The emphasis on "classroom control" personally doesn't surprise me. If two or three students start refusing a teacher's orders, that teacher is done for the year, and maybe forever at that school. In my middle school, discipline was all but lost in most of my classes. Play cards in class, tell the teacher to shut up. What's she going to do? We stole her phone and keys in first period, locked the doors to the room, and we disconnected the intercom weeks ago.

You can send an administrator or a police officer to sit in the class, but are they going to sit there all day, every day, until the end of the year? Are they going to do that in all twenty classes that need the treatment? The second they get called away because someone set another fire in the woods, it's game on in the classroom.

At least we almost never actually assaulted staff. Someone I grew up with became a teacher and quit after just a few years. She had a student actually beat her up.

I regret a lot about my behavior in school, and reflecting on that has led me wonder why so many students hate being in school so much, and how—if?—we could educate children without making them resent the activity.

I said it before and will say it again: the way public high schools are arranged is cruel towards both the kids and the adults. (Also counterproductive, but first of all, cruel.)

Teenagers are forced into groups of the same age, within 1 year tolerance. This is the age of learning of social structures, building social ties, learning about various forms of social status, etc. They need to be inside a rich social structure to learn all that.

Instead, they are locked up with their peers, and a lonely adult. What can they do?

Of course they try to build various social structures of themselves, but since they are all peers in most regards, the only structure they can build is a gang. The more bold (and often violent) becomes a leader, others follow.

The only way to raise in status is to join a gang, and fight for a higher rung, or to start a gang. The more violent gang leaders do everything to make actual learning seen as despicable, because they'd hate to see a competing hierarchy based on academic success. Confronting the lone adult, a dangerous but not too dangerous enterprise, becomes a way to show bravery to others.

While some students may cause more problems and be more prone to violence than others, the cause is not the presence of such students, like presence of oil is not a cause of a fire. It's the system, the way classes are formed, that ignites them.

BTW 100-150 years ago high school was elective and required certain determination to get into it. This is why it did not show these problems so much: the students joined because they valued the academic success hierarchy, and could form structures along attaining better grades at the very least. (A teacher had many more violent response options, too.) But today's public high schools receive students with different incentives, even filtered against attaining academic success, because kids who eagerly want to learn go to various competitive high schools (charter, Catholic, private).

This is very sad, both because it keeps happening, and because nobody is coming up with a better structure, it's not a topic of a wide discussion in the society.

You said exactly what I've always thought about public school but could never put into words. I've found, though, that private school avoids some of these problems by filtering out problem kids and keeping class sizes small. Kids can be made to be friends with each other(at least to some extent), but many of them don't have that guidance

I think the main difference between private and public schools (in Denmark) is that private schools can expel kids who sabotage the lessons.

Public schools cannot expel kids. They can't even make a kid move to another school.

Denmark has also closed "special classes" for disruptive kids and classes for autistic kids and put the in the normal classes. So now you have the autistic kid who can't handle noise in the same class as pupils who like to make noise.

In addition to this, the problem kids are often made into the victims. So you are not allowed to blame them or tell the parents they need to parent their kid.

So we also have an exodus of teachers. I cannot see how you can survive as a teacher in such a situation.

I think you are right. But the kids who are involved need to actually be held responsible.

In middle school I was a kind and polite person. There were a significant portion around me who were not. And more than enough who were literally underage criminals. Many abused the teachers, especially ones who were having a tough time such a chemotherapy.

Stealing by middle schoolers should result in imprisonment of middle schoolers. Same thing for locking a teacher out of her classroom.

I'm not joking. I think we need to start building more juvenile prisons. It will cut down a lot on the requirements for adult prisons. If there is any capability for reform, it is much greater when they are young.

It also needs to be clear to juveniles that they can't commit crimes and have them dismissed as "poor classroom control".

It's garbage juveniles is what it is. Take the trash out.

My understanding is that juvenile prisons have not been evidenced in decreasing the amount of crime?

Generally my understanding is that children who severely misbehave is actually an indication of neglect, abuse, or something else seriously wrong with the environment that the child cannot escape.

If that's the case then it's too bad. Better for them to be in juvenile prison than stealing from or assaulting students and teachers.

This confuses me because at my high school the kids who did anything like this would be sent to the principal's office, then disciplined with on campus supsension or at home suspension, then eventual expulsion where they'd land at the school for bad kids. I never saw the behavior you describe so it sounds like you and your friends / classmates were just absolute horrible people back then.

I like how you wonder how you can educate children without making them resent it like it's the systems fault for creating a boring classroom that therefore made you terrorize some poor teacher when really you were all horrible bullies to the teachers because you chose to be that way.

I hated being in school too but what I did was show up, take notes, go home do homework, repeat until I graduated. I didn't tell the teacher to shut up or play cards or steal stuff or play cruel jokes like you.

> This confuses me because at my high school the kids who did anything like this would be sent to the principal's office, then disciplined with on-campus or at-home suspension, then eventual expulsion where they'd land at the school for bad kids.

We had "crossword puzzle school", where the soon-to-be-dropouts were sent. The only work was apparently in the form of crossword puzzles, all day, every day. You usually only got sent here if you were actually arrested by the police for something like drugs or violence, preferably on school grounds.

Back in my normal school, sometimes you got sent to the principal's office. Sometimes you get in-school or home suspension. But eventually, you were back in class. I don't actually ever recall hearing of someone getting expelled from the school system—I'm not even sure that was legal. I assumed that's because, at least in my state, education was required for all students under a certain age (apparently even if that "education" was crossword puzzles, or worse, in a juvenile prison).

Anyway, you could only be punished you if you got caught. Students were very good at not getting caught. A mentality of "us against them" took hold in many cases, where "them" was the staff. For example, I once brought some contraband to school in my backpack. An administrator found out about it, dropped into my class, called me up in front of the class and asked me about it. I lied. The administrator then went to my desk and searched my backpack. To my surprise, there was no contraband inside. He suspected that I had passed it to another friend of mine, so he searched that person. Nothing. The administrator searched several more people in class, but he came up empty. No one was ever punished.

I found out afterwards that, while the administrator was interrogating me, another student removed the contraband from my backpack. Students then proceeded to quietly pass the objects around the classroom, from student to student, so that they wouldn't be found. They returned the items to me when the administrator left, and did so in full view of the teacher. Many of the people who helped me were acquaintances at best. I wasn't even very popular—some of the people who helped me frequently beat me up.

When a teacher sends one student to the office, the student is punished. I strongly suspect that, if a teacher tried to send 50% of their students to the principal, the teacher would be punished.

> I like how you wonder how you can educate children without making them resent it like it's the systems fault for creating a boring classroom that therefore made you terrorize some poor teacher when really you were all horrible bullies to the teachers because you chose to be that way.

Let me start by saying that, if I could do my school days over again knowing what I know now, I would act very differently. I often behaved like a rude idiot, squandering more opportunities and days than I care to count now. I hope I have become a better person since then.

I'll also point out that several of the people I went to school with died before graduating high school (suicide, drunk or otherwise impaired driving accidents, overdose, etc.).

I left my first reply because I think many people grew up in schools where my stories seem ludicrous, and they can't imagine why a teacher's interview would put so much emphasis on "classroom control". Having seen or heard first-hand accounts of similarly bad behavior in so many classes and schools, I thought some concrete examples of what can happen without classroom control might be illustrative. My school might have been a bit below average in terms of student behavior, but I don't even think we were the worst school in my district.

Ultimately, I think you are trying to say that it is not the school's responsibility to make students behave and accept education, but rather the students' responsibility not to misbehave and disrupt school? If so, I understand the sentiment, but I'm not seeing how it leads to any practical solutions. Some students just don't care. I'm just not sure that's a reasonable demand of a child's brain, particularly when that child might be hungry and scared.

I express a desire for educators to find ways to engage students and make schools welcoming, exciting places to be because that's what I wish my schools could have been instead of the dismal, often terrifying places they were. I wish others would have an easier time than me in school, and as a result that they come out better than I am.

Could I have behaved better? Yes, absolutely. My question is that, if you accept that some students don't see why they should behave differently, how do you change their minds?

Send the kid home and fail them for the year? They can try again next year. Well behaved kids are the parents' problem

A secondary problem is that public schools have essentially transformed into state nannys.

1. You can't send the kids home because both parents are probably working. It's more likely the kid becomes lost forever and it becomes a government problem again once that kid is now living an alternative lifestyle that consumes government resources in other ways (crime, homelessness, or health).

2. Because of the realities of (1) everyone else is now forced to asked why the kid is no longer in school and becomes a failure of the teacher that the kid is not in school. The teacher must now deal with disgruntled parents and administrators for not enduring the emotional abuse and disruption a neglected child causes while also dealing with 20 other students.

I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today. Even if you are relatively well off having your kid kicked out of school isn't financially feasible for a lot of families. Even a disruptive child might be the result of absent parents who must be at work to even afford school lunch.

> I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today.

This is it. Our framework for understanding childhood success is based entirely in “school quality”. If a child enters adulthood with a criminal record, without job skills, or without prospects for higher education, it is always blamed on either the parents or the school system. The only remedies anyone can imagine is throwing money at the school system or setting up charter schools, so when that doesn’t work, you’re left guessing.

But none of this addresses poverty! I am convinced that if children can go to sleep with food in their belly, stable housing, and proper healthcare, they’re much more likely to have good outcomes.

I agree, you have to address these things outside the school. This is the same story when it comes to policing: police can arrest people all you want, but unless you're willing to significantly increase our existing lead in incarcerations per capita, it seems like just arresting people isn't working. On the other hand, if you can give people homes, food, jobs, and healthcare, I believe the crime rate will drop.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I suspect there are plenty of measures by which other countries achieve better educational outcomes with lower educational spending, in which case I'd be willing to bet that they are simply spending more in "social programs" (broadly speaking) than the United States.

> Send the kid home and fail them for the year? They can try again next year. Well behaved kids are the parents' problem

You are speaking a Catholic school here. But there are a lot of other schools in 20-mile radius of my home in Silicon Valley where my wife worked.

1. Big city district with “no child left behind” policy, very stupidly executed. Never again, no matter how high the salary is.

2. A charter school chain - a commercial exercise- that has no money planned on disciplinary problems: no staff, no rooms to deal with reports and detentions. Dick drawing, chair humping - “it’s your professional responsibility to control the classroom”.

3. The Catholic school: “thank you doctor N for joining our school” - from kids! When she got all 25 answers on the first assignment- she cried. She was forced to leave the school because you can’t get California credentials in a State university in a program paid by me, not the state - while working in a Catholic school, teaching exactly the same science course.

But there is no need to brutal measures like expelling. There is say option

4. A public school in an ethnic minority suburb. Three reports - and a conference with the teacher and administrator, who is absolutely on the teacher’s side but wants to know how to improve the situation. And that actually helps - these badly behaving kids are not necessarily cruel. “No child left behind” too, but executed properly.

Sounds simple but as a society we have decided not to hold parents and students accountable for their actions.

Teachers are left to deal with the impossible burden of raising 30+ kids and fail.

When I grew up, there were different classes for the smart kids and the less smart kids. There was a bottom class where the students had all sorts of behavioural issues. Some people just won't learn, and I think it's fair to separate them from the people who do. At least that way, teachers get at least a few classes of eager students.

This was the generally accepted approach nationwide in the past, until we realized it fuels systemic transgenerational inequalities, a bit like economic, racial, residential, etc. forms of segregation.

Putting a hooligan amongst decent people works, but only of the decent people can force the hooligan to behave. Most of the time, it works by just peer pressure, even in the positive sense. But for those who don't yield, a society at large has police. And a classroom does not have police.

So a teacher has a choice: to be a saint (and do miracles), to be the police (with hands tied though), or to be a victim. Sadly, many end up with the third option :(

> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals

I want to understand this more and think we need to measure this well.

As a software dev, I’ve always struggled with measuring the amount of work performed and usually disregard measures of intellectual output as misleading measures (eg, lines of code, story points completed, whatever).

What makes you think teachers work more in 9 months than a typical professional (engineer, attorney, healthcare worker) does in an entire year? Wouldn’t it then make sense for these teachers to change professions? Or other professionals to teach? Or is everyone just stupid? Or just really dedicated to teaching as a passion?

I only have my own experience but I’ve always had a stack of work after hours- training, mentoring, networking. And I assumed all professions have this kind of additional metawork that is unpaid. Is it harder to tutor a student than to mentor someone?

Teachers are changing professions, in large numbers, and have been for a while. TFA discusses that and how districts are resorting to desperate measures to get bodies to teach, like drafting in college kids, cutting school hours, and importing them.

You don’t have one student. You have easily dozens, maybe hundreds. There isn’t enough time to actively teach, and grade all their stuff, and figure out the next lesson plan in the eight hour day.

FWIW: as a high school English teacher in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, I had approx. 120-150 students on my roster (depending on what classes I was teaching at the time).

My SO works in schools and she seems to work 60 hour weeks 10 months of the year for total compensation circa $60k, which is above the teacher pay scale for her years of experience. Schools seem to be undergoing a slow-motion collapse because every year the needs for specialized professionals go up, and the number of folks willing to do it goes down. Severe mental, social emotional, and behavior problems get worse every year, and even in K-5 schools people start to feel like they're just getting paid to get bit, spat on, and disrespected because there's no systemic solution to bad and crazy parents or neglected kids, let alone the fact that because nobody is willing to work in the conditions the average quality of those left is going down.

I've been working as a software dev for 20+ years,the only time I actually truly worked 60+ hours a week was when I was attempting to get my own startup off the ground.

Other than that, it's usually been 10-15 of actual work work.

Really not trying to brag, but to bring context to the conversation,I make 10 times what a teacher makes.

I think it's a real problem teachers are underpaid and undervalued. IMO schools should have very basic facilities/luxuries, and awesome very well paid teachers (150-200k) who we expect a lot out of, give a lot of liberties to. This way there will always be competition and prestige involved with being a teacher.

Might sound expensive, but I truly think it's an investment that will more than pay for itself in ~1 generation

I just did the math. Paying every teacher $150k would cost more than my entire local district gets in total funding every year.

That's a lot of new property taxes.

Did you deduct the current average pay and take into account federal and state funding which may even exceed local funding?

Or... maybe reduce our defense budget nationally. We have endless funds for wars and bailing out large corporations. We don't need to raise taxes to accomplish this.

>Really not trying to brag, but to bring context to the conversation,I make 10 times what a teacher makes.

no, that lines up with my experience. I was making 60k/yr as a software engineer when I was working Part Time. That was fine for me since I had an extra 20 hours a week to do whatever I wanted and they let me work remote. I could not imagine going through that job while dealing witch a laughably disrespectful salary.

>IMO schools should have very basic facilities/luxuries, and awesome very well paid teachers (150-200k)

Parents and taxpayers want fancy new football fields, and they want teachers to be poorly paid because they want to look down on them.

The evil American empire is controlled by very rich tyrants who train people to be corrupt dumbasses everywhere. That's why you have a mob of loud-mouthed people who care about sports more than teachers. That mob of people are not perfect for a civilization. They are perfect for making civilization collapse. Civilization is built by making education more important than sports. Teachers being looked down upon is a symptom of civilization collapsing while entertainment like a football game distracts sheep from that ugly reality. Those parents who look down on teachers are sheep. I would keep my imaginary children away from those sheep. Those sheep only care about themselves in a short-sighted way based on instant gratification bullshit.

I'm a software dev as well, coming from a family of educators (dad, mom, brother, all three have taught at some point during their career or for an extended part of their career).

The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not.

In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes a day, with a 10 minute break between each one. So, roughly 6 hours of 'meetings', since those 10 minutes in between were really just prepping for the next class, and oftentimes speaking to students in between too. That in and of itself is draining. This is the schedule of a manager, more or less - 6 hours of meetings where you need to be "on" and can't zone out.

The problem is that teachers don't just operate on a manager schedule. They also operate on a maker schedule: designing lesson plans. My mom's other 2x50 minute blocks were designated for a 50 minute lunch break and 50 minutes of planning. But 50 minutes of planning is not nearly enough time to plan two classes that my mom teaches every day. So, no actual lunch break, the lunch break is actually eating while planning. And that's still not really enough time, so my mom would get there an hour early and stay an hour late. She worked 7am-530pm M-F, and since getting behind on lesson plans means you need to put on a movie which puts your kids behind, she often worked 3-4 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week ahead. This is not my mom being an overachiever, or being dedicated to her work, this is her being dedicated to ensuring that she is just doing her job. This is what the job requires. Sure, it does get easier over time as you get to reuse lesson plans.

The point I want to drive home is not that working 7am-530pm is "more [time] than most professionals", but rather the quality of work is so much different, and so much harder. Managing a classroom of 25-30 children, middle schoolers in her case, is draining, so much more draining than coding. It is more draining than being a manager, because your team is often 3x as big and significantly less behaved (they're children after all).

The cherry on top is that my first job out of college as a developer I was already making $30k more than my mom a year. She had a masters and 10yrs of experience at the time. I am not under the illusion that I am smarter or more qualified.

To answer your statement of "I also need to do trainings, mentorings, networking", teachers regularly need to do trainings too. For my mom, these trainings are required - she was required to do something like 20 hours of professional development a year. And they often mentor students as well, as you absolutely experienced during your own education whenever you went to a teacher during their lunch break for help. I don't think tutoring versus mentoring is that hard. Having someone come to you with questions is an easy way of educating someone. The hard part is lesson plans, to think through a year of "how can I distill this knowledge down and transfer it?", which I personally have never needed to do as a tutor.

To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier?

> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals work in a year

I do think this is an overstatement, maybe a little. Maybe not. It depends on the teacher and the subject. I hope these explanations help, growing up I definitely did not realize how hard my "good" teachers worked to provide me a solid education.

> To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier?

You're hanging out on a website where people regularly talk about how college should be abolished/de-emphasized because it's not needed to get a good job. Yea unfortunately, a lot of people here really DO think those people who go into journalism/art/music are stupid because they're not working in more lucrative fields.

Of course they do that while listening to music and probably enjoying art. Of course.

> a lot of people here really DO think those people who go into journalism/art/music are stupid because they're not working in more lucrative fields.

I don’t think they are stupid as people have interests and there’s many reasons to pursue a career other than money.

I just think they are stupid when they complain about how they don’t make a higher income in these fields. The income potential of these fields is known, so complaining about this, once in the field, is really just an irrational thing.

> The income potential of these fields is known, so complaining about this, once in the field, is really just an irrational thing.

Are we not allowed to complain about known things? If you get a speeding ticket do you complain about it? Under that same philosophy, complaining about your ticket is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about a hangover is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about having back problems because you sit all day and don't exercise is irrational and stupid. I just don't think this line of reasoning makes sense at all. Our priorities change and maybe a teacher wants to do something good for the world but after 10 years they see they're not paid/respected well, and they have a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay and they're tired because they work 60 hour works. IMO that's a very rational place to start complaining.

I have the exact same experience: watching family members work in teaching, seeing them do overtime, getting a software job and beating their salary after 2 years in the job.

It's disgraceful.

Teachers are, to the best of my knowledge, universally paid salary, not hourly.

The other reasons this hasn't changed are

a) This is just "how things are". It's more or less considered the "normal" way of doing education.

b) Changing it would require increasing education budgets by a fairly significant amount, and since those are all local, and based on local property taxes, they are much more likely to have a bunch of entitled rich people coming in to say "I shouldn't have to pay any taxes to support those damn kids" and voting for budget cuts. (Because the people who aren't rich don't have the time and energy to be coming in to these meetings on a regular basis.)

My guess is that this hasn't changed due to union action or lawsuits because (1) teachers are salaried, and tend to be over the limit where overtime pay is legally required; and (2) union organizers don't think they can get any more money without giving something else up.

Also, in the states where this problem is the worst, there’s usually “right to work” legislation and other rules that do their best to defang collective bargaining power.

Actual time teachers spend working has, of course, been measured.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/04/art4full.pdf

The first study assumes they don't work on weekends - which they very often do.

> 5. What is the current model for education based on? [...] Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago.

This is very well put. IMO nothing better illustrates how deep-rooted that model is than distance learning in 2020-2021 in the US. That was an opportunity to innovate quickly, and yet no state or district I know of took it seriously. Instead they had students on Zoom for 3-5 hours a day, including 1st-3rd graders, structured as if it was a regular classroom. It served no educational purpose except adhering to the model and requirements you mentioned.

> 1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes).

There are certificate programs in Maryland. That's how I got my Maryland teacher's license. You typically have to be enrolled in an alternative certification program, like Teach For America, Baltimore City Teaching Residency, etc. But there are a bunch of them: https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DEE/Pr...

Sounds like there are two jobs here: babysitting, and teaching. Both are valuable, though likely that the former isn’t as difficult skill to master.

As a post-secondary teacher, I spend more mental energy on babysitting than on teaching. It's definitely the harder part for me. I hesitate to imagine how bad it must be in primary or secondary education.

Though, it's not really that clear-cut a division. When I worry about how to manipulate students into doing the minimum readings (say an hour a week) for a class that they voluntarily signed up for and paid for, is that babysitting or teaching?

The problem is usually that in a very disrupted classroom, teaching is going to be impossible, so you do need to have the ability to keep things manageable.

If kids start climbing on things and throwing stuff no one is going to pay attention to math.

There have to be consequences for actions like that. If there are no consequences, then yes teaching will become impossible.

I mean, there are.

The thing about classroom control is that it is easier to notice early signs and stop the situation from escalating into behaviors that need to go through a whole punishment process (possible student trauma, paperwork for the teacher and administration), and so teaching how to correct things early and keep things controlled is a win-win for the student, teacher, and administration, and also the rest of the class.

How does the education most Americans get K-12 compare to other G20/OECD countries? Unless I'm wrong, we're like #15 or worse in a lot of educational benchmarks, right?

What could federal/state/local governments do (other than divert money from wealthy areas into poorer areas) to make American children receive a more "world class" K-12 public education?

Stop squeezing families economically into poverty traps for corporate benefit.

Squeezed families can't raise mentally healthy kids.