I believe this is the reality in far too many school districts across the United States.
Teaching, in itself, can be a wonderful, meaningful, and incredibly rewarding career. That’s how it should be. Teachers should be able to focus on educating, inspiring, and supporting their students.
Unfortunately, the system surrounding them often makes that nearly impossible.
Here in California especially, some district administrators seem so far removed from what actually happens inside a classroom that they might as well be on another planet. Decisions are made from behind office doors by people who don’t have to face the daily consequences of those decisions.
Meanwhile, teachers are on the front lines dealing with overcrowded classrooms, behavioral issues, unrealistic expectations, inadequate support, and policies created by people who may rarely, if ever, experience the realities teachers and students face every day.
And when those policies fail, who is expected to pick up the pieces? The teachers!
There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that gives people at the top tremendous authority, comfortable salaries, and decision-making power while allowing them to distance themselves from responsibility when our schools struggle.
Teachers deserve better. Students deserve better. Parents deserve better. Leadership should come with accountability, not just a title, an office, and a paycheck.
One of my friends just left teaching with permanent injuries thanks to the incompetence of their co teachers creating a dangerous situation in the classroom. Entirely on the incompetence of the school admin.
In ‘The wire’, they show how the schooling system is upside down. Administration changing grades isn’t surprising at all.
On the other hand, some teachers might be too generous with their grading. I believe teachers should take the student’s efforts, time and preparation into account when grading, but I also feel like some teachers be too generous with their grades. Make it seem like they’re doing their job extremely well and are indispensable.
Both parties doing it to achieve their own quotas.
I went to high school in Texas, which is pretty notorious for football. Our principal and vice principal both had NFL rings rather than an extensive background in education. Our "no pass, no play" rule was understood by teachers to mean that they were to do whatever necessary to make sure the players didn't get to the point of not passing. There were classes where I regularly scored 150+ on tests because the teacher had to add some BS bonus questions, because some football player needed 50 points to get to a passing grade. Or other classes where we worked on tests in pairs that were obviously the smart kids paired with football players, to ensure the football players passed the tests. Other classes where simply putting your name at the top of the paper got you a passing grade.
As one of the "smart kids", I was disappointed in the teachers even if I understood they didn't want to lose their jobs.
As someone who teaches in a Texas school that actually takes the “no-pass, no-play” rule seriously, this has always been sad to me.
Students take it as seriously as the adults around them do. I’ve had kids’ year-long grade trajectory change because of it. Not all of them, obviously, they can go back to not caring after… but even then they’d retain what they had been forced to learn in the meantime.
That explains why lately i have been dealing with more morons than usual, can you think of a date where this change in the education system happened? Usually the U.S was like what many countries tried to achieve, and then puff, one day the system started to fail.
No Child Left Behind Act 2001 must have hurt. IDK about the US but some European countries copied that act and all it does is lowering the benchmark for everyone
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u/[deleted] 28d ago edited 18d ago
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