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.
Good read. I worked at schools in the early 2000s as an IT consultant. It was quite interesting as at the time I wasn't really that far from high school myself. Back then though, it was more of seeing school from a different perspective. Teachers reminded me of the high school gossip cliques mainly. These were low budget rural schools though. I looked up the one I worked at the most and their budget 15 years later is a whopping $5M, so it's probably not much of a comparison. I didn't notice the woke back then much though, but I suspect a lot of those teachers have aged out by now anyway.
I've heard some stuff from a friend of my homeschooled cousin that's in public school. It's all sort of second hand info, but I've heard of his tranny teacher and another gay one, fights at school, furry students, etc. I've definitely not heard of any discipline. This is in a red-voting part of a red state. Small city, for the sake of reference and not getting too specific, I'll just say it's not going to be anywhere near say the population of a top 200 city in the US. White majority but I think blacks being the 2nd demographic.
Wow, I would have abused the shit out of this in school. I bet I wouldn't have turned in a single piece of homework any more than putting my name on it. I didn't do most of it in the later grades anyway. Many teachers didn't like me back then. I was never disruptive, rude, anything like that, but if I wasn't interested in a topic I was going to do the bare minimum effort to get the grade I wanted and had no shame about it. If I could have started with a 50% baseline on homework, I'd have made straight As.