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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted

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.

This is now starting also to happen to women past 40.

It appears that the average age of public school teachers in 2011-2012 was 42; the median was 41. It was the same in 2017-2018. In 2000 the median was 42, up from 36 twenty years earlier.

Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else

Again, I don't see much evidence of increased early burn out

Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.

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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