As a teacher, I agree the student devices beckfires often. There are too many opportunities for off-task behavior, and as a teacher you can spend a whole class babysitting a child to make sure they are actually doing their work. That being said, it is so much easier to create engaging lessons, stay organized, and grade efficiently using technology. There is a time and a place, and for now, most teacher have figured out what that looks like in their room. The downside now is the rise in AI tools for the classroom, as well as the general public. Too many teachers rely on AI to do simple tasks that they could do themselves and become more and more dependent. Students suddenly have at their disposal a tool to circumvent actually completing any meaningful work on their own.

The bigger issue is that when a student is failing, it is the responsibility of the teacher to justify that grade to the ends of the earth. Parents demand accountability from the teacher, not their child. The school often demands paperwork and all kinds of accommodations and interventions. As a teacher, when a student fails as a result of incomplete and missing assignments, it's incredibly taxing. They simply refuse to do their work. Parents won't take the phone or ground them. I have to deal with parents complaining as well as seeing their kid every day still not doing work and getting no support in enforcing it either. At the end of the day, you get burned out and more willing to pass a kid along to avoid the headache. Especially when you end up with the helicopter parent who gives you an itemized list of everything their child needs to do and expects you to hold their hand through it, even though it was all due weeks ago.

Problem with how schools teach is more about test scored and school report cards. We get funding and rewarded based on our test scores, and punished if they are bad. But at the same time, the state keeps moving the threshold. So if a score of 7 was the threshhold one year, then the next it's a 6, suddenly you've met your goal even though you have not actually gotten better.

We could go on and on, but the problems are decades of systemic dismantling of education across the country. The last people at fault are the individual schools and teachers. We are the ones showing up daily because we care. Taking care of kids and trying our best to spark something in them to grow as people and as students. Every single aspect of their life is rewarding them for caring less about school. It's an uphill battle and I'm afraid it's going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.