Thread

Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?

148 points · 332 comments · obscurette

ValueTheory · 1790606717 · focus · HN ↗
"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
1. toomuchtodo · 1790606824 · focus · HN ↗
  Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own. I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
  From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
  (last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
  Schools across the U.S. are trying a 4-day week. Why? To retain teachers - <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the-u-s-are-trying-a-4-day-week-why-to-retain-teachers" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the... - November 8th, 2023
  Teachers are calling it quits amid rising school violence, burnout and stagnating salaries - <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/us/teachers-quitting-shortage-stress-burnout-dg/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/us/teachers-quitting-shortage... - May 31st, 2023
  Four day school week? In rural Missouri, more districts see it as a way to recruit teachers - <a href="https://www.kcur.org/education/2022-06-11/four-day-school-week-in-rural-missouri-more-districts-see-it-as-a-way-to-recruit-teachers" rel="nofollow">https://www.kcur.org/education/2022-06-11/four-day-school-we... - June 11th, 2022
  1. nailer · 1790607011 · focus · HN ↗
    > teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own
    Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
    [deleted] · 1790607102 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    nemomarx · 1790607177 · focus · HN ↗
    How much of that goes to the teacher? It seems to be soaked up by administration.
    ericmay · 1790607386 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, what does the administration do? What programs does it have to manage? How are administrators paid compared to teachers?
    zdragnar · 1790607394 · focus · HN ↗
    The teachers who didn't grade homework and passed students who hadn't actually learned anything? They're utterly powerless and more funding won't help them. The schools need to radically change their approach to education, top to bottom.
    mrguyorama · 1790608711 · focus · HN ↗
    Those teachers wanted to fail the kids, but administration told them they couldn't.
    Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
    Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
    zdragnar · 1790610059 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm calling BS here. The article on NHJ would have had the failure rate around 50% or higher based on how poorly the students performed. The school literally cannot accommodate so many students failing a grade level and being held back.
    Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
    Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
    TitaRusell · 1790617430 · focus · HN ↗
    Schools are for education. They are not for raising kids. That is the parents job.
    If the home situation is fucked up it doesn't matter how much money you throw at the schools.
    alwaysthiserror · 1790615093 · focus · HN ↗
    > 52K of funding per student
    This gets kinda tricky to analyze, and especially hard to compare to other countries, which may have very different ways of accounting for things.
    That money goes to:
    1) Salaries for school administrators.
    2) Salaries for teachers.
    3) Salaries for office support staff (e.g. secretaries)
    4) Depending on how the accounting is done, that may include a fraction of the salaries of district admin (super and assistant superintendents, and Nb there can be several of the latter, even in smallish districts) and their office support staff.
    5) Facilities construction and renovation, and/or servicing debt on bonds for past facilities construction and renovation.
    6) Property and building maintenance. Mowing, fixing potholes and re-painting lines in parking lots, roof leaks, playground maintenance, whatever.
    7) Transportation for students (e.g. busses). This can get pretty expensive in sparsely-populated areas.
    8) Extracurriculars, including supplemental pay for coaches and sponsors, and maybe an equipment budget.
    9) Supplies for "specials" classes, including stuff like band instruments and maintenance of those instruments (lots of places you bring your own, but that's not true for all instruments, often the really big ones, especially, will be school-provided) and art supplies and all that.
    10) Electronics and computer services. Powerschool licenses, laptops, "smart" projectors, all that stuff.
    11) Special educators and paraprofessionals who will have much smaller student-counts they're responsible for than classroom teachers. This can get as low-count as a dedicated para for a single student, following around and helping them all day.
    12) ESOL services. Districts with lots of students speaking English as a second language (if at all...) bear higher costs.
    13) Special services for kids who can't fit into the mold of ordinary school. This can look like a district budget paying for transportation to and from a fairly distant magnet or private school, which school will probably cost a lot more than ordinary public schools because they'll have far lower student-to-staff ratios.
    14) School lunches, and maybe breakfasts. The food, the staff to serve it, health code compliance and appliance maintenance, all that. IDK if the spending figure would include money students put into accounts for their kids to use for this purpose, but lunches are often subsidized to at least some degree, if not 100%.
    15) Other support staff and services (nurses, counselors and psychologists, librarians, janitors)
    16) Other supplies. Books, paper, toner, et c.
    (and probably more stuff I'm forgetting about)
    The result is that actual spending for a given student, if we restricted it to only the things they're directly benefiting from, can be a ton lower than average per-student spending. Meanwhile, some students soak up well over $100k in spending per year, all on their own.
    Also, it's easy to pick out some of the above that might plausibly not count as part of the school's budget, in, say, another country that simply made different choices about what budget each thing belongs in, or might just naturally have far lower costs due to geography or demography or whatever.
    TL;DR average spending per-student doesn't tell you a lot on its own, and you definitely can't usefully compare one school to another based on such a figure without gathering a lot more context.
    underlipton · 1791060409 · focus · HN ↗
    Also doesn't capture parental spend in places where the per-student cost is "lower". The district only spends $nK, but then the parents add in private tutoring, study materials like books and computer programs/subscriptions, etc. Even something as basic as the monetary value of "supervision during study", where another child is on their own because both parents have to work just to afford rent and food.

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