What do you see as her major frustrations? Everyone knows about the money going in, but the other stuff???
Oh man, where to start?
The pay thing has gotten way worse. It already wasn't good to start with, but then our previous governor looked at the fact that we had the best graduation rate in the nation while spending slightly less than average per student on it, and decided that was a problem that needed solving. So, with the help of our gerrymandered legislature, he removed all power from the teachers' unions. Now they're the ones that take the brunt of all the budget shortfalls because that same legislature has cut state funding to the school districts, leaving many to rely on referenda (that often fail) for operating expenses rather than infrastructure upgrades. In the past FIFTEEN YEARS, she has gotten ONE raise. They'll throw a "bonus" out here and there to keep them from all leaving en masse, but her real earnings have gone way down.
That, of course, has drastically impacted staffing as all the good teachers head for the exits. You can now get a teaching job with no training in education and no license, and substitute teachers are essentially nonexistent - They hire a "building sub" for each school who floats around to various classrooms, and then they force the other teachers to do mandatory substitute teaching during their prep time, which just means that they have to extend their workday or take more work home at night.
There's this constant search for the One Perfect Teaching Technique that will magically make all kids into well-behaved, knowledge-thirsty automatons, and it seems that every year they're forced to sit through a couple of days worth of professional development to learn whatever this new magical technique is, and of course it never works because kids are still kids.
Insert all the stuff about standardized testing, purchasing supplies with their own money, retirement funds getting raided, getting second jobs to make ends meet, etc here. Education is the most important occupation to the long-term health of the country, and it has been reduced to a job so ****ty that colleges are shutting down their education programs because nobody wants to do it. We are well and truly ****ed as a country, but the politicians who did most of the ****ing aren't going to feel any of the pain that they caused because people who care are holding this rickety system together as best they can for now. In 20 years, my kids are going to have one hell of a mess to clean up, and it's unlikely that they'll have the resources to do so. China will be taking over, our national debt will come due, and we'll have a citizenry that's too stupid to make great things any more.
If she could change two things, what would they be?
Get paid a reasonable wage, and get better support from all directions including society at large.
I remember that if you got disciplined at school you got disciplined even worse at home. Does that still happen?
Depends. The variety of kids, parents, and situations is incredibly wide, and public education has to deal with every last one of them. There are kids with one breadwinner parent and one stay-at-home parent, plenty of money, good food, and a good support structure around them. Of course, those kids rarely misbehave in the first place.
Then, there's the girl being raised by a single mom who barely survived a brutal murder attempt last year. There's the boy whose physical ailments caused mental ailments whose behavior problems are literally unsolvable because the parts of his brain that regulate it are damaged. There's the kids who are depressed and the mental health system is so bad that they have to be literally suicidal before they can see a professional, and then it's a 2-3 month wait for a TWENTY MINUTE visit, which is not nearly enough time to develop the trust necessary for that relationship to work.
Kids today have been dealt an absolute **** sandwich, and the parents and teachers are doing their best but it's a losing battle.
But hey, it's Taco Tuesday, so at least we have that to look forward to while we watch the world burn.
