Originally Posted by
JRB
My Mother and my Sister both taught in Title I schools, which means almost all the students were from poor families. They have both taught in schools where the entire student body was eligible for free lunch. In too many cases, that was the only meal those kids could depend on. My Sister still teaches in such a school.
Overwhelmingly, they say that good parents almost always raise good kids, and bad/absent/abusive parents raise kids that struggle and cause lots of problems in the classroom. Regardless of genetic background, the parents that back up the teachers and work with the teachers on behavioral problems or studying or anything else have children that succeed and grow that school year, and kids adjust for the better whenever the parents hold their children accountable for misbehavior in the classroom.
The parents that verbally assault teachers for daring to punish their precious little Johnny-do-nothing are almost always defending children with massive behavior or attitude problems, which emboldens them, and then sets the stage for those kids to disrespect law/authority in general. It also sets a false expectation that their parents will always bail them out when they fuck up.
Years ago, before my Mom retired I remember her telling me about a student she had, a 5th grader, that stood up on a table, dropped his pants, and urinated all over the table and on at least two other students. The Mom came in and screamed at the top of her lungs at my Mom for almost 20 minutes, screaming that she'd have my mother's job for accusing her son of doing something so gross and disgusting and that some other student's behavior or my Mom's teaching must have made him do that. The parents of the students who were urinated on were not impressed, needless to say, and demanded that student be removed from the class. All of the students that were asked about that kid all agreed that he was persistently disruptive and regularly pulled other student's hair, tripped them, pushed them, etc.
Turned into a real clusterfuck that kept my Mom up for weeks until that student was put on an individual education plan (IEP) that moved him and his problems into another class - whereupon he kept acting like a little shit and his mother kept screaming at teachers for daring to do anything to punish him.
The school was powerless to address that problem student. Worse still, other students seeing that little shit get away with such behavior emboldened them to do the same shit.
I don't know where that kid is now, and that's been at least 12-13 years so he's probably an adult now, but I doubt he's anywhere good.
If I had to make a difference in this problem not just for folks of a specific genetic background, but for all students in all schools across the country - I'd give the schools the ability to separate persistently disruptive students, and expel the students that simply will not stop disrupting the educational process in their classrooms.
Public schooling is a privilege and it should be treated as such.
There's always going to be that ugly end of the bell curve in any given population of students, but forcibly keeping that end of the bell curve mixed into already overcrowded classrooms and absorbing a massively disproportionate amount of Teacher's effort and school resources for dubious if any real benefit to the community or society is simply not viable for the long term. Schools in lower-income areas are disproportionately affected and damaged by this problem for all the cultural reasons already discussed here.
Teachers are leaving the profession in droves because they can't teach the kids that actually want to learn. They're too busy filling unreasonable administrative requirements levied upon them by outsiders who've never taught a classroom full of students, and too beaten down from the verbal abuse and emotional stress from disruptive children and parents - with little if any backup or meaningful support from their administration. It got so bad in my Mom's last year of teaching that I genuinely worried for her health. My sister and I both celebrated when we convinced our Mom to retire a year before she'd planned. A few years into my Mom's retirement now, she wonders why she didn't do it sooner.
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