My wife is an administrator at a public school, and as such I know a lot of teachers.
I’ve yet to meet any that say the limiting factor on their decisions is government interference.
I’d say the thing I hear most with regards to limiting their ability to teach/choose curriculum is how litigious American society is. The schools are so afraid of being sued they bend over backwards to every whim of the parents.
Little Timmy is stabbing the other kids? Better have it documented over a 18 month span with 57 different ways you politely asked him not to. Then maybe we’ll consider moving him to a tougher placement.
Oh, you want to teach the Odyssey? Susie’s mom thinks Zeus is actually Satan in disguise, so you have to pick something else or we’ll be sued for promoting devil worship.
And then you have EdTech corps pushing snake oil so hard that admins are buying it up left and right and forcing it into the classroom against teachers’ wills.
All that to say, it’s a big, multifaceted problem, but the core of it isn’t money. The US spends more per student than almost any country in the EU. It has some of the highest per student spending worldwide. It’s not helping, and it’s not because the government is interfering.
A lot of that spending goes into incredibly bloated admin staff and suspiciously high admin salaries.
And most of that is because, of course, admin are the ones who decide how the money gets spent. And, being admin, they always have admin’s issues front and center and their first thought is to spend the money to address those issues.
Yep, they are a leech, but the government civil servants are taking nothing compared to the corporate interests who pay a few of those civil servants to look the other way while they steal the lion’s share in exchange for being “service providers”.
First off, as someone who has known a lot of teachers:
None of them think their administrators are competent or speak entirely freely around them. Not that the problems she hears about aren’t entirely valid, just that she isn’t and won’t get the whole story
The application of the law is the government. The fact a teacher can be even inconvenienced for teaching something heretical like ‘the guy who wrote this liked him some twinks’ or ‘the number zero exists’ is a function of government overreach, subcontracted and made more politically palatable by decentralizing it a bit, but government power is applied, and its favored-tax-status religions are the ones wielding it.
As for shit admibs buying garbage: yeah. Yeah if I buy a solid gold case and a cloud aggregated dildo that vibrates based on cost movement of a financial derivative of RAM manufacturers, its not going to make my computer have more RAM. You do need to actually spend money on education to improve education outcomes.
My wife is an administrator at a public school, and as such I know a lot of teachers.
I’ve yet to meet any that say the limiting factor on their decisions is government interference.
I’d say the thing I hear most with regards to limiting their ability to teach/choose curriculum is how litigious American society is. The schools are so afraid of being sued they bend over backwards to every whim of the parents.
Little Timmy is stabbing the other kids? Better have it documented over a 18 month span with 57 different ways you politely asked him not to. Then maybe we’ll consider moving him to a tougher placement.
Oh, you want to teach the Odyssey? Susie’s mom thinks Zeus is actually Satan in disguise, so you have to pick something else or we’ll be sued for promoting devil worship.
And then you have EdTech corps pushing snake oil so hard that admins are buying it up left and right and forcing it into the classroom against teachers’ wills.
All that to say, it’s a big, multifaceted problem, but the core of it isn’t money. The US spends more per student than almost any country in the EU. It has some of the highest per student spending worldwide. It’s not helping, and it’s not because the government is interfering.
Admin itself is a problem.
A lot of that spending goes into incredibly bloated admin staff and suspiciously high admin salaries.
And most of that is because, of course, admin are the ones who decide how the money gets spent. And, being admin, they always have admin’s issues front and center and their first thought is to spend the money to address those issues.
Yep, they are a leech, but the government civil servants are taking nothing compared to the corporate interests who pay a few of those civil servants to look the other way while they steal the lion’s share in exchange for being “service providers”.
First off, as someone who has known a lot of teachers:
None of them think their administrators are competent or speak entirely freely around them. Not that the problems she hears about aren’t entirely valid, just that she isn’t and won’t get the whole story
The application of the law is the government. The fact a teacher can be even inconvenienced for teaching something heretical like ‘the guy who wrote this liked him some twinks’ or ‘the number zero exists’ is a function of government overreach, subcontracted and made more politically palatable by decentralizing it a bit, but government power is applied, and its favored-tax-status religions are the ones wielding it.
As for shit admibs buying garbage: yeah. Yeah if I buy a solid gold case and a cloud aggregated dildo that vibrates based on cost movement of a financial derivative of RAM manufacturers, its not going to make my computer have more RAM. You do need to actually spend money on education to improve education outcomes.