Society is to blame for this, lots of parents are also being crushed.
We've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
I'm not debating whether or not some parents are able to do the right thing despite hardship or busy schedules. I'm sure there are thousands of people who will come out of the woodwork to tell me anecdotally that their single parent with every disadvantage would kick their ass if they looked at a teacher the wrong way.
What I'm aiming to say is that given more time and space a lot of people who aren't good parents could be better parents. Some of them certainly would be.
There used to be more space for parents in society (or at least a parent in a middle class double parent household), and we can have more space for this now without some tradwife reductionist nonsense. We have more resources than ever to help parents be good parents but they're very unevenly distributed. Resources for poor parents often focus on getting poor parents a job and childcare rather than spending time with kids, for example.
My mom received threats of rape and assault and direct violence against her vehicle as a teacher in los Angeles public schools. Turned her from a bleeding heart liberal into a die hard conservative.
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
I don't think you need to go that far but not punishing teachers for defending themselves from violence would be a good start honestly. Defend yourself from a kid hitting you and you're the one in trouble in most places.
Nothing. She recognized there was no way to fight back. Her principal just felt the need to tell her that if she were to try to defend herself, she would be the one held to be at fault by the principal. The union similarly did nothing. There is no quicker way to radicalize a pro-union liberal than to be told from their union that they will not defend you against threats of sexual assault at work.
I would argue conservatism is the cause of this problem. Their constant attacks on educators and education in general are so pervasive.
Additionally, there's no world in which they want these parents to actually succeed. If there's ever a scenario where someone tries to improve the lives of these people, conservatives will argue that they do not deserve it because they don't contribute to society like conservatives do.
Conservatives believe that people need to meet the same standards, and that it is racist to not hold people to those standards. This means if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher it's treated the same as if a white kid at a rich school hits a teacher - very seriously.
Liberals believe in intersectionalism, and that marginalized groups need unique affordances. This means accepting that if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher, it may be because of poverty and racism and we should understand the issue in that context.
Conservatives believe in defunding public education, social security and perpetuating root causes of a lot of issues like this that can directly be linked to, racism, poverty and lack of access to education.
Conservatives believe in double standards when it comes to "holding people to the same standards". White kids get off scott free way more often for the same crimes than kids of color.
Do your research.
I don't think this is consistent with reality. Are the historical inequities causing a lot these issues as you mention, or are you arguing there actually are no issues because in fact white kids are committing just as many crimes?
In a world where we solve racism, poverty, and lack of access to education do we expect white kids to now be committing way more crimes than non-whites?
Conservative people are definitely more favorable of tough punishment against students and giving teachers more power, but do conservative politicians actually pass laws to this effect? I'm wondering what a bad school looks like in a red vs blue district.
liberalism tends to see all of these issues as the results of the students being victims of something. She believes her students suffered from poor parenting and placed the blame on the families.
In her case, she's a brown woman teaching brown and black kids. She used to think the police were being racial in their interactions. Now she's like... Well they are hurting people and we can't help if the races of the perpetrators just so happen to be whatever
A whole slew of things she just changed her mind on essentially. She felt lied to by the progressive establishment. Moreover when she tried to do something or complain to the union, she was basically thrown under the bus. So her final bit of union sympathy also left her.
One uncomfortable truth you should probably confront is the hostility of conservatives. Education and educators specifically have been targets of hate campaigns for the last 40 years.
People who went to college in the past 15 years saw something very different from others. Even Fox boomer news complaining about liberal colleges doesn't know the full extent of it.
That the reason the kids are violent is because they come from cultures where violence is glorified. The problems causing violence are not societal ones as the progressives claim but ones innate to those particular subcultures.
I agree with the author, violence against educators has become normalized, but it's also been a fault on both sides. Both sides have lost respect for one another, and the reasons why depend a lot on politics and social issues. It almost mirrors the strife between citizens and cops: each side entrenching believing they "know what's best" and the other side be damned.
I don’t think that view holds up to data, for instance you’re more likely to get shot by police as an unarmed white person than black person, when adjusted for population/crime. Even ignoring this, the number of unarmed black people shot per year is usually <20, so it’s not like the problem is endemic.
27 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 according to the Mapping Police Violence database. (Despite this, 53.5% of people identifying as "very liberal" estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were killed. Only 15.71% correctly estimated "about 10."[1]) There are 800,000 police officers in the United States, so I am not sure you can say they generally enjoy killing unarmed black men based on a few dozen deaths a year.
This type of puerile thinking is so common, there really aught to be severe social consequences for saying this type of thing in a public forum.
A 6’6”+ unarmed man of any race could easily kill 90% of the population in a 1 on 1 encounter. We’re talking about a basic physiological reality and we have adults who can freely assert the opposite of this to the extreme detriment of society.
Having someone who thinks that simply being “unarmed” makes them a non-threat is actually a dangerous person to have around other people because they don’t have a theory of human relations that understands the role of physicality and violence and how that should be properly understood and mediated. This is someone too dangerous to operate in an office environment for example.
Workplace violence in general is becoming normalized. I think of healthcare workers and fastfood employees as well as teachers with this trend
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
When you use the term "workplace violence" it seems like this is something between co-workers or between boss and worker, when it's actually nothing like that.
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
Through my observations this has been completely normalized and with terrible pay as a reward. The justification is that it’s the students’ home life causing it and the teachers are there to fill in as a stable adult.
All our politicians go out of their way to claim that they don't like school shootings while guaranteeing that absolutely nothing can ever be done about it. Gun lovers are angry about it getting pointed out.
Agreed. I came here to post "If so, then you have ceased to be a civilized society."
To be honest, in the Netherlands there are more and more teachers dropping out because of stress and burnout, largely due to increasing criticism and demands from parents. But I haven't yet heard of cases of actual violence.
I see in Switzerland teachers being constantly required to fill in for missing colleagues. They might be lured in with good pay, but in the end are unable to cope - so they leave. And then the administration keeps wondering "how much money they want???" instead of hiring more teachers...
> The American Psychological Association completed three National surveys in which the findings reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying)
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
> Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
Potentially, yes. Doubly so when those terrible teachers are kept in those roles year after year. The whole system defends and backs these teachers, even knowing they create horrible outcomes and dread for everyone.
> We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Nope. We all dont. It also depends on if you went to a "good public school" or a "bad public school", or rather worse or well funded.
> Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
True. But saying bad words is *not* violence. However threatening violence is absolutely actionable.
> Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Again, this is looking at individual choices over what im arguing as a system based failure. The whole way the system is constructed is a failure to students and teachers both.
Look at how schools are funded. Property tax. Means poor property locations get shittier schools, worse teachers, low funded classrooms. And this also shows the students' housing is also likely just as poor. Food insecurity, whole lot of trickle down poverty effects. I came from a poor funded rural school. I had no choice in that matter.
Nah, absent parenting. There’s a lot of shitty parents glued to their phones, which has short-circuited the innate desire to parent.
Gentle Parenting is full of uncertainties. There are times when you need to skip the gentle crap and be a parent.
It works on a small scale, where parents are dedicated to the cause, but it falls apart as soon as it hits genpop: someone watches a TikTok summary and thinks they’re an expert.
Imagine parents still parenting we wouldn't be in this shity situation. Most of you have kids as a lifestyle accesoire and externalize way to much of their upbringing and raising.
I remember James Talarico talking about how a very aggressive student completely transformed from an angry kid into a thriving one once he had the therapy and support. Of course republicans cut the funding and the therapy ended and he was eventually expelled.
Yeah its the same with prisoners. Obviously with the right targeted support they do very well at rehabilitation. Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost, and the cost of individual targeted support is only increasing. I'm sure with infinite money we could educate everybody to an amazing standard, and reform every prisoner. It is a shame that our wellbeing as a society has become an act of taxation budgeting.
How often, though, are these not really "cost saving" measures so much as "nobody gets a free ride" measures?
Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.
We don't need indefinite money, we just need to realize that spending more on care has better outcomes than doing what's immediately cheaper. A rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to re-enter the system, but we don't measure that cost.
This is the same with healthcare and schools. We let the system be run by a bunch of short-term get rich quick charlatans who get in the way of more long-term prosperity for everyone. It's easier to measure the immediate cost, so we cut there and ignore the long-term expense it creates.
What's worse is that there are many examples for the US to learn from abroad but generations of propaganda have lead us to believe that our deficiencies are what makes us exceptional.
Yes, the "fiscal conservatives" show their hands over and over again when they simply choose policies that cost us more money, punish more people, lead to worse health outcomes, lead to worse societal outcomes, and just fail to produce the world we want to live in.
Well if you look at how much prisons cost per day (median of 167$ / day in the US), it's quite obvious that therapy combined with confinement at home would be magnitudes cheaper... My personal guess: it's got to do with the fixation on reward / punishment that's so present in our societies.
> Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost
A ugly way to say that our society has limited resources.
Working hours especially are a zero-sum choice.
We require some way to choose between different usages of people's time. All choices are suboptimal. Our societies have slowly developed something that mostly works.
Money as a topic is distracting: instead think about how we allocate the lives (time) of people: especially when trading one person's life/work against another's rights.
This article so very poorly written, to the point that I wonder whether this is real or just AI generated. One whole sentence in the 2nd paragraph is repeated nearly verbatim in the 3rd. In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online. There is an Elizabeth Martin who comes up as a writer, but she is a script-writer. I am not sure that this is a real story. Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
I'm not skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students, and there's nothing unbelievable about this story, just not getting the impression that it's real.
The entire site is suspect, IMO. Pangram says that the entirety of TFA save the paragraph beginning "The American Psychological Association" is AI-generated.
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
Yes and nothing will be done with it because intentional or not, teachers being treated like shit from both ends furthers the goal of the people in charge, which is to dismantle the public school system completely, let rich kids go to private schools, and pipe poor kids straight into the serf class.
My understanding is that it’s normalized by administrators, and the public doesn’t think much about it. Another issue is that some schools have heavy police presence and prison-like rules.
I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers. Other commenters are blaming parents, and sure we should incentivize and facilitate better parenting, but in the short term what is more successful at reducing violence is expelling violent students.
It's society's problem regardless. Not expelling them just means the school itself is an incubator and breeder for antisocial behavior, and when they get out of school, they're still a problem.
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
Even if expelling students doesn't reform them: first, it protects other students; second, ex ante, it's an incentive to behave better in the first place. In fact there's quite good evidence that this works well. (You can check the evidence yourself, by asking ChatGPT "What's the evidence on expelling badly behaved students from schools?" or a similar question.)
They are already societies at large problem keeping them in the school degrades the function of the school for everyone while providing nothing of value to violent students.
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
If the behavior of children was meaningfully driven by career consequences that are a whole lifetime in the future (from their point of view), then parents would have a very easy job.
This is obviously not the case.
Violent behavior obviously has to be sanctioned and hopefully corrected, but excluding children from education is not especially helpful there and has insanely costly side-effects.
How will they become productive in school? Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need. School shouldn’t be that therapy, it degrades the other students’ education.
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
> Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need.
I'm not advocating against this. But keeping their education timeline somewhat on track is highly preferrable in my view (inserting "fixed delinquents" into classes of younger children seems very undesirable to me).
> And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I honestly don't see how this could ever apply.
You have basically an average >$200k investment from the parents alone, plus all the direct/indirect subsidies starting with day care. Between low-wage working adult and "worthless person" there is at least a $50k/year swing in expected value to society every year they work, too.
Even if your success rate of "fixing" child delinquents is laughably low (say 15%), and costs you like $100k per attempt it is easily worth it; its not even close.
My high school principal once told me after expelling me for a few days, don't worry it's not a big deal. When I was your age I was permanently expelled from half the schools in the county.
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.
Vagueposting is a new term online for this kind of behavior - it stems from people getting absolutely destroyed online for various opinions, resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean. Sometimes it's hateful opinions, sometimes it isn't. The end result is people will become unable to simply state their opinions and we won't be able to pick apart people with terrible ideas from the good ones, because no one wants to talk!
It's not rocket science, certain kids showing up as getting impacted by punitive measures looks bad on certain government measures. So they stop getting punished. Problem solved!
Does it matter which kids is it? Just remove the metrics, apply the punitive measures fairly, and let the dice fall where they may. Or don't and allow the safety of teachers and the quality of public education to keep degrading. We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
> We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?
From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know
Punitive measures only work if you believe you have something to lose, a lot of these kids don't. Sure, you can þunish them for their infraction, and you'll have justice, but it's not going to stop them from doing it again unless they feel like the lost out on something. And if you have nothing in the first place why do you care?
And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.
We're talking about schools in the US, which means we're talking about black and latino students. This trips the culture war wires, so people get wink winky.
Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.
Probably because what this poster seems to be implying is a sort of inconvenient or unpopular truth. The kinds of things that there's no point actually saying out loud no matter how true they are, because they just make people angry and being explicit about it just paints a sort of target on you instead of actually driving anything towards a solution
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
I'll volunteer: in every single video of American teachers being assaulted I've glimpsed over the years, the assailants were black.
I'm sure someone could take their time and find a few rare instances of that not being the case (if they can manage to do it before I inevitably get -4 points [flagged][dead] for this callous sacrilege), to which I will preemptively reply that someone equally invested in the argument could easily find ten videos confirming my anecdotal observation for each one you provide.
If it's really this, seems there needs to be some state or federal pushback against these lawsuits. Cause idk about schools, but it's gotten out of hand elsewhere. We've already seen the SCOTUS ruling against DEI very quickly having a positive impact on universities and even corps.
To some degree it's a concern for "problematic" statistical outcomes, but it's also anti-bias training, both explicit and implicit, giving individual decision makers hesitancy when dulling out punishments.
I am reminded of a former boss's niece who was a kindergarten teacher in a rural, very white district. No physical abuse, but she was very surprised the first time a kid started cussing her out.
It's not a race issue so much as a poverty and cultural issue. Any racial correlation is a proxy for those two things.
Sundar, Elon, and Zuck have my best interests in mind and at the forefront of their goals. Xi wants nothing more than the downfall of my glorious Western values. He’ll stop at nothing, even stooping so low as to violate the Anthropic terms of service.
Let's take aside the charged component of this and just suppose hypothetically that 100% of the assaulting students belonged to some subgroup. So what?
They may be 100% black, or 100% male, or something, but it's not like you can reasonably just say "So no males at our school." Regardless of whether you can find a subgroup who this belongs to with a very low specificity, you still need policies that tackle the behavior itself rather than trying to find some really weak predictor.
I'll bite. The importance is this: if you do not acknowledge a disproportion of a certain group committing the offenses, then you cannot enforce punishments without them seeming inequitable. If 90% of the suspensions of students come from a certain protected group, if you refuse to believe they are 90% of the offenders, we must roll back the policies because they are clearly bias.
Or the simpler way is to not acknowledge what group is committing offenses and not care what group is receiving punishment. People rightfully get suspicious when it's about groups.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Trump revoked the Obama/Biden which didn't allow schools punish black students unless they punished an equal amount of whites:
Saying you're too lazy to actually check if these videos are genuinely all black students, but someone could do it, and you know the answer even without checking somehow, isn't exactly convincing.
There just aren't enough blacks in the US for them to completely dominate any crime. To be at your imagined rate of 90% of instances being black, when only 13 or 14% of the population, would require a ridiculously high rate compared to every other group.
Because these things are for unfortunate reasons of historical happenstance, correlated with race. And if you let race into the discussion the evil people who peddled all this bad metrics and bad policy can use it to sow division and get everyone arguing with each other while they quietly dodge blame.
Preemptively jail minority and special ed children and make them work their way up from prison to school.
OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate currently, it’s currently his vibes based hypothesis that he’s afraid to openly state.
Listen buddy, I make $350k programming. Obviously I’m an expert in something as simple as knowing what’s wrong with black kids and schools.
I get what you’re saying. Even if we already punish black kids at a higher rate, it’s not high enough, because they could be committing offenses at and even higher rate than that. And we can’t possibly know that, because everyone is afraid of the DEI man, so they only report white offenses in school.
That’s why my solution was brilliant, we side step all that by putting them in jail from the start, and they work their way out from first principles.
> My experience made something painfully clear: violence against educators has become so normalized that society now treats it as an expected part of teaching.
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Serious question. Do you know any teachers, especially any special education teachers? They all have stories about the violence they receive, and a lot of them.
Special Ed is a special case- those kids are specifically segregated because they cannot be taught at grade level or be expected to behave safely for their size.
It happens more often in special education, but non special ed teachers have plenty of stories too. Also, special ed teachers are not some underclass and are also deserving of a safe workplace.
To be fair, the precise reason violence against teachers is normalized is because liberalism (I.e. the supporting ideological structure of modern Western society) posits a theory of human psychology and sociology on the basis of the fact that this theory feels good.
It essentially just asserts a particular model of human psychology and sociology and the moral structure of the universe and also makes discussion about its assumptions impossible.
The fundamental tenet of liberalism being that people are basically good and any sort of bad behavior from someone is the fault of a societal failing inflicted upon them. So when a student attacks a teacher this is society failing the student, the teacher being an agent of society and therefore at least partial responsible for being attacked.
To question this is to question liberalism itself which no one, not even the people who do have a sense that this is wrong, are prepared or have the capacity to do.
I don’t know what you’re calling a strawman, but the point is that wxw’s response is simply an epitome of the underlying problem. He’s just engaging in political discourse completely in line with the ideological superstructure which is ultimately responsible for this very problem (violence against teachers being normalized). You can’t expect the typical person to be able to transcend that, hence “to be fair”.
I'd modify this take: modern liberalism was meant as a commitment, not as a truth. Something collectively agreed on as good, valuable and important, as opposed to something true like the "sky is blue".
The issue, as I think history will judge it, is the truth that precedes liberalism has been spent & forgotten. In the absence of the "why", commitment became truth: the perception/prism/the water people see themselves in and others, the world, etc. From there, as you said, the logic proceeds mechanically (fact: kids are blank slates, results: parents, teachers, environment are to be blamed[1]). Because we can't reason our way out of the truth even if our senses and experiences are screaming at us to stop.
It is a consuming, comfortable & reasonable truth, held tightly because the alternatives are seen as unreasonable. In this way, modern liberalism is useful as a defense mechanism.
What you’re describing is basically a people + a covenant + a system of law. That is basically the structure of the Jews, the covenant they have with G-d, and the Torah.
The question is then to what extend that particular system is an accurate reflection of reality, and to answer that question you would have the analyze the delta between them, both in terms of how it was initially conceived vs how it evolved.
In the case of the US, at a very basic level for example the founders did not envision the US as a multiracial society or that everyone, including non-landowners could vote. Also that the US constitution itself looks very different today in terms of its amendments and more importantly the case law and jurisprudence around constitutional law which is de facto the constitution of the US. I don’t mean that these are right or wrong necessarily, just that the initial conception is very different.
Basically I think you are right but that also the basic premise of liberalism and the liberal system even in its initial conception is flawed and therefore doomed to fail.
I do think fundamentally liberalism does assert a view of human psychology and sociology that assumes that properly organizing and orienting the human mind is at least 3 orders of magnitude easier than it really is. If you actually study anthropology, like the anthropological studies that were done in the 19th century and if you study depth psychology which heavily makes use of those anthropological studies, you find a very terrifying and very chaotic and complex picture of the human psyche, as revealed in the religions, mythologies, and rites of pre-civilization peoples which liberalism has virtually absolutely no awareness of.
I've heard a lot of stories like that, where the teacher gets the short end of the stick and the student gets 0 consequences because of age. At the same time, the article looks like AI writing, so I backed out.
"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own. I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
(last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
> teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own
Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
The teachers who didn't grade homework and passed students who hadn't actually learned anything? They're utterly powerless and more funding won't help them. The schools need to radically change their approach to education, top to bottom.
Those teachers wanted to fail the kids, but administration told them they couldn't.
Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
I'm calling BS here. The article on NHJ would have had the failure rate around 50% or higher based on how poorly the students performed. The school literally cannot accommodate so many students failing a grade level and being held back.
Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
This gets kinda tricky to analyze, and especially hard to compare to other countries, which may have very different ways of accounting for things.
That money goes to:
1) Salaries for school administrators.
2) Salaries for teachers.
3) Salaries for office support staff (e.g. secretaries)
4) Depending on how the accounting is done, that may include a fraction of the salaries of district admin (super and assistant superintendents, and Nb there can be several of the latter, even in smallish districts) and their office support staff.
5) Facilities construction and renovation, and/or servicing debt on bonds for past facilities construction and renovation.
6) Property and building maintenance. Mowing, fixing potholes and re-painting lines in parking lots, roof leaks, playground maintenance, whatever.
7) Transportation for students (e.g. busses). This can get pretty expensive in sparsely-populated areas.
8) Extracurriculars, including supplemental pay for coaches and sponsors, and maybe an equipment budget.
9) Supplies for "specials" classes, including stuff like band instruments and maintenance of those instruments (lots of places you bring your own, but that's not true for all instruments, often the really big ones, especially, will be school-provided) and art supplies and all that.
10) Electronics and computer services. Powerschool licenses, laptops, "smart" projectors, all that stuff.
11) Special educators and paraprofessionals who will have much smaller student-counts they're responsible for than classroom teachers. This can get as low-count as a dedicated para for a single student, following around and helping them all day.
12) ESOL services. Districts with lots of students speaking English as a second language (if at all...) bear higher costs.
13) Special services for kids who can't fit into the mold of ordinary school. This can look like a district budget paying for transportation to and from a fairly distant magnet or private school, which school will probably cost a lot more than ordinary public schools because they'll have far lower student-to-staff ratios.
14) School lunches, and maybe breakfasts. The food, the staff to serve it, health code compliance and appliance maintenance, all that. IDK if the spending figure would include money students put into accounts for their kids to use for this purpose, but lunches are often subsidized to at least some degree, if not 100%.
15) Other support staff and services (nurses, counselors and psychologists, librarians, janitors)
16) Other supplies. Books, paper, toner, et c.
(and probably more stuff I'm forgetting about)
The result is that actual spending for a given student, if we restricted it to only the things they're directly benefiting from, can be a ton lower than average per-student spending. Meanwhile, some students soak up well over $100k in spending per year, all on their own.
Also, it's easy to pick out some of the above that might plausibly not count as part of the school's budget, in, say, another country that simply made different choices about what budget each thing belongs in, or might just naturally have far lower costs due to geography or demography or whatever.
TL;DR average spending per-student doesn't tell you a lot on its own, and you definitely can't usefully compare one school to another based on such a figure without gathering a lot more context.
> Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own.
Teachers are not underpaid. We live in a free market society and they have extensive collective bargaining agreements. If anything, they’re overpaid vs a totally free market.
Those who can and want to use those same talents in a different progression are free to do so. Nobody is forced into the progression (okay maybe grad students but that’s something else…).
> I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
Almost all states offer pensions, or hybrid pensions and direct contribution plans. You have to add 1/3-1/2 or more (especially for states with retirement health plans) to yearly salary to appreciate real compensation.
I happen to have a friend group that has a few teachers in it.
Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount. In a few of our local districts, on average teachers are making $130k/yr if you scaled their pay to a normal 48 week career schedule. This is on top of gangbusters benefits.
Beyond that, once you get a few years into it and have your scaffolding built, you can kinda just cruise control for the rest of your career with only minor changes.
Yes, the job is challenging and stressful, but lowkey most $130k/yr jobs are.
The real devotion of teaching is being willing to have so much unproductive time which would be filled in a different higher paying career.
it's very dependent on state and most states are underpaid even including getting summers off. The benefits aren't very good in my state and we're one of the better paying states in the region.
There are some huge outliers like California but most states teachers are just treading water. I know this in my state because I was trying to get accredited earlier this year.
14-16 weeks off a year is no compensation for dealing with little shits 5 days a week (and their parents), while attempting to teach the minority that want to learn.
1) There aren't plenty. It's hitting the lowest-paying and least-otherwise-desirable areas first, but there's an ongoing staffing crisis that's been worsening for years. Enrollment in teaching programs has plummeted.
2) People often talk about wanting the median teacher quality to be higher, and to be able to fire more bad teachers. A nigh-necessary early step toward addressing that complaint is to increase pay. A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
> A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
This would be a fine argument if we could somehow align incentives, fire low performing teachers, and rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
Why can't we fire them? The typical answer is "unions" but a bunch of states de facto don't have teachers' unions (as far as unions with any ability to collectively bargain or meaningfully protect teachers from firing), and still have to retain all but the very worst teachers... because the supply of good teachers is too low. These same states tend to have poor educational outcomes, further suggesting that ability to fire, on its own, isn't helping much.
> rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
This, unfortunately, turns out to be a really hard problem. It's been sincerely attempted in a bunch of ways and they've all turned out to suck, is the short history of the notion.
In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
> In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
~40 percent of pregnancies annually are unintended in the US (per the Guttmacher Institute), so lots of folks parenting who didn't want to or didn't intend to parent. As unintended pregnancies are driven down over time (via education and contraceptives), this should reduce aggregate load off the system of people who do not want to or cannot parent effectively. We avoid, to the best of our ability, people who don't want kids having them, we get parents to success to the best of our ability with the kids that are here today (because there is no other option). We can predict future demand for systems needed to support children based on the US projected fertility rate curve (US total fertility rate stands at ~1.58 as of this comment, and will continue to trend down into the future: https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...).
> There are approximately 7.3 million standalone single mothers and about 15.7 million single-mother family households in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data tracking. Roughly 23% of children under 18 in the U.S. live with a single mother.
> The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
(think in systems, and overlay this issue with how many K-12 schools are closing across the US every year due to structural demographics and total fertility rate decline)
Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S: Limited funds and low enrollment forced districts to close more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/07/20/school-c... | https://archive.today/4r4uo - July 20th, 2026 ("We call it the big shrink," said Marguerite Roza, who tracks school funding as director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Enrollment at public schools is declining, partly because there are fewer kids in the U.S.")
> Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further reducing the number of kids at some schools.
(TLDR pay teachers a living wage, get class ratios to whatever the science says is best before diminishing returns to optimize for student success, and continue solving for avoiding unwanted children with education and contraceptives; k-12 schools, as well as colleges [https://college-cuts.com/], will continue to close well into the future due to structural demographics, optimize accordingly)
Whose responsibility is a kid's behavior if not his/her parents'?
Being a parent is a big responsibility, and (barring rare exceptions) you don't become one unintentionally.
Unfortunately, I see plenty of people out in the wild who act like their kids' behavior is none of their business. There was a time when parents unable to control their children would be asked to leave public establishments, but now, everyone is supposed to stand by impotently, and anyone who dares speak up is accosted by the bad parent(s).
You can't even touch student and don't even think about slap. Some years ago I witnessed the case where teacher grabbed the student (14y old) who ran around screaming, kicking things and other students. A teacher was charged with a criminal offense (physical violence against a minor) and must now comply with behavioral supervision. What happened with kid? Nothing. He had a bad day and don't have skills to regulate his emotions yet.
For the rare few cases it may have been warranted, it wasn't a bad idea. The problem is that for the vast, vast majority of cases in which it was used, it wasn't warranted.
Remember: schools don't have tribunals to judge which student was or wasn't actually guilty of what, to which extent, with which attenuats if any, etc., to then decide who was going to be beaten and how much. The teacher merely looked at you, decided you were guilty because you didn't look into his eyes while he was speaking (autistic children were typical cases of this), and decided to traumatize you for life, fully unjustly.
When modern schools do the same but in the opposite direction, unjustly punishing teachers, that simply shows they haven't changed one iota from what they have always been.
> school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
No different than any other employer-employee relationship - the school has a responsibility to protect itself. Teachers have rights too, if she believes her employer contributed to harm or has taken retaliatory action against her she can bring her own suit.
The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.
A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.
Wild how much of the successful entertainment coming out of South Korea (like Squid Game), is basically them dramatizing facets of their dystopian society, that a lot of it is actually based on real issues they face, and it's not all just made up fantasy.
I seriously doubt any hospital in the US outside of a major metro area has an "armed tactical team". I've never even heard of such a thing despite working in a major metro area for most of my adult life.
At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?
As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?
I think you are exactly right. This is the product of society which has more empathy towards the bullies, because they are the real victims, ignored and left behind by the society. On the other hand there is very little empathy towards actual victims themselves. And to go further probably the majority of teachers believe, support and vote for people holding such ideas.
Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.
I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".
They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.
Disagree. When you admit to a mistake you just took on a bunch of liability and risk being sued. Worker bees are not empowered to take on that liability. It is much cheaper to let things get bad and maybe get sued but the plantiffs have to prove their case versus hand people a slam dunk 'we messed up' in the eyes of management. Simple things I could address in the past I now have to just shut up and no longer talk to the customer at all. It all comes back to lawsuits causing societal level changes that yet again remove slack/productivity/the previous way a functioning society works.
Along these same lines, it seems to me that patients in the US can rarely afford the exorbitant and escalating cost of medical care, so with increasing frequency they expend considerable effort trying to identify any possible error that they think could get them a break on their bill or enough of a legal case to give them a fighting shot at beating medical bankruptcy.
I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.
I don't work in medical or a hospital, but I am the person whose job it is to limit liability at my workplace. We have a bunch of language we have to advise people not to use when an incident happens.
It might come off a little impersonal, but unfortunately one wrong word in the wrong place can give someone an entire case when maybe they didn't have one before, unfortunately.
The legal system is meant to be a backstop, not a standard mode of operation. What I despise, and what makes me feel embarassed by proxy, is when the imagined solution involves using the legal system as a deterrent (to either the kids or their parents). I think there's a systemic cultural failure if parents are not emparting proper morals and imposing proper consequences, so much so that we need the law to be involved to protect teacher from harm.
I advise against using Google for things like that, because Google results are very dependant on how Google classified you, and it might differ from how Google classified me.
Are you sure you wanted to point me to some Facebook post, which is the nr. 1 result for me?
> but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
They don’t have budget to put food on their teachers tables or supplies in the classroom.
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
The ugly secret is that vast amounts of teachers are leaving the field, but there's also an inexplicably vast fresh supply of new teachers coming out of universities, so it sort of perpetuates the conditions.
I don't anticipate change until this fresh supply dries up and people start asking why.
If it has gotten to a jury, it has already taken a significant amount of time and resources from the district and the teacher.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
That is a problem but it’s definitely not the root. The root is our increasingly high tolerance for violence, especially in schools. We should also stop shying away from the gendered aspects of the thing: this is done by boys and men FAR more than girls and women. We just don’t like to talk about it.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
Your dog whistling argument can be easily countered by peeling a few more layers of the onion... The trouble is, as usual, some things we just dont talk about.
How are “conservatives” to blame for increasing violence in school systems that are overwhelmingly run by liberals? To be clear, I don’t think this should be a political thing. Violence against teachers is abhorrent. We should try the liberal solutions to the problem, but if those don’t work we should also try the conservative solutions to the problem.
both extremes have really bad takes, the middle path is the way
The underlying basis for current "conservatives inspire more violence" is largely drawn from clips taken from the manosphere-podcast realm. There is an amount of war hawks always being on the right that predates all of this.
I've seen similar from the left wing, though they don't have good podcast game or modern communication generally.
The people setting disciplinary standards in schools aren’t childless manosphere “podcast” bros. It’s parents, teachers, and administrators. Out of those, you do have the “war hawk” types. But they exercise violence in a very abstract way. I guarantee you Dick Cheney’s kids wouldn’t have dreamed of talking back to a teacher, much less laid a hand on one.
I grew up around the Dick Cheney type back when northern virginia was a red area in an even redder state. I recall almost no fights between students, much less anyone attacking faculty. Hitting a teacher would have gotten you sent to some alternative school with armed guards.
Yeah, my wife is friends with one of the founders. They are conservatives who don’t want to use taxpayer dollars to pay for books in schools that contain material they find objectionable. Their kids are super fucking well behaved. These are the types of people who ran the Virginia schools when I was growing up in the 1990s. We had Bill Clinton-funded abstinence-focused education in northern Virginia back then. Violence against teachers was unheard of back then.
In the last 10-15 years, traditional conservatives have largely been pushed out of school administration, even in places like my current county, which was a Romney 2012 county. Groups like Moms4Liberty have zero influence on how schools discipline kids.
> there is nothing civilized about violence
Violence against potential threats is necessary for the maintenance of civilization. But violence against elders within your community, which is what we’re talking about here, is completely unacceptable.
The education profession in the United States has become a black hole that gives people who don’t plan the illusion of a career.
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
It's not like the parents are wrong. But it's a structural issue, a product of the way schools are set up, and not of the actions of a given staff/faculty member.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.
Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.
My wife works for a school system that at one point had the following proclamation handed down:
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution. It takes an endless amount of time before it's clear "problem is the parent" and by the time that is decided they're gone and on to the next parent who submitted their 6th absurd complaint this year and everyone starts over wagging fingers at the teacher's.
Having been a student in the mid-late 90s in US public school I can say I witnessed this often. Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with. Instead the public school is forced to try and deal with these delinquents. They take time and resources away from the smarter youth who are trying to do the best they can in the public school system.
buddy will be so surprised to learn how many people on social programs like that hold down a job and are some of the nicest, sweetest people in the world who just got screwed over by circumstances
in the same way people are delusional in thinking they're just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, they also don't realize how precarious their own financial positions are, and how they'll definitely want a safety net that helps them to survive if it happened to them
We're getting off-topic here, but while "unemoloyed" I worked part-time as a cashier at one of the local grocery stores. Now I can't see how people on food stamps live, but I CAN confirm what they buy. Mostly, its pretty reasonable. But "welfare queens" do, in fact, exist. They buy shrimp and steaks with those stamps. Weekly.
I won't go into my theories as to causes or reasons or whatever. Just know that it IS a thing amongst a small subset of welfare recipients despite propoganda otherwise.
I am glad you have an anecdote to counter everyone else's, but the thing we should be using is data, not anecdotes.
The reality is that most places you get on the order of 200 bucks per person PER MONTH, so that's not going far on steaks and shrimp.
Auditing and finding fraud is useful, but we also have to value it against the cost of auditing and fraud management in the first place, and the value is put up against honest people who have to a decent chunk of hours every month juggling government paperwork and websites to get the most meager of handouts.
I don’t think anyone disputes that it can be abused, and sometimes is. It isn’t at a scale that it is killing you or America, and the remedy should reduce abuse without impacting those that need the help.
> and then what? they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid.
And if they stay, they become adults who live large on food stamps and medicaid, and on top of that seriously hurt or permanently disable teachers, staff, or other students. It's as if letting them pummel teachers in the face will somehow result in them becoming upstanding citizens.
Well, not exactly. Have you ever seen the quality of life of someone on substantial government assistance? It’s not a life I’d want. No one lives on food stamps and Medicaid because they enjoy it.
I've had two people try to sell me their food stamps while I was buying groceries, something along the lines of "let me buy your groceries with my food stamps and you can give me 80% in cash". I presume they were getting money from selling drugs and didn't need the food stamps, hence willing to sell them, but I didn't actually ask.
My partner was also a single mother who utilized wic and food stamps and food pantries until she was able to work full time again.
When the system works, it works well. When it gets abused, there's less for the people who need it.
> No one lives on food stamps and Medicaid because they enjoy it.
Unfortunately, this is also not true. My best friend's mother stayed on benefits because she didn't want to work, and moved out of state because her assistance ran out. She was nominally capable of working, though she also abused drugs and was more comfortable using and getting benefits than getting clean and a job.
It's more likely they wanted to buy something that isn't able to be purchased with food stamps. Probably alcohol. Or smokes. Something to let them journey to oblivion and blot out their reality.
Nah, I've seen people like that too, and that's not the guys I ran into. Were I to stereotype, they looked more like gangbangers than strung out druggies.
>they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid
That often happens regardless. You might as well spare the poor teacher from dealing with them so they can focus on kids that are still redeemable, because otherwise, if you force them, the teachers will just choose to leave the system entirely, only because you had misplaced empathy for the irredeemable bottom % of society, when you weren't the one actually having to deal with that problem you want fixed. It's easy to write cheques you don't have to cash but most people, just like you and me, have limits to the amount of abuse they will take at work, even for humanitarian jobs like nurses and teachers.
I see. Would you advocate killing off the “bottom % of society”? Serious question. Because if you would not, it means you have empathy, just not to the same degree as the people you are clashing with here.
"and then what" is the common retort to when people suggest removing the problem students, it's practically a cliche now.
Then what is the students are held accountable now and won't be able to harm the education of their classmates and continue to harass their teachers. Then what is we don't have to pad grades as much and lie so that we can meet a fake metric. Then what is we stop doubling down on an approach that doesn't work.
believe me, im not in support of the delinquents. but they dont just go away. they stay in society. they vote and consume resources. if you dont get them to a point of self-sufficiency, they will happily become leeches on the rest of society anyway.
So if we are going to pick on people who live off of a government-sponsored subsidy, can I ask if the home interest mortgage deduction also counts as a government-sponsored subsidy?
and if not, why not? is it because people who have a house are good people and deserve it, while CHILDREN who are born to the wrong parents are bad people and don't?
Having been a student in the late 90s in US public school, I can say I did not witness this at all, and my high school had several thousand students.
However, my district also had a school specifically for troublemakers (with fences and extra security and all of that) so the other schools wouldn't have to deal with them.
Although for self-selected friends my personal saying is that "All the smartest left school at 15". My other friends are academically educted which doesn't smarten up anyone.
> Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with... They take time and resources away from the smarter youth...
You seem to have a severe deficit of compassion. Also a deficit of strategic thinking.
Some significant fraction of those "delinquent kids" are that way due to some generational cycle of poor treatment and/or bad circumstances. If, as you advocate, little attempt is made to break those cycles, you'll just leave the problem to fester and get worse.
Also you're advocating punishing kids for being the victim of their own circumstances, which is just heartless.
The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
>The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.
> With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.
FYI, you're not a decent person, you're a problem person. You lack compassion.
If someone beats you and leaves you for dead in a ditch, when the paramedics find you, what should they say? It pretty obvious: "a dollar spent helping this guy could be used to help someone better, leave him for dead."
Speaking as a former teacher, as long as schools can find someone willing to stand at the front of a classroom, the terrible pay and working conditions will persist.
I finished my career in the UK, where a third of all teachers leave the profession within five years. I started that career in Australia, where half of all teachers leave the profession within five years. It's not a 'calling' or a 'vocation', it's just the post-university equivalent of a gap year.
Obama "Dear Collegue Letter"[0] policy threatened civil rights enforcement if schools disciplined more black and latino students than white students, assuming that disparities of the rate of discipline implied injustice, rather than matching up with disparities in the rate of behavior meriting punishment.
This was a disaster for schools; many students who would have been expelled were kept around disrupting teachers and students who had to bear their presence in classrooms, hallways, fighting each other, bullying students and teachers.
For about 5 years after this went into effect, my local school district that also allowed open enrollment around this time got an influx of students with bad behavior from previous schools enrolling and not being expelled for fighting and other repeated misbehavior and disruptions. There was huge wave of teachers and families leaving and enrolling in the rural school close by so both could actually do teaching and learning without interference. The schoolboard had a lot turnover until the now head got elected promising to drastically curtail open enrollment and apply whatever discipline policy they could get away with to revoke open enrollment rights from non-residents due to bad behavior.
Here is a great account [1] from a teacher about her experience in schools where discipline was severely limited and prevented expulsion of disruptive and violent students, and the obvious consequences to the degraded learning environment that resulted.
This is obviously going to be regional, because it's cultural.
I'm old enough to have adult children, although I never did have kids of my own.
My parents would have gone to school in the knowledge that if they acted up, words would be had with their parents, and there would be consequences.
At some point, something changed, and we decided that teachers were there to be put in their place by parents, and if a teacher suggested a child was doing something wrong the parent would expect to challenge that and the teacher would be put in their place.
We're now in a situation where children being taught sometimes think its their right - perhaps even obligation - to not be instructed in appropriate behaviour, and so feel free to react the way that they do.
There's a microcosm natural experiment for this in the Pennines, the North of England. There's a small town called Hebden Bridge, which for a while had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the UK. Some thought it was related to the environment - it sits in a valley, the persistent low grey cloud can make it feel claustrophobic - but I think another theory holds up: parents there didn't bother parenting. A community was drawn to the town by adults who were in essence, hippies: they believed in freedoms their parents didn't including for their children.
That meant that many of the kids growing up there did so in an environment without real structure, and became adolescent in an environment with easy supply to plentiful drugs and a relaxed attitude to its use.
I'm not a parent, that was an active choice I made, and so I wouldn't deign to tell parents how to bring up their children, but I would suggest parents look at the data: children thrive with structure and rules and gentle consequences for non-compliance (the naughty step, etc.), and recognition of genuinely outstanding behaviour (winning things, not participating in them). They struggle to develop as emotionally secure people without those. Hell, I'm a data point there - took me years to realise I needed therapy, and years more to benefit from it. As the old poem starts: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don't mean to, but they do."
Anyway, teachers play a part in that journey, but they can't do the whole thing, and the sooner parents (and society in general), restore the respect to the profession it once had, the better. Are all teachers good? No, but they are professionals who have more data on more children than any parent, so maybe just respect that.
A friend of mine is on their way to becoming a teacher and already teaching at a school for one year part-time.
He tells tales about his children mostly from low income families, where school is the only structure they have as their families are completely dysfunctional. Thorn apart by the family trying or not trying to integrating into German society as well as themselves.
When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
> When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
Could be. A lot of kids only have so much good behavior for a day... act out at school or at home, pick one.
But also, the student who has to live with expectations at school may set expectations at home, and that may be seen as worse behavior by the parents.
My wife is a college level teacher and she is continuously receiving disrespect and open challenges in her classroom. Fortunately it has not come to physical violence. But the environment created by a large number of students who have a bloated sense of entitlement is problematic. Feeling entitled all the time is a sure way to living a sad life divorced from reality.
Is it "accepted" by society? Answering that depends on the definition of "accepted."
Is it reasonably expected? Yes, definitely, if that means "much more likely than violence against non-teachers": a random K-12 teacher in the USA is ~2.5-7x more likely to be assaulted than a random person in the USA.
Probably not a popular opinion but I feel the same way about police officers. Teachers aren't the cause of the vast majority of this, they're just the front line of people who have to deal with it. If it weren't educators, it'd just be whoever these dysfunctional kids / parents run up against next.
And sometimes those are police officers, who then get blamed for metrics we don't like. So we cut back on policing and now it'll be somebody else who gets the short end of the stick.
If you're a teacher in the US, it's kind of on you at this point. There's no sane reason anyone should be teaching in the US without full support from the administration and full control over your curriculum, both of which the US does not give teachers.
US schools were restricted from engaging in appropriate disciplinary action without the threat of losing federal funding. Either schools take action against violent students appropriately, or they can lose federal funding. They were financially strong armed to ignore it.
It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.
After reading both the article and the discussion here, it seems to me that this is the symptom of an increasingly transactional America. Call it late stage capitalism or atomisation of society, but when labour is no longer respected, this is the result. Teachers getting bullied and fast food workers getting shouted at, all while scraping to get by. Just like the manufacturing sector, the service sector is hollowed out, entertainment and automation economy is king.
The backdrop of this includes the normalization of mass-shootings in schools. The incredible amount of violence needs to stop. One of the solutions is to ban all guns in America but not even one politician will take it seriously. Also, teachers must be paid as lucratively as defense contractors because in my opinion our children are the biggest priority when it comes to national security.
I went to a high school in California. The school district had a separate dedicated campus where they sent all of the violent and antisocial kids in the rest of the school district. They weren’t hesitant to use it either, repeat offenders weren’t a thing. All of us were aware of it.
The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.
I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.
Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
I was in middle school when iPhones first came out, was saying day 1 this is a cancer. My intro to AI slop videos was sitting next to a 3yo who was watching YouTube Kids on an iPad, and it was https://www.youtube.com/shorts/goZrTf-YYjY
On a tangential note, I come from a society where violence against students was pretty normalised. 90s kid from your run of mill CBSE school in Chennai. My crimes were being piss poor at Maths and Hindi. I’ve dealt with face slappings, foot ruler on the knuckles, ears being pinched and twisted, kneeling down for the hour, wooden dusters hurled, slaps to the head, verbal abuse, humiliation, earned a few nicknames. All this came from teachers, vice principal, PT masters etc. I’ve had to carry a lot of baggage all these years. I’m 41 and fine now but if met certain people from the past, it would be really hard to not to confront them. Anyhow, I hope India is a changed place these days and I sincerely hope parents stick up for their children in the face of abusive teachers. Not all teachers were bad, there were some wonderful teachers in the early standards (1-7) I hope teachers love their students regardless of their academic performance.
Schools decided to try this experiment in post-liberal ethics where violence is simultaneously never justified under any circumstance including self defense, while also failing to punish the worst offenders in a meaningful way. This is one of many results of that experiment.
mlinhares | 7 hours ago
micromacrofoot | 7 hours ago
We've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
mlinhares | 5 hours ago
micromacrofoot | 4 hours ago
What I'm aiming to say is that given more time and space a lot of people who aren't good parents could be better parents. Some of them certainly would be.
There used to be more space for parents in society (or at least a parent in a middle class double parent household), and we can have more space for this now without some tradwife reductionist nonsense. We have more resources than ever to help parents be good parents but they're very unevenly distributed. Resources for poor parents often focus on getting poor parents a job and childcare rather than spending time with kids, for example.
anon291 | 7 hours ago
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
glitchc | 7 hours ago
Vasbarlog | 7 hours ago
throw9383930 | 7 hours ago
mahboi | 6 hours ago
Blackthorn | 6 hours ago
mahboi | 6 hours ago
Vasbarlog | 3 hours ago
anon291 | 3 hours ago
Not that she'd stand a chance against a group of determined post pubescent males.
Vasbarlog | an hour ago
anon291 | 43 minutes ago
SubmarineClub | 7 hours ago
It wasn’t republicans that trashed California public schools in the name of ‘racial equity.’
mahboi | 7 hours ago
anon291 | 3 hours ago
mahboi | 3 hours ago
sixothree | 7 hours ago
Additionally, there's no world in which they want these parents to actually succeed. If there's ever a scenario where someone tries to improve the lives of these people, conservatives will argue that they do not deserve it because they don't contribute to society like conservatives do.
nailer | 7 hours ago
Liberals believe in intersectionalism, and that marginalized groups need unique affordances. This means accepting that if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher, it may be because of poverty and racism and we should understand the issue in that context.
bevilp | 6 hours ago
criagsbkbk | 4 hours ago
In a world where we solve racism, poverty, and lack of access to education do we expect white kids to now be committing way more crimes than non-whites?
mahboi | 4 hours ago
anon291 | 3 hours ago
In her case, she's a brown woman teaching brown and black kids. She used to think the police were being racial in their interactions. Now she's like... Well they are hurting people and we can't help if the races of the perpetrators just so happen to be whatever
A whole slew of things she just changed her mind on essentially. She felt lied to by the progressive establishment. Moreover when she tried to do something or complain to the union, she was basically thrown under the bus. So her final bit of union sympathy also left her.
ValueTheory | 7 hours ago
panzagl | 7 hours ago
mahboi | 4 hours ago
sixothree | 7 hours ago
mahboi | 4 hours ago
creata | 6 hours ago
anon291 | 3 hours ago
Molitor5901 | 7 hours ago
ryanmcbride | 7 hours ago
DaSHacka | 7 hours ago
guywithahat | 7 hours ago
letmevoteplease | 7 hours ago
[1]https://research.skeptic.com/content/files/2025/02/Research-...
monideas | 6 hours ago
A 6’6”+ unarmed man of any race could easily kill 90% of the population in a 1 on 1 encounter. We’re talking about a basic physiological reality and we have adults who can freely assert the opposite of this to the extreme detriment of society.
Having someone who thinks that simply being “unarmed” makes them a non-threat is actually a dangerous person to have around other people because they don’t have a theory of human relations that understands the role of physicality and violence and how that should be properly understood and mediated. This is someone too dangerous to operate in an office environment for example.
Steaglsz | 7 hours ago
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
throw9383930 | 7 hours ago
carlosjobim | 7 hours ago
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
phishin | 7 hours ago
This is at a tipping point.
criagsbkbk | 4 hours ago
amanaplanacanal | 7 hours ago
engineer_22 | 7 hours ago
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a06
ApolloFortyNine | 7 hours ago
[OP] obscurette | 7 hours ago
Tangurena2 | 7 hours ago
Footnote7341 | 7 hours ago
mahboi | 6 hours ago
Tangurena2 | 2 hours ago
https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
MadameMinty | 7 hours ago
gpvos | 7 hours ago
To be honest, in the Netherlands there are more and more teachers dropping out because of stress and burnout, largely due to increasing criticism and demands from parents. But I haven't yet heard of cases of actual violence.
soco | 7 hours ago
nekusar | 7 hours ago
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
overtone1000 | 7 hours ago
aantix | 7 hours ago
We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
ChickeNES | 7 hours ago
nekusar | 6 hours ago
Potentially, yes. Doubly so when those terrible teachers are kept in those roles year after year. The whole system defends and backs these teachers, even knowing they create horrible outcomes and dread for everyone.
> We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Nope. We all dont. It also depends on if you went to a "good public school" or a "bad public school", or rather worse or well funded.
> Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
True. But saying bad words is *not* violence. However threatening violence is absolutely actionable.
> Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Again, this is looking at individual choices over what im arguing as a system based failure. The whole way the system is constructed is a failure to students and teachers both.
Look at how schools are funded. Property tax. Means poor property locations get shittier schools, worse teachers, low funded classrooms. And this also shows the students' housing is also likely just as poor. Food insecurity, whole lot of trickle down poverty effects. I came from a poor funded rural school. I had no choice in that matter.
UrineSqueegee | 7 hours ago
xattt | 7 hours ago
Gentle Parenting is full of uncertainties. There are times when you need to skip the gentle crap and be a parent.
It works on a small scale, where parents are dedicated to the cause, but it falls apart as soon as it hits genpop: someone watches a TikTok summary and thinks they’re an expert.
doubled112 | 7 hours ago
fHr | 7 hours ago
7sigma | 7 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x2PsFWrwCDI
I know its a single data point, but I think those situations would happen a lot less if students had access to the right support.
alt227 | 7 hours ago
lostapathy | 7 hours ago
Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.
micromacrofoot | 7 hours ago
This is the same with healthcare and schools. We let the system be run by a bunch of short-term get rich quick charlatans who get in the way of more long-term prosperity for everyone. It's easier to measure the immediate cost, so we cut there and ignore the long-term expense it creates.
What's worse is that there are many examples for the US to learn from abroad but generations of propaganda have lead us to believe that our deficiencies are what makes us exceptional.
hilariously | 6 hours ago
fhackenberger | 7 hours ago
robocat | 2 hours ago
A ugly way to say that our society has limited resources.
Working hours especially are a zero-sum choice.
We require some way to choose between different usages of people's time. All choices are suboptimal. Our societies have slowly developed something that mostly works.
Money as a topic is distracting: instead think about how we allocate the lives (time) of people: especially when trading one person's life/work against another's rights.
johnobrien1010 | 7 hours ago
engineer_22 | 7 hours ago
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
Toynbeeidea | 6 hours ago
ChickeNES | 6 hours ago
engineer_22 | 6 hours ago
just sit kids in front of well written books and the job is done.
mahboi | 6 hours ago
jihadjihad | 6 hours ago
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
ryanmcbride | 7 hours ago
armchairhacker | 7 hours ago
I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers. Other commenters are blaming parents, and sure we should incentivize and facilitate better parenting, but in the short term what is more successful at reducing violence is expelling violent students.
dominotw | 7 hours ago
calmworm | 7 hours ago
Society at large has tools and systems in place to better deal with a violent person, student or otherwise.
dominotw | 7 hours ago
really? for minors?
calmworm | 7 hours ago
zetanor | 7 hours ago
zdragnar | 7 hours ago
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
dash2 | 7 hours ago
throwawayffffas | 6 hours ago
myrmidon | 7 hours ago
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
klooney | 7 hours ago
DaSHacka | 6 hours ago
bitfilped | 7 hours ago
By learning, for likely the first time in their lives, that actions have consequences.
myrmidon | 5 hours ago
This is obviously not the case.
Violent behavior obviously has to be sanctioned and hopefully corrected, but excluding children from education is not especially helpful there and has insanely costly side-effects.
armchairhacker | 6 hours ago
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
myrmidon | 6 hours ago
I'm not advocating against this. But keeping their education timeline somewhat on track is highly preferrable in my view (inserting "fixed delinquents" into classes of younger children seems very undesirable to me).
> And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I honestly don't see how this could ever apply.
You have basically an average >$200k investment from the parents alone, plus all the direct/indirect subsidies starting with day care. Between low-wage working adult and "worthless person" there is at least a $50k/year swing in expected value to society every year they work, too.
Even if your success rate of "fixing" child delinquents is laughably low (say 15%), and costs you like $100k per attempt it is easily worth it; its not even close.
throwawayffffas | 6 hours ago
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
gadders | 6 hours ago
Ambolia | 7 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
dash2 | 7 hours ago
mahboi | 7 hours ago
BowBun | 7 hours ago
mahboi | 7 hours ago
BigTTYGothGF | 6 hours ago
This is hacker news, most of us are anonymous. People say all sorts of vile things on here. Come on, Ambolia, have the courage of your convictions.
chambers | 4 hours ago
In any case, his caution birthed a comment tree that's normally verboten.
Ambolia | 7 hours ago
phoghed | 7 hours ago
Ambolia | 7 hours ago
phoghed | 6 hours ago
Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?
From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know
badgersnake | 6 hours ago
And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.
robocat | 2 hours ago
Today I learned that the Icelandic keyboard has a dedicated key for typing þ
badgersnake | 38 minutes ago
cubefox | 7 hours ago
bpodgursky | 7 hours ago
klooney | 7 hours ago
dolni | 7 hours ago
If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.
Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.
Mathnerd314 | 7 hours ago
linksnapzz | 6 hours ago
"weird" is two years ago. Time to update your firmware.
bluefirebrand | 6 hours ago
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
vlyan | 6 hours ago
I'm sure someone could take their time and find a few rare instances of that not being the case (if they can manage to do it before I inevitably get -4 points [flagged][dead] for this callous sacrilege), to which I will preemptively reply that someone equally invested in the argument could easily find ten videos confirming my anecdotal observation for each one you provide.
mahboi | 6 hours ago
DaSHacka | 5 hours ago
mahboi | 4 hours ago
criagsbkbk | 4 hours ago
zdragnar | 6 hours ago
It's not a race issue so much as a poverty and cultural issue. Any racial correlation is a proxy for those two things.
phoghed | 6 hours ago
DaSHacka | 5 hours ago
mahboi | 4 hours ago
phoghed | 3 hours ago
hasviolence | 6 hours ago
palmotea | 6 hours ago
Yeah, no.
zug_zug | 5 hours ago
Let's take aside the charged component of this and just suppose hypothetically that 100% of the assaulting students belonged to some subgroup. So what?
They may be 100% black, or 100% male, or something, but it's not like you can reasonably just say "So no males at our school." Regardless of whether you can find a subgroup who this belongs to with a very low specificity, you still need policies that tackle the behavior itself rather than trying to find some really weak predictor.
criagsbkbk | 4 hours ago
mahboi | 4 hours ago
casefields | 5 hours ago
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/education-department-...
nitwit005 | 3 hours ago
There just aren't enough blacks in the US for them to completely dominate any crime. To be at your imagined rate of 90% of instances being black, when only 13 or 14% of the population, would require a ridiculously high rate compared to every other group.
cucumber3732842 | 5 hours ago
jmull | 6 hours ago
phoghed | 6 hours ago
OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate currently, it’s currently his vibes based hypothesis that he’s afraid to openly state.
neuroticnews25 | 6 hours ago
phoghed | 6 hours ago
I get what you’re saying. Even if we already punish black kids at a higher rate, it’s not high enough, because they could be committing offenses at and even higher rate than that. And we can’t possibly know that, because everyone is afraid of the DEI man, so they only report white offenses in school.
That’s why my solution was brilliant, we side step all that by putting them in jail from the start, and they work their way out from first principles.
colpabar | 5 hours ago
wxw | 7 hours ago
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Blackthorn | 7 hours ago
klooney | 7 hours ago
Blackthorn | 7 hours ago
nailer | 7 hours ago
Oh good, wxw disagrees. They've supplied zero supporting arguments, making discussion impossible, but at least Hacker news knows wxw's position.
monideas | 6 hours ago
It essentially just asserts a particular model of human psychology and sociology and the moral structure of the universe and also makes discussion about its assumptions impossible.
The fundamental tenet of liberalism being that people are basically good and any sort of bad behavior from someone is the fault of a societal failing inflicted upon them. So when a student attacks a teacher this is society failing the student, the teacher being an agent of society and therefore at least partial responsible for being attacked.
To question this is to question liberalism itself which no one, not even the people who do have a sense that this is wrong, are prepared or have the capacity to do.
calmworm | 6 hours ago
Opening with “to be fair” doesn’t make a straw man fair.
monideas | 6 hours ago
chambers | 5 hours ago
The issue, as I think history will judge it, is the truth that precedes liberalism has been spent & forgotten. In the absence of the "why", commitment became truth: the perception/prism/the water people see themselves in and others, the world, etc. From there, as you said, the logic proceeds mechanically (fact: kids are blank slates, results: parents, teachers, environment are to be blamed[1]). Because we can't reason our way out of the truth even if our senses and experiences are screaming at us to stop.
It is a consuming, comfortable & reasonable truth, held tightly because the alternatives are seen as unreasonable. In this way, modern liberalism is useful as a defense mechanism.
[1] reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226329
monideas | 5 hours ago
The question is then to what extend that particular system is an accurate reflection of reality, and to answer that question you would have the analyze the delta between them, both in terms of how it was initially conceived vs how it evolved.
In the case of the US, at a very basic level for example the founders did not envision the US as a multiracial society or that everyone, including non-landowners could vote. Also that the US constitution itself looks very different today in terms of its amendments and more importantly the case law and jurisprudence around constitutional law which is de facto the constitution of the US. I don’t mean that these are right or wrong necessarily, just that the initial conception is very different.
Basically I think you are right but that also the basic premise of liberalism and the liberal system even in its initial conception is flawed and therefore doomed to fail.
I do think fundamentally liberalism does assert a view of human psychology and sociology that assumes that properly organizing and orienting the human mind is at least 3 orders of magnitude easier than it really is. If you actually study anthropology, like the anthropological studies that were done in the 19th century and if you study depth psychology which heavily makes use of those anthropological studies, you find a very terrifying and very chaotic and complex picture of the human psyche, as revealed in the religions, mythologies, and rites of pre-civilization peoples which liberalism has virtually absolutely no awareness of.
mahboi | 7 hours ago
zug_zug | 5 hours ago
ValueTheory | 7 hours ago
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
toomuchtodo | 7 hours ago
From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
(last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
Schools across the U.S. are trying a 4-day week. Why? To retain teachers - https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the... - November 8th, 2023
Teachers are calling it quits amid rising school violence, burnout and stagnating salaries - https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/us/teachers-quitting-shortage... - May 31st, 2023
Four day school week? In rural Missouri, more districts see it as a way to recruit teachers - https://www.kcur.org/education/2022-06-11/four-day-school-we... - June 11th, 2022
nailer | 7 hours ago
Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
nemomarx | 7 hours ago
ericmay | 7 hours ago
zdragnar | 7 hours ago
mrguyorama | 6 hours ago
Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
zdragnar | 6 hours ago
Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
TitaRusell | 4 hours ago
If the home situation is fucked up it doesn't matter how much money you throw at the schools.
alwaysthiserror | 5 hours ago
This gets kinda tricky to analyze, and especially hard to compare to other countries, which may have very different ways of accounting for things.
That money goes to:
1) Salaries for school administrators.
2) Salaries for teachers.
3) Salaries for office support staff (e.g. secretaries)
4) Depending on how the accounting is done, that may include a fraction of the salaries of district admin (super and assistant superintendents, and Nb there can be several of the latter, even in smallish districts) and their office support staff.
5) Facilities construction and renovation, and/or servicing debt on bonds for past facilities construction and renovation.
6) Property and building maintenance. Mowing, fixing potholes and re-painting lines in parking lots, roof leaks, playground maintenance, whatever.
7) Transportation for students (e.g. busses). This can get pretty expensive in sparsely-populated areas.
8) Extracurriculars, including supplemental pay for coaches and sponsors, and maybe an equipment budget.
9) Supplies for "specials" classes, including stuff like band instruments and maintenance of those instruments (lots of places you bring your own, but that's not true for all instruments, often the really big ones, especially, will be school-provided) and art supplies and all that.
10) Electronics and computer services. Powerschool licenses, laptops, "smart" projectors, all that stuff.
11) Special educators and paraprofessionals who will have much smaller student-counts they're responsible for than classroom teachers. This can get as low-count as a dedicated para for a single student, following around and helping them all day.
12) ESOL services. Districts with lots of students speaking English as a second language (if at all...) bear higher costs.
13) Special services for kids who can't fit into the mold of ordinary school. This can look like a district budget paying for transportation to and from a fairly distant magnet or private school, which school will probably cost a lot more than ordinary public schools because they'll have far lower student-to-staff ratios.
14) School lunches, and maybe breakfasts. The food, the staff to serve it, health code compliance and appliance maintenance, all that. IDK if the spending figure would include money students put into accounts for their kids to use for this purpose, but lunches are often subsidized to at least some degree, if not 100%.
15) Other support staff and services (nurses, counselors and psychologists, librarians, janitors)
16) Other supplies. Books, paper, toner, et c.
(and probably more stuff I'm forgetting about)
The result is that actual spending for a given student, if we restricted it to only the things they're directly benefiting from, can be a ton lower than average per-student spending. Meanwhile, some students soak up well over $100k in spending per year, all on their own.
Also, it's easy to pick out some of the above that might plausibly not count as part of the school's budget, in, say, another country that simply made different choices about what budget each thing belongs in, or might just naturally have far lower costs due to geography or demography or whatever.
TL;DR average spending per-student doesn't tell you a lot on its own, and you definitely can't usefully compare one school to another based on such a figure without gathering a lot more context.
koolba | 7 hours ago
Teachers are not underpaid. We live in a free market society and they have extensive collective bargaining agreements. If anything, they’re overpaid vs a totally free market.
Those who can and want to use those same talents in a different progression are free to do so. Nobody is forced into the progression (okay maybe grad students but that’s something else…).
> I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
nl | 7 hours ago
orangedog | 7 hours ago
wahern | 6 hours ago
orangedog | 5 hours ago
WarmWash | 6 hours ago
Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount. In a few of our local districts, on average teachers are making $130k/yr if you scaled their pay to a normal 48 week career schedule. This is on top of gangbusters benefits.
Beyond that, once you get a few years into it and have your scaffolding built, you can kinda just cruise control for the rest of your career with only minor changes.
Yes, the job is challenging and stressful, but lowkey most $130k/yr jobs are.
The real devotion of teaching is being willing to have so much unproductive time which would be filled in a different higher paying career.
orangedog | 6 hours ago
There are some huge outliers like California but most states teachers are just treading water. I know this in my state because I was trying to get accredited earlier this year.
phatfish | 5 hours ago
esseph | 5 hours ago
Teachers in my district take extra work for the district doing maintenance and tutoring and drive doordash to pay their bills during that time.
koolba | 4 hours ago
If there’s plenty of people willing to do the job, that’s simple supply and demand.
“I think educators should be paid more” or “I want us to pay them more” does not mean they’re underpaid.
alwaysthiserror | 4 hours ago
2) People often talk about wanting the median teacher quality to be higher, and to be able to fire more bad teachers. A nigh-necessary early step toward addressing that complaint is to increase pay. A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
koolba | 4 hours ago
This would be a fine argument if we could somehow align incentives, fire low performing teachers, and rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
alwaysthiserror | 3 hours ago
Why can't we fire them? The typical answer is "unions" but a bunch of states de facto don't have teachers' unions (as far as unions with any ability to collectively bargain or meaningfully protect teachers from firing), and still have to retain all but the very worst teachers... because the supply of good teachers is too low. These same states tend to have poor educational outcomes, further suggesting that ability to fire, on its own, isn't helping much.
> rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
This, unfortunately, turns out to be a really hard problem. It's been sincerely attempted in a bunch of ways and they've all turned out to suck, is the short history of the notion.
esseph | 5 hours ago
A teacher with 20yr of experience in my district makes $5,000-$10,000 less than the state median wage.
And their retirement actually sucks.
apefulsin | 7 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 7 hours ago
~40 percent of pregnancies annually are unintended in the US (per the Guttmacher Institute), so lots of folks parenting who didn't want to or didn't intend to parent. As unintended pregnancies are driven down over time (via education and contraceptives), this should reduce aggregate load off the system of people who do not want to or cannot parent effectively. We avoid, to the best of our ability, people who don't want kids having them, we get parents to success to the best of our ability with the kids that are here today (because there is no other option). We can predict future demand for systems needed to support children based on the US projected fertility rate curve (US total fertility rate stands at ~1.58 as of this comment, and will continue to trend down into the future: https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...).
Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says - https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate... - April 9th, 2026
> There are approximately 7.3 million standalone single mothers and about 15.7 million single-mother family households in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data tracking. Roughly 23% of children under 18 in the U.S. live with a single mother.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-economic-status...
> More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate
https://fortune.com/2026/06/28/student-parents-workforce-tal... | https://archive.today/NZQRZ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 (0 comments)
> The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/24/kindergar... | https://archive.today/Fm1nG | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 (1 comment)
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... (~60% of US households consist of adults with no children in them)
(think in systems, and overlay this issue with how many K-12 schools are closing across the US every year due to structural demographics and total fertility rate decline)
Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S: Limited funds and low enrollment forced districts to close more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/07/20/school-c... | https://archive.today/4r4uo - July 20th, 2026 ("We call it the big shrink," said Marguerite Roza, who tracks school funding as director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Enrollment at public schools is declining, partly because there are fewer kids in the U.S.")
> Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further reducing the number of kids at some schools.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...
(TLDR pay teachers a living wage, get class ratios to whatever the science says is best before diminishing returns to optimize for student success, and continue solving for avoiding unwanted children with education and contraceptives; k-12 schools, as well as colleges [https://college-cuts.com/], will continue to close well into the future due to structural demographics, optimize accordingly)
atmavatar | 6 hours ago
Being a parent is a big responsibility, and (barring rare exceptions) you don't become one unintentionally.
Unfortunately, I see plenty of people out in the wild who act like their kids' behavior is none of their business. There was a time when parents unable to control their children would be asked to leave public establishments, but now, everyone is supposed to stand by impotently, and anyone who dares speak up is accosted by the bad parent(s).
hyperlinerapp | 5 hours ago
armada651 | 7 hours ago
[OP] obscurette | 7 hours ago
littlecorner | 6 hours ago
WarmWash | 6 hours ago
/s
foobarian | 6 hours ago
alexgieg | 5 hours ago
Remember: schools don't have tribunals to judge which student was or wasn't actually guilty of what, to which extent, with which attenuats if any, etc., to then decide who was going to be beaten and how much. The teacher merely looked at you, decided you were guilty because you didn't look into his eyes while he was speaking (autistic children were typical cases of this), and decided to traumatize you for life, fully unjustly.
When modern schools do the same but in the opposite direction, unjustly punishing teachers, that simply shows they haven't changed one iota from what they have always been.
robocat | 2 hours ago
I'm guessing you're supporting when a loving parent smacks their kid in outlier circumstances.
Your comment includes the abusers.
engineer_22 | 7 hours ago
No different than any other employer-employee relationship - the school has a responsibility to protect itself. Teachers have rights too, if she believes her employer contributed to harm or has taken retaliatory action against her she can bring her own suit.
danesparza | 7 hours ago
It's wrong. We need to stand up for educators and healthcare providers.
jan_m_savage | 7 hours ago
A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.
highly recommend you watch it.
PorciiVorbesc | 7 hours ago
phatfish | 6 hours ago
PorciiVorbesc | 6 hours ago
boogieknite | 7 hours ago
forshaper | 6 hours ago
hunterpayne | 5 hours ago
hogs_get_fat | 6 hours ago
As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?
nec4b | 2 hours ago
WarmWash | 6 hours ago
Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.
I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".
They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.
_DeadFred_ | 5 hours ago
n8henrie | 4 hours ago
I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.
techjamie | 3 hours ago
It might come off a little impersonal, but unfortunately one wrong word in the wrong place can give someone an entire case when maybe they didn't have one before, unfortunately.
xattt | 5 hours ago
Waterluvian | 7 hours ago
hammock | 7 hours ago
wafflemaker | 7 hours ago
Are you sure you wanted to point me to some Facebook post, which is the nr. 1 result for me?
runjake | 7 hours ago
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
Henchman21 | 6 hours ago
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
Our world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare.
runjake | 4 hours ago
I don't anticipate change until this fresh supply dries up and people start asking why.
littlecorner | 6 hours ago
shagie | 6 hours ago
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
igetspam | 6 hours ago
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
pelagicAustral | 6 hours ago
watwut | 6 hours ago
Yes, conservatives are trying to make it go up, but statistically speaking, they are not succeeding.
rayiner | 6 hours ago
verdverm | 2 hours ago
The underlying basis for current "conservatives inspire more violence" is largely drawn from clips taken from the manosphere-podcast realm. There is an amount of war hawks always being on the right that predates all of this.
I've seen similar from the left wing, though they don't have good podcast game or modern communication generally.
rayiner | 2 hours ago
I grew up around the Dick Cheney type back when northern virginia was a red area in an even redder state. I recall almost no fights between students, much less anyone attacking faculty. Hitting a teacher would have gotten you sent to some alternative school with armed guards.
verdverm | 2 hours ago
They have a whole effort around conservative activism through school board membership. They love their book bans.
> exercise violence in a very civilized way
there is nothing civilized about violence
rayiner | an hour ago
In the last 10-15 years, traditional conservatives have largely been pushed out of school administration, even in places like my current county, which was a Romney 2012 county. Groups like Moms4Liberty have zero influence on how schools discipline kids.
> there is nothing civilized about violence
Violence against potential threats is necessary for the maintenance of civilization. But violence against elders within your community, which is what we’re talking about here, is completely unacceptable.
verdverm | 11 minutes ago
0o_MrPatrick_o0 | 6 hours ago
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
59percentmore | 6 hours ago
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
SubmarineClub | 6 hours ago
The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.
Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.
duxup | 6 hours ago
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution. It takes an endless amount of time before it's clear "problem is the parent" and by the time that is decided they're gone and on to the next parent who submitted their 6th absurd complaint this year and everyone starts over wagging fingers at the teacher's.
KellyCriterion | 5 hours ago
cyanydeez | 7 hours ago
You know, ==your budgets are your values==
puskavi | 7 hours ago
dominotw | 7 hours ago
bluedino | 7 hours ago
j45 | 7 hours ago
rootnod3 | 7 hours ago
t1234s | 7 hours ago
Invictus0 | 7 hours ago
hilariously | 7 hours ago
sixothree | 6 hours ago
mahboi | 6 hours ago
superb_dev | 6 hours ago
bsoqk | 6 hours ago
skulk | 6 hours ago
swed420 | 4 hours ago
Not at all HN specific, nor wholly representative of it.
sixothree | 6 hours ago
TitaRusell | 4 hours ago
paimapi | 6 hours ago
in the same way people are delusional in thinking they're just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, they also don't realize how precarious their own financial positions are, and how they'll definitely want a safety net that helps them to survive if it happened to them
ks2048 | 6 hours ago
Toynbeeidea | 6 hours ago
I won't go into my theories as to causes or reasons or whatever. Just know that it IS a thing amongst a small subset of welfare recipients despite propoganda otherwise.
hilariously | 5 hours ago
The reality is that most places you get on the order of 200 bucks per person PER MONTH, so that's not going far on steaks and shrimp.
Auditing and finding fraud is useful, but we also have to value it against the cost of auditing and fraud management in the first place, and the value is put up against honest people who have to a decent chunk of hours every month juggling government paperwork and websites to get the most meager of handouts.
LastTrain | 2 hours ago
KetoManx64 | 3 hours ago
So yes, they are living larger than most part time or minimum wage employees. That's the problem.
Toynbeeidea | 7 hours ago
t1234s | 7 hours ago
rdtsc | 7 hours ago
And if they stay, they become adults who live large on food stamps and medicaid, and on top of that seriously hurt or permanently disable teachers, staff, or other students. It's as if letting them pummel teachers in the face will somehow result in them becoming upstanding citizens.
edot | 7 hours ago
zdragnar | 6 hours ago
My partner was also a single mother who utilized wic and food stamps and food pantries until she was able to work full time again.
When the system works, it works well. When it gets abused, there's less for the people who need it.
> No one lives on food stamps and Medicaid because they enjoy it.
Unfortunately, this is also not true. My best friend's mother stayed on benefits because she didn't want to work, and moved out of state because her assistance ran out. She was nominally capable of working, though she also abused drugs and was more comfortable using and getting benefits than getting clean and a job.
philjohn | 6 hours ago
zdragnar | 6 hours ago
WarmWash | 6 hours ago
They basically have mastered exploiting government assistance. It's 9 parts enraging and 1 part deeply impressive.
PorciiVorbesc | 6 hours ago
That often happens regardless. You might as well spare the poor teacher from dealing with them so they can focus on kids that are still redeemable, because otherwise, if you force them, the teachers will just choose to leave the system entirely, only because you had misplaced empathy for the irredeemable bottom % of society, when you weren't the one actually having to deal with that problem you want fixed. It's easy to write cheques you don't have to cash but most people, just like you and me, have limits to the amount of abuse they will take at work, even for humanitarian jobs like nurses and teachers.
LastTrain | an hour ago
Varelion | 6 hours ago
havblue | 6 hours ago
Invictus0 | 3 hours ago
LastTrain | 2 hours ago
ds_opseeker | 6 hours ago
and if not, why not? is it because people who have a house are good people and deserve it, while CHILDREN who are born to the wrong parents are bad people and don't?
iAMkenough | 6 hours ago
while we’re at it, let’s take public money away from public schools and give it to private schools with no audit requirements.
that will solve the issue, right?
gamblor956 | 6 hours ago
However, my district also had a school specifically for troublemakers (with fences and extra security and all of that) so the other schools wouldn't have to deal with them.
robocat | 2 hours ago
Although for self-selected friends my personal saying is that "All the smartest left school at 15". My other friends are academically educted which doesn't smarten up anyone.
palmotea | 6 hours ago
You seem to have a severe deficit of compassion. Also a deficit of strategic thinking.
Some significant fraction of those "delinquent kids" are that way due to some generational cycle of poor treatment and/or bad circumstances. If, as you advocate, little attempt is made to break those cycles, you'll just leave the problem to fester and get worse.
Also you're advocating punishing kids for being the victim of their own circumstances, which is just heartless.
The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
cucumber3732842 | 5 hours ago
With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.
palmotea | 5 hours ago
FYI, you're not a decent person, you're a problem person. You lack compassion.
If someone beats you and leaves you for dead in a ditch, when the paramedics find you, what should they say? It pretty obvious: "a dollar spent helping this guy could be used to help someone better, leave him for dead."
cjs_ac | 7 hours ago
I finished my career in the UK, where a third of all teachers leave the profession within five years. I started that career in Australia, where half of all teachers leave the profession within five years. It's not a 'calling' or a 'vocation', it's just the post-university equivalent of a gap year.
graemep | 6 hours ago
PKop | 7 hours ago
This was a disaster for schools; many students who would have been expelled were kept around disrupting teachers and students who had to bear their presence in classrooms, hallways, fighting each other, bullying students and teachers.
For about 5 years after this went into effect, my local school district that also allowed open enrollment around this time got an influx of students with bad behavior from previous schools enrolling and not being expelled for fighting and other repeated misbehavior and disruptions. There was huge wave of teachers and families leaving and enrolling in the rural school close by so both could actually do teaching and learning without interference. The schoolboard had a lot turnover until the now head got elected promising to drastically curtail open enrollment and apply whatever discipline policy they could get away with to revoke open enrollment rights from non-residents due to bad behavior.
Here is a great account [1] from a teacher about her experience in schools where discipline was severely limited and prevented expulsion of disruptive and violent students, and the obvious consequences to the degraded learning environment that resulted.
[0] https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/let...
[1] https://quillette.com/2019/02/10/public-educations-dirty-sec...
PaulRobinson | 7 hours ago
I'm old enough to have adult children, although I never did have kids of my own.
My parents would have gone to school in the knowledge that if they acted up, words would be had with their parents, and there would be consequences.
At some point, something changed, and we decided that teachers were there to be put in their place by parents, and if a teacher suggested a child was doing something wrong the parent would expect to challenge that and the teacher would be put in their place.
We're now in a situation where children being taught sometimes think its their right - perhaps even obligation - to not be instructed in appropriate behaviour, and so feel free to react the way that they do.
There's a microcosm natural experiment for this in the Pennines, the North of England. There's a small town called Hebden Bridge, which for a while had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the UK. Some thought it was related to the environment - it sits in a valley, the persistent low grey cloud can make it feel claustrophobic - but I think another theory holds up: parents there didn't bother parenting. A community was drawn to the town by adults who were in essence, hippies: they believed in freedoms their parents didn't including for their children.
That meant that many of the kids growing up there did so in an environment without real structure, and became adolescent in an environment with easy supply to plentiful drugs and a relaxed attitude to its use.
I'm not a parent, that was an active choice I made, and so I wouldn't deign to tell parents how to bring up their children, but I would suggest parents look at the data: children thrive with structure and rules and gentle consequences for non-compliance (the naughty step, etc.), and recognition of genuinely outstanding behaviour (winning things, not participating in them). They struggle to develop as emotionally secure people without those. Hell, I'm a data point there - took me years to realise I needed therapy, and years more to benefit from it. As the old poem starts: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don't mean to, but they do."
Anyway, teachers play a part in that journey, but they can't do the whole thing, and the sooner parents (and society in general), restore the respect to the profession it once had, the better. Are all teachers good? No, but they are professionals who have more data on more children than any parent, so maybe just respect that.
AyanamiKaine | 7 hours ago
A friend of mine is on their way to becoming a teacher and already teaching at a school for one year part-time.
He tells tales about his children mostly from low income families, where school is the only structure they have as their families are completely dysfunctional. Thorn apart by the family trying or not trying to integrating into German society as well as themselves.
When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
toast0 | 6 hours ago
Could be. A lot of kids only have so much good behavior for a day... act out at school or at home, pick one.
But also, the student who has to live with expectations at school may set expectations at home, and that may be seen as worse behavior by the parents.
krunck | 7 hours ago
apefulsin | 7 hours ago
djoldman | 7 hours ago
Is it reasonably expected? Yes, definitely, if that means "much more likely than violence against non-teachers": a random K-12 teacher in the USA is ~2.5-7x more likely to be assaulted than a random person in the USA.
moduspol | 7 hours ago
And sometimes those are police officers, who then get blamed for metrics we don't like. So we cut back on policing and now it'll be somebody else who gets the short end of the stick.
rdtsc | 7 hours ago
What does that mean. Is it a diagnosis or a term schools use for some students but not others? Don't all students need emotional support?
Lio | 6 hours ago
Without trying to be funny, it reads like a student who's job it is to support another student's emotions. That can't be right though, is it?
behringer | 7 hours ago
DaSHacka | 6 hours ago
ks2048 | 6 hours ago
behringer | 5 hours ago
gadders | 7 hours ago
tyjen | 6 hours ago
It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.
fyredge | 6 hours ago
kittikitti | 6 hours ago
jandrewrogers | 6 hours ago
The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.
I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.
dev0p | 6 hours ago
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
tl;dr yes, also water is now even wetter.
mahboi | 5 hours ago
tndibona | 5 hours ago
some_random | 3 hours ago