This school year I went "undercover" at my local school district. Long story short, I'm in a position in life where I don't really have to work so I can do more or less what I want (once I see to it my children are taken care of that is).
So I decided to become a substitute teacher. It's shockingly easy. They'll let anyone with a pulse do it apparently because I just applied on the website and a week later I was in a room with 40 other people in an orientation.
I went to elementary, middle schools and high schools throughout the district to get a good idea of what's going on all levels. I know we all have a basic understanding that public education is bad but what I saw shocked even me.
My district has begun a policy called "inclusion" wherein all the special ed kids are put in regular classes in the name of, well, inclusion. This goes about like you'd expect. The teachers spend all their time trying to control the screaming autistic kid while all the others play Fortnite on their school issued laptops. The gen-ed teachers told me they were given no extra training about how to deal with kids with special needs. They just got an email a week before school started letting them know of the new policy.
The lowest grade any student can be given is a 50%. If a student puts their name on a paper and turns it in blank, congratulations! Automatic 50%. This was done in the name of "equity" because certain demographics were performing poorly compared to others (you know who). The fudging of the grades serves to eliminate some of that gap and also boost graduation rates so they get that sweet, sweet federal funding.
The most shocking thing to me though was the absolute lawlessness in the high schools. Teachers told me they have no way to discipline a kid now. The admin will side with the kid every time (especially if they have a certain baseline of melanin) so the teachers don't bother. There were a minimum of two fights every day and the video was circulating on snapchat 20 minutes later every time.
Kids do basically no work and learn nothing at any time. Assignments are either ignored or the kids get the answers from a group chat.
I looked up the district's budget to see if maybe a lack of funds was causing some of this. Nope. My district's total budget for this year was 200 million (!!!) dollars. No doubt all that money is lining someone's pocket because it hasn't gone to any of the classrooms that are the same as they were in the nineties when I was in them.
The kicker? I live in one of the reddest states in the US. Get your kids out of public schools as fast as you can.
Don't get me started on inclusion, this has been my bugbear for decades.
It's a massive overcorrection from the past that harms everyone. The kid with special ed needs gets sent to some random local school with no training and resources to handle them, while the other 30 normal kids get disrupted.
The past did slightly over segregate out the slightly special needs kids to be fair, a kid who could (and should) integrate with the rest of society, some mild cerebal palsy so he can't walk right? And that's it, not disruptive? Yeah ok he doesn't need to go to the specialist cerebral palsy school. The high functioning aspergers kid who just misses a lot of social cues, yeah he needs to learn to function in amongst the rest of society, him being there is a part of the therapy.
But the Deaf kid who needs an interpreter? They've closed the schools for the deaf and they each get issued an 'interpreter' with all of 6 months training in a level IV (FSI scale) language! It takes 2 years to qualify as an interpreter, and pass a test where you need 70% accuracy. 70% after 2 years, imagine what the 6 month old student is interpreting, they're getting 20%, at best.
What is the point, it's just disruptive to everyone.
That's been my experience for about a decade.
A sperg in every elementary school classroom holding it hostage daily, screaming, writhing on the floor and throwing shoes in the hallway while the teacher and the rest of the students go into lockdown and hide in the classroom.