Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best colleges for the very top students. There was honors, accelerated, standard, and remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning. Nobody cared what happened to those kids including in many cases their own parents.<p>Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nationalpost.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;rex-murphy-cutting-honours-programs-and-keeping-smart-kids-down-proves-the-silliness-of-inclusivity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nationalpost.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;rex-murphy-cutting-honours-...</a><p>The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.<p>The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.

&gt; Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%<p>&gt; And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most<p>I don&#x27;t understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I&#x27;ve never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?

&gt; And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most<p>All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can&#x27;t afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those &quot;single student who struggled most&quot;, will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn&#x27;t even pass city college&#x27;s math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn&#x27;t even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.

&gt;Another thing I’ve discovered is that many students— not just a couple here and there, but several in every class— consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes.<p>&gt;I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect.<p>Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kbdlayout.info&#x2F;KBDLA&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kbdlayout.info&#x2F;KBDLA&#x2F;</a><p>It has the umlaut (actually diaeresis in a Spanish context I think) and acute accent mark pretty prominently available.<p>Look at the Spanish Spain keyboard layout: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kbdlayout.info&#x2F;kbdsp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kbdlayout.info&#x2F;kbdsp</a><p>It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote.<p>I wonder whether the students&#x27; families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they&#x27;re using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.

One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn&#x27;t get fixed.<p>Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.

Public school is broken and we all know it - in general.<p>We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school.<p>Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

&gt; Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and… drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like they’re years behind everyone else and don’t know what’s going on, because they are and they don’t.<p>There must a good way to describe this &quot;school to life in debt&quot; pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they&#x27;ll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.

During high school we had had an exchange program with a German college track high school. My family hosted a student for a month and then they hosted me in Germany. I was shocked at the difference in expectations and quality of education compared to an average American high school. I really wish we offered something equivalent of their combination Vocational Tech&#x2F;High school with industry partnership as a viable career path compared to the 4 year high school only option I had.

This is sad. It reads more as though teachers and school employees are doing whatever they can to keep&#x2F;justify their jobs, but not to improve learning. It is almost as if a teachers first job is self-preservation. If students can’t pass the test, then the test must be made easier, that way more students can pass and the teacher doesn’t look bad.

Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes every time I hear that schools are underfunded and how we need to give them just a little more funding, and surely things will get better. If they&#x27;re just going to pass students anyways, what&#x27;s the point of increasing the funding?

I am close to two families with children in the SF public school system. One family has a 5-year-old boy and 7-year-old girl. The other family has an 11-year-old boy.<p>SF schools went to all-remote education starting in March 2020 and by the end of the 2020-2021 school year, did not yet return for in-person instruction. The effect on children&#x27;s education has been devastating. [0]<p>The teacher&#x27;s union refused to entertain in-person teaching even though SF has reportedly reached herd immunity as of May 2021. Negotiations have yielded almost no progress and well-meaning high-earning parents dedicated to the public school system have been stymied despite organizing as a group. [1]<p>As a former college professor, I understand low wages are a problem for most teachers. Even as a tenure-track professor, my salary in 2009 was less than 50% of what I was (and am) able to command as a front-end developer in the Bay Area.<p>Teaching K-12 in public schools in the US is difficult. There are nigh insurmountable problems which, in my opinion, are the product of so few financial resources dedicated to the project of educating children in the US.<p>The behavioral problems less-endowed schools encounter among their students is an outgrowth of poor funding and poverty economics.<p>Public school education in wealthy communities (famously Stuyvesant High School [2]) is a different story altogether.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;remote-learning-failure.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;remote-learning-f...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;decreasingthedistance.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;decreasingthedistance.org</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stuyvesant_High_School" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stuyvesant_High_School</a>

I thought AP classes and a level of general competitiveness stopped stuff like this?<p>Even if the in person classes are easy to pass, the AP scores should be consistent with the rest of the country and should make identifying the relative difficulty between schools pretty easy? ACT and SAT should also make grade inflated school very easily to spot.<p>I think California has a rule requiring that at least X% of their students are from California right? Has that shifted the balance at CA to accepting lower quality students from their own state?

This school sounds like some sort of weird Kafkaesque punishment for kids. Everyone is trying to game it: kids who don&#x27;t want to write essays, administrators who don&#x27;t want kids to fail. Teachers who want kids to both learn stuff and pass.<p>Motivate the kids. Show them stuff about the world, and show them how to find out things for themselves. If you&#x27;re going to test them, do it in a way that doesn&#x27;t destroy all enjoyment of the subject. Try to get the kids to want to keep learning after they leave you.

School&#x27;s so stupid. If you give people a grade and tell them to maximize it, with no meaningful rewards that they can understand, they&#x27;re going to cheat. Duh. I regret not cheating in school, what a waste of time all of that shit was.<p>The teacher is basically like &quot;haha dumb kids, we know you&#x27;re cheating&quot; and &quot;if only we could punish students more!&quot;. There&#x27;s a lot of &quot;the smart kids are suffering because of the dumb kids&quot; attitude here that I find disgusting.<p>&gt; That too was in keeping with a theme. The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types.<p>Oh god, how awful that these students won&#x27;t get to suffer through some idiot&#x27;s assignment that I&#x27;m sure would greatly better their life.<p>There&#x27;s a lot wrong with school but I feel like this teacher doesn&#x27;t realize that they&#x27;re a part of that.<p>&gt; Wow, a 100% pass rate! What a successful school!<p>Yes, it&#x27;s cheating. They have an incentive, as your students do, to &#x27;pass&#x27;, and so they cheat.<p>Give students a place to be during the day while their parents work. Give them real, meaningful incentives that matter to young people - money, freedom, social structure, a feeling of productivity - and align those with learning real, practical skills, like how to read, write, analyze context, etc.<p>Hire non-idiots, pay them more, reduce class sizes. Yeah it&#x27;ll cost more, but the obvious economic benefits will offset that. I can count on one hand how many teachers I had that I respected - the rest were obvious failures.

<i>&gt; And the plagiarism detection software was indeed fooled! What the student didn’t realize is that teachers don’t need software to be able to tell the difference between honestly composed sentences and computer-generated gibberish.</i><p>Hilarious.

I once had a cheating scare.<p>I was in college, working on a take-home excel sheet for an accounting class. I was struggling with some of it, so I did my best and filled in the parts I knew and some I could guess at. I wasn&#x27;t too worried about it because the rest of my grades in that class were good. The professor called me in for a meeting and accused me of cheating because the total column happened to be correct but only some of the inputs were incorrect. I was actually scared I might get expelled for cheating, when I was just following my prior teachers&#x27; advice (and basic logic) to guess when not sure.

So, this seems ludicrous and sad. What I am wondering is whether or not this is an accurate representation of the real situation in SFBay area schools? If we have any parents from the SF Bay area on HN who are sending their kids to public schools, I&#x27;d be interested in hearing their take on this.

It&#x27;s sad but it&#x27;s only going to get worse. UK universities are already worse.

I learned more in two months of USAF Basic Training than any year of school, maybe any two years.<p>As they told us repeatedly, it&#x27;s a privilege to be here. Although they had the option to boot us out, no one was, and only one guy bailed out of 50.

This sounds like something out of a surrealist novel.<p>&gt; consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes<p>US-International keyboard layout, maybe. Maybe the student doesn&#x27;t know what umlauts and acute accents are, so maybe they think they&#x27;re valid equivalents to &quot; and &#x27;.

Education and education leadership heavily skew leftist. Part of the leftist creed is destroying the West from within. What better way to do that than destroying the institution that&#x27;s sole purpose is creating the next generation of citizens?

The only aspect that is not distressing is that there is at least one public school teacher who can recognize the futility of trying to simultaneously accommodate students, parents and administration.<p>What educational outcome do these groups expect?

I find this report very funny because it ultimately places responsability upon administration. As if the curriculum and pedagogy weren&#x27;t flawed to the bones, and as if the body of teachers knew any better. Your students are trying to burn the school, literally. Your classes and your method of evaluation suck. They contain the genesis of both the idiocracy and also the cleptocracy. Your debates are repetetive, meaningless and repetetively meaningless. I hope you never even get even one more inch of power. Eventually the rebellion of the slaves will succeed.

This is terrifying. How representative is this actually?

&gt; “you’re legally required to assign this much homework, so make sure you do that, only don’t, because the kids are overwhelmed”. That too was in keeping with a theme.<p>I think the underlying theme is that the parents themselves are overwhelmed and the schools that were ill-equipped to handle education before COVID-19 are crumbling.<p>If I take this report at face value (which, frankly, I&#x27;m tempted to), it paints an even more broken image of the American school system than the dumpster fire I had on my wall already.

&gt; With half the term remaining, teachers of seniors received a notification that they would not be allowed to fail students unless they filled out a form right then and there declaring that the student was certain to receive an F.<p>I think that OP is misconstruing the reasons behind this notification requirement. This notification has to do more with a &quot;cover your ass&quot; policy than lowering expectations for seniors.<p>The California Education code [1] requires school districts to develop procedures to notify parents of a failing grade. All the CA districts that I worked for had some procedures in place for when and how notify families of failing grades in response to this law. From a quick search, it seems that SFUSD policies 4.2.5 [2] and 4.2.6 apply in this case. The policy clearly states that teachers have to notify parents of grades either 1 or 2 times during the semester (i.e., mid-semester report cards-if you went to school in CA you will remember receiving those).<p>It seems that OP&#x27;s school was on a 9-week reporting period, requiring teachers to notify parents of grades mid-semester and that their school added a requirement of filling out an additional form outlining that the student was in danger of failing the class specifically for seniors (probably because most families stopped looking at report cards for seniors). This form is required to be in compliance with the CA ed code as parents have the right to appeal failing grades and not being notified is probably an enough reason for the district to change a failing grade to a passing one in case of a lawsuit&#x2F;complaint.<p>I would imagine that failing a class is more &quot;high stakes&quot; for seniors than other students, so they have more paperwork involved for seniors if you want to fail them. Families might be more &quot;litigious&quot; if a student ends up failing a class required for graduation. It is simpler to complain to the board&#x2F;suing that having to repeat a school year.<p>The bottom line is that the CA ed code gives teachers final say in grades and even the superintendent cannot change a grade without the teacher&#x27;s consent. On the other hand, the CA ed code gives some rights to parents to appeal grades and has some notifications guidelines so they shouldn&#x27;t be surprised of failing grades. OP will be able to fail as many seniors as they want, but they just have to notify their families that they are in danger of failing the class at some point before the end of the semester. At the end of the day, if they have enough evidence for failing a student (that would stand up during a public board meeting&#x2F;lawsuit), notifying the student&#x27;s family 9 weeks before the end of the semester shouldn&#x27;t be too much of a burden.<p>Links:<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=EDC&amp;sectionNum=49067" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;codes_displaySectio...</a>. [2]: ]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfusd.edu&#x2F;services&#x2F;know-your-rights&#x2F;student-family-handbook&#x2F;chapter-4-student-academic-expectations&#x2F;42-academic-guidelines&#x2F;425-grading-period" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfusd.edu&#x2F;services&#x2F;know-your-rights&#x2F;student-fami...</a>

&gt; Meanwhile, here’s what it’s like in the teacher email threads. This is a verbatim, non-ironic quote: “I didn’t really hear you at first, steeped as I am in a culture of assumed patriarchal white privilege, rank privilege, and inequitable hierarchy&quot;<p>It&#x27;s my perception that adults involved with schools, especially younger grades, have been penetrated so intensely by woke ideology[1], much more so than the broader subcultures (urban, educated, etc) they belong to that already skew woke. Is this just down to how skewed female this group is?<p>[1] I mean this neutrally, not as a particular criticism of wokeness or the manner in which it penetrates communities. When thinking about large groups of people, modeling ideologies as memetic viruses moving through a population is a lot more sensible than as emergent entities from the rational decisions of large numbers of intelligent, thoughtful people capable of critical thinking.

In the balance, from talking to teachers a lot of students are really struggling this year with COVID lockdowns, and so I wonder to what extent this is to dampen that. I suspect most will be a little bit behind next year, and it feels like we will have to lean into that.

The umlauts for quotes thing is really interesting. I don’t know why the author went for “these kids haven’t seen enough ‘proper’ text” rather than, say “these kids weren’t taught typing and discovered a creative solution that communicates their intent well.”

I would give this 10 votes if I could. Great read!

Institutions, like public schools, usually start out with the best of intentions. As the institution ages though, corruption sets in.<p>Administrators multiply like rabbits and obtain higher salaries, teachers unions prevent the firing of bad teachers, and politicians just go along with whatever items powerful special interests demand.<p>We should dissolve all public schools in their current form at a specific predetermined time, and have new educational institutions built. Then we should set up a recurring mechanism to dissolve completely the existing institution to allow for new innovations.

I&#x27;ve read somewhere that the affluent don&#x27;t send their kids to public school in SanFran or anywhere in the Bay Area, is that true? I assume there are a lot of locals browsing this.

The soft bigotry of different standards is talked about but rarely is the premise carefully examined. Can there be a single standard? Maybe the problem is expecting a good essay, composed in earnest, by a kid that can “barely string a sentence together.” We ought not be surprised when humans act human.<p>Maybe we should redefine public education to be a bit more exclusive, and not shame those that aren’t on a college track into pursuing mentally challenging work for which we are unfit. Give kids the money that would be spent on their education (loosely defined) and let them invest it, or spend on vocational training or seed money to start their own small business. Too much focus on producing som eidetic notion of the educated individual. People don’t wind up homeless because they weren’t exposed to Shakespeare. Some people will be lucky to attain enough basic skill to stay afloat. If such a person is able to fool plagiarism software, maybe that’s something to celebrate.

I cant help but think this is tied to the way government funding for schools is handled. Schools dont want to lose funding by having poor performance so the make the performance measures look better.

Ask HN: given that school education in USA is so complicated is there a guide that the good folks here can suggest for kids and parents on how to successfully navigate the education system in USA?

There are a lot of complaints about public school in this thread, but much of the data on achievement says that in the US, private schools don’t do a better job.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.3102&#x2F;0013189X18785632" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.3102&#x2F;0013189X1878563...</a><p>Hell, voucher programs have been shown to lower academic attainment. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w21839" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w21839</a><p>If people really wanted to improve educational outcomes, UBI might actually do the most good. The situation at home matters a lot, and it shows up in the data.

Here is a modest proposal: copy the best educational system in the world (Finland). Stop thinking you know better.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Z1LWH" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Z1LWH</a>

&gt; Even before the advent of the internets, catching students cheating was generally not particularly hard. ... Catching this sort of malfeasance has gotten even easier with the development of plagiarism detection software.<p>&gt; ...students use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes<p>Those students figured out a way around the plagiarism detection.

Just say no to this garbage. Your kids will only learn how to be like them.

Is this real?<p>Thought yes but after the nobody can get below 50% part I’m less sure

imagine posting a day in a life of San Fran Public School Teacher on YouTube and seeing a student deliberately setting the school on fire

I wonder how many of the commentators in here that mention any level of surprise have children. I suspect none.

Depressing read honestly.

Meanwhile, China is pushing its children to learn so much more, and is developing one of the most educated populations on earth[1]. They&#x27;ll win by our own implosion.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wenr.wes.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;education-in-china-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wenr.wes.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;education-in-china-3</a>

very frequent topic here on HN. i remember a comment about a persons experience with the public schools in the soviet union when it collapsed. all the smart people pulled their kids out and did something else. its the same as everything else because if you want it to be done right then you have to do it yourself. there is no fixing public schools... they are run by the majority and they always will be. the problem isnt the schools, its the majority. after WW2 all the dumbest people fucked like rabbits with no financial or existential limitations to stop them, medicine increasingly spared idiots from the consequences of their actions. this initial seed of stupidity brought the next tooth of the ratchet into place: the popularization and normalization of eliminating all consequences from ones own actions. we just keep getting dumber. we were supposed to be re-galvanized by a major depression and a pandemic in the past 20 years but we postponed it all with technology and massive economic manipulation. eventually the chickens are going to come home to roost... in the meantime dont let the public schools rot out the inside of your kids head.

if I was a teacher I would give an extra five points on any handwritten assignment, and an extra ten points if it is cursive.

Wow, lot&#x27;s to unravel in this one. First, the kids are trying to skip out on mindless work like book reports. Most of the students aren&#x27;t bright enough to fool the teacher in the anecdotes, but probably there are some that do.<p>Next, there&#x27;s the discipline issue. Yes, they stopped suspending kids in a lot of places because they realized those kids would just be left alone at home all day, and the only reason those kids were at school at all was because it was in some way convenient for their parents.<p>Finally, there&#x27;s the homework issue. Yes, homeless is pointless busy work. If something is worth learning, make sure you block off enough time during classroom hours to teach it, otherwise most kids aren&#x27;t going to learn it at all. Yes, the students are overwhelmed.<p>We have millions of kids that are from completely broken homes, basic needs like food and housing aren&#x27;t met, and this person is complaining about book reports? Society is broken.