#ftr I do not think youre disagreeing with me in the initial ask either

[nothorses]

Hi I have a question/discussion? about public schools and ik this is your area of expertise so I thought I'd ask your opinion. When I ponder the problems of schooling, I think about things like: how we value grades more than actual learning and information retention; how late work policies aren't representative of how the real world works and needlessly puts extra stress on students; how we don't give students that need it the additional support they require to succeed; how we overemphasize success on the first try rather than allowing multiple attempts, which isn't reflective of how to appropriately navigate life; how we require students to be unnaturally quiet, still, and non-disruptive, which is genuinely difficult for a lot of kids, especially younger ones, and can impact their ability to learn; how we give them too much work for too many subjects at once...

And it genuinely feels like the root of a lot of these problems, aside from teaching philosophy, is a simple lack of manpower- we don't have enough competent teachers for the amount of kids we have in public schools. A lot of these problems, in my opinion, don't result from teachers or administrators who have a meanspirited or incorrect philosophy about teaching, but from the fact that it is impossible to manage an ideal classroom environment in a room of 30 kids to 1 adult (or 2 adults if the teacher's lucky enough to have an assistant). We require kids to be silent and still because in a room of 30 children if all of them got to fidget and move around, no one would be able to focus on the lesson or even hear it. We have late work policies because the teacher needs to be able to get a move on on the curriculum and can't spend forever on a few students for one topic. Etc etc

I struggled immensely in public schools, so much so that continuing to go to school there irreparably damaged my mental health. I was lucky enough to get transferred to a private school with a max of 4 kids per class after being hospitalized when I became a danger to myself. The learning environment there was so much better and it pretty much solved every single issue I ever had with school; I was able to build a personal relationship with all my teachers and I learned more effectively there than I had anywhere else. The teachers also had room to diverge from the curriculum as needed and move as quickly or as slowly as the class required, so we could spend more time on important, interesting, and difficult topics and skip past the easy ones within a week. My history teacher was able to make his own unit on greek philosophical history just because he wanted to and we were all interested in it. I really think the small class sizes was what made all the difference.

How accurate is that assessment? And is there really a solution other than simply more people going into teaching so we can have smaller classes?

That's a huge chunk of it, yeah- large class sizes cause a lot of those problems, and smaller class sizes create a lot of flexibility for teachers that we currently lack in the public ed system.

The thing about it, though, is that those policies are often not even up to the individual teacher. They do usually have control over late work policies, accommodations they can personally offer, and how much fidgeting they'll allow; but they often don't get a say in things like curriculum, the physical classroom they teach in, school policy, and certainly not in standardized testing and the prep that comes along with it.

Education as a whole is designed to be "optimized", in a way, in order to run as effectively as possible on a shoestring budget.

You'll often see that schools in wealthier areas tend to have smaller class sizes and better learning environments on the whole, and that's because school funding is partially local property taxes, and they have the money to hire more teachers, reduce class sizes, fund classroom furniture and accommodation tools, and give them more control.

But even then, they still have to follow district- and state-mandated curriculum requirements, they will definitely still have to go through standardized testing, and their schools will still be limited by the larger, system-wide roots in that sort of "optimization".

How many students can we educate? Where can we best put our money to support learning? is that gonna be 24-32 new exercise ball chairs and a box of fidget toys, or is it gonna be new learning materials with updated content, informed by modern learning science?

These aren't obvious choices, these are genuinely difficult questions to answer. A lot of people spend a lot of time doing research and writing papers and having discussions in attempts to answer them.

A lot of future-teacher education that I've been through has talked about what we as teachers can do with the tools we're given, and less: democratic classroom environments, anti-racist and culturally-responsive teaching practices, trauma-informed care of students and classroom culture, critical literacy and student empowerment, and removing unnecessary access barriers (late work, testing, etc.).

As a student teacher, I worked with my teacher to redesign his whole grading structure to be more equitable- all according to what I had been learning at my university. But according to the school, I still had to take attendance, mark tardies and absences, and make sure only one of my (high school!!!) students was out of the room at a time. And I felt like a fucking warden.

It's not just that we need more people to go into teaching; I assure you, lots of people want to teach. Lots of people love teaching. And there are things we need to address to enable them to teach: teachers usually go into debt in order to get their degrees and certifications, and the whole field pays so little that they are extremely unlikely to ever pay off that debt without significant outside help. You have to be able to afford to teach.

Not to mention it's an extremely emotionally intensive- even traumatizing- job, and access to mental health support is reliant upon income that, again, does not exist.

We need to pay teachers more; not because They Deserve It (they do, and so does everyone else on the fucking planet), but because if we don't, we won't have teachers. They will leave the profession, they won't enter it in the first place (I'm getting higher degrees partially so I can go into education in a better-paying position), or they'll burn out, undergo trauma, won't have the care they need- and that impacts the health, wellness, and safety of students, too. And that means more funding toward education.

The other piece of it is, again, school culture; schools being run on these shoestring budgets means they have to answer these difficult catch-22 "what's more important" questions, and those answers will never be good enough. It will never be "good" to choose better text books over fidgets, or to choose engaging readings over experiential learning opportunities.

Schools- not districts, not higher-ups in the system- should have enough money that they can run the way they want to run, that their students need them to run, without having to worry about whether this field trip to a science museum is going to deprive other students of filling, nutritious school lunches.

I know "fund education" isn't the most controversial take here, but I do think it's important to emphasize just how much of an impact that has on the system overall: not just the day-to-day decisions, not even just the teachers, but the culture and the fundamental structure of our schooling.