I went to a public middle school that's the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado (frequently in the top 1 or 2 for math and reading) and it's the top rated school in the city. It's also located in Pueblo, a town of historic poverty relative to the rest of Colorado.
The problems with the system are obvious: lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. They also had the fewest schooling hours of any school in the district and almost no homework.
It was ran by a genius who cared and was willing to say "no" to the dogma of his teaching peers.
> Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems
> bad teachers
Perhaps if teaching offered higher salaries, you would get better teachers. Why would a talented teacher work in a US state school if they could instead get a job in the tech industry or work in a foreign private school?
> lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment.
Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago.
> Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems.
Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.
You said it yourself "Genius Principal"! What happens when they retire? Sure, occasionally you will get excellence despite a lack of resources but that's sheer luck.
My high school was exceptional due to a confluence of factors leading to a great staff but it has faded in the past 40 years and is now only average in our province.
My parents were both teachers, though not in the US, and they point to:
+ A decline in respect for teachers and the institution of teaching
+ Lower qualifications required to become a teacher relative to the general population[0]
+ More classroom hours and larger class sizes
+ The previous factors plus lower pay have been driving a systemic brain drain for decades, which forms a positive feedback loop to drive respect down even further
+ Greater opportunities elsewhere, along with the removal of studentships and incentives, make teaching less useful as a socioeconomic stepping stone
+ Inability for students who don't want to be in school to leave and get a job
+ Parents who are uninvolved in discipline or who actively counter it
+ Inability to remove disruptive students from classrooms, which is getting worse over time, as alternative pathways to school are no longer viable and disabled schools are shutting down[1]
+ An increasingly hostile environment where clearly false allegations are "taken seriously" to the point of not supporting accused teachers even after they're exonerated[2]
+ Far fewer men in the classroom than women, which has (unfair) effects on the perception of teaching as a "caring profession"[3] and on collective bargaining, as well as practical matters like boys lacking role models, and a worsened ability to verbally (or even physically) stop really disruptive students[4]
[0] The actual requirements have gone up, but a bachelor's is relatively less prestigious than a diploma used to be. 50 years ago about 30% of people stayed in school, while it's up around 80% now. The US stats are very different, of course, and this might not apply there.
[1] Not that disabled students are all disruptive, but one historical way to remove or manage disruptive students was to slap an autism/ADHD diagnosis on them, qualifying them for a classroom helper or to go to a special school.
[2] This may just have been a single incident that happened to a family friend, but it was bad.
[3] E.g. an underpaid one.
[4] My parents talk more in terms of senior teachers helping with classroom control in a wing, but grudgingly admit that it occasionally helps if some of those senior teachers are large and look strong.
Such as the politicization of everything, or the abandoning of teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills in favor of woke political agendas, or perhaps due to the hollowing out of cultural/religious consensus and the corresponding doubt's that there is any unifying factor in the academy.
After all, universities were born in the high to late middle ages out of the conviction that knowledge found its unifying point in the Word of God's revelation of Jesus, but today the vast majority of (western) universities have long abandoned the pursuit of truth. Theology, once seen as the queen of the sciences, is generally regarded as less useful and less true than fiction writing.
