Schools in the US are glorified daycares and have been for decades. I had classmates who graduated high school without the ability to read a sentence out loud. I worked as a subsitute for a while in an underfunded, crowded school in a poor area too. The students there were receiving absolutely zero education. The teachers would assign reading and then do no instruction. I watched kids smoke weed in class, or take naps. More than several times I saw teachers let students get into fights, idea there is the kids will wear themselves out.
I don't mean to speak ill of these teachers though. I got the impression they were just too exhausted to care anymore. It was sad. The light had burned out of them.
I was also astounded by the size of these classrooms. There were often 50, 60, 70 students in one classroom with one teacher. The school would have 1,000 students and maybe 30 teachers. It's a horrifying ratio.
High school dropouts are a major problem too. In my state about 10% of students don't graduate. That's millions of people who didn't finish their compulsory education, even if it was just sitting around learning nothing.
These are public schools in poor areas though. I taught at a few private and charter schools and they had a much more typical school environment, which is also horrifying in its own way.
Your comment made me curious about what state you were possibly in, since I figured that having only 90% of students graduate highschool would put you in the bottom 5-10. However according to this source I found: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/high-school-graduation-rates-by-state then there are 20 states with less than 90% graduation rates. Also somehow Montana has the highest rate in the country with 94% of their high school students graduating.
Schools in the US are glorified daycares and have been for decades. I had classmates who graduated high school without the ability to read a sentence out loud. I worked as a subsitute for a while in an underfunded, crowded school in a poor area too. The students there were receiving absolutely zero education. The teachers would assign reading and then do no instruction. I watched kids smoke weed in class, or take naps. More than several times I saw teachers let students get into fights, idea there is the kids will wear themselves out.
I don't mean to speak ill of these teachers though. I got the impression they were just too exhausted to care anymore. It was sad. The light had burned out of them.
I was also astounded by the size of these classrooms. There were often 50, 60, 70 students in one classroom with one teacher. The school would have 1,000 students and maybe 30 teachers. It's a horrifying ratio.
High school dropouts are a major problem too. In my state about 10% of students don't graduate. That's millions of people who didn't finish their compulsory education, even if it was just sitting around learning nothing.
These are public schools in poor areas though. I taught at a few private and charter schools and they had a much more typical school environment, which is also horrifying in its own way.
Your comment made me curious about what state you were possibly in, since I figured that having only 90% of students graduate highschool would put you in the bottom 5-10. However according to this source I found: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/high-school-graduation-rates-by-state then there are 20 states with less than 90% graduation rates. Also somehow Montana has the highest rate in the country with 94% of their high school students graduating.
Yeah the national average is around a 90% dropout rate. Education is not exactly America's strongest quality.