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Liked this post. Two additions for consideration.
Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges. I just tried to find the report on this that I'm thinking of, but wow is Google really trash theses days. The report I'm thinking of mentions that a reason for this is that graduate education programs, even among the social sciences, has a particular resistance to, well, evidence. Think about it. If you're trying to compare the long term outcomes of a particular teach style, you have to track children over several years and then somehow control for cognitive ability, parental involvement, and personal preferences (Alice likes math naturally etc.) This is impossible almost from the jump. Therefore, a LOT, of the courses taught in graduate education courses are one step away from woo-woo bullshit. I had a family friend who, already quite liberal, shifted his graduate program to education technology (basically finding better ways to catalog and use online materials in public schools) because he was aghast and the low level of rigor in the teaching instruction courses.
It's worth looking at who teachers used to be and who they are know. Fun fact; there are more active duty Navy SEALs than there are male pre-K teachers in the US. The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted. This is now starting also to happen to women past 40. Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else. Pair this with administrator's inability to really do anything with disruptive students, and classroom order and discipline is DESTROYED. Then, it doesn't even matter what the instruction style is. Repeating words, guessing them based on context - none of it matters when have the class is filming a TikTok and the most the non-binary double masters grad at the front can do is loudly clear her throat.
This post got longer than initially intended, but you caught me mid caffeine stream. There is no viable path for public education in the US for the close to mid-term. COVID was the last nail in the coffin. Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.
Is there any evidence for this? Because this indicates that the percentage of male public school teachers was 25% in 1999-2000, and 24% in 2017-2018.
Again, I don't see much evidence of increased early burn out
Home schooling is an option for only a very small percentage of parents, and certainly not the substantial number of parents whose first language is not English. As for private school enrollment, it has not exactly skyrocketed including after COVID, if CA is representative.
NOTE: The column for "schools with fewer than 6 students" in the above is probably home schools, given that the average enrollment in those schools is less than 2. A 25,000 increase in enrollment in a state with 6 million K-12 students doesn't mean much.
Ca is almost certainly not representative due to low fertility rates and outmigration.
That is unlikely to be very important, because the change in numbers is tiny, regardless. And, controlling for those factors, as a pct of total enrollment, the increase in pvt school enrollment since 2017-2018 has been from 8.3 percent to 9.3 percent. And outmigration is offset by immigration; with 10-11 pct of the US population, CA has 23% pct of the US foreign-born population, and those residents are definitely raising kids.
The point is that OP made claims without evidence.
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I think a big problem is that universities now have entirely separated departments from the others. Something that can be taken as an axiomatic truth in one department can be seen as completely false in another. Peer review has become review by your small subfield. Papers should have to have a randomly select a peer reviewer from another department. It would be interesting to see a neuroscientist, pediatrician, psychologist or psychiatrist review education papers. Just taking zoologists who are used to studying how animals behave and function in an ecosystem and toss them into sociology or education would be intriguing. Academia has become too specialized for ideas to propagate or for there to be effective cross-breeding of ideas.
The academia works on layers of abstraction. On the bottom there are mathematicians and physicists who describe the fundamental truths of the world, a bit higher up we have chemists, biologists and neuroscientists, in the middle there are psychologists, engineers, and doctors and on top we have economists and sociologists and historians. Generally, peer review should include people from a lower level of abstraction.
Economists and sociologists should be be put on small islands together, neuroscientists and educators would be another high priority combo.
How would this work for anything non-trivial in practise?
I have a masters degree in electrical engineering, have published a bunch of peer reviewed papers in a subfield of that and it wouldn't be at all hard to find papers I'd be unqualified to review even in that subfield. Back when I was working in university, it was hard enough to come up with responses to supposedly qualified reviewers in the same subfield who clearly hadn't at all understood what the paper was about.
Maybe you could find a small handful of superhumans who could understand both 3D electromagnetic field simulations as well as quantization noise in multi-bit sigma-delta-converters, but those are just two narrow sections of electrical engineering. You certainly won't find anyone who understands all the thousands of slices of just electrical engineering, nevermind all of science.
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100%. And it's particularly bad in humanities where over-subdivision is ridiculous. I think the British University's still have PPE as a sort of default humanities major - that's politics, philosophy, and economics. Which, when you stop to think about it, are all intrinsically related and, therefore, necessary to be taught together. In a sort of dark hilarity "intersectionality" is a weird bottom-up recreation of ... sociology (which, to be clear, is anthropology without the field work and economics without the math).
Part of this has to do with the relentless credentialism. I went to a fancy kid college and there were classmates I had who wanted to take STEM courses from genuine interest but worried they would struggle and their GPA would fall. The idea of college GPA is absurd to me because it can be hacked and demonstrates ZERO proficiency at anything. Take the courses you want, attend however you feel. Senior year should be an independent project that you publish publicly ... employers can make their determination based on that.
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By highly educated do you mean bachelor's degrees? I think few have more than that, and there are also many who are allowed to teach while working towards their bachelor's. My guess is that that "do something else" for most women is to become a stay at home mother, possibly retaining a part-time job.
And yeah, the state of education is abysmal. The good teachers try to work around the relevant laws. For instance, when a severely disabled kid is throwing a tantrum, teachers aren't allowed to intervene, even if the tantrum involves throwing around and destroying expensive equipment. Idk about whether the same rules apply to regular kids. However, teachers CAN intervene if the tantrum is threatening someone else. So they stand in front of the expensive equipment, wait for the kid to throw a swing as they inevitably will, and then restrain them. Resource teachers have strict limits regarding how many support minutes they give to students who need them, and their workarounds for dealing with these incredible regulations are absurd and often hilarious.
At its core I think it comes down to something very simple. We are outsourcing parenthood, but not trusting the government-provided parents to do their job. Parents need to be able to discipline kids and teach them morality. Giving teachers such an enormous role in kids' lives, without the ability to discipline or support any coherent worldview besides enlightened secular centrism, is doomed from the start. Of course, giving unrelated government employees a parenting role is doomed from the start anyways, so I don't want to give them even more power over kids--just pointing out the inherent contradiction in our approach.
Pedantic answer: Only a minority of American's have bachelors so, by default, a four year not-online bachelors degree is highly educated. However, I AM the asshole for saying that so ...
Anecedotally ... there's a trend of women doing an immediate masters in education / social something something right after undergrad, mostly as a way to continue to delay adulthood. They stack this again with a delay into adulthood by teaching and then, yes you are 100% right, plop into adulthood by getting married. I see it as a way to save professional / feminist face (I have a masters degree and was an educator!) while covertly pursuing a more traditional family arrangement that they may have wanted all along.
Regarding Government-As-Parent .... the antecedent for Teachers-As-Parents was welfare. It's tricky. I'm not a crypto-libertarian-social-darwinist that says let single mothers fend for themselves ... but the OVERWHELMING incentives to abandon the nuclear family have wreaked havoc on everyone, most especially the children of the lower middle class. Even the middle to-upper middle class essentially pay for surrogate or auxiliary parentage in the form of nannies, afterschool programs, and summer camps. This is because fighting for the limbo of a Dual Income Household necessitates both parents spend most of their time (and close to all of their energy) in competitive careers.
For sure. We didn't always need dual income households to feel successful. My wife (a teacher) has quite a few coworkers who pay for childcare only $3-4/hr cheaper than what they themselves make. After taxes, gas costs, etc. they are pretty much paying money to look like teachers rather than mothers. And sure, maybe they're just financially illiterate, but it still raises the question of why they felt like the default should be working rather than parenting.
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Well I think there is some disagreement on whether we should be outsourcing parenthood at all. The group that thinks it's a good idea and the group that distrusts the government provided parents are not composed of the same people but because we've allowed so much centralization we can't seem to conceive of having different systems for these groups.
Well, I agree that it would be nice to have separate systems, but I'm not sure such a clear dichotomy exists. I think most people both think it's a good idea and somewhat distrust the teachers, with a large minority both liking the idea and trusting the teachers, and a much smaller minority disliking school and distrusting the teachers. There's a reason that among those who support school (most people) most still want restrictions on what teachers teach--they're not allowed to teach their religion, or their politics, or generally provide their own viewpoint on anything divisive. That group clearly trusts teachers less than parents, but also still wants their kids spending more time with teachers than with parents.
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