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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.
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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