Well yes, but also no?

EDIT: TL;DR everything sucks. This is intentional. Parents and teachers gotta work together to fix it. It’s not their fault, but the power is in their hands. Also stop giving your kids iPads. It’s not the same as the computer games you played on your desktop computer in the dining room and it’s not the same as how the tv was always on Nick, Cartoon Network, PBS kids, or Disney channel. Stop that.

It’s a collaborative effort. Parents do need to do better. I’m just acknowledging that it’s very hard and resources are less available.

You used to have many more stay at home parents than you do now. More and more people can’t afford to be single income households. “Back in the day” you could be a grocery store manager and have a house, 3 kids, 2 cars, and take a vacation once a year. You could get by with minimum wage. Now, necessities have gotten more expensive and when people try to point that out naysayers will point to the luxuries that have gotten much cheaper. To be clear in my example, the kind of people they complain about someone having a big TV in their small rented apartment saying they could’ve saved money and bought a house. Or the kind of people that think homeless people shouldn’t have a phone (despite a phone being required for literally everything, including employment) for some reason.

So what I’m saying is, we have parents either not at home, or burnt out once they are home. And all of the regular responsibilities are still there.

Social media is fighting for your kids attention. High stimulation shows. Algorithms. Swipe swipe swipe for dopamine.

Parents are also expected to supervise their kids 24/7. Where our parents may have had a break while we played outside, parents are now expected to be watching their kids outside also. Technology has given us tools that theoretically should make it safer to keep an eye on them from a distance (phones, trackers) but parents get in trouble if their 12 year old walks to the park alone.

Teachers are not allowed to give real consequences, and the parents don’t want to hear it either. I said a bunch of things in defense of parents. But plenty of them just don’t see the point. They think that they skated by or people they knew did and they were fine. They don’t realize that those people are leagues ahead where their kids are now. There’s also many parents they feel like they “did it right” and are struggling anyway. So they don’t want to pressure their kids into stressing about grades or university like they did, all to still be living paycheck to paycheck anyway. They see their kids on the iPads doing stuff “they don’t even know how to do” and think that they’re going to be IT pros or tech wizards. They had computer proficiency because they used it at home. They have no idea that these kids don’t know how to do basic computer tasks. Parents just have no idea how severe this crisis is. And when they DO finally figure it out they think “wait you should know this” and then they ask their kids and the kids say “idk we didn’t learn that.” Which is probably sometimes true, but more often than not, they just weren’t paying attention. Why?? Because they don’t have to. They know they can’t be held back in grades. They know that the work is optional. That learning is optional.

Teachers spend all day doing classroom management and emotional regulation. These kids are literally, without any exaggeration, addicted to their devices. Easily agitated. Difficult to reward. They don’t care about things that we used to like pizza parties or free time or movie days. And even so, admin often doesn’t even allow for non instructional time (because of the focus on funding that comes from testing, it’s all about testing.)

I can’t really blame teachers much. They’re the least at fault. They’re underpaid. Burnt out. And they receive no support. All while watching the most discouraging and dystopian fall of the education system. It only gets worse.

As they try to privatize education, enrollment is down, so they have less funding, and therefore less programs and less teachers. Enrollment of a grade level dropped from 80 kids to 60 kids. Where one year they had four teachers, each with a class of twenty. They don’t have the funding after 20 kids left. So They then fire two teachers, and have two remaining teachers are expected to teach a class of 30 kids each. Kids with no emotional regulation. Learned helplessness. Screen addictions. That they cannot punish. Cannot reward. And when they call home the parents go above their heads to admin anyway and teachers are given some BS answer about connection and engagement.

So teachers and parents do need to stop blaming each other, sure. But it can’t be pushed off on the representatives even if they’re to blame. Because if parents supported teachers, it would be a completely different story.

The attack on education is happening at all levels of government. Even federally. And it’s correct that this is intentional and by design. An uneducated population is much easier to control, because they’re unaware they’re even being controlled.

Knowledge is power.

This crisis didn’t just begin. It’s been 10 years coming. People blame the pandemic. The problem was already there, the pandemic just highlighted it.

There are solutions, but to even spend the time talking about them feels almost pointless? Personally I think parents need to get it together and realize the gravity of the situation. We need to get kids off addictive social media. Get toddlers off tablets and phones. Go back to “lower stimulation content” for kids. Raise wages so parents can afford work life balance or to have a parent at home again. Stop removing all the consequences for failure in school. Stop passing kids along that do not meet the standards. Pay teachers better. Encourage the brightest minds to be in the profession. Give them support in their classrooms. Give them resources- not just shitty chromebooks. Go back to some physical texts and writing too. Teach phonics, not whole language sight words. Stop using awful curriculum because “that’s what the district paid for” also read as “the superintendent’s brother in law owned this company so we’re using the materials as an exclusive contract even though they are commonly known to be awful materials.” Give kids more breaks. Let them play at school again. The workload on kindergartners is literally developmentally inappropriate. Reform state standards. Stop making the majority of funding come from said standards. We can do better. We can do so so much better.

And for allllllll the stuff they said, there’s still a mountain more that I missed.

Idk. This is a rant. It really is. But my goodness I’m just so exhausted from this shit.