Recently, Gig 601XL Builder wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net posted:

The education problems all boil down to a combination of some bad
teachers, some bad administrators, some bad parents, and state and
federal lawmakers and courts stepping in to make a bad situation
worse.

We need to get rid of silly federal and state mandates for student
testing that require teachers teach to a test and little else. We
need a system of getting rid of bad teachers and rewarding good ones.
We need a process that allows us to get kids that cause problems out
of the schools but only after teachers are given the right and
responsibility to deal with those on the bubble in the classroom. And
we need to make parents responsible for how their children act when
they are in school.

It seems to me that all the conversation about education in this thread
misses a few key points.

In the US, primary education is not a national priority, nor a state-level
priority, and in many if not most communities, not a local priority. On a
national level, we struggle with issues such as standardization and
"leaving no children behind", but put no substantial financial support
into either area. States largely fund education through property taxes (a
practice that was deemed unconstitutional here in Ohio more than once, yet
there is no change on the horizon), which largely works against
standardization and ensuring equal educational opportunities. On a local
level, school systems are sometimes unbalanced in terms of the ratio of
administrators to teachers.

What I find curious is that the teachers in this thread aren't speaking of
the teacher/student ratio. Given the significant increase in necessary
knowledge beyond what was needed when I was in K-12 almost 50 years ago,
and that class sizes are now about 3 times what they were then, I don't
know why it isn't apparent that this has to at least contribute to the
issues under discussion.

The way I see it, there need be no other reasons for the results that
we're getting other than the priorities and structure that we're working
with.

Neil