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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Liked this post. Two additions for consideration.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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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