This is really sad: schools giving up on teaching children. Not that it hasn't happened before (NCLBA, impoverished districts), but it's still sad when schools fail at their only job.
There are significant numbers of kids who have been trained not to want to learn in America because America is deeply anti-intellectual and teaching to excessive standardized testing drives what little curiosity there was out of greater numbers of them. As a result of this and wildly inappropriate teacher performance measurement, the really good teachers who inspire kids get frustrated and leave. As a result, most American public schools are watered-down, don't care about excellence, and are de facto prison daycare with absurd levels of performative testing pantomiming a quality education while being anything but. It's not the teachers' fault but the parents, voters, school districts, state education boards, and past US presidents who all share in culpability.
This, sadly, conforms very well with my experience of lower-income/higher-minority schools. I was a volunteer teacher (for a program teaching young ones to code with Scratch, once weekly) at a number of West Philly grade 1-12 schools for a few years, and the environment in those schools was obviously to the detriment of the students. Wonderful kids, but it's no wonder that so many won't make it to a better life when they're taught nothing of value, but are taught that they're to be feared, derided, and not cared for from a young age. I kid you not, the average SAT math score from one school I taught at was in the 300s (and of course, less than 10% of those graduating took the SAT/ACT) — you can score a 300 on the SAT math without answering a single question correctly. The students were taught nothing at all. There was constant cacophony of teachers yelling all the time, I saw multiple police in the halls every day, had to be scanned myself going in. The whole thing was ridiculous, and it's only clear purpose was to imprison those wonderful children in the poverty and destitution they were born into
PARCC, Common Core, and the heightened focus on (even more) standardized tests is an unmitigated educational disaster. My children have been wasting their time taking practice tests instead of actually learning. The school has to jump through the distict's hoops. The district has to jump through the state's hoops. Kids don't actually get educated because everyone's afraid of failing the tests so they're overpreparing. My kids are only learning how to game the system and take tests and not actually learning information analysis and synthesis.
It really feels like we are gutting our education system with this kind of nonsense. It's so weird. We do so poorly in our education system, yet rather than simply doing what the effective and successful education systems and societies do, we decide that we need to change everything and now deprive children of playing as if they are some kind of little adults.
I watched a very smart 5-year-old turn into a listless and bored 6-year-old. The school system's practice of beating down initiative can take effect shockingly quickly.
The problem is that schools, especially in the west, have totally lost the plot! We need to get back to its original and sole purpose. Teaching young people the basic skills needed to work in society. As well as the skills needed to move onto secondary education and vocational training. The fact that so much time and effort is spent on things other than core subjects, even while we graduate children who fail at one or more of said subjects, is inexcusable. It also makes efforts to push things like political/social activism and issues onto children, all the more infuriating! (not to mention the real harm and derangement doing so causes to children and young people's mental health)
My schools were all like that. "Kids aren't paying attention to our standardized-test preparation studies! Perhaps we should make schools more like bleak prisons, and force people to spend the bulk of their formative years there! That will certainly result in a more capable general populace."
That's no surprise, actually. The public education establishment is quite simply setting minority kids up for failure while also being deeply in denial about the fact that they are failing, and most importantly, rejecting even the slightest amount of accountability for that ongoing failure. Silencing test outcomes and lowering expectations across the board would merely be the latest means to that end. They are unironically piggybacking on "woke" memes as a means of defending their own petty privilege, all the while quite literally perpetuating oppression and white supremacy as a result. The K12 education system in the U.S. is increasingly a sad joke by developed-world standards, and it's not going to be White or Asian kids who are hurt the most when we collectively fail to educate them to a minimally satisfactory standard.
It seems to me that the us education system rearranges the deck chairs while the ignoring the titanic problem that the schools are designed for the staff, not the kids.
I think our school system is approaching a local maxima where the idea that learning sucks and should be avoided is embedded in as many young brains as possible.
Folks - it is not the schools - it is the kids and the situations they are raised in.
The schools are nearly identical everywhere. Even crap schools, if you put those teachers in an upper middle class setting, they would shine.
And the most talented teachers in the nation, put into one of those violent inner city schools - would not magically make the the kids pass math.
The kids grow up with single/no parents or one/both parents in jail, no stable job or income, total lack of support at home - or worse, parents that actively call them 'stupid' or tell them they're worthless, zero educated role models, by age 8 idolizing street tough guys, by age 11 wanting to join them, by grade 10 hardly ever showing up, 5 years behind, could care less, getting into fights, peers mocking them if they do well, haven't been out of the neighbourhood in a decade, no serious extra curricular activities etc..
The 2018 OECD/PISA scoring really highlights a lot of these issues.
I was driving through Detroit one night 'for fun' with my work mates to give them a taste of 'some parts of America' - it was 12:45am and on the street corner at the gas station was a child, on his bike, just sitting there waiting for something.
Think of much you can surmise from just that one little thing: a 7 year old, up at 1 am, out in the neighbourhood, hanging out on a Tuesday night. There is no way that story is good, and there are probably 100 things that are bad. Just from that one glimpse you can probably estimate that kid might not be likely to finish school.
Most schools and teachers are good, esp. the one's that have the tenacity to teach in the inner city.
We need decent jobs, stable families, boring nonviolent neighbourhoods, kids who can be free to be 'into' school stuff and the chess club, basic healthcare - i.e. your normal, middle-class semi-aspirational upbringing. If we can do that, grades will go way up to the normal middle class level.
I'm the same. But are they worse than they were when we were in school? I don't blame the kids for doing badly or being disinterested. But why is it rapidly becoming worse?
>I feel bad for these kids as their future is being pigeon-holed.
For what it's worth, your opponent's argument shares the very same sentiment. After all, the schools in question all offer little appreciation for self-directed specialization.
This is depressing and an absolute travesty. If this was anywhere else but California I might look to the parents for blame, but here I blame the teachers and the school system.
Maybe I'm over thinking this, but the public education curriculum in major cities seem to have strayed far from making sure that every child is drilled in the basics: Basic reading, writing, and mathematics.
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