Great commentary. Look, I was a public & private school teacher in CA. I finished out my career in public schools & wild horses could not drag me back to teaching in that state.
Granted, sometimes teachers are the problem. I’ve seen this 1st hand. However, many times their hands are tied by the school district & principal. For instance, in our district, all discipline was to be dealt w/ by a child study. This was a merry-go-round of school psych, principal, & teacher meetings that basically just studied the problem to death.
Geeze, did we hate them! Then there were contracts where we had to check off behavior or write it for a child daily. Another punishment for teachers.
Many times I had parents violate the contract as they would not sign it when their little darling did something wrong.
Also, our district was famous for passing on students that flunked to make them look good in Sacramento. I had personal experince w/ this as the parents, principal & yours truly agreed to fail a child due to grades & maturity. Unbeknowst to me, our principal “lost” his paperwork & he was passed on to 7th grade. I only found out when one of his new teachers called me & asked why he was passed!
Then, you have parents that spend no time w/ their child or could care less what their darling does in school.
Teachers have it touch & many times their hands are tied as to what they can do for discipline & classroom control. Basically, in CA it is down to talk & threats of revoking things a student could normally do.
Besides this, CA schools are a huge bastion of PC & liberalism. Lord help ya if you are a conservative teaher there!
Standards are also constantly dumbed down to make schools look successful & good.
I personally know of a friend who taught high school in CA. His principal told him to allow his students to cheat in order to pass 12th grade graduation standard testing. He finally quit over this as it was a no win situation.
Then we have about 1/4 of our students that are from illegal alien families that simply do not assimilate. (Naturally, this does not include lily white areas like Marin County, etc.)
So on one hand, you have the State pushing to get these immigrant kids higher scores & on the other hand, they don’t help a bit. All of this manditory garbage that accomplishes nothing, but gives lots of administrator’s jobs.
Discipline is such a pain in public schools. I’ve actually had 7 year olds threaten to sue me for disciplining them by making them stand next to a wall!
But even when I taught, we got flack about taking away recess from poorly behaved kids because they needed excercise. You just can’t do anything anymore in public schools & a lot of them are huge babysitting clubs.
Public schools in CA are a god awful mess. We have 2 kids, one a 10 yr. old & a 16 yr. old. Gehenna would freeze over before we let them to to ANY public school in CA.
Been there & done that.
Homeschooling all the way…
