[Bogie Shooter]

Originally Posted by JudyMonin

The books that are being banned in school SHOULD BE BANNED.
Teaching children that you can change your sex if you want, at the k-6 level is not what schools should be teaching!
Talk about failing grades, this could possibly be part of the problem.

Or another way to look at it.

You can decide what your child can or cannot read but…..you cannot decide for my child.

[Bill14564]

Originally Posted by Bogie Shooter

Or another way to look at it.

You can decide what your child can or cannot read but…..you cannot decide for my child.

This is the way things ought to be with just a few exceptions related to a well-rounded education.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by Pugchief

The good news: FL is the second best in the nation. Bad news: The entire country has failing schools.

Why is this such a problem? Why are today's youth unable to read or do math at grade level? I know Covid caused a setback, but this was going on prior, and continues after.

According to Forbes, the top 5 states for performance on standardized tests are Massachusetts, Utah, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by manaboutown

I just noticed (no surprise), that New Mexico at 21% had the lowest reading competency of all 50 states. Last I read only about 65% of children there graduate high school. I am saddened because it is my home state as I grew up there. I also still own and operate a business in NM so am firsthand all too familiar with the illiteracy and terrible crime rate.

There probably is a correlation between crime rate and low test scores.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by jimbomaybe

Many private schools are an out growth of religious organizations, teachers who see teaching as a calling. Parental involvement. School choice and selective enrollment that the teachers unions have no use for, it puts school performance under scrutiny. My son went through a selective enrollment high school a place with both parents and student had a very deferent attitude from the usual public high school . The Washington post has an article on how GPAs were up and SAT scores were down, that is the answer of the public school systems dominated by the teacher unions.

Teaching is a LOW paying occupation. At least, the Unions give them stability. The problem with US public schools is that their expenses are paid for and therefore tied to PROPERTY TAXES. Which rich property owners desire to keep low for their greed and benefit. They could care less if GOOD quality education would improve American life in general. They see only THEMSELVES as important.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by dtennent

While it is convenient to blame teachers, education starts in the home and needs to be emphasized throughout the educational process. When the message from multiple sources makes education less important than sports, social media, etc., it isn’t surprising that our students are not performing well. From what I have observed, children from recent immigrants performed much better than average. In the home in which I was raised, my performance in school was a regular discussion. As a parent, I continued that tradition. Unfortunately, my kids haven’t been as diligent. I am guessing that is not happening much in the average home today.

Since about 1980 each newer generation reported that they have less opportunity than the older generation. Opportunity means in jobs after they get older than high school. The schools purpose is to PREPARE children for THEIR OPPORTUNITY that arrives after they are 17 or 18. I say that the schools are NOT the MAIN ones to blame. After 1980 many jobs were outsourced 1st to Mexico and then finally China. Because of this the US lost OPPORTUNITY AND China GAINED OPPORTUNITY. As a consequence Chinese Schools improved and the whole Chinese society improved while the US schools suffered and the US students KNEW they were losing OPPORTUNITY, so they studied less hard and became more interested in parties and sports for upward mobility (not many make it that way).
.........After 1980, schools decided that to keep rich people's taxes low that trades were TOO costly to teach in high schools. So those that might have SUCCEEDED in a vocational education class or school were FORCED to be in College Preparatory classes where they were like "fish out of water" and could NEVER succeed. They acted up in classrooms, which made problems for classmates that wanted to learn and the teachers. Then many of them became juvenile delinquents and worked their way up to more serious crimes and then eventually PRISON. Note: The US started building MORE prisons about that time.
.......As a result, since 1980 US unions have been decreasing in member numbers and power. And many European countries that do NOT link education to property taxes and pay their teachers well - have vastly outperformed US education.
........In summary, education is all wrong in the US, but outsourcing was an even greater problem.

[justjim]

OP, I don’t put the blame on public schools for students failing to make the “grade” so to speak. I don’t blame the teachers either. In short, PARENTS is where I put 90% of the blame. Parents is where it starts and where it ends.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by ehonour

This survey (not the one originally cited by OP) provides part of the answer to the OP's original question, when you read the criteria for evaluation:

"WalletHub ranked each state's public schools for "Quality" and "Safety" using 33 relevant metrics. Metrics included high school graduation rate among low-income students, math and reading scores, median SAT and ACT scores, pupil-teach ratio, the share of armed students, the number of school shootings between 2000 and June 2020, bullying incidence rate, and more"

Some of these factors are good measures. Many others are NOT what I would consider to be measures of a "good school." They are factors brought in by the PC crowd with the intent of social engineering. It can even be reasonably argued that lack of safety in schools is a direct result of the PC attitudes, as others have noted above. And unfortunately, it is those same factors, used as measures of "learning," that have de-emphasized the core purposes of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The Wallet hub criteria more correctly quantifies MODERN school situations. The 3 R's are old school thinking.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by MandoMan

Blame Parents Not Teachers.
The Covid shutdown is a sad excuse. Parents were home with their kids for months and could have been sitting down with them and reading to them and helping them read, one on one. Too many parents think it’s up to the teachers to teach, but really parents should be the primary teachers of their children. Reading to children for an hour or more every day from when they are about one leads to their eagerness to learn to read on their own. Shows like Sesame Street can teach a lot but don’t make up for parents reading aloud.

This isn’t a matter of money. There are lots of public libraries. There are books sales with books going for a dollar. The failure to read to children is found in prosperous homes as well as impoverished homes. It requires dedication of time by parents.

Later, it’s important to give kids time and incentive to read. Lots of kids spend so much time playing sports or hanging out with friends or texting or watching cute things on their phones that they don’t have time to read books.

I taught College English for about forty years. In most cases, the students who started class reading well were the ones whose parents helped them develop a habit of reading. Every time I surveyed the students, I discovered that about 10% of my college freshmen had never read an entire book outside of class assignments. Those were the students most likely to drop out. But I discovered that if I assigned exciting books, I could get them hooked on reading. So I gave up teaching Medieval Literature and started teaching Detective Fiction and The Thriller and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and things like that to freshmen who needed a literature credit. It worked. But how much better for them if their parents had guided them.

That is a case of adapting the school to the NEEDS of the student. Unfortunately, in high school and below the needs of the student MUST conform to the needs (for low cost and low property taxes) of the school board.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by opinionist

Why do certified teachers and tenured professors teach kids that they can choose their gender?
Why are they not fired for complete and total incompetence?
Our institutions have become totally corrupted to where home schooling is the only rational option.

Less than 1/3 of one per cent of children change their sex. The whole idea is over-magnified by certain sites.

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by phylt

I may have missed something along the way here. What the Hxll is 'book banning'?

I am 100% for school choice, charter schools, and diminish the power of teacher unions. The USA pay SO much to 'support' public schools, with horrible results.

Many feel that European schools are better and UNIONS are not "bogey mans" in Germany. They are respected as they ONCE were (when America was really America) ( prior to 1970).

[jimjamuser]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

Overindulgence of today's kids - who is overindulging them? THeir parents. Who taught those parents how to BE parents? THEIR parents. The buck stops with The Villages generation.

You created these parents, and now our country has to deal with the fallout.

The average parent did NOT decide that the US should outsource all its industry to China beginning in 1980. The upper 1% decided that and US society, industry, and schools suffered. Parents probably spend MORE TIME with their children today than in 1960. Because they can't go out and play a game of stickball or any game outside without getting shot. But the NRA........................

[jimbomaybe]

Originally Posted by jimjamuser

Teaching is a LOW paying occupation. At least, the Unions give them stability. The problem with US public schools is that their expenses are paid for and therefore tied to PROPERTY TAXES. Which rich property owners desire to keep low for their greed and benefit. They could care less if GOOD quality education would improve American life in general. They see only THEMSELVES as important.

The AVERAGE Chicago teacher makes about 145K according to the Illinois Policy Institute, it has been a long time , but when my kids were in school the private schools paid the teachers considerably less than what was current for public school teachers

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Originally Posted by maistocars

The age of the smartphone and schools allowing kids to have them in class.

Where are they getting these smartphones? I get that in today's violent culture where kids have to worry about getting shot to death in the classroom, phones are important. But flip-phones with just text and voice and no apps at all are totally sufficient. They don't need to own smart phones. Parents are buying them for their kids.

[Aces4]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

Where are they getting these smartphones? I get that in today's violent culture where kids have to worry about getting shot to death in the classroom, phones are important. But flip-phones with just text and voice and no apps at all are totally sufficient. They don't need to own smart phones. Parents are buying them for their kids.

I agree, in fact, it may very well improve their child's grades in school if they were switched to limited flip phones.