Comment by mrguyorama
21 days ago
Title has been editorialized.
In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.
Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.
The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.
The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.
"No child left behind" is a disaster.
I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.
Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.
She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.
Do you have any idea what it is that makes her so effective, especially with kid who otherwise wouldn't care?
A good education taught her how to teach. She has a 4 year degree, then some sort of 1-2 year program of being essentially an apprentice, and then you must take several college classes every few years to demonstrate your continued learning, and oddly IMO, the same school that was adopting weird and unproven teaching methods around reading was giving their teachers fairly good yearly workshops about how to teach.
She has a genuine-ness that is palpable, something that I've also inherited. My girlfriend describes it as "You have golden retriever energy" and it gets people engaged with you. She's a very fun teacher.
She treats kids like people, yet the way the interactions go and the way she gets to kids ensures that they still generally respect her. She also used to have an administration that recognized her talent and value, and would stand behind her when a kid was a serious problem. She has helped "bad" kids do better, and helped bullied kids, and has helped needy kids, and this gives her a sort of legendary status. Everyone knows and loves Madame.
She was well experienced dealing with stupid shitheads because she grew up next to my dad's family (lol small towns) and raised three kids that were pains in her ass in diverse ways.
She works her absolute ass off. She habitually showed up to work ten minutes late (ADHD runs in our family quite bad), but the admin ignores that when she is teaching every student in the school and grading assignments until 8pm most nights, and building the curriculum for all the other teachers. I once stayed up with her until early in the morning grading a writing project she had given. Hundreds of students, every year, and she would always know their name and lives and all about them even though she's bad at remembering names otherwise. She was willing to teach kids how grammar worked and how to diagram sentences when they came into her class and didn't know. She was also able because of her education.
She comes from a family tradition that treated education as a total good, something everyone should seek out as much as possible, and something that would lift you up, along with your family, despite ostensibly being a very rural lineage. We have the journal of a woman in our ancestry 200 years back talking about how she learned to read and write because that's just how great education was in general. We aren't nobility or anything that would traditionally do that kind of thing.
A crazy mix of genetics: We are all super neurodivergent and probably super inbred and the latest generation is experiencing crazy illnesses and autoimmune disorders, but my mom's family consistently scores above average on standardized tests and has done so for generations. So she has a good brain to use the things she learned, even though there's tons of "smart" things that isn't so good at. The role of a good educator just happened to really fit well with her mix of beneficial and problematic brain issues.
So, you know, luck. She picked this career path because she was 20 and her marriage failed and she suddenly had to support three kids. Turns out she's really good at it. We aren't ambitious people, but this general theme is the same for my entire extended family.