Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding.

Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.

The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.

Source:

My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.

In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.

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phil21 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The single variable that actually matters when it comes to school - and nothing else matters until this one is fulfilled: The quality of the peers who make up the student body.

Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent.

A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it.

There is not a single thing any public education system can do to counteract that simple fact. If the average student in the classroom is uninterested at best and troublemaking at worst, it doesn't matter how good the teachers are or what the ratios are, or if the classrooms are old and busted or brand new.

Until society becomes serious again, this problem will only get worse as education continues to be a political and culture war football. The best realistic thing I can think of is take a look at nearly all other western social democracies who have much better outcomes and immediately implement student academic tracking. But that would be politically impossible to do in the current state of the US.

I fear that things are going to get far worse before they get better. You could 10x the primary school education budget and likely continue to see worsening results.

When I went from private (poor) primary and middle school, to a rich suburban high school, to a poor inner city high school back in the 90's this was self evident. I didn't think it could get much worse than that, but the administrative and political classes figured out how to wildly beat even my exceedingly low expectations.

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mothballed 5 hours ago | parent [-]

If you ask boomers they'll be far more likely to tell you dad was out working 16 hours in the oil field / carpenter for the housing boom or something like that. Mom has no time for you either, she is busy with the 4th baby. Kid gets a nice belting for bad behavior and other than that, be back before the street lights come on for a dinner conversation and then left to your own devices before bed.

I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.

The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.

	▲	ytoawwhra92 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Another big difference is the amount of interaction between kids of different ages.

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RyanOD 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family.

And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.

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mothballed 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's also becoming increasingly more likely to enter into college with lower relative and absolute high school performance.

Perhaps some wonder why they should try so hard in HS, when most anyone that graduates can get into college, and no employer is asking a college grad what their high school grades and scores were.

There was a time back in the 60s or 70s or earlier when anyone that graduated HS could get a decent job. And a time now where most anyone who wants a decent job, must complete college or trade school. The latter are increasingly becoming less correlated with HS performance. The importance of HS performance needed to succeed is regressing back towards what was needed back in the 70s or before, so long as you actually graduate so you can go on to further schooling. In the 80s -00's was a time where you where the ladder was shut off if you didn't go to college, but going to college was far more correlated with having the highest marks.

	▲	nradov 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In an era of declining birth rates and thus fewer students graduating from high school, of course the third-tier private colleges are going to lower their admission standards in order to survive. In the long run this won't work because employers will eventually figure out that degrees from those colleges are worthless. But they'll keep up their grifting for a while, and leave a lot of mediocre students stuck with huge debts they can't pay off.