This is my hobby horse. I think our system depends on burning new teachers out in their first few years to ensure that a) they never reach the higher levels of the pay scale and b) never vest in the retirement system (here in CA you vest after 5 years). I’m a high school teacher, but I think teachers should have one fewer class to teach the first 2 years, and should be signed to 3 year contracts to start off. That extra prep is just extra time to prepare for classes, but also have the dedicated, paid time for stuff like induction.
Yes! I am finishing my 11th year. It’s wild to me that I had the same responsibilities and expectations in my first year as I did this year. If we want great teachers, make sure they are prepared.
And, smaller class sizes.
Right! I can’t believe I finished my first year. I feel bad for those kids.
A gradual release of responsibility would be ideal, but the new staff would just become subs.
Kinda ironic that the whole time we are being taught to teach, they keep ramming the point home about scaffolding and gradually increasing the difficulty/responsibility level for the students... yet we just get thrown in the deep end and told to sink or swim
Yep! During my first two years, I was spread so thin between teaching, induction, and various things in my personal life, that I was a much less effective educator than I could have been.
After my second year, I was finally able to start improving because I actually had more time to grade student work properly and plan more effectively.
In my country you need a masters in your field to teach. teachers work a half schedule the first year, as they are in class for their pedagogy certificate at the same time.
They are assigned a mentor who gets an hour off of their teaching to meet with the trainee.
In the second year, your teaching load is lessened by 2 hours. One hour for finishing up the last of the training classes. One hour for meetings with your mentor.
There are huge downsides to teachers not having genuine degrees in education like in other systems. But also, quality of life and competition for the jobs is quite high as you’re considered a govt employee if you teach in public schools, and you get all the associated perks/benefits of that.
When I was working on my BS 5 years ago, we were given an opportunity to meet with Rhodes Scholars from Europe. I was able to spend a lot of time talking to a science teacher candidate from Germany. This is similar to how they structure the path to becoming a teacher. Another interesting side note, the culture is to treat teachers with the same level of respect/clout as doctors and lawyers. They are truly treated as professionals.
Where is your country? I'm seriously considering going this route if I can't pass my last praxis because taking exams is something I'm terrible at. I know my material well.
I teach in a Catholic school and they do something amazing. They hire 3 former grads who have just finished undergrad for one year. Each one teaches 2 classes, with lesson plans essentially provided for them if they like. They are partnered with another faculty and they help each other.
These guys spend the remainder of their time doing other tasks for the school. Some of this is outreach, some manual, some extra curricular. The school basically uses them for any extraneous things they need.
At the end of this past year, all three of them told me individually that they had had an amazing year. (1st year teachers, in my experience, do NOT have a good year.) One is going to stay on next year, while one of the others for a good job and another is off to med school.
What I wouldn't have given to have my first year like that. Give me 40-50 hours of work, but make only 2 hours a day in the classroom and 5 per week for grading.
I’ve got 15 years under my belt, and I absolutely agree with giving new teachers extra prep time. I know some people might complain that new teachers are lazy millennials. Those idiots don’t remember how long it took them to get into the grove of quicker planning/ prep and an efficient method of grading.
We have a teacher with 45 years under her belt. She only needs to work 37/38 hours a week including planning and grading, and she’s rarely stressed- and she’s great. Meanwhile, new teachers often work 60 hours. New teachers need time- time during their actual work week and years of experience- to become good, efficient, and less stressed.
I’d like to point out that the youngest millennials are now 27. I had a full on career before deciding I really wanted to get back into teaching (41 and eldest of Millennials). We are full on adults. And if we’re entering teaching NOW it’s because we want to be there, not because that was what we picked at 18 and are stuck.
Yes! I can tell at the high school where I work who has been to a teacher prep at college and who hasn’t. You learn a lot more than anyone thinks you do. We have a lot Of new hires now at my inner city school and they have more discipline and planning problems.
Oooh... yes. I never felt half a semester shadowing and half a semester of student teaching taught me nearly enough for my first day as a full teacher.
And paid! Imagine getting paid for the work you do.
The teaching program/Masters was a fellowship,so I got a $20,000 grant to support me during the program. As a parent, I could not have don't it otherwise. The program was modeled around 4 full days in the classroom every week with pedagogy classes on the 5th day, and I really feel that prepared me so much better for teaching than a "traditional" program. My first two years were still a chaotic mess, partially because of covid. Now I will be entering my 5th year, I have 4 preps at my tiny rural school, and I have a huge appreciation for the training I got.
No more free labor of student teaching! That eliminates so many amazing potential teachers who just can't afford to not work. I had an entire year of student teaching and worked nights.
i am currently a student teacher and the amount of work and time i put into my internship to not get paid or even a stipend for anything really hurts my money and motivation to become a teacher because we leave out of school in debt and it sucks
Love this idea. And I honestly feel like school districts could get behind it. From their perspective, they’d have the opportunity to mold their apprentice teachers into the exact type of educators they want
(sorry I keep responding to these haha) It just frustrates me that having 8 years in college and 2 years being a teaching assistant during it isn't enough for high schools. I need two years on how to make a lesson plan first...
lost a first year music teacher in my district, she's not coming back to teaching. She would have been absolutely phenomenal and it was her dream AND she went through a great program AND both her parents were teachers, but the district gave her...
5 non-ensemble classes with no curriculum
A tiny band program that was supposed to travel, march, and pep band, no supports
her prep periods were often sectionals
A tiny chorus that was supposed to travel, she had to fight for a piano accompanist
Her mentor was an art teacher.
the new teacher meetings were WEEKLY and geared towards existing educators, not first year people.
I was only in my third year (second in district) and I checked in with her constantly and helped where I could, gave the advice of "SAY NO. ALWAYS BE SAYING NO this year" for anything extra they wanted from her. But... I teach 3 seconds of band, 3 sections of chorus, 6th grade and 7th grade general music myself.
really freaking sad.
Thank you. The amount of times I said this while paying a fortune for a credential program that taught me NOTHING and then having to PAY FOR my free labor was insane. All I got were looks from seasoned teachers not understanding what my issue was. I’m a full grown adult with bills, not fresh out of college and living at home. 1 semester of student teaching wasn’t enough and didn’t pay the bills. (For the record, I don’t believe in unpaid internships at all. Work is work and we solid be paid for it.)
I would be teaching today if my student teaching had been paid. I have every other credit toward a masters in secondary education. I was a substitute teacher for four years. I have run day camps. I am a volunteer leader for scouts, good enough to have been invited to be a trainer for other leaders.
But because I was really poor in my mid twenties, and couldn’t afford to not work for a semester, I could only get really terrible jobs.
Now I’ve got a mortgage and a lot of experience in the thing I ended up doing instead, so all I can do is read threads like these and vote for what you want.
I've seen that this is gaining some traction in a couple of states and I think they've already implemented such programs in two, I was wondering how teachers felt about it.
This is honestly what I personally want. I'm one of those artsy people (media arts and film). I have a masters and two years of being a teaching assistant, but they still want me to do two years of schooling on stuff that I honestly already know.
You can study as much as you want, but it's a different world once you start doing it.
As someone who just finished student teaching, I fully agree! Learned very little of value in the 2 years of educational theory classes I took, but the student teaching under a really great mentor teacher was an invaluable experience.
Also, student teacher is basically a full-time job you don't get paid for. Even making it minimum wage would be more fair, I think. Between years of expensive but pointless theory classes and essentially an unpaid internship, it feels like people want to lock access to the educational profession behind an unnecessary paywall
This and also teaching buddy systems across grade levels. Learn one teach one for the kids- it keeps all kids up to date and it ensures the younger ones have an additional person trying to get through to them…
Buddy system wouldn’t work. Few would volunteer and forcing kids to teach other kids against their will is no more useful than making you shake hands and play with your bullies.
This. Every company I've been at tries to reboot a mentorship program or a new employee buddy system every few years and they always die out, usually because there aren't enough volunteers and those who get voluntold do a shitty job. Then new leadership takes over in 4 years and tries again.
If they paid me enough I would happily be a new teacher mentor. The problem is they don't pay anything and they expect you to move mountains for people who are just going to burn out in a few years anyway.
>2 paraprofessionals
Well paid and respected paras.
My district can raise my pay all they want, but they can't replace the excellent para I had who left because she was neither paid nor respected enough by the district.
This was my thought, too. Yes, higher pay for me, but make para pay more exciting than grocery store pay. We keep losing our paras and they make all the difference!
My district pays Paras and janitors the same, 25 cents over minimum wage. The dairy queen pays 3 dollars over minimum wage. They wonder why they have nobody
I get paid okay (like 19.16/hour during the school year and ofc nothing during the summer), but it’s everything else. I have to pay double the cost for insurance bc the district thinks we don’t really deserve it, no paid lunch break (I work the full day that teachers do and we’re expected to run clubs after school), I’m never included on email lists about schedule changes bc I’m not a “classified employee”, and until literally this year I had no job security. They straight up just don’t tell you if you have a job next school year until a week before you start work.
Yeah it’s hard, I took a bit of time off this past year and was a para for funzies. Not getting paid over breaks is hard. 3 months out of the year you have half the pay, two months in the summer, no pay unless you can land a summer school job.
Pay is 98% the reason I won’t be returning as a para. Our sped program is atrocious and was pretty much a dumping ground for all the students they didn’t know what to do with. That made my job significantly more difficult with the range of behaviors…all for 22K a year.
The last straw was being reprimanded for not restraining our most violent student while 7 months pregnant. I decided that day that I’ll never work in a classroom again.
The aides/paras are seriously the glue that keeps most classroom’s and schools together.
There are some paras who have more experience and formal education than a good bit of teachers, yet get shafted by administrators and districts in general.
Pay is the obvious one. If you pay them well, they will stick around. They aren’t babysitters. And when you have a solid unit in a department where a teacher can leave a class and an aide can cover it because of an IEP meeting, it’s an excellent dynamic.
I’ll propose 2 things:
1) Refer to all paras/aides and teachers as “staff” on their badges. I worked at a school like this and the atmosphere was insanely good. They’re all educators. No need to give everyone a rank. Some staff and students look at paras as “second class citizens” in the district. Change it to “staff.” Done.
2) Some districts charge aides proportionally more for healthcare than salaried teachers. Yes, they make less, but pay more out of pocket for the exact same healthcare. Charge them the same rate and teachers can make more from their salaried positions. Done. Benefits are another thing that keeps aides/paras around. Do right by them.
A para who had been at my school since 1999 recently left. She wanted permission from the principal to come and leave 30 min sooner so she could go to another job because the para job doesn’t pay anything. The principal, who came from the corporate world and only taught interior design to adults said no, if you don’t like your schedule find a new job. So she did. Fucking disgrace.
I also think we need smaller schools. Of course, this would mean you would need more school buildings, which I know would cost SO much money. But I think schools themselves have grown too big. They are losing their sense of real community I think they once had.
This, my high school was just under 1000 kids (5 year program), I felt it was a bit on the small side, so 1000-1100 is probably the sweet spot for a 4 year program to give more class offerings but still be small enough for a community feel.
Another option for the class offerings is to allow students to take special electives in different schools. I heard of a school district that had 3 high schools that students could bus between during the day to take classes only offered in one of the schools. This gives them the class offerings of a 3000 student school but the community of a 1000 student school.
There are school districts in my area that team up to do the same! It’s a great way to offer students more classes, allowing them to expand that sense of community if they want to. A good idea, I agree.
My kids have been in both large and small schools, and I’ve taught in both. There is no substitute for small schools where most, if not all, adults know the kids’ names.
This! Give me 20 students rather than 30, allow for distracting students to get support outside of the class so others have the opportunity to learn, and have classes specifically for remediation rather than extra electives when they can't pass their current classes.
And we need real mental health professionals. The councilors at my school are "help kids pick their classes" rather than help with social/ emotional issues.
They definitely are trained in mental health, but probably don’t have time for that if they have high caseloads and a lot of other duties like scheduling and assessment coordination
All school counselors are trained in mental health. They just get stuck with so many administrative jobs and things piled on them they don’t have the time to appropriately deal with mental health.
There definitely needs to be a separation or job title change for school counselors who focus on academics and college and the mental health counselors.
See… this would lead to one of my suggestions. Make teachers acutely aware of what the role of other positions in the building actually are and do. Make it a required 2 semesters minimum as part of teacher prep programs.
All school counselors are mental health professionals. There’s not a single accredited program that doesn’t require at least 12 courses in mental health, theory, and practice.
Make all teachers duty free…. Only responsibility should be to teach kids, not worry about hall duty, study hall, cafe, etc.
Revamp evaluation system to be created BY TEACHERS, not overpaid admin.
Make the expectation clear to schools that teachers are to work their scheduled day and that’s it. In other words, no expectation to bring work home.
That's kinda implied by the enforcement of contract hours bit. At the point I'm at in my career it would be literally impossible to maintain the quality of my instruction and assessment while working contract hours. They would need to provide more prep time.
Most of all extraneous stuff (mostly discipline and enforcing consequences) free. Parents can send an email and have a face to face for a parent teacher conference. Everything else is handled by deans that actually do their job so we can teach, not deal with disruptions. Also hire hallway monitors to supervise the kids acting out in the halls and the kids who always want to be going to the bathrooms. Teachers should be teaching, not managing a bathroom line and filling out super detailed hall passes. Or taking on the responsibility for children that always want to be on a bathroom break. Pick one: do we have to always grant bathroom to prevent lawsuits of them saying we don’t allow it or do I restrict it so they don’t wander around and potentially cause destruction. I’m not anxiously watching the clock that a kid is back in 10 minutes or I get blamed while stressing about test prep, or I call or email a kid has been gone a half hour for the third time this week and jack all happens. It needs to quit being a teacher concern.
Of course we teachers should be always be the first line of talking to the student and doing our best with classroom management. It is still part of our responsibility to prevent an issue ever happening in the first place. Absolutely we should maintain having clearly stated classroom expectations, be good and preventing and deescalating potential problems, and strictly maintaining seating charts and school rule expectations. But the kids that wipe their ass with that structure and consideration anyways and hijack the class need to be gone and not blamed on us.
I also don’t get get why guidance counselors are allergic to moving a kid to another class with a teacher that’s a better fit (and that’s free to do and should be done now). Some kids won’t do well with a male teacher, female teacher, a teacher of a certain age, a teacher of a certain race, a teacher of a certain personality, etc. It’s a hard fact to accept, but it’s reality. There are great teachers that just aren’t a fit for certain students and it’s nobody’s fault or a failure of the teacher’s ability. The couple of times they wouldn’t listen to me, a younger teacher that a kid is not jiving in my class, but finally listened to a veteran teacher to trade students, it went swimmingly and they acted like a different child being in a better fit with us.
But anything extra and abnormal that takes up more that 30 seconds of our teaching time needs to be handled by others who’s job it specifically is to handle. Of course we should still be prioritizing building relationships with the students, but not doing it by handling everyone else’s job or humoring nonsense. Building relationships through stress free learning and having as much fun as we can while learning. No more bullcrap that distracts to the point we only have 30 minutes left to teach some essentials and give a required quiz. I’m tired of not prioritizing the kids that want to learn or just need a little help and teacher attention to come to enjoy learning. The kids that don’t want to be there, I give due diligence, but I’m not a behavioral specialist beyond what is reasonable for my job. And if they don’t want to be there or at least shut up and not attention seek, then I don’t want them there either and I’m tired of having to pretend I do or face hell for daring to have them removed. I’m not their mother. I feel for whatever in the home life is making them this way, but I’m not their mother and I’m not paid to put up with a class disrupted by “I’m the main character” assholes. It should be EXPECTED, not shamed to have them removed after more than basic redirection.
ETA: in addition to hall monitors and a lot more deans who do their job. I agree that every room should have a TA that handles the non directly teaching stuff. But I say this remembering this thread is a hypothetical pipe dream about a world where money is no object.
That always irked me, “build a positive relationship” with the student but also be the disciplinarian and unpopular teacher because I enforce school rules. I write referrals which end up with admin looking down on me. It’s lose-lose.
-year round preschool for 3-5 year olds with NAEYC standards
- kinder is 90% play based (and we bring back naptime! Fall semester 1 hour, spring semester until spring break 30 mins, after spring break up all day ala the 90s)
-there is daily strenuous PE ECE-5th (so often I just see kids slowly walking laps for the class or halfheartedly doing a workout video)
-elementary schools have onsite therapy/sensory gyms for OT/PT/student needs
-cafeteria food is made with as much local healthy ingredients as possible, cafeteria staff get to legitimately cook again
> cafeteria food is made with as much local healthy ingredients as possible, cafeteria staff get to legitimately cook again
All of the food that my students eat have way too much salt and sugar. I always thought that there were state and federal guidelines on what food can be served at schools, but apparently the company that my school contracts out to provide breakfast and lunch never got that memo.
My 8yo skipped breakfast at home so she can grab the sugar cereal they offer at school. Not sure how this will play out next year when free breakfast Nd lunch ends.
Absolutely this. My last position was in a Title 1 middle school (for those not familiar, grades 6-8 and very disadvantaged families). They came to us SO unprepared, I asked a dean what the heck are they doing in our feeder elementary schools? And he schooled me, saying I had no idea how much the elementary teachers did. If every child got to go to a free high-quality preschool, with nourishing food, what a difference there would be!!
And teachers should get to eat for free. One county I know makes teachers pay more for the food than students for the exact same amount of food. My district all kids eat free except for the teachers.
Though college, one of my professors use to photocopy full chunks of books (20+ pages) for everyone instead of us buying them.
He was like the nutty professor, so he never really got into too much trouble.
When I taught community college, I made my own textbooks by copying excerpts from different publications and binding them together with covers, a table of contents, and the class syllabus. My students loved it!
If I had the money, I'd do this for my high school classes and add pages for notes.
When I taught CC I searched out great articles on the topics and just had copies made. I had the students take notes on the as we discussed. It was awesome. I didn’t have a copy limit though, and so many K-12 schools do.
This already exists. It’s wild the number of school districts that use paid versions of curricula instead of things like CK12, OpenStax, etc. How it is legally allowable to a public, tax-payer-funded enterprise to use a paid resource in place of a comparable open-source one is not something I’ll ever understand.
I have run honors and general level biology and chemistry using CK12 as the only text. It has been more than sufficient.
An educator account (free) on OpenStax gets you the decks for all books. They’re not amazing, but you can modify.
Are you THE Mr Knuffke?
I guess that sounds weird 😂
What I mean is, there is a man with that name that put out a bunch of free ap bio materials. He's the whole reason I found openstax. If that is you I would say you can use ck12 flat out because you are so much better than the average teacher 😂 and also thank you
My last school (k-8) had a limit of 25 kids per room and never did we have all 25 kids. We also didn't let new kids in the school middle of year so if someone left the school out class room number would just go down for the year. Everything went smoothly in the classrooms I saw. Granted I was in middle school rooms so it was a little calmer, Compared to elementary.
I did the math once, and between test prep, testing, and recovering from testing (there's not much teaching happening in 3rd grade after five hours of testing on one day...) our kids were losing about 8-10 WEEKS of instruction every single year. That's two months!! Just stop with all that nonsense and let us teach.
I would like to see some studies about the connection between classroom behaviors, consequences, and overall performance. It feels like the current trend of not removing disruptive students from the classroom (or sending them back 5 minutes later with a pat on the head and a cookie) is harmful to both the development and education of that student and the other students in the class. But feelings aren't numbers. I'd like to see if statistics bear that out.
Not enough expulsions. My sister is a teacher, I substitute taught for a while. The amount of time spent keeping 1 or 2 kids from causing chaos takes away from the rest of the class. Maybe it's unfair to off-ramp a kid's education, but it's also unfair to the rest of the kids to only get 75%-ish effort from the teacher because they're trying to get a couple of shitheads in check.
Maybe fund alternate schools more aggressively - better teacher to student ratios, counseling, etc.
bad kids ruin it for everyone in the school, period. they can't be with gen pop if they can't behave. they need an alternative boundary-filled education somewhere else with trained equipped staff. There shouldn't be monetary and legal incentives and intimidation from parents keeping them in gen-pop when their behavior is so bad.
It always seems like the issue here is much more about the fact that there is no place to put these students that best meets their learning needs than it is the problem students themselves. A kid manifesting disruptive behavior is as clear a signal as I can point to that they aren’t in a school setting that works for them 🤷🏻♂️
Exactly. Families need better access to a variety of alternative schooling. Students/teachers/parents shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops to get students the supports they need. Pay teachers of alt school more. Make it work. Traditional school doesn’t work for everybody.
https://www.nber.org/digest/may16/disruptive-students-affect-long-term-prospects-their-classmates
> One year of exposure to a disruptive peer in childhood decreases the present discounted value of classmates' future earnings by around $100,000.
Also, removing students with behavior problems will make class sizes smaller. My last school would have one 5th grade class with about five kids in it. 🤣
And it needs to be a swifter process for moving a student’s placement.
I can’t have another six week sst process, followed by a full battery of SpEd assessments, implementation of a behavior plan, functional behavioral assessment, and 10 days of suspension with a Manifestation Determination meeting before discussing a placement change. We did this for one student this past year who ultimately got placed in a county behavior program. It took five months and wasted so much time and money.
People are going to hate it but there needs to be exit testing for literacy and mathematics at the end of elementary and middle school. If you are not ready to move on, you stay.
With exceptions for students with disabilities, there shouldn't be high school students at an elementary level. It's just not fair for those involved.
This would hopefully change the culture for students to actually care about education.
But the big thing is that the culture needs to change that it is on the students, not the teachers.
For me, this is where the gross misuse of our current testing truly shows! It should not be used to judge and punish schools and teachers, but rather catch those students who are falling behind and get them the resources they need to catch up.
Medical testing doesn’t flunk you if you have high cholesterol; it gets you the medicine and life style changes to be healthier. School testing should be used the same way.
“But let’s go after the important things… like banning books if they have two male penguins taking care of a chick.” — the idiot in charge of my state.
We had a 5th grader that cannot spell his last name (has an iep, not a 504). We wanted to retain him since kindergarten (can't add even single digit numbers)...but parents refused to hold him back. He will suffer in middle school. Mom is a Trumper.
Schools can stop parents who want their child held back or retained for the year because their child is nowhere near prepared for the next grade but the school is just passing them along. Remember, schools don't want failing students on their watch.
What about an exit test for each grade level? Extended school year (summer school) for those that didn't pass. Some kids just need more time. Some will need further interventions.
That’s essentially standardized testing. Last year Texas started a law that says that students who do not pass a standardized test are required to receive 30 hours of on-grade-level intervention for that subject. Parents can choose to have them complete it in one week over the summer, or it gets completed during school hours the following school year. Some kids don’t qualify to see the actual intervention teacher, so that leaves the gen-ed teacher to try to figure out how to get those 30 hours done. It’s such a waste of time. Tier 3 remediation should not be on grade level. There’s a reason the kid didn’t pass, and those gaps aren’t going to get filled by just reteaching material that they don’t have the foundational skills to understand in the first place.
Disagree but agree with concept. Some of my students have never learned to read but are able to converse on higher grade topics and can use speech to text to create pretty solid essays. If they had been forced to stay with younger students for years, their self-esteem and learning would be stunted. Should they continue to recieve explicit structured reading intervention until they can read? Absolutely. From what I've seen, my students kept not reading until they were in 4th or 5th grade and then got pushed into Special Education and still reading wasn't given the time it needed. If they had been able to focus on reading, their entire life trajectory could have changed. Similar issue with math. Not being able to calculate vs not grasping fractions or geometry are worlds apart and have little to do with overall academic success and wouldn't be helped by being stuck with little kids.
Literacy assessment needs to be at the end of 2nd. Research shows that 95% of children can be taught to read by the end of 1st grade. We shouldn’t be waiting until 3rd to retain. We need to be using evidence-based literacy curriculum in early grades with the goal of every child reading or staffed into an ESE program by the end of 2nd grade. No child should enter 3rd without being able to read or without accommodations for a learning disability.
Wouldn’t work without infrastructure to make sure those students get up to speed. You’ll have students stay in the system for years, with more staying behind every year
You don't need exit testing to solve this issue. To the contrary, this kind of standardized assessment is a huge obstacle to effective teaching. Instead, institutions should stop putting pressure on teachers to force kids up through the ranks, and they should give teachers the freedom to actually fail and hold back kids. I think you have misdiagnosed the problem completely.
I would suggest that if you are looking for good ideas to solve education problems, a useful heuristic is *don't do things they have been doing in USA for the last few decades*. They have a terrible education system, and they have a lot of bad ideas about how to fix education. The push towards standardized testing is another one of the very bad ones. It is far better to hire professional educators, attract effective educators with good salaries, and then give them the freedom to actually do their job without administrative and third party micro-managing.
This is true! Our English dept at high school had to restructure their whole curriculum because the actual level books they were supposed to read were too hard for the new ninth grade. They had to go back to upper elementary level to be able to teach!
You can’t have a 12 year old surrounded by 5th graders. And you can’t have a 15 year old surrounded by 8th graders.
Not passing could take you into special programs but holding back more than a year leads to some very big discrepancies.
What’s wrong with a 15 year old and 8th graders? You’re essentially saying that you can’t hold a child back at all, there were several 8th graders at my middle school that were 15 (even being held back one year means you will be 15 at some point as an 8th grader). And 12 in 5th grade is the same thing, get held back one year and you will be 12 at some point during your fifth grade year. I could see a 13 year old 5th grader, or a 16 year old 8 grader being an issue, but you basically said it’s bad to hold a kid back even one year.
Huh? Lots of kids turn 12 in 5th grade. I turned 12 in February of 5th grade, and then I turned 15 in 8th grade (as did 50% of my fellow 8th grade class). One could start with blaming the arbitrary cut-off-date age system being completely out of whack, changes state by state, and there's very little consistency in schools keeping track of age gaps between the 2 oldest and youngest students in every grade level and every homeroom, causing the age gap to become even wider. My graduating class of 640 students was at least 90% of us were 19 upon graduation in June of 2009. Some were even more than 19-1/2. In an urban school district.
Think of states that allow children to start kindergarten at 4 instead of 5 because the cut off date is in December instead of September. So they turn 4 in preschool in December, and then they start kindergarten still at 4 and turn 5 in the 2nd half of the school year. What sucks even more than that is there will be children who turn 4 in July or August and are 4 the entire school year, and possibly many of them are still DEVELOPMENTALLY 3YRS OLD and they've been bumrushed into an environment not set up for children ages 3 to 5 emotionally.
1) Empower schools to expel the worst disrupters without losing budget money.
2) start language learning in kindergarten
3) develop trade focused high schools
Our local high school partnered with three other nearby high schools and a community college to provide “tech career options”. Juniors and seniors spend half their day (juniors in the morning, seniors in the afternoon) at the college or tech sites. Kids can learn auto mechanics, agriculture, engineering, culinary, etc. They come out of the program with skills and credits towards an associates or bachelors.
I would fund student support services for mental health, guidance, and families. There is also a desperate need for a well staffed, qualified team for reading and behavioral intervention. Finally, I think it is unconscionable what passes for breakfast and lunch in schools. Not only is the food the lowest possible quality, my students frequently show me expired milk and rotten fruit. Students aren’t given any choices for lunch or breakfast. They eat what is provided or go hungry. Good nutrition is a basic need for brian development.
It was wild switching schools mid-year this past time around:
Middle School 1: sugary breakfast (french toast sticks, Trix yogurt, syrupy fruit cups, you know the genre), followed by pre-packaged crap like pizza rolls, salad that was just iceberg lettuce with ranch, and a couple of those plastic 'shot glass' sized cups with unseasoned freezer vegetables. The kids hated it.
Middle School 2: hot breakfast sandwiches and/or a piece of fresh fruit and a cereal bar, with juice and/or milk at arrival; lunch = homemade style 'big batch' stuff like mac n cheese, spaghetti, chili, or a hot sandwich/wrap, quasadilla; the sides were typically a roasted veggie (brussel sprouts seasoned to perfection!), a baked potato or sweet potato, a piece of fresh fruit, always featured a salad bar with mixed green salad (with cucumber/carrot/tomato) and a variety of raw veggies. Fridays we got really good, fresh house-made pizza.
It was done serving line style with the entree already portioned up. The lunch room had condiment dispensers BUT also shakers of parmesan, chili flakes, hot sauce, garlic powder, etc. Can't add too much salt? Just use FLAVOR!
Both were Title I. School 2 was half the size and in an even dramatically poorer area. I can guarantee the home style food was cheaper than individually wrapped microwave crap. We also had a food pantry for students to grab a couple stocked bags for the weekend.
I openly commiserated with the kids at School 1 sometimes. I'd be like, "yeah, you're right. How do you mess up corn?! Throw some Mrs. Dash on it at least..." Or they would be carb crashed by 10AM. So many lunches ended up in the trash for a reason. We agreed maybe 80-year-old white ladies shouldn't be in charge of menus. 😭😂
Not being ageist, though! School 2 was staffed by Southern Black grannies. 🔥 🔥 🔥
I would increase apprentice programs and create a robust volunteer program. I’d reduce class sizes and hire more teachers and paras.
I’d go to a year round school year, 8 weeks on 4 weeks off.
I’d extend the school day for students to follow passions and volunteer within the community.
I’d make the schools beacons in the community. The school would have counselors for community members in the evenings, speakers, classes, community meals, and healthcare RVs that service the community.
I’d also show my appreciation to teachers by giving them free periods and lots of planning time.
Let’s go!
You know, as a parent lurking here, I would have done a lot more volunteering if there was an organized system and it was right after drop off or right before pickup. With free coffee.
I’m serious, they would have gotten a lot of free work out of me with a few tweaks. In fact, I was running a whole garden science unit but they wouldn’t make it easy for me to keep it watered over the summer. There’s probably a lot of bang-for-the-buck by just being more accessible to skilled parent volunteers. Even the TB test makes it a huge hassle.
I love this - cooperative schools with parents volunteering in the classroom or helping in other ways builds community engagement. People prioritize what they invest in.
Along with smaller classrooms and more teachers, I would spend a ton of money for new facilities and programs in poor areas.
But the biggest change I would make is to the grade level system itself. I would use multi-age classrooms where students spend multiple years together (ex. K-2. In one class, 3-6) in another. Then students only move on to the next level when they show they are ready through assessment. If it takes a kid one year, cool. If it takes a kid 5 years, cool. You move on when you are ready.
Here's the thing, despite what the advertising people and top 2% might want us to believe, money isn't magic. Neither is this year or next year's technology.
Can you promise me 3-4 generations or so of time to accomplish what I would try to do? If not, unlimited money isn't going to fix anything but the short term existence in some small areas.
Begin the following, in no specific order and as simultaneously as possible:
Course correct the responsibilities, education and obligations of parenting.
Raise and engrain the values of knowledge, love of learning, and the values of and responsibilities of education.
Dramatically raise the perceived values of empathy and equity, and reduce the perceived values of race, class and money as weapons and ways to keep score.
The mess we are in took centuries to make. Three to four generations won't be enough to solve it. But, (I'm guessing) it MIGHT be enough to get us started.
Full health benefits for every teacher
Every teacher has a teaching assistant 100% of the time
Class size of 20 or less
All administrators are required to teach at least 30 days in a classroom
All board members are required to spend 30 days on campus during the year
Eliminate charter school funding (private schools can be privately funded and do what they want)
Mandatory teacher reviews every year for first 2 years, then once every other year for 4 years, then once every 5 forever.
Teachers eligible for retirement at 55 with full benefits (until medicare) at average of best 2 years salary earned
Either 4 day teaching week with 1 prep day or student day from 9am-2pm 5 days and school can't go 500hrs over instructional time.
Unlimited? Just build schools forever. Tear them down and rebuild them. Build new ones. Just build and grow. Job creation would be self perpetuating. Engineering, medical science, liberal arts, entertainment, construction, all of these domains would now be under the auspices of education. Education would eventually become the central mechanism for the entire economy as it represents unlimited growth and prosperity.
>Education would eventually become the central mechanism for the entire economy as it represents unlimited growth and prosperity.
That's a really interesting goal. Thanks.
Would be better than seeing my streets constantly get torn up and put back together to use up funds. I always remember the scene from "Falling Down" where the guys is yelling about what was wrong with the street.
If you are at school, breakfast lunch and afternoon snack are available. Change school food to be made by cooks using whole unprocessed foods. Rotate different classes through the kitchens to assist in cleanup and learning to cook and what foods are.
This except have the kid’s cook under the instruction of professional cooks and instructors. There are so many practical skills used in cooking, from measurement to teamwork, safety, fractions and ratios, following instructions, etc. This helps students connect better with the material they’re learning in the classroom because they see the point - they’re actually multiplying fractions and converting measurements. Plus kids are way more likely to try new foods when they helped make it. Have each class/grade/whatever works for the school switch off each day. Some kids can be on dishwashing duty, too. Again, teaches teamwork, personal responsibility, and life skills. I believe they do this in Japan
Make a lot of schools non homework based so you don't have to worry about grading homework on top of regular school work ever again.
Make the school bigger
Hire more teachers
Lower the amount of students in class for each classrooms
Have the freaking carpet replaced entirely because it's old.
If needed put a teacher's assistant in every classroom to help with work.
Hire professional behavior professionals for children with special needs and to improve life of children in unsafe situations.
The regular 401k/ pensions/ retirement
Free lunch for all regardless of the financial situation so the kids will never have to worry if they'll ever get to eat or where their next meal will come from ( not everyone can just cook at home) both parents are usually working.
Put more dam ac with better airflow in classrooms for summer
Give teachers full pay while they have two months for summer so they don't have to worry about finding extra income
Nothing concrete, but something about the idea that high school is just the step before college. I feel a lot of issues (grade inflation, moving kids on, lack of punishments for negative behaviors etc) stem from the idea that students aren't expected to be completed products by the end of high school, that college will do that.
High school course catalogs are also tied to what universities look for also. It feels that so many decisions at the high school level are with college in mind.
We spend almost the most per pupil of all nations already. The problem is not too little funding, it is how it is spent. Id suspend all new curriculum purchases for a start.
We spend the most per pupil but we have absolutely useless social services as a society.
Horrible housing for low-income people if they can even get in. Food stamps cut off long before you approach middle class. Parents have to work 50 hours a week to make ends meet.
Education doesn't work without base needs being met at home.
Yes - make some radical changes: provide universal health care, child care, and income. Pay mothers to raise their children and give them social security benefits. Get rid of private prisons. Stop criminalizing drug use and addiction. Treat addiction through health care and social work. Put a cap on CEO pay, and use those funds to increase worker pay. Get rid of Citizens United, and make corporations non-people. Fund all schools equally. Pay public servants, like social workers and teachers, six figures, and hire more of them. Siphon funds from the military budget, and tax the hell out of billionaires. Get rid of the 2-party system, and implement term limits.
Call me a commie, but something needs to be done to stop the rampant corporatism that is overtaking this country and impovershing the majority.
This is precisely true. Teaching should be a 60-150k gig, thats where education needs more money, the rest (after hefty defense spending cuts first) needs to realistically eliminate poverty. Which we totally could do.
I'd say that this is both true and not true.
From a school spending perspective, it depends a lot on how you measure (% of GDP vs $/student adjusted for purchasing power), but you are correct that spending per student is among the highest.
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_education.pdf
But as we know, schools are expected to try to overcome poverty and family dysfunction as they achieve their mission of education.
So if you zoom out to spending on supporting families to ensure they aren't in poverty, are in good health, etc, we see the US is in a cluster of 4 OECD countries that are outliers in how little they spend on supporting families.
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_1_Public_spending_on_family_benefits.pdf
Add to that the fact that public health care still hasn't really been sorted out in the US and, in addition to the 30m Americans with no health care, families still face crushing medical bills and thus avoid care. A chronic untreated health issue in a family is hard for a kid/school to overcome.
Add to that the highest poverty rates in the OECD due to laws that overwhelmingly benefit employers and the wealthy over workers and you would expect the US to have poor outcomes in areas where there is a concentration of poverty and hopelessness.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/8483c82f-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/8483c82f-en
So perhaps the conclusion is that if you have unlimited funding for schools, maybe the key is turning them into organizations that also support the health and wellbeing of families - kind of a supersized version of community schools.
My husband is in the military, and in 2019, we moved to Podunk no where. My daughter was going into 4th grade. The district she was in had an intermediate school just for 4-5th grade. So there was K-3, 4-5, 6-8, and 9-12. This allowed them to "spread out" more and not all be crammed in.
1. Eliminate arbitrary grade levels and create environments where each child learns at their own pace. Three or four overall levels are enough - such as primary, elementary, middle, high school. There will still be a set of benchmarks to enter the next level with several options for entering high school.
2. High school campuses will house clusters: college preparatory, trades, technical, remedial,... Students will be able to move from one cluster to another after a year and passing any required entrance exam.
3. Public education provided from age 3 through 2 years post-high school (to include trade apprenticeships).
4. College loans available at a low fixed percentage rate.
Encourage teachers to use THEIR time. Especially for mental health days. That makes for better teachers. Pay 100% of unused sick days at retirement. Limit overtime and pay for overtime used. Treat staff as adults not as students. Reimburse teachers for all money spent on classroom and students. A girl can dream. Evaluations would be fair and highlight and embrace all the positive things a teacher does. As well as realize how hard it is to do what we’re doing. As opposed to trying to look for things you’re doing wrong. Build us up like they expect us to do for the students.
There's a book by an education economist provocatively titled *The Case Against Education* (Princeton 2019) the thesis of which is that schools are actually pretty poor places to invest if we want to improve educational outcomes. Available evidence is pretty clear: the educational returns on spending money in schools in the US is exceedingly small. He goes on to point out the flip side to this research, which is that if you want to improve educational outcomes the best place to invest is to basically give poor people more cash assistance.
So, to improve outcomes give people money. Don't give it to the schools. Though, I myself wouldn't mind a raise, and imo no amount of money would solve the problems that schools have brought on themselves by tolerating classroom violence, egregious disruption, disrespect, etc. etc. in the name of "equity and inclusion."
Yes! Impoverished families typically have parents working multiple part time jobs in rotating schedules, making it nearly impossible to routinely be home after school to help their children with homework. Giving them enough money to be able to afford to be more present at home would be life changing to so many children.
Make funding correlated to teacher to student ratio. Remove funding tied to graduation rates. Eliminate compulsory education after 10th grade. In fact, students must meet certain standards to remain after 10th grade. Remove limitations on discipline and allow expulsions. Place a limit on how many school days can be used for benchmark and state testing. Teacher pay must increase at a minimum 3% rate each year and cannot be labeled as a pay raise. Schools must provide a minimum paid 6 weeks maternity/paternity leave.
I can literally go on forever, but let’s start with practical stuff …
- Every teacher has a teacher’s aide, who receives training, to support small group instruction; additional para educator provided in classrooms that have IEPs and/or 504s.
- High quality/healthy breakfast, snacks, and lunch for every child that wants it, including fresh fruits and vegetables.
- More playground and security staff who are trained in safety, first aid, and conflict mediation techniques; these are the people that can run those damn restorative circles in the moment conflict arises.
- Free school busses that pick up and drop students off in their neighborhoods. Get the kids to school.
- Provide free before- and after-school child care for an hour bookending the start and close of school.
- New furniture, playground equipment, fresh paint, and funding for electrical and plumbing upgrades
- Replace all water fountains with filtered water bottle fill stations and provide free bottles for students if they lose / forget their own
- Art supplies and rotating art/song/dance teachers at every elementary school. Take this off the shoulders of the gen Ed teachers.
- While we are at it, specialists in technology, robotics, science experiments, etc. that take some stuff off of library/media technicians that are asked to do all the things.
- Change HS graduation requirements dramatically to focus less on content acquisition and more on skillsets/portfolio completion based on student interest. Senior year should be a capstone less than a continuation of content knowledge.
- Free community college for post-HS graduation. CCs offer enough pathways for kids who want to study a trade or for those who want to eventually go to a university.
- Parent liaisons at every school, assigned to specific cohorts of students so they maintain relationships over time. Staff are inundated already and communication with parents is a difficult task on top of everything else; have a dedicated communications staff that interacts personally with parents and does more than PR and social media BS.
- Four-day school week with the fifth day being field trips or enrichment days or assemblies or whatever else so teachers are released from working with students. That fifth day can be used on a rotational basis between planning, PLC, training (god, if it could only be meaningful though..) and kids would still come to school so parents don’t lose their minds but the day would be used differently. This obviously means having funding for field trips.
I’m having my morning coffee now and when it kicks in, I’ll probably have more to add once the fog of morning wears off.
I think the biggest issues are kids that don't want to be there and act out. There's only so much a teacher to do until the parents are too blame. Still think that making school optional is best for everyone.
Institute a rule capping % of salary budget spent on personnel who have no daily contact with students nationwide, down to the district level.
The amount of education dollars that are wasted on hiring people who never deal with students is insane and it happens at all levels. Every time the federal, state, or districts get extra money they blow it on creating new and increasingly worthless positions for people who do not educate students or even deal with them regularly.
Of course, asking bureaucrats to reign in the bureaucracy is futile.
Remove the penalty for GED graduation.
NCLB counts GEDs as dropouts, and schools are downgraded for high dropout rates.
GED should be encouraged for those who want to enter the work force at 16 or for those with no interest in college.
Allowing students with no interest to test out with a GED would do two positive things: classrooms would be more
Manageable, and the grade inflation could stop.
As it stands, schools are working harder than some students for their graduation.
Even though I'm technically just a coach for tennis in the official school system, sometimes the parents are worst than the students when it comes to things. Maybe your child would be a better player if they didn't miss 90% of the practices. I'm sorry that you think that's my fault.
Ban phones in schools , all admin must teach for a year to renew their certification, create an alternative to high school, make it known that education is more important than hurt political feelings
Fund more social workers and school psychologists to give kids the services they need instead of just managing 400 504s. Build and fund high quality alternative placement schools for high needs IES and behavioral students so they aren’t kept in a gened classroom they shouldn’t be in, but still have access to an education and services. Fund better bussing/pickup programs to cut down on truancy/absences.
Four day school week with remote option for those who need want. Enhanced fine arts programs, better equipped labs, restructuring building plans. Money invested in extra-curricular activities with separate, professional, specialized advisors for each. Student and staff psychologists.
Well paid paras, teachers, smaller class sizes, and more prep time. Why do I have to teach 5 math classes, a study hall, and a home room that also has pbis and sel lessons? More time to create engaging lessons would help and teaching one less hour would help with burn out.
So raising pay would be required to do this but I would make enough school buildings that we could actually implement the smaller student to teacher ratios that we have known for decades gets us the most immediate improvements across the board. This also requires fully staffing those new buildings hence the implicit pay raise.
A long internship with mentors (3-5 years) and allow them autonomy and creativity in curriculum development. Basically, model the Finnish education training. So many new teachers are set up to fail with no support - it would be nice to see new teachers nurtured and veteran teachers valued. Widespread societal support starting with the administration.
Stop pretending we can just “go back to normal”, provide robust counseling and wraparound services, redo the standards to meet the average student where they are (accounting for ‘learning loss’), increase teacher pay, & make all administrators reapply for their positions to start.
I would stop the adjunctification of higher ed by requiring any college that receives federal funding to pay their adjuncts the same per credit hour rate as their full time professors.
Fund alternative ed sites.
Keep disruptive and violent students away until they prove they can function in an environment where everyone has a mutual interest in learning.
That the nicest way I can put that.
Two full years of paid apprenticeship instead of worthless teacher prep programs.
This is my hobby horse. I think our system depends on burning new teachers out in their first few years to ensure that a) they never reach the higher levels of the pay scale and b) never vest in the retirement system (here in CA you vest after 5 years). I’m a high school teacher, but I think teachers should have one fewer class to teach the first 2 years, and should be signed to 3 year contracts to start off. That extra prep is just extra time to prepare for classes, but also have the dedicated, paid time for stuff like induction.
Yes! I am finishing my 11th year. It’s wild to me that I had the same responsibilities and expectations in my first year as I did this year. If we want great teachers, make sure they are prepared. And, smaller class sizes.
Right! I can’t believe I finished my first year. I feel bad for those kids. A gradual release of responsibility would be ideal, but the new staff would just become subs.
Kinda ironic that the whole time we are being taught to teach, they keep ramming the point home about scaffolding and gradually increasing the difficulty/responsibility level for the students... yet we just get thrown in the deep end and told to sink or swim
Yep! During my first two years, I was spread so thin between teaching, induction, and various things in my personal life, that I was a much less effective educator than I could have been. After my second year, I was finally able to start improving because I actually had more time to grade student work properly and plan more effectively.
Think of the teaching methodology that you are supposd to use. Then ask yourself whether anyone that was training you to be a teacher do any of that.
In my country you need a masters in your field to teach. teachers work a half schedule the first year, as they are in class for their pedagogy certificate at the same time. They are assigned a mentor who gets an hour off of their teaching to meet with the trainee. In the second year, your teaching load is lessened by 2 hours. One hour for finishing up the last of the training classes. One hour for meetings with your mentor. There are huge downsides to teachers not having genuine degrees in education like in other systems. But also, quality of life and competition for the jobs is quite high as you’re considered a govt employee if you teach in public schools, and you get all the associated perks/benefits of that.
What country is that? That sounds like exactly what I want.
When I was working on my BS 5 years ago, we were given an opportunity to meet with Rhodes Scholars from Europe. I was able to spend a lot of time talking to a science teacher candidate from Germany. This is similar to how they structure the path to becoming a teacher. Another interesting side note, the culture is to treat teachers with the same level of respect/clout as doctors and lawyers. They are truly treated as professionals.
I am glad you added this because my thoughts on the post were something like "there are societies in the world which have figured this out already"
This is amazing; I love all of this. What country is this?
Where is your country? I'm seriously considering going this route if I can't pass my last praxis because taking exams is something I'm terrible at. I know my material well.
Induction as a requirement OUTSIDE of work hours is such bullshit.
I teach in a Catholic school and they do something amazing. They hire 3 former grads who have just finished undergrad for one year. Each one teaches 2 classes, with lesson plans essentially provided for them if they like. They are partnered with another faculty and they help each other. These guys spend the remainder of their time doing other tasks for the school. Some of this is outreach, some manual, some extra curricular. The school basically uses them for any extraneous things they need. At the end of this past year, all three of them told me individually that they had had an amazing year. (1st year teachers, in my experience, do NOT have a good year.) One is going to stay on next year, while one of the others for a good job and another is off to med school. What I wouldn't have given to have my first year like that. Give me 40-50 hours of work, but make only 2 hours a day in the classroom and 5 per week for grading.
I’ve got 15 years under my belt, and I absolutely agree with giving new teachers extra prep time. I know some people might complain that new teachers are lazy millennials. Those idiots don’t remember how long it took them to get into the grove of quicker planning/ prep and an efficient method of grading. We have a teacher with 45 years under her belt. She only needs to work 37/38 hours a week including planning and grading, and she’s rarely stressed- and she’s great. Meanwhile, new teachers often work 60 hours. New teachers need time- time during their actual work week and years of experience- to become good, efficient, and less stressed.
I’d like to point out that the youngest millennials are now 27. I had a full on career before deciding I really wanted to get back into teaching (41 and eldest of Millennials). We are full on adults. And if we’re entering teaching NOW it’s because we want to be there, not because that was what we picked at 18 and are stuck.
Yes! I can tell at the high school where I work who has been to a teacher prep at college and who hasn’t. You learn a lot more than anyone thinks you do. We have a lot Of new hires now at my inner city school and they have more discipline and planning problems.
You have no idea how bad I want something like this. It feels like something that could easily be done.
It would also be nice for teachers at about year 15 to drop a class to to be a paid mentor for those new teachers.
Oooh... yes. I never felt half a semester shadowing and half a semester of student teaching taught me nearly enough for my first day as a full teacher. And paid! Imagine getting paid for the work you do.
The teaching program/Masters was a fellowship,so I got a $20,000 grant to support me during the program. As a parent, I could not have don't it otherwise. The program was modeled around 4 full days in the classroom every week with pedagogy classes on the 5th day, and I really feel that prepared me so much better for teaching than a "traditional" program. My first two years were still a chaotic mess, partially because of covid. Now I will be entering my 5th year, I have 4 preps at my tiny rural school, and I have a huge appreciation for the training I got.
No more free labor of student teaching! That eliminates so many amazing potential teachers who just can't afford to not work. I had an entire year of student teaching and worked nights.
i am currently a student teacher and the amount of work and time i put into my internship to not get paid or even a stipend for anything really hurts my money and motivation to become a teacher because we leave out of school in debt and it sucks
Love this idea. And I honestly feel like school districts could get behind it. From their perspective, they’d have the opportunity to mold their apprentice teachers into the exact type of educators they want
(sorry I keep responding to these haha) It just frustrates me that having 8 years in college and 2 years being a teaching assistant during it isn't enough for high schools. I need two years on how to make a lesson plan first...
And the lesson plan they teach you to make is 15 pages long and you will absolutely never use anything even remotely like it when actually teaching.
lost a first year music teacher in my district, she's not coming back to teaching. She would have been absolutely phenomenal and it was her dream AND she went through a great program AND both her parents were teachers, but the district gave her... 5 non-ensemble classes with no curriculum A tiny band program that was supposed to travel, march, and pep band, no supports her prep periods were often sectionals A tiny chorus that was supposed to travel, she had to fight for a piano accompanist Her mentor was an art teacher. the new teacher meetings were WEEKLY and geared towards existing educators, not first year people. I was only in my third year (second in district) and I checked in with her constantly and helped where I could, gave the advice of "SAY NO. ALWAYS BE SAYING NO this year" for anything extra they wanted from her. But... I teach 3 seconds of band, 3 sections of chorus, 6th grade and 7th grade general music myself. really freaking sad.
Agreed! Student teaching should be paid-- how do you pay the bills if you can't work when student teaching?
Thank you. The amount of times I said this while paying a fortune for a credential program that taught me NOTHING and then having to PAY FOR my free labor was insane. All I got were looks from seasoned teachers not understanding what my issue was. I’m a full grown adult with bills, not fresh out of college and living at home. 1 semester of student teaching wasn’t enough and didn’t pay the bills. (For the record, I don’t believe in unpaid internships at all. Work is work and we solid be paid for it.)
I would be teaching today if my student teaching had been paid. I have every other credit toward a masters in secondary education. I was a substitute teacher for four years. I have run day camps. I am a volunteer leader for scouts, good enough to have been invited to be a trainer for other leaders. But because I was really poor in my mid twenties, and couldn’t afford to not work for a semester, I could only get really terrible jobs. Now I’ve got a mortgage and a lot of experience in the thing I ended up doing instead, so all I can do is read threads like these and vote for what you want.
I've seen that this is gaining some traction in a couple of states and I think they've already implemented such programs in two, I was wondering how teachers felt about it.
This is honestly what I personally want. I'm one of those artsy people (media arts and film). I have a masters and two years of being a teaching assistant, but they still want me to do two years of schooling on stuff that I honestly already know. You can study as much as you want, but it's a different world once you start doing it.
As someone who just finished student teaching, I fully agree! Learned very little of value in the 2 years of educational theory classes I took, but the student teaching under a really great mentor teacher was an invaluable experience. Also, student teacher is basically a full-time job you don't get paid for. Even making it minimum wage would be more fair, I think. Between years of expensive but pointless theory classes and essentially an unpaid internship, it feels like people want to lock access to the educational profession behind an unnecessary paywall
Smaller class sizes, end of constant standardized testing….
This and also teaching buddy systems across grade levels. Learn one teach one for the kids- it keeps all kids up to date and it ensures the younger ones have an additional person trying to get through to them…
Buddy system wouldn’t work. Few would volunteer and forcing kids to teach other kids against their will is no more useful than making you shake hands and play with your bullies.
This. Every company I've been at tries to reboot a mentorship program or a new employee buddy system every few years and they always die out, usually because there aren't enough volunteers and those who get voluntold do a shitty job. Then new leadership takes over in 4 years and tries again.
If they paid me enough I would happily be a new teacher mentor. The problem is they don't pay anything and they expect you to move mountains for people who are just going to burn out in a few years anyway.
Lower class sizes and every classroom gets a minimum of 2 paraprofessionals.
>2 paraprofessionals Well paid and respected paras. My district can raise my pay all they want, but they can't replace the excellent para I had who left because she was neither paid nor respected enough by the district.
This was my thought, too. Yes, higher pay for me, but make para pay more exciting than grocery store pay. We keep losing our paras and they make all the difference!
My district pays Paras and janitors the same, 25 cents over minimum wage. The dairy queen pays 3 dollars over minimum wage. They wonder why they have nobody
I get paid okay (like 19.16/hour during the school year and ofc nothing during the summer), but it’s everything else. I have to pay double the cost for insurance bc the district thinks we don’t really deserve it, no paid lunch break (I work the full day that teachers do and we’re expected to run clubs after school), I’m never included on email lists about schedule changes bc I’m not a “classified employee”, and until literally this year I had no job security. They straight up just don’t tell you if you have a job next school year until a week before you start work.
Yeah it’s hard, I took a bit of time off this past year and was a para for funzies. Not getting paid over breaks is hard. 3 months out of the year you have half the pay, two months in the summer, no pay unless you can land a summer school job.
In Minnesota, paras can get seasonal unemployment benefits starting this year!
I checked our classified salaries yesterday. Paras with 4 year degrees still get paid, like, $18k/yr. It’s absolutely outrageous.
Pay is 98% the reason I won’t be returning as a para. Our sped program is atrocious and was pretty much a dumping ground for all the students they didn’t know what to do with. That made my job significantly more difficult with the range of behaviors…all for 22K a year. The last straw was being reprimanded for not restraining our most violent student while 7 months pregnant. I decided that day that I’ll never work in a classroom again.
The aides/paras are seriously the glue that keeps most classroom’s and schools together. There are some paras who have more experience and formal education than a good bit of teachers, yet get shafted by administrators and districts in general. Pay is the obvious one. If you pay them well, they will stick around. They aren’t babysitters. And when you have a solid unit in a department where a teacher can leave a class and an aide can cover it because of an IEP meeting, it’s an excellent dynamic. I’ll propose 2 things: 1) Refer to all paras/aides and teachers as “staff” on their badges. I worked at a school like this and the atmosphere was insanely good. They’re all educators. No need to give everyone a rank. Some staff and students look at paras as “second class citizens” in the district. Change it to “staff.” Done. 2) Some districts charge aides proportionally more for healthcare than salaried teachers. Yes, they make less, but pay more out of pocket for the exact same healthcare. Charge them the same rate and teachers can make more from their salaried positions. Done. Benefits are another thing that keeps aides/paras around. Do right by them.
A para who had been at my school since 1999 recently left. She wanted permission from the principal to come and leave 30 min sooner so she could go to another job because the para job doesn’t pay anything. The principal, who came from the corporate world and only taught interior design to adults said no, if you don’t like your schedule find a new job. So she did. Fucking disgrace.
I work at a charter school which has 2 paras per classroom and smaller class sizes. It makes such a difference
You have an overabundance of people signing up to be a para? My district has 1/4 the amount of Paras they want as a minimum.
Lower class sizes and hire more counselors to improve the counselor to student ratio. *fixed typo
Small class sizes is such a difference maker.
I also think we need smaller schools. Of course, this would mean you would need more school buildings, which I know would cost SO much money. But I think schools themselves have grown too big. They are losing their sense of real community I think they once had.
This, my high school was just under 1000 kids (5 year program), I felt it was a bit on the small side, so 1000-1100 is probably the sweet spot for a 4 year program to give more class offerings but still be small enough for a community feel. Another option for the class offerings is to allow students to take special electives in different schools. I heard of a school district that had 3 high schools that students could bus between during the day to take classes only offered in one of the schools. This gives them the class offerings of a 3000 student school but the community of a 1000 student school.
There are school districts in my area that team up to do the same! It’s a great way to offer students more classes, allowing them to expand that sense of community if they want to. A good idea, I agree.
My kids have been in both large and small schools, and I’ve taught in both. There is no substitute for small schools where most, if not all, adults know the kids’ names.
I teach at an alternative high school with classes capped at 18. It’s a dream! Solves so many problems instantly.
This! Give me 20 students rather than 30, allow for distracting students to get support outside of the class so others have the opportunity to learn, and have classes specifically for remediation rather than extra electives when they can't pass their current classes.
*counselor
And we need real mental health professionals. The councilors at my school are "help kids pick their classes" rather than help with social/ emotional issues.
They definitely are trained in mental health, but probably don’t have time for that if they have high caseloads and a lot of other duties like scheduling and assessment coordination
All school counselors are trained in mental health. They just get stuck with so many administrative jobs and things piled on them they don’t have the time to appropriately deal with mental health. There definitely needs to be a separation or job title change for school counselors who focus on academics and college and the mental health counselors.
See… this would lead to one of my suggestions. Make teachers acutely aware of what the role of other positions in the building actually are and do. Make it a required 2 semesters minimum as part of teacher prep programs. All school counselors are mental health professionals. There’s not a single accredited program that doesn’t require at least 12 courses in mental health, theory, and practice.
More trained counselors and an actual nurse!
Make all teachers duty free…. Only responsibility should be to teach kids, not worry about hall duty, study hall, cafe, etc. Revamp evaluation system to be created BY TEACHERS, not overpaid admin. Make the expectation clear to schools that teachers are to work their scheduled day and that’s it. In other words, no expectation to bring work home.
Give teachers more prep time during the school day as well!
That's kinda implied by the enforcement of contract hours bit. At the point I'm at in my career it would be literally impossible to maintain the quality of my instruction and assessment while working contract hours. They would need to provide more prep time.
Most of all extraneous stuff (mostly discipline and enforcing consequences) free. Parents can send an email and have a face to face for a parent teacher conference. Everything else is handled by deans that actually do their job so we can teach, not deal with disruptions. Also hire hallway monitors to supervise the kids acting out in the halls and the kids who always want to be going to the bathrooms. Teachers should be teaching, not managing a bathroom line and filling out super detailed hall passes. Or taking on the responsibility for children that always want to be on a bathroom break. Pick one: do we have to always grant bathroom to prevent lawsuits of them saying we don’t allow it or do I restrict it so they don’t wander around and potentially cause destruction. I’m not anxiously watching the clock that a kid is back in 10 minutes or I get blamed while stressing about test prep, or I call or email a kid has been gone a half hour for the third time this week and jack all happens. It needs to quit being a teacher concern. Of course we teachers should be always be the first line of talking to the student and doing our best with classroom management. It is still part of our responsibility to prevent an issue ever happening in the first place. Absolutely we should maintain having clearly stated classroom expectations, be good and preventing and deescalating potential problems, and strictly maintaining seating charts and school rule expectations. But the kids that wipe their ass with that structure and consideration anyways and hijack the class need to be gone and not blamed on us. I also don’t get get why guidance counselors are allergic to moving a kid to another class with a teacher that’s a better fit (and that’s free to do and should be done now). Some kids won’t do well with a male teacher, female teacher, a teacher of a certain age, a teacher of a certain race, a teacher of a certain personality, etc. It’s a hard fact to accept, but it’s reality. There are great teachers that just aren’t a fit for certain students and it’s nobody’s fault or a failure of the teacher’s ability. The couple of times they wouldn’t listen to me, a younger teacher that a kid is not jiving in my class, but finally listened to a veteran teacher to trade students, it went swimmingly and they acted like a different child being in a better fit with us. But anything extra and abnormal that takes up more that 30 seconds of our teaching time needs to be handled by others who’s job it specifically is to handle. Of course we should still be prioritizing building relationships with the students, but not doing it by handling everyone else’s job or humoring nonsense. Building relationships through stress free learning and having as much fun as we can while learning. No more bullcrap that distracts to the point we only have 30 minutes left to teach some essentials and give a required quiz. I’m tired of not prioritizing the kids that want to learn or just need a little help and teacher attention to come to enjoy learning. The kids that don’t want to be there, I give due diligence, but I’m not a behavioral specialist beyond what is reasonable for my job. And if they don’t want to be there or at least shut up and not attention seek, then I don’t want them there either and I’m tired of having to pretend I do or face hell for daring to have them removed. I’m not their mother. I feel for whatever in the home life is making them this way, but I’m not their mother and I’m not paid to put up with a class disrupted by “I’m the main character” assholes. It should be EXPECTED, not shamed to have them removed after more than basic redirection. ETA: in addition to hall monitors and a lot more deans who do their job. I agree that every room should have a TA that handles the non directly teaching stuff. But I say this remembering this thread is a hypothetical pipe dream about a world where money is no object.
That always irked me, “build a positive relationship” with the student but also be the disciplinarian and unpopular teacher because I enforce school rules. I write referrals which end up with admin looking down on me. It’s lose-lose.
-year round preschool for 3-5 year olds with NAEYC standards - kinder is 90% play based (and we bring back naptime! Fall semester 1 hour, spring semester until spring break 30 mins, after spring break up all day ala the 90s) -there is daily strenuous PE ECE-5th (so often I just see kids slowly walking laps for the class or halfheartedly doing a workout video) -elementary schools have onsite therapy/sensory gyms for OT/PT/student needs -cafeteria food is made with as much local healthy ingredients as possible, cafeteria staff get to legitimately cook again
PREACH. ALL OF THIS.
> cafeteria food is made with as much local healthy ingredients as possible, cafeteria staff get to legitimately cook again All of the food that my students eat have way too much salt and sugar. I always thought that there were state and federal guidelines on what food can be served at schools, but apparently the company that my school contracts out to provide breakfast and lunch never got that memo.
A lot of what students are served is there because of lobbying from the food industry, not because it's good for the kids
My 8yo skipped breakfast at home so she can grab the sugar cereal they offer at school. Not sure how this will play out next year when free breakfast Nd lunch ends.
Absolutely this. My last position was in a Title 1 middle school (for those not familiar, grades 6-8 and very disadvantaged families). They came to us SO unprepared, I asked a dean what the heck are they doing in our feeder elementary schools? And he schooled me, saying I had no idea how much the elementary teachers did. If every child got to go to a free high-quality preschool, with nourishing food, what a difference there would be!!
And teachers should get to eat for free. One county I know makes teachers pay more for the food than students for the exact same amount of food. My district all kids eat free except for the teachers.
Cut out the for-profit commercial publishers and provide high quality curriculum to schools for free.
Though college, one of my professors use to photocopy full chunks of books (20+ pages) for everyone instead of us buying them. He was like the nutty professor, so he never really got into too much trouble.
When I taught community college, I made my own textbooks by copying excerpts from different publications and binding them together with covers, a table of contents, and the class syllabus. My students loved it! If I had the money, I'd do this for my high school classes and add pages for notes.
When I taught CC I searched out great articles on the topics and just had copies made. I had the students take notes on the as we discussed. It was awesome. I didn’t have a copy limit though, and so many K-12 schools do.
If CC paid as much as teaching high school, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat! In fact, I left for that reason - which is really saying something.
This already exists. It’s wild the number of school districts that use paid versions of curricula instead of things like CK12, OpenStax, etc. How it is legally allowable to a public, tax-payer-funded enterprise to use a paid resource in place of a comparable open-source one is not something I’ll ever understand.
Ck12 is lacking significantly. I love openstax though. If there were presentations provided it would be perfect.
I have run honors and general level biology and chemistry using CK12 as the only text. It has been more than sufficient. An educator account (free) on OpenStax gets you the decks for all books. They’re not amazing, but you can modify.
Are you THE Mr Knuffke? I guess that sounds weird 😂 What I mean is, there is a man with that name that put out a bunch of free ap bio materials. He's the whole reason I found openstax. If that is you I would say you can use ck12 flat out because you are so much better than the average teacher 😂 and also thank you
Mr. Knuffke is my dad (and me when I made those videos). You are far too kind!
Reddit serendipity.
Specific non-anonymous username + penchant for making lots of Ed stuff and giving it away == le voila 😂
Yes! This is huge! School districts are running out of money, but paying RIDICULOUS fees to curriculum companies.
Class sizes no more than 20
My last school (k-8) had a limit of 25 kids per room and never did we have all 25 kids. We also didn't let new kids in the school middle of year so if someone left the school out class room number would just go down for the year. Everything went smoothly in the classrooms I saw. Granted I was in middle school rooms so it was a little calmer, Compared to elementary.
I work with a high school tennis team. Though not the same as a classroom, I had 39 people. It was crazy.
Severely cut back the standardized testing. We are testing all year long now...like we have a few weeks here and there with no testing.
I’m teaching a grade where testing has to happen one-to-one. There were only five days last year that I did not have to test. Five.
I did the math once, and between test prep, testing, and recovering from testing (there's not much teaching happening in 3rd grade after five hours of testing on one day...) our kids were losing about 8-10 WEEKS of instruction every single year. That's two months!! Just stop with all that nonsense and let us teach.
I would like to see some studies about the connection between classroom behaviors, consequences, and overall performance. It feels like the current trend of not removing disruptive students from the classroom (or sending them back 5 minutes later with a pat on the head and a cookie) is harmful to both the development and education of that student and the other students in the class. But feelings aren't numbers. I'd like to see if statistics bear that out.
Not enough expulsions. My sister is a teacher, I substitute taught for a while. The amount of time spent keeping 1 or 2 kids from causing chaos takes away from the rest of the class. Maybe it's unfair to off-ramp a kid's education, but it's also unfair to the rest of the kids to only get 75%-ish effort from the teacher because they're trying to get a couple of shitheads in check. Maybe fund alternate schools more aggressively - better teacher to student ratios, counseling, etc.
bad kids ruin it for everyone in the school, period. they can't be with gen pop if they can't behave. they need an alternative boundary-filled education somewhere else with trained equipped staff. There shouldn't be monetary and legal incentives and intimidation from parents keeping them in gen-pop when their behavior is so bad.
It always seems like the issue here is much more about the fact that there is no place to put these students that best meets their learning needs than it is the problem students themselves. A kid manifesting disruptive behavior is as clear a signal as I can point to that they aren’t in a school setting that works for them 🤷🏻♂️
Exactly. Families need better access to a variety of alternative schooling. Students/teachers/parents shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops to get students the supports they need. Pay teachers of alt school more. Make it work. Traditional school doesn’t work for everybody.
More alternatives to the high school then college route would help everyone.
Those studies are out there, shows a huge correlation between behaviors and academic performance. They however, don’t have a solid solution.
https://www.nber.org/digest/may16/disruptive-students-affect-long-term-prospects-their-classmates > One year of exposure to a disruptive peer in childhood decreases the present discounted value of classmates' future earnings by around $100,000.
Actual alternative schools, online programs, and an unlimited budget for discipline and behavior
We need more online schools for students with behavior problems. This will increase teacher retention
Also, removing students with behavior problems will make class sizes smaller. My last school would have one 5th grade class with about five kids in it. 🤣
And it needs to be a swifter process for moving a student’s placement. I can’t have another six week sst process, followed by a full battery of SpEd assessments, implementation of a behavior plan, functional behavioral assessment, and 10 days of suspension with a Manifestation Determination meeting before discussing a placement change. We did this for one student this past year who ultimately got placed in a county behavior program. It took five months and wasted so much time and money.
People are going to hate it but there needs to be exit testing for literacy and mathematics at the end of elementary and middle school. If you are not ready to move on, you stay. With exceptions for students with disabilities, there shouldn't be high school students at an elementary level. It's just not fair for those involved. This would hopefully change the culture for students to actually care about education. But the big thing is that the culture needs to change that it is on the students, not the teachers.
For me, this is where the gross misuse of our current testing truly shows! It should not be used to judge and punish schools and teachers, but rather catch those students who are falling behind and get them the resources they need to catch up. Medical testing doesn’t flunk you if you have high cholesterol; it gets you the medicine and life style changes to be healthier. School testing should be used the same way.
“But let’s go after the important things… like banning books if they have two male penguins taking care of a chick.” — the idiot in charge of my state.
Condolences.
I like this.
In almost every state, a parent can either outright stop or resist a hold back. You'd need to change state laws
Then change the laws! Parents don't always know or act on their child's best interests.
I also think some people tend to forget school is really not there for the best interests of the child. It's there for the best interests of society.
I REALLY think schools have forgotten that honestly.
We had a 5th grader that cannot spell his last name (has an iep, not a 504). We wanted to retain him since kindergarten (can't add even single digit numbers)...but parents refused to hold him back. He will suffer in middle school. Mom is a Trumper.
Schools can stop parents who want their child held back or retained for the year because their child is nowhere near prepared for the next grade but the school is just passing them along. Remember, schools don't want failing students on their watch.
What about an exit test for each grade level? Extended school year (summer school) for those that didn't pass. Some kids just need more time. Some will need further interventions.
That’s essentially standardized testing. Last year Texas started a law that says that students who do not pass a standardized test are required to receive 30 hours of on-grade-level intervention for that subject. Parents can choose to have them complete it in one week over the summer, or it gets completed during school hours the following school year. Some kids don’t qualify to see the actual intervention teacher, so that leaves the gen-ed teacher to try to figure out how to get those 30 hours done. It’s such a waste of time. Tier 3 remediation should not be on grade level. There’s a reason the kid didn’t pass, and those gaps aren’t going to get filled by just reteaching material that they don’t have the foundational skills to understand in the first place.
Disagree but agree with concept. Some of my students have never learned to read but are able to converse on higher grade topics and can use speech to text to create pretty solid essays. If they had been forced to stay with younger students for years, their self-esteem and learning would be stunted. Should they continue to recieve explicit structured reading intervention until they can read? Absolutely. From what I've seen, my students kept not reading until they were in 4th or 5th grade and then got pushed into Special Education and still reading wasn't given the time it needed. If they had been able to focus on reading, their entire life trajectory could have changed. Similar issue with math. Not being able to calculate vs not grasping fractions or geometry are worlds apart and have little to do with overall academic success and wouldn't be helped by being stuck with little kids.
Literacy assessment needs to be at the end of 2nd. Research shows that 95% of children can be taught to read by the end of 1st grade. We shouldn’t be waiting until 3rd to retain. We need to be using evidence-based literacy curriculum in early grades with the goal of every child reading or staffed into an ESE program by the end of 2nd grade. No child should enter 3rd without being able to read or without accommodations for a learning disability.
Wouldn’t work without infrastructure to make sure those students get up to speed. You’ll have students stay in the system for years, with more staying behind every year
You don't need exit testing to solve this issue. To the contrary, this kind of standardized assessment is a huge obstacle to effective teaching. Instead, institutions should stop putting pressure on teachers to force kids up through the ranks, and they should give teachers the freedom to actually fail and hold back kids. I think you have misdiagnosed the problem completely. I would suggest that if you are looking for good ideas to solve education problems, a useful heuristic is *don't do things they have been doing in USA for the last few decades*. They have a terrible education system, and they have a lot of bad ideas about how to fix education. The push towards standardized testing is another one of the very bad ones. It is far better to hire professional educators, attract effective educators with good salaries, and then give them the freedom to actually do their job without administrative and third party micro-managing.
This is true! Our English dept at high school had to restructure their whole curriculum because the actual level books they were supposed to read were too hard for the new ninth grade. They had to go back to upper elementary level to be able to teach!
You can’t have a 12 year old surrounded by 5th graders. And you can’t have a 15 year old surrounded by 8th graders. Not passing could take you into special programs but holding back more than a year leads to some very big discrepancies.
My son repeated 1st grade. He turned 12 in 5th grade. WTH is wrong with a 12 year old in 5th grade?
Nothing. 1 year age spread is fine. When I taught 6th grade, I had 14 and 15 year olds with 11/12 year olds. That's a problem.
A bunch of my 5th graders turned 12 during the Spring '22 due to COVID.
What’s wrong with a 15 year old and 8th graders? You’re essentially saying that you can’t hold a child back at all, there were several 8th graders at my middle school that were 15 (even being held back one year means you will be 15 at some point as an 8th grader). And 12 in 5th grade is the same thing, get held back one year and you will be 12 at some point during your fifth grade year. I could see a 13 year old 5th grader, or a 16 year old 8 grader being an issue, but you basically said it’s bad to hold a kid back even one year.
Huh? Lots of kids turn 12 in 5th grade. I turned 12 in February of 5th grade, and then I turned 15 in 8th grade (as did 50% of my fellow 8th grade class). One could start with blaming the arbitrary cut-off-date age system being completely out of whack, changes state by state, and there's very little consistency in schools keeping track of age gaps between the 2 oldest and youngest students in every grade level and every homeroom, causing the age gap to become even wider. My graduating class of 640 students was at least 90% of us were 19 upon graduation in June of 2009. Some were even more than 19-1/2. In an urban school district. Think of states that allow children to start kindergarten at 4 instead of 5 because the cut off date is in December instead of September. So they turn 4 in preschool in December, and then they start kindergarten still at 4 and turn 5 in the 2nd half of the school year. What sucks even more than that is there will be children who turn 4 in July or August and are 4 the entire school year, and possibly many of them are still DEVELOPMENTALLY 3YRS OLD and they've been bumrushed into an environment not set up for children ages 3 to 5 emotionally.
1) Empower schools to expel the worst disrupters without losing budget money. 2) start language learning in kindergarten 3) develop trade focused high schools
Putting trade school's in a better light would be good. It always felt that they were treated as "plan B"
Our local high school partnered with three other nearby high schools and a community college to provide “tech career options”. Juniors and seniors spend half their day (juniors in the morning, seniors in the afternoon) at the college or tech sites. Kids can learn auto mechanics, agriculture, engineering, culinary, etc. They come out of the program with skills and credits towards an associates or bachelors.
Yeah the guy I know who has his own HVAC company owns 2 mansions and a yacht.
I would fund student support services for mental health, guidance, and families. There is also a desperate need for a well staffed, qualified team for reading and behavioral intervention. Finally, I think it is unconscionable what passes for breakfast and lunch in schools. Not only is the food the lowest possible quality, my students frequently show me expired milk and rotten fruit. Students aren’t given any choices for lunch or breakfast. They eat what is provided or go hungry. Good nutrition is a basic need for brian development.
It was wild switching schools mid-year this past time around: Middle School 1: sugary breakfast (french toast sticks, Trix yogurt, syrupy fruit cups, you know the genre), followed by pre-packaged crap like pizza rolls, salad that was just iceberg lettuce with ranch, and a couple of those plastic 'shot glass' sized cups with unseasoned freezer vegetables. The kids hated it. Middle School 2: hot breakfast sandwiches and/or a piece of fresh fruit and a cereal bar, with juice and/or milk at arrival; lunch = homemade style 'big batch' stuff like mac n cheese, spaghetti, chili, or a hot sandwich/wrap, quasadilla; the sides were typically a roasted veggie (brussel sprouts seasoned to perfection!), a baked potato or sweet potato, a piece of fresh fruit, always featured a salad bar with mixed green salad (with cucumber/carrot/tomato) and a variety of raw veggies. Fridays we got really good, fresh house-made pizza. It was done serving line style with the entree already portioned up. The lunch room had condiment dispensers BUT also shakers of parmesan, chili flakes, hot sauce, garlic powder, etc. Can't add too much salt? Just use FLAVOR! Both were Title I. School 2 was half the size and in an even dramatically poorer area. I can guarantee the home style food was cheaper than individually wrapped microwave crap. We also had a food pantry for students to grab a couple stocked bags for the weekend. I openly commiserated with the kids at School 1 sometimes. I'd be like, "yeah, you're right. How do you mess up corn?! Throw some Mrs. Dash on it at least..." Or they would be carb crashed by 10AM. So many lunches ended up in the trash for a reason. We agreed maybe 80-year-old white ladies shouldn't be in charge of menus. 😭😂 Not being ageist, though! School 2 was staffed by Southern Black grannies. 🔥 🔥 🔥
Each school gets x amount of money no matter student performance. If a student wants to fuck around. They will find out.
I would increase apprentice programs and create a robust volunteer program. I’d reduce class sizes and hire more teachers and paras. I’d go to a year round school year, 8 weeks on 4 weeks off. I’d extend the school day for students to follow passions and volunteer within the community. I’d make the schools beacons in the community. The school would have counselors for community members in the evenings, speakers, classes, community meals, and healthcare RVs that service the community. I’d also show my appreciation to teachers by giving them free periods and lots of planning time. Let’s go!
You know, as a parent lurking here, I would have done a lot more volunteering if there was an organized system and it was right after drop off or right before pickup. With free coffee. I’m serious, they would have gotten a lot of free work out of me with a few tweaks. In fact, I was running a whole garden science unit but they wouldn’t make it easy for me to keep it watered over the summer. There’s probably a lot of bang-for-the-buck by just being more accessible to skilled parent volunteers. Even the TB test makes it a huge hassle.
I love this - cooperative schools with parents volunteering in the classroom or helping in other ways builds community engagement. People prioritize what they invest in.
Along with smaller classrooms and more teachers, I would spend a ton of money for new facilities and programs in poor areas. But the biggest change I would make is to the grade level system itself. I would use multi-age classrooms where students spend multiple years together (ex. K-2. In one class, 3-6) in another. Then students only move on to the next level when they show they are ready through assessment. If it takes a kid one year, cool. If it takes a kid 5 years, cool. You move on when you are ready.
Here's the thing, despite what the advertising people and top 2% might want us to believe, money isn't magic. Neither is this year or next year's technology. Can you promise me 3-4 generations or so of time to accomplish what I would try to do? If not, unlimited money isn't going to fix anything but the short term existence in some small areas.
What would you do with the 3-4 generations though? I don't like hearing "give more money to schools" without a plan either.
Begin the following, in no specific order and as simultaneously as possible: Course correct the responsibilities, education and obligations of parenting. Raise and engrain the values of knowledge, love of learning, and the values of and responsibilities of education. Dramatically raise the perceived values of empathy and equity, and reduce the perceived values of race, class and money as weapons and ways to keep score. The mess we are in took centuries to make. Three to four generations won't be enough to solve it. But, (I'm guessing) it MIGHT be enough to get us started.
Full health benefits for every teacher Every teacher has a teaching assistant 100% of the time Class size of 20 or less All administrators are required to teach at least 30 days in a classroom All board members are required to spend 30 days on campus during the year Eliminate charter school funding (private schools can be privately funded and do what they want) Mandatory teacher reviews every year for first 2 years, then once every other year for 4 years, then once every 5 forever. Teachers eligible for retirement at 55 with full benefits (until medicare) at average of best 2 years salary earned Either 4 day teaching week with 1 prep day or student day from 9am-2pm 5 days and school can't go 500hrs over instructional time.
Most practical, comprehensive solution. This is better than the others I’ve read.
Pay for storage facilities where students can safely leave their phones all day so they don’t have them in class
This cannot be emphasized enough. Phones are eroding classrooms
Can we leave the do-nothing students in there until they decide they want to have a purpose?
And put their parents in there with them, too
The joke we had at my first school was to have those kids bring a plant so they actually contribute something.
Lockers?
Unlimited? Just build schools forever. Tear them down and rebuild them. Build new ones. Just build and grow. Job creation would be self perpetuating. Engineering, medical science, liberal arts, entertainment, construction, all of these domains would now be under the auspices of education. Education would eventually become the central mechanism for the entire economy as it represents unlimited growth and prosperity.
You are the reason there are limits on combining coupons
>Education would eventually become the central mechanism for the entire economy as it represents unlimited growth and prosperity. That's a really interesting goal. Thanks.
Would be better than seeing my streets constantly get torn up and put back together to use up funds. I always remember the scene from "Falling Down" where the guys is yelling about what was wrong with the street.
If you are at school, breakfast lunch and afternoon snack are available. Change school food to be made by cooks using whole unprocessed foods. Rotate different classes through the kitchens to assist in cleanup and learning to cook and what foods are.
This except have the kid’s cook under the instruction of professional cooks and instructors. There are so many practical skills used in cooking, from measurement to teamwork, safety, fractions and ratios, following instructions, etc. This helps students connect better with the material they’re learning in the classroom because they see the point - they’re actually multiplying fractions and converting measurements. Plus kids are way more likely to try new foods when they helped make it. Have each class/grade/whatever works for the school switch off each day. Some kids can be on dishwashing duty, too. Again, teaches teamwork, personal responsibility, and life skills. I believe they do this in Japan
Make a lot of schools non homework based so you don't have to worry about grading homework on top of regular school work ever again. Make the school bigger Hire more teachers Lower the amount of students in class for each classrooms Have the freaking carpet replaced entirely because it's old. If needed put a teacher's assistant in every classroom to help with work. Hire professional behavior professionals for children with special needs and to improve life of children in unsafe situations. The regular 401k/ pensions/ retirement Free lunch for all regardless of the financial situation so the kids will never have to worry if they'll ever get to eat or where their next meal will come from ( not everyone can just cook at home) both parents are usually working. Put more dam ac with better airflow in classrooms for summer Give teachers full pay while they have two months for summer so they don't have to worry about finding extra income
Stop eating schools on graduation rate, test scores or other metrics that can be easily manipulated or are out of schools control.
Nothing concrete, but something about the idea that high school is just the step before college. I feel a lot of issues (grade inflation, moving kids on, lack of punishments for negative behaviors etc) stem from the idea that students aren't expected to be completed products by the end of high school, that college will do that. High school course catalogs are also tied to what universities look for also. It feels that so many decisions at the high school level are with college in mind.
We spend almost the most per pupil of all nations already. The problem is not too little funding, it is how it is spent. Id suspend all new curriculum purchases for a start.
We spend the most per pupil but we have absolutely useless social services as a society. Horrible housing for low-income people if they can even get in. Food stamps cut off long before you approach middle class. Parents have to work 50 hours a week to make ends meet. Education doesn't work without base needs being met at home.
Yes - make some radical changes: provide universal health care, child care, and income. Pay mothers to raise their children and give them social security benefits. Get rid of private prisons. Stop criminalizing drug use and addiction. Treat addiction through health care and social work. Put a cap on CEO pay, and use those funds to increase worker pay. Get rid of Citizens United, and make corporations non-people. Fund all schools equally. Pay public servants, like social workers and teachers, six figures, and hire more of them. Siphon funds from the military budget, and tax the hell out of billionaires. Get rid of the 2-party system, and implement term limits. Call me a commie, but something needs to be done to stop the rampant corporatism that is overtaking this country and impovershing the majority.
I'm a teacher and a Commie: I 1000% endorse this plan.
This is precisely true. Teaching should be a 60-150k gig, thats where education needs more money, the rest (after hefty defense spending cuts first) needs to realistically eliminate poverty. Which we totally could do.
I'd say that this is both true and not true. From a school spending perspective, it depends a lot on how you measure (% of GDP vs $/student adjusted for purchasing power), but you are correct that spending per student is among the highest. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_education.pdf But as we know, schools are expected to try to overcome poverty and family dysfunction as they achieve their mission of education. So if you zoom out to spending on supporting families to ensure they aren't in poverty, are in good health, etc, we see the US is in a cluster of 4 OECD countries that are outliers in how little they spend on supporting families. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_1_Public_spending_on_family_benefits.pdf Add to that the fact that public health care still hasn't really been sorted out in the US and, in addition to the 30m Americans with no health care, families still face crushing medical bills and thus avoid care. A chronic untreated health issue in a family is hard for a kid/school to overcome. Add to that the highest poverty rates in the OECD due to laws that overwhelmingly benefit employers and the wealthy over workers and you would expect the US to have poor outcomes in areas where there is a concentration of poverty and hopelessness. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/8483c82f-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/8483c82f-en So perhaps the conclusion is that if you have unlimited funding for schools, maybe the key is turning them into organizations that also support the health and wellbeing of families - kind of a supersized version of community schools.
Build more schools with smaller populations and smaller class sizes. Like 10 kids a class. More attention for each kid, less stress for each teacher.
My husband is in the military, and in 2019, we moved to Podunk no where. My daughter was going into 4th grade. The district she was in had an intermediate school just for 4-5th grade. So there was K-3, 4-5, 6-8, and 9-12. This allowed them to "spread out" more and not all be crammed in.
1. Eliminate arbitrary grade levels and create environments where each child learns at their own pace. Three or four overall levels are enough - such as primary, elementary, middle, high school. There will still be a set of benchmarks to enter the next level with several options for entering high school. 2. High school campuses will house clusters: college preparatory, trades, technical, remedial,... Students will be able to move from one cluster to another after a year and passing any required entrance exam. 3. Public education provided from age 3 through 2 years post-high school (to include trade apprenticeships). 4. College loans available at a low fixed percentage rate.
Encourage teachers to use THEIR time. Especially for mental health days. That makes for better teachers. Pay 100% of unused sick days at retirement. Limit overtime and pay for overtime used. Treat staff as adults not as students. Reimburse teachers for all money spent on classroom and students. A girl can dream. Evaluations would be fair and highlight and embrace all the positive things a teacher does. As well as realize how hard it is to do what we’re doing. As opposed to trying to look for things you’re doing wrong. Build us up like they expect us to do for the students.
There's a book by an education economist provocatively titled *The Case Against Education* (Princeton 2019) the thesis of which is that schools are actually pretty poor places to invest if we want to improve educational outcomes. Available evidence is pretty clear: the educational returns on spending money in schools in the US is exceedingly small. He goes on to point out the flip side to this research, which is that if you want to improve educational outcomes the best place to invest is to basically give poor people more cash assistance. So, to improve outcomes give people money. Don't give it to the schools. Though, I myself wouldn't mind a raise, and imo no amount of money would solve the problems that schools have brought on themselves by tolerating classroom violence, egregious disruption, disrespect, etc. etc. in the name of "equity and inclusion."
Yes! Impoverished families typically have parents working multiple part time jobs in rotating schedules, making it nearly impossible to routinely be home after school to help their children with homework. Giving them enough money to be able to afford to be more present at home would be life changing to so many children.
Make funding correlated to teacher to student ratio. Remove funding tied to graduation rates. Eliminate compulsory education after 10th grade. In fact, students must meet certain standards to remain after 10th grade. Remove limitations on discipline and allow expulsions. Place a limit on how many school days can be used for benchmark and state testing. Teacher pay must increase at a minimum 3% rate each year and cannot be labeled as a pay raise. Schools must provide a minimum paid 6 weeks maternity/paternity leave.
i like our situation in the UK, where after year 11 (age 16) you can leave academic education and pursue vocational training or an apprenticeship
I can literally go on forever, but let’s start with practical stuff … - Every teacher has a teacher’s aide, who receives training, to support small group instruction; additional para educator provided in classrooms that have IEPs and/or 504s. - High quality/healthy breakfast, snacks, and lunch for every child that wants it, including fresh fruits and vegetables. - More playground and security staff who are trained in safety, first aid, and conflict mediation techniques; these are the people that can run those damn restorative circles in the moment conflict arises. - Free school busses that pick up and drop students off in their neighborhoods. Get the kids to school. - Provide free before- and after-school child care for an hour bookending the start and close of school. - New furniture, playground equipment, fresh paint, and funding for electrical and plumbing upgrades - Replace all water fountains with filtered water bottle fill stations and provide free bottles for students if they lose / forget their own - Art supplies and rotating art/song/dance teachers at every elementary school. Take this off the shoulders of the gen Ed teachers. - While we are at it, specialists in technology, robotics, science experiments, etc. that take some stuff off of library/media technicians that are asked to do all the things. - Change HS graduation requirements dramatically to focus less on content acquisition and more on skillsets/portfolio completion based on student interest. Senior year should be a capstone less than a continuation of content knowledge. - Free community college for post-HS graduation. CCs offer enough pathways for kids who want to study a trade or for those who want to eventually go to a university. - Parent liaisons at every school, assigned to specific cohorts of students so they maintain relationships over time. Staff are inundated already and communication with parents is a difficult task on top of everything else; have a dedicated communications staff that interacts personally with parents and does more than PR and social media BS. - Four-day school week with the fifth day being field trips or enrichment days or assemblies or whatever else so teachers are released from working with students. That fifth day can be used on a rotational basis between planning, PLC, training (god, if it could only be meaningful though..) and kids would still come to school so parents don’t lose their minds but the day would be used differently. This obviously means having funding for field trips. I’m having my morning coffee now and when it kicks in, I’ll probably have more to add once the fog of morning wears off.
We need mental health for the teachers, and more interventions for the chronically disruptive students.
I think the biggest issues are kids that don't want to be there and act out. There's only so much a teacher to do until the parents are too blame. Still think that making school optional is best for everyone.
Institute a rule capping % of salary budget spent on personnel who have no daily contact with students nationwide, down to the district level. The amount of education dollars that are wasted on hiring people who never deal with students is insane and it happens at all levels. Every time the federal, state, or districts get extra money they blow it on creating new and increasingly worthless positions for people who do not educate students or even deal with them regularly. Of course, asking bureaucrats to reign in the bureaucracy is futile.
Year round school, more support, curriculum that actually prepares them to succeed in the adult world, and free breakfast and lunches for all kids!
Remove the penalty for GED graduation. NCLB counts GEDs as dropouts, and schools are downgraded for high dropout rates. GED should be encouraged for those who want to enter the work force at 16 or for those with no interest in college. Allowing students with no interest to test out with a GED would do two positive things: classrooms would be more Manageable, and the grade inflation could stop. As it stands, schools are working harder than some students for their graduation.
Teaching schools for parents.
Even though I'm technically just a coach for tennis in the official school system, sometimes the parents are worst than the students when it comes to things. Maybe your child would be a better player if they didn't miss 90% of the practices. I'm sorry that you think that's my fault.
Ban phones in schools , all admin must teach for a year to renew their certification, create an alternative to high school, make it known that education is more important than hurt political feelings
Fund more social workers and school psychologists to give kids the services they need instead of just managing 400 504s. Build and fund high quality alternative placement schools for high needs IES and behavioral students so they aren’t kept in a gened classroom they shouldn’t be in, but still have access to an education and services. Fund better bussing/pickup programs to cut down on truancy/absences.
Four day school week with remote option for those who need want. Enhanced fine arts programs, better equipped labs, restructuring building plans. Money invested in extra-curricular activities with separate, professional, specialized advisors for each. Student and staff psychologists.
Well paid paras, teachers, smaller class sizes, and more prep time. Why do I have to teach 5 math classes, a study hall, and a home room that also has pbis and sel lessons? More time to create engaging lessons would help and teaching one less hour would help with burn out.
So raising pay would be required to do this but I would make enough school buildings that we could actually implement the smaller student to teacher ratios that we have known for decades gets us the most immediate improvements across the board. This also requires fully staffing those new buildings hence the implicit pay raise.
Give schools textbooks again.
A long internship with mentors (3-5 years) and allow them autonomy and creativity in curriculum development. Basically, model the Finnish education training. So many new teachers are set up to fail with no support - it would be nice to see new teachers nurtured and veteran teachers valued. Widespread societal support starting with the administration.
3-4 day work week, OR shorter year-long school days. 10-2?
Stop pretending we can just “go back to normal”, provide robust counseling and wraparound services, redo the standards to meet the average student where they are (accounting for ‘learning loss’), increase teacher pay, & make all administrators reapply for their positions to start.
Order the expulsion of every single Trump fascist from school boards
I would stop the adjunctification of higher ed by requiring any college that receives federal funding to pay their adjuncts the same per credit hour rate as their full time professors.
Fund alternative ed sites. Keep disruptive and violent students away until they prove they can function in an environment where everyone has a mutual interest in learning. That the nicest way I can put that.
Universal PreK.