When I was young, teaching, like nursing, was still largely a women’s job. It was one of the jobs where women were predominate, and so smart, capable women went into it for lack of alternatives where they would be accepted. But since women were rarely the primary breadwinners, and their incomes were secondary to the family, their pay was decent, but not great. After all, these were women, so whatever money they brought home was atop their husband’s. It was gravy, if you will.
Simultaneously, teachers were respected because education was respected. It was the way children could succeed in life, to do better than their parents and climb the ladder to success. Teachers were the conduit to this future and were appreciated and feared because of it. If a teacher told a parent that little Johnny was misbehaving, little Johnny could well expect to pay a price for his teacher’s disapproval, sometimes a punishment like being grounded. Sometimes, a swift smack across the backside. You didn’t piss off a teacher if you didn’t want to anger your parents. Even if the teacher was wrong, she was right. Parents did not question a teacher.
Much has changed since then, as Thomas Edsall explains.
Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.
Pandemic issues aside, which exacerbated but clouded many of these problems, students are the worse for these problems.
Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.
And then there’s the mental health issue atop the educational issues, as students are suffering from an epidemic of mental illness, depression and anxiety, that they hadn’t suffered in the bad old days when they were learning more and better.
As an aside, while Ivies are busily trying to reinvent themselves to create diversity and inclusion from a sows ear, few talk about the GIGO problem. If students are doing poorly in elementary education, by what magic would they be expected to read at grade level when they enter college?
But now that the opportunities for women have exploded, it’s created a hole in the old profession where they once dominated.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.
On the one hand, the pay has largely stagnated, although this varies greatly by locale, where some areas pay teachers quite handsomely (like Long Island, for example) and competition for jobs is fierce, while others go begging for qualified teachers. And this, of course, raises the issue of “qualifications,” a sore point in a profession that the best and brightest women no longer wish to join and men still see as women’s work.
In a study of teachers’ salaries, Sylvia Allegretto, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, found a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010. In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364. By 2010, teachers made $1,352 and other graduates made $1,811. By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, schools have become a battle ground in the culture wars, where memorizing times tables takes a back seat to memorizing pronouns and gender identities.
White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.” In addition, they write, “Teachers (46 percent) and principals (58 percent) in schools with predominantly white students were significantly more likely than teachers (34 percent) and principals (36 percent) in schools with predominantly students of color to consider the intrusion of political issues and opinions as a job-related stressor.”
Curiously, the relative positions of educators and parents are at odds, giving rise to this “intrusion” of political issues into the schoolhouse. The cause and effect nature of these stresses seems to elude educators, who can’t understand why parents might take issue with the teacher selecting words like “genderfluid” for the spelling test.
Having had a long conversation with a dear friend not too long ago, it appears that there is another issue that failed to make the cut into Edsall’s analysis. Parents no longer value education as highly as they once did. Students no longer feel compelled to do as teachers instruct them. “They say ‘no,'” my friend explained.
I tell them to do the assignment, they stare at me and just say “no,” as in “you can’t make me.” And they’re right, I can’t. I can’t punish them. I can’t fail them. If I call their parents, a “good” parent will make excuses and an asshole parent will scream at me that it’s my fault because I must suck as teacher. These are usually the same parents who won’t read their kids, won’t help them with homework and are too busy having their own fun to give a damn how their kids are doing.
There is much going very wrong with education, and trying to fix it on the back end by handing out degrees to students who can’t spell their own name but know which boxes to check on an application and how to memorize insipid word salad isn’t going to work. While making the job of teaching sufficiently remunerative to attract smarter people will help, it’s only one of a great many serious problems that make little Johnny dumber. And no matter how good the teacher, no student can be taught if he can just say “no.”
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Well, the important thing is the teachers using pronouns of choice. The kids will learn what they need from Internet memes.
I can relate, while we were fortunate that our children have good teachers our daughter specially rejected teaching as a career “because teachers get shit on all the time”. Along that line one of my son’s high school Spanish teachers quit his job to go full time selling wooden phone stands at the Saturday Market because it was less aggravation for the same pay.
While it’s deeply unfashionable and apparently a “tool of the patriarchy” discipline is the only way to create an environment why those who want to learn are able to. Of course it doesn’t help that people with PhDs are denigrating education, and willingness to do work as “whiteness”
Even way back when, teachers were frustrated that the only parents who came to the parent/teacher meetings were those whose kids were doing well, not those with kids that needed help.
Do they even have such meetings anymore? Does anybody go?
If the parents don’t give a damn, the kids won’t give a damn. A vicious downward spiral, that can only be fixed by parents that break the cycle.
But everyone here knows that.
Not “only by parents.” It can be fixed by Yale and Harvard too.
Point taken, but who or what could drive Yale and Harvard to do it?
I’m probably not comprehending the complexity of the problem, so please excuse my simplicity.
I haven’t a clue, so perhaps we share the same simplicity.
Sharing is caring.
I’ve attended many BOE meetings in my town. Years ago I did so as a parent (with kids too young for the system) and within the last 4 years as the Town Council liaison to the Board of Education.
Parents rarely show up, until their child is affected in some way. When competition for resources and budgets forced cuts, the board knew how to do it. Pick programs where the pain was sharp, but only for a small segment and you can easily win a war of attrition. They came for the drama program, but I didn’t have kids in the drama program, so I remained silent… except those parents had no clue a drama program existed, nor cared about the lack of funding. The mom I heard crying into the microphone because the drama program was her kid’s passion and the only hope of a scholarship to attend college where he’d be the first in the family was shared with the empty room.
This is the current state of BOE meetings. And it’s largely the reason that one candidate in whom I had high hopes when she was overwhelmingly elected in 2020, baled to seek other office 2 years into her 3 year term.
Oh, and she was the third out of 3 elected in 2020 to quit.
Public education is a mess. It’s problems are structural, but the excuses flow like water.
I see “inadequate funding for schools” made it on to Edsall’s list. My mother-in-law was one of the last one-room schoolhouse teachers in Arizona. Her pay was abysmal and her higher education consisted of two years in the state teacher’s college. She served alone in a loose community of ranchers. The schoolhouse, built by hand by the parents of her charges, really was only one room with a pot-belied wood and coal stove, home-made tables and benches, a chronic shortage of books, paper and pencils and an unheated outhouse. She generally had about a dozen students in at least five grades. She helped those families produce educators, state senators, WWII fighter pilots, chemists, historians, doctors and at least one lawyer. The same families still raise cattle in those valleys.
“inadequate funding” had nothing to do with it. Her dedication and commitment coupled with the disciplined hardscrabble work ethic of the community she found herself in was the basis of her students’ successes. She liked the work and the people so much she married one of the local boys and I got a great wife out of the deal.
Great story.
Being the lone teacher of a one-room schoolhouse might be particularly appealing to a teacher valuing autonomy from bureaucracy and standardized teaching methods more than money. If she were highly creative and intelligent she could work wonders, as seems to have been the case.
Conversely, as education has become more bureaucratized smart teachers become frustrated and leave.
She was born in 1910 and began teaching in 1930. According to her personal history she took the job because it paid a steady wage. She used to chuckle when telling my wife that the state education department sent someone once a year to see how she was doing and deliver new books. There was no school district, just the local parents.
My wife taught in elementary schools for 28 years, the last dozen being in a district with 300,000+- students. Whenever she complained about the layers of “educated idiots” in the “Ed Shed” her mother trotted out the once-a-year story.
Amazing, really, how we have created schools that, in thirteen years, don’t manage to bring all the students even to functional literacy. Parents who care better be looking after their own.
Perhaps an over simplification: Get rid of half the bureaucrats and the system will imporve.
Seems like we are rapidly heading toward a two-tier primary educational system where parents who care and have the funds send their children to private and parochial schools. Everyone else is relegated to the rapidly declining public system. Of course, this has been happening for decades but there is a real urgency to the movement these days. Wish there was a way to invest in the private school system.
I have multiple friends and family members who are involved in primary/secondary education, varying from poor school districts to middle-class districts, and they essentially echo what your friend said. There are obviously some parents who do value education and respect teachers, but many parents either don’t care, and view the public school system as a taxpayer-funded daycare so that they can work or do whatever else it is they do during the day such that *you*, the teacher or principal, better not bring any concerns about your kid to them; or they are overly indulgent of their child and assume any behavioral, educational, or developmental issues they might have are because the teachers/principals/admin/other kids are hostile to their child. For the latter, many worry that any disciplinary action or bad educational evaluation of their kids will wreck their child’s future, so they expect the school district to wave their kid through.
The latter indulgent/neurotic type is much more common in middle-class districts, the former in poorer districts.
As a former teacher I am totally agreed that a lot of politics permeates education. When the, now happily recalled, San Francisco School Board decided the renaming schools (based on often inaccurate history) was more important than opening or running them during the pandemic, they showed the kind of political and cultural BS that often gets shoveled in a teacher’s way. The politically inclined are often way more interested in signaling how great they are rather than the nuts and bolts of educating well, including student accountability. If we want literate students who have the ability to analyze and parse numbers and words, that is what we need to focus on. Sadly, on all levels (including at colleges of education) that seems like its on the bottom of the priority list. It was bad when I taught high school in the 1990’s, it is much worse now. On the other hand with AI rapidly gaining in all of this, maybe none of us need think at all!!
Public schools are now run for the benefit of the unions, they have captured the system. Kids, who cares? See Pournells Iron law of Bureaucracy.
Charter schools in my area get 70% of the public school funding, yet always get the top rankings. Selection bias is part of it, but mostly it’s they hire teachers, not administrators.
Bluntly, if the parents and kids don’t care about getting an education, why should they be allowed to drag down those who do want to learn?
Let anyone who can teach do so. Abolish the requirement for an “education degree” . Do you really think that with an BS from MIT and math though calculus, differential equations, linear and matrix algebra, not to mention a six sigma black belt and 30 years hands on experience, that I can’t teach high school math? The state says I’m not able to…but a state school graduate with an Ed degree , no experience and basic algebra can.
The pandemic lockdowns have had the benefit that more people are home schooling, which may break this monopoly. Those who value education will get it, those who don’t will be a drag on our nation.
This is an example of an OVERDETERMINED PROBLEM. There are so many causes in parallel that effective action on any few of them will have negligible effect:
Here are a few of them but no matter how many anyone can list the list of those they cannot perceive will have more influence. Here is my short list of some of them:-
Anti-Intellectualism;
Anxiety;
Culture Wars;
Disadvantage and poverty limiting the ability to benefit from education for the children of the underclass;
Fear of bullying and violence;
Sneering contempt for those who think as pointy headed elitists;
The belief by many that disadvantage of those they dislike is to their own advantage;
Themisms, including classism, religion based hatred of those who worship incorrect gods, racism…;
Essentially the USA is house divided against itself in so many ways that decay and collapse are inevitable. The US is an empire in decline, it is where the Soviet Union was in the eighties. It may bumble and muddle on for another 20 years or it may collapse next week.
In the Eighties, we were still worried that the Soviet Union would soon overcome us!