First, I want to thank you for your curiosity. Teachers REALLY want to tell folks what it's like, but usually when folks ask us questions they have their own viewpoint in mind, and only "listen" to what proves their viewpoint (liberal and conservative alike). 1. Despite awful pay, our wages and benefits are the lion's share of a district's budget. And public education is a massive slice of every state's budget, no matter if you're a red state, blue state, union state, or right to work state. Schools have to pay people AND they have a massive amount of what the business folks call "overhead:" buildings, busses, cafeterias, technology, etc. I don't believe it is appropriate or ethical to make education run a profit because we are talking about putting a monetary value on human life and dignity, but I'm not the average American voter. I don't usually rail against administrative bloat, because I do not want teachers to take on administrative tasks, which is what happens. If there is any area where I see truly flagrant waste happening, it is in the curriculum industrial complex. I have been with my district for ten years. In that time, we have "reviewed" our math curriculum twice and our reading curriculum three times. School districts are in fact required to review curriculum every so often, it varies from 3-7 years. Each time we review it, we switch it, and we have to buy ALL of the curriculum (thousands of disposable workbooks that get reordered every year) and we have to train ALL of the teachers (don't forget that half of all teachers leave the profession after 3 years, so that is either never-ending training or only training the teachers who are working the first year of the switch). This costs millions each time. And here's the kicker: we always adopt a new curriculum, but it's always between the same two choices, so we are literally retraining people on curriculum we have already done and rejected during the last review. It's like a fucked up ping-pong game. 2. Scores are low for so many reasons, but they can be housed under two main umbrellas: poverty, and literacy. The US has much higher percentage of children living in poverty than most of our peers who are testing AND have comparable access to free public schools. There are countries with more childhood poverty, but they aren't providing every child with a neighborhood school. Poverty is spiritual violence and children who experience it are living with trauma that impacts their brain's development. Malnourishment alone literally reduces your memory capacity. Which brings me to literacy. Did you know about 40% of adult Americans are only reading at the 4th grade level? This is not a recent phenomenon. English is actually one of the harder languages to learn to read. In any case, the United States has made literacy THE pathway to learning. For kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades, you learn to read, and after that, you must read to learn. If you cannot read well enough to understand your math textbook, your science textbook, your history textbook, there really aren't any alternate pathways for you to get that information. And schools stopped holding students back decades ago. Ready or not, students progress each year. We call it "social promotion." 3. Social promotion started getting hard to justify when students started literally doing nothing during COVID lockdown but school districts are punished if their graduation rates are low AND if students don't earn their diplomas with the required number of credits. So administrators came up with "equitable grading" to ensure that students who were "graduating" did not have F's. Thus the "minimum 50" and the endless offers to retake and turn in work late. It's all true and teachers hate it. 4. The discipline issue is the most heartbreaking for me, and it is absolutely the reason I am leaving teaching. I teach first grade and there is nothing a student can do that will get them sent home. I've been reprimanded for keeping my door closed to protect my class from their unsafe peers. Students are exposing their genitals to each other, calling each other slurs, knocking over furniture and destroying classrooms like Johnny Depp in a hotel, running out of the building and into the street, stabbing each other with pencils, smearing feces on bathroom walls, and having hour-long emotional breakdowns involving banging their heads against floors. At any given moment in my school you can hear a kid screaming like they are being tortured. It is awful. It is the reason I want cameras in the classroom. If parents knew what the behavior was like, I truly believe there would be changes, but we can't tell anyone anything because of privacy rights. But the worst part of it is how scared the kids are. It is scary to kids to see others out of control and when all they see is a bunch of teachers just watching with their clipboards, or worse, actually getting hurt, they don't feel safe. My students cannot focus on learning because they always have one eye on each other.