The very worst schools in my city pay significantly better than the ones out in the "good" districts. They can do that because they get a ton of extra funding from the state and (I think) feds. I think the only schools that pay better than them are a small minority of the private schools.
It doesn't help much, because working conditions are so bad that anyone with options still doesn't want to work there. More funerals for kids. More 2nd-graders threatening teachers. More lockdowns over gun threats and such. More drug problems. More chronically-absent kids. More turnover among students. More horror-stories about home life. Most teachers who can afford to turn it down decide that their sanity & safety is worth more than an extra $8-12k/yr. Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast. It's brutal, and money—at least, money spent on education per se—does not seem to be the solution.
> The level of complacent sloth within administration is not to be underestimated, and outright graft does occur from time to time.
Heh, yeah, and that's in most districts, not just the poor ones :-(
"Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast."
I have a friend who completed his teaching degree. He said the policies at the school where he student-taught were so bad that he decided not to apply to teaching jobs. Stuff like you weren't allowed to give less than a 50% as long as they put their name on the paper, and ineffective discipline options. Basically, the school was just passing kids through the grades without the kids really learning and some kids wouldn't even try. I guess if you just graduate them, they're no longer the school's problem...
Yeah, kids don't fail grades anymore but are just passed ever upward, and many schools have incompetent admin (of all the things I was wrong about as a kid, turns out school administrators are, on average, even dumber than I thought they were back then—it's shocking, really) who insist on completely worthless discipline schemes, among other bad ideas. Can confirm all that's true.
So then you're a teacher with a bunch of 6th graders, say, 2/3 of whom are one or more grade levels behind on at least one subject, but that material's not what will be on the test that'll be used to evaluate your performance. The right thing to do is to go back and fill in the gaps for those kids, but you don't have the time, and showing them enough of this year's material that they might at least get a few answers on the standardized test correct is safer for your career anyway.
This is because it’s really about the parents. Everything hinges on the parents. No amount of money will enable a school system to completely compensate for poor parenting (whatever the reason is). I don’t understand why it’s not openly discussed.
I think it's just an uncomfortable discussion to have. No amount of social engineering will fix this. As a group, children who come from good home with a mother and a father - who have jobs and aren't on public assistance - are better prepared for many aspects of life including education. There's no shortage of talent and intelligence that will go wasted because of this fact and that is sad and it makes us feel bad. San Francisco's efforts here are meaningless sacrifices to the altar of equity that bring us one step closer to a Harrison Bergeron style dystopia that makes the problem (of wasted talent and education) much worse. But doing _something_ feels better than doing nothing, so I'm not expecting the situation to improve.
For the absolute worst of schools, perhaps extending online learning might be best. That way disruptive students can just be muted. And then provide some physical location where students can do online classes when they don't have a suitable home environment.
It doesn't help much, because working conditions are so bad that anyone with options still doesn't want to work there. More funerals for kids. More 2nd-graders threatening teachers. More lockdowns over gun threats and such. More drug problems. More chronically-absent kids. More turnover among students. More horror-stories about home life. Most teachers who can afford to turn it down decide that their sanity & safety is worth more than an extra $8-12k/yr. Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast. It's brutal, and money—at least, money spent on education per se—does not seem to be the solution.
> The level of complacent sloth within administration is not to be underestimated, and outright graft does occur from time to time.
Heh, yeah, and that's in most districts, not just the poor ones :-(