to improve education has since moved on.
Locally, at least one private school was able to open earlier & safer than the public schools, and without pissing off their teachers by exposing them to unnecessary risk... in no small part because the school's culture tends to exclude families that'd take excessive risks during a pandemic, send kids to school when someone at home was sick with likely or confirmed Covid, or tell their kids things that'd lead to their having poor masking and distancing discipline.
Part of the reason public schools struggled to open was precisely because of parents "challenging" things. That private school could do better, in part, because it had the freedom to exclude assholes. Public schools don't have that freedom.
The pandemic was the disastrous part and yes measures were taken in response to it that no one liked doing, but how we lay blame on people trying to protect themselves, and their family.. I think is shortsighted. More people died in most countries from it than what they died in the last World War, and maybe 2.
We don't go around constantly blaming the people and decisions that led up to the World Wars, it happened and we accept it and move on from it. Also sending kids into private schools in the US I think is part of the problem - there are many proponents that'd love all public schools to go under and to teach their brand of "science" and "history" to their students while knowing they are not providing an actual education. That is not all private schools, but many do have an agenda and little to no oversight in the US.
> how we lay blame on people trying to protect themselves, and their family.. I think is shortsighted
Sure, but does ensuring my child has a good education not part of protecting my family? I faced about a 0.5% chance of being critically harmed by Covid versus an unknown chance that my child would permanently be affected by school closures. That's not so cut and dry a choice as people make it.
And we can find all sorts of reasons to knock private education, but they actually stayed open and provided education.
It is sometimes better to step out of the way of a barreling misguided consensus that will soon enough dash itself to pieces.
No amount of argument or action could alter Randy Weingartner’s strategy. She was going to close schools nationwide and mischaracterize any criticism of her strategy as anti-science in order to stigmatize her opponents and increase her own person power, until the political environment shifted and she had to be less lazy.
Anecdotally - in my area, private school attendance has surged. I know other families who have taken to home schooling.
My son is in a private middle school. There's a good chance they wouldn't be in private middle school if the pandemic didn't happen. He was very frustrated being at home with Mom and Dad. After a year, he was getting very angry and depressed. I didn't expect to be paying for private school, but given his situation, here we are...
Yes... but one million students, what percentage surge would that be in private schools if they all ended up there? I think it would have to be much larger, especially considering many private schools don't have that much additional capacity. (Edit: Also considering marginalized groups are the most likely to drop out... they are the least likely to afford private schools.)
I strongly suspect many students have just completely fallen off the radar. Who knows what will happen to them.
Also anecdotally, I don't think truancy enforcement has been particularly strict during the pandemic. I know our school has given a lot of grace to students going on vacation, etc compared to pre-pandemic.
> many private schools don't have that much additional capacity
In terms of teachers, maybe not, but in terms of facilities, any school that was around in the 70s-80s should have plenty of classrooms and lockers. And I imagine that as public schools shrink, there will be teachers looking at those jobs.
The public schools around here are having a serious staffing crisis because wages, which were already low and stagnant for years, didn't go up as wage inflation hit the rest of the economy, and teachers are sick of the whole thing and burnt out, so are leaving. There's a big "leave for literally anywhere else—you'll be better-paid, less stressed, and more-respected" movement among teachers right now, because all that's more-or-less true.
Even then, households that choose to homeschool or private school their children still contribute to public schools. So the article's claim of needing to close schools due to fewer pupils and lack of funding is left unanswered. There may be migration involved.
Every state manages school fundig differently, and within states, it can vary, too. But in California, most districts are funded by the state, and the funding formula is based on attendence (and details about the student population). Some districts opt to get their funding directly from local property taxes which don't vary by attendance, but most districts get more funding by accepting the state funding and choose that instead.
If public school attendence goes down in such a system, the school districts (and therefore the schools) get less funding, but tax collection probably doesn't change. Instead there will be a surplus in the general fund. California has a lot of formulaic budget requirements, so if attendence dropped enough, it might derail the rest of the budget, but I'm not familiar with how close to the requirements the school budget tracks.
This website claims there are ~160k fewer 10 to 14 year olds than 15 to 19 year olds in the US. I presume that means 40k to 50k kids age out every year and who will not be replaced by kids in the class under them for high school.
Uh… it says right there in the article that some went to private schools, some are now home schooled, and some were never born (declining birth rates means overall number of potential students dropping).
Anecdotally, I heard from some public school teachers that when they moved to online school during the pandemic, some students, who previously were failing, blossomed and excelled, but went back to failing when in-person school was brought back. It turns out that in-person school doesn’t work well for everyone.
Anecdotally, home-school. My friends have not sent their kids back. Mom dropped out of work to full-time home-school, and they like it better. They have not asked for my opinion, but I worry for their kids.
public schools in this coastal California urban area include a litany of daily, relentless vices; are some of the only school districts in US history to be seized by State government (more than once now) for gross fiscal mismanagement, and have had shooting resulting in death often enough that it is not reported in the news generally. There are more than forty human languages spoken at home in the greater county schools, and many, many homes are dysfunctional including abuse and neglect.
Is it such a bad thing? Anecdotally, the student enrollment in the school my kids are zoned for has gotten to the point where they had to bring Portables and put them in the field next to school to continue to support all the incoming kids. I dont know the specifics about why there isn't funding (or viability) to build a permanent structure. We also have not heard plans about building new schools to alleviate the overflow. Just to be clear, I realize schools are a mechanism for many kids to escape abusive parents, get proper meals and the numerous benefits of getting a structured education and companionship of peers. I just feel like we are trending towards blaming the pendemic for literally everything while systemic issues in education have existed long before pandemic ever happened.
Most school districts do portables because they expect gentrification and less school age children going forward (demographics are destiny), so no point in bulding permanent structures for a temporary problem.
People are waking up to the fact that public school is one of the biggest intrusions of the state into your personal life. Zero tolerance polices of all kinds can land your child in criminal trouble. Truancy laws can have police sent to your home. School boards calling the FBI when you voice displeasure with their policies.
Expensive, world-class facilities. When I was a kid, no school had a swim team because we didn't have pools. Can't put in a new school without state of the art gym, sports fields, often a pool. Giant auditoriums so your taxes can pay whack-job public speakers.
And for what? So kids can learn to read, write, and do math? We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation?
Good riddance. Public school is a scourge on man kind.
> We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation?
Public "education" made me despise learning and helped suppress my love of reading to the point that I'm only just starting to rekindle it. I performed well in school, but not well enough to be in advanced courses. It was complete torture, constantly vascilating between things being so easy that I'd stop paying attention to then being difficult because I'd fallen behind. This isn't even including disciplinary nonsense, I've got stories about that.
Well I had a similar experience with them jamming bad books on me, but on the whole I would say I was better off with public schooling than the alternatives that would have been available to me without a doubt.
I should clarify, it's not just "bad books" that were the issue. There definitely were bad books, but there were also books which I've reread and enjoyed. The issue is more pertaining to the context of the books. Being required to regurgitate things about a book which you didn't have time to read thoroughly, being forced to focus not on the content but on how you can write a report that will please your particular teachers tastes. This, combined with numerous other issues, created terrible associations.
Damn man.. if it weren't for public schools I would seriously be worried about what type of education I'd have gotten at the hands of my own parents or the type of private school they'd have sent me. Public schooling is quite literally one of the only reasons I care about science and take an analytical approach to most everything the way that I do.
US public schools is how I had a chance to get ahead, because my poor non English speaking parents who are prone to believing cult bullshit were not of much use in terms of providing the critical thinking skills and information (pre internet data) necessary to succeed.
> Public schooling is quite literally one of the only reasons I care about science and take an analytical approach to most everything the way that I do.
You assume. If there was no public school, there would be some other thing that fills this void. In fact, even with public school, there are a variety of alternatives.
I'm not against public schooling in principle but its current form is baffling. We expect kids to spend 1/4 of their entire life in an authoritarian system where they have no autonomy and then we throw them to the wolves when they become adults.
> When I was a kid, no school had a swim team because we didn't have pools. Can't put in a new school without state of the art gym, sports fields, often a pool. Giant auditoriums so your taxes can pay whack-job public speakers.
When I was a kid I attended at least two schools built decades earlier, that had pools, but they weren't in use because they could no longer afford the cost of maintenance and (I assume) insurance and such. None of the newer buildings had pools at all. Ones they've built in the couple decades since I graduated don't have pools, either.
These weren't in, like, slums, either. These were relatively rich districts.
I associate pools with 60s and 70s schooling, mainly. Was probably really damn nice.
[EDIT] Not sure why the downvotes. My point is the parent is extrapolating an awful lot from a very narrow set of experiences. Maybe that wasn't clear enough.
"Declining birthrates, a rise in home schooling and growing competition from private and charter schools are contributing to the decline in traditional public school enrollment, according to school officials."
I think the problem with public schools is really the teachers. They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex.
After the chaos of the pandemic, we put our kids in private school and haven't looked back. Kids are happier and there really is something to be said when the teachers actually have to listen to the parents, instead of dismissing our concerns and telling us they know best.
I'd argue that there's a huge selection effect on what kinds of students you have. I have the ability to listen to parents because the vast majority of parent feedback I receive is given in good faith and because I don't end up in the ridiculous situations I hear about from public school colleagues.
> They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex.
Really, unless you derive some intrinsic satisfaction and feel some deep desire to do this job-- in public or private school-- there's no economic reason to do this job. Better comp is available elsewhere for most of us, and even in the relatively supportive environment I'm in, I need to cope with a lot of people who don't just think of themselves as my customers, but by social betters/superiors.
It’s funny. If you talk to teachers the problem is the 10% of students who make the whole place miserable and no parental support. In fact, the parents make the problem worse by siding the problem students instead of helping the school fix the problem.
This. And the mission creep for teachers: more standardized tests every year it seems, hall duty, lunch duty, increased professional training, individualized programs for more and more students (wife had more than 20%), etc... When she was still teaching I would ask my wife if they ever had any actual classes.
The high school my kids go to changed completely across covid. From no discipline problems to daily fights, vandalism, and generally (many) students ignoring anything short of police presence.
Teachers are quitting in droves in a top tier school district. The only saving grace here is that it's a district that people want to get into, so they get pulled from somewhere else. I can only imagine what's going on elsewhere.
The testing thing can be really horrible. This was my first year teaching AP Microeconomics.
Students depend upon doing well on that test, and the college board has crammed the class full of a whole lot of topics.
I had a group of students who were in love with game theory even before the class, and as an individual I love the topic, too. But all the time I could spend on it was half a class period, and only the very boring cases involved in analyzing oligopoly behavior... Because we had to get back to all the edge cases in monopolistic competition and practicing how to write answers to free response questions in the very formulaic ways that we can be sure the graders will give credit for. I feel like I was forced to teach a less engaging and useful class than I'd have liked to.
So my wife's school had a 4th grader bring in a taser and threaten a kid with it before break- where does a kid even get a taser? He's back at school. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that's a detriment to learning or if it's that my wife is just another spoiled teacher.
Around here the very worst district pays better than any other public schools around. Lots of aid dollars flowing in because the district's so bad.
My wife subbed at one of their elementary schools once when taking a break from full-time teaching to care for our kids.
It was on lockdown that day—and, apparently, many days—over credible threats of violence. Nobody told her this, so she found out when she poked her head out the classroom door and got yelled at by a cop for opening the door. Early elementary kids swore at her and refused to do any work, and there was nothing she could do about it. Admin couldn't handle minor stuff like that because they had multiple fights that day to deal with, despite the lockdown. The other teachers told her they were threatened with violence on the regular—by, like, 3rd graders—and occasionally attacked.
As a former teacher in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country at the time (South Bronx, early 2000s), as well as the current parent of a kid in a very different (Midwestern) city's public school systems, this is the answer I would point to.
Teacher quality has always been a distribution, with some good and bad outliers, but the vast majority are sufficient.
What hasn't always been the case is the inability to get rid of kids who are extremely disruptive and make it impossible for education to take place. There also seems to be a bigger share of that disruption now than two decades ago, when I was teaching. I think a lot of it relates to feedback loops: in the suburban schools in my area, as well as the elite public high school in my area (requires an academic test for entrance), these problems don't exist. The problems only seem to exist in the schools where there are higher concentrations of antisocial expectations/behavior. This does tend to correlate with poverty, but poverty doesn't apprar to be causative, merely correlated:
I would point out that poor kids who test into the elite public high school tend to do just fine. But, they are all there for a reason (i.e., it is a self-selecting group of people who want to test), and also worked hard enough to pass the entrance exam.
There's certainly a spectrum of teacher quality out there but I worry you're falling into the same trap as those who target their aggression at customer service representatives. Public schools have a lot of issues that start at the top and teachers are just the most visible endpoints.
I think the problem with public schools is really the teachers. They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex.
Actually, the problem is the parents who either don't care about their child succeeding, or only care about making sure that their child is taught exactly what the parent feels is should be true (a teacher I know was consistently harassed at the school by a grandparent who wanted her to teach the children that Obama was a terrible president and human being and got angry when she wouldn't).
More importantly the lack of teachers. My daughter's math teacher quit and they haven't found a replacement, just an assistant that tells them to do rote exercises each day.
Her previous school's teacher was fired for something sketchy but they're brining him back.
Teachers are pretty universally overworked and underpaid in America. They face threats ranging from deadly diseases to school shooters and are expected to give their lives for their students (and have) when the threat from either is acute. They have recently been the target of political activists, causing them to receive death threats labeling them everything from "groomers" to "treasonous" for simply doing their jobs. And on top of all that, teachers are expected to be grateful for their lot. They're expected to not ask for more for themselves or they're selfish. Just look at how Teachers Unions are vilified (even here in this forum). Moreover, they're actually expected to take more abuse than they already are.
In a very real sense, teachers deal with shit that no other profession has to face, especially the underworked/overpaid technocrats here on HN. Does that make them superior? No, but I think it earns them more deference than you're giving them here.
> I think the problem with public schools is really the teachers. They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex.
I went to public school. Where I'm from our schools, at least high school, performed at or near the top of the state performance (not a state with terrible education). I agree with your analysis. There were only a handful of teachers who were neutral or even good, many were self absorbed and put the role of "teacher", as expressed in the public school environment rather than generally, above all else. If I am able to get married and have kids I refuse to send them to public school, it's either homeschooling or private.
You can blame the teachers, but if you think the public school environment is a cesspit of social dysfunction, authoritarianism, and abuse for the kids... well, it's not much better for the teachers.
The system molds the kinds of bad teachers you saw, and drives out the good ones who don't thrive in that kind of toxic environment.
> The system molds the kinds of bad teachers you saw
This is probably true, and that's why I oppose the system generally. There are a myriad of issues which could be addressed, but unfortunately I don't see that happening, so I encourage disengagement from the public schooling system whenever possible. It's going to be better, and easier, to build new homeschooling networks and private institutions rather than fix government schools.
One of the worst things is how repeatedly we were told to "think outside the box" until that resulted in disagreement or something that didn't fit the grading/testing paradigm. Then it became a time for, as you say, authoritarian crushing down. I can only remember one teacher who fostered an environment that was both structured while still encouraging real discussion and thought, they were probably my favorite teacher which is interesting since they were also the one who I disagreed with most vehemently. I wish it had been like that more.
I have to agree that this is often true. And they're not even shy about it. One teacher at my school has enough time to post political memes on Facebook at least four to five times a day. And the timestamps make it pretty obvious that he's doing it during the school day. But he doesn't care. The union has his back and he's going to be there forever until he collects his huge pension.
Kind of. Many charter schools are run by private boards or individuals that don't answer to the city or state [1], many are run by for-profit management companies [2]. In many states, charter schools amount to a privatization of public schools because they are run by organizations that don’t answer to the public and in some states aren’t subject to key rules that apply to government agencies, such as open meetings and public records laws.
In these states, the only things that make charter schools "public" is the fact that they take money from the district or the state, and tuition is free, but in all other respects they are basically private schools.
In other states they are directly under the control of the school board, and are indeed public schools.
Not saying you're wrong, but I feel the need to point out the framing that something being controlled by government beurocrats is what makes it public by this definition. Charter schools are often free to attend, available for anyone to apply to, and are accountable to the families attending them and the voters who elected officials that made them legal. That's a perfectly reasonable version of "public" as well, it's just not centralized.
Well, they're answerable to the public in that parents can take the kids to another school if things aren't working out. And since they're paid a certain dollar amount per warm body, the school has a pretty direct feedback loop.
Sure, but in that way a private school is public as well.
> "parents can take the kids to another school if things aren't working out. And since they're paid a certain dollar amount per warm body, the school has a pretty direct feedback loop."
Indeed, this is exactly why British private schools like Eton are called "public schools," because anyone can attend if they have the money. But in the US we use a different definition.
Alternate narrative: Teachers don't like charter schools because their business model often revolves around idealistic, frequently underqualified [0] young teachers being paid $40k/year to spend 12 hours/day as prison guards "for the good of their community". The unions are just doing their job in opposing horrific working conditions in their industry.
The situation is the same as an entry level teacher in non-charter schools in a lot of places, but this isn't universally true of charters. I'm not even trying to say that charters are always better, it's pretty clear that on balance they're roughly similar in terms of outcomes across all charters. That said, the really good ones absolutely outperform their peer schools by miles, and at least in NYC charters receive 28% less funding per pupil.
Pre pandemic, I feel we were in a positive cycle of renewed cities, increased social capital. Now it feels like we're in a negative cycle of people avoiding each other, leading to negative feedback loops and lack of social support.
1 - https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-soci...