- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
they are happy to spend money on technology and shiny new buildings.
they aren’t spending money on teaching staff. teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.
the issue is the metricization of education. everything must be measured… and this creates a perverse system where everything is now about increasing the metrics, regardless of improving education.
not to mention the changing in parenting where ever parent things their child is a genius and it’s the ‘school system’ that’s failing their kid, instead of their kid being a dumbass jerk who refuses to learn or participate in their own education.
They’re not more credentialed than ever. The days of a teacher needing a master’s degree, much less a PhD, are well behind us. Modern teachers - across both public and private sectors - can start working with as little as a GED and a state-issued teaching certificate. They don’t need a bachelor’s in their subject of expertise or in education as a degree. They don’t need to undergo an apprenticeship under a more experienced professional. They don’t need good references to land a job. All they need is a willingness to undercut existing (unionized) teaching staff and a clean criminal record.
Schools in low-budget districts onboard these green recruits in droves. Then they use the added manpower as an excuse to fire anyone on track for a pension or old enough to receive full benefits. Education has become the default job for drop-outs and victims of industry layoffs. It’s the employer of last-resort, with enormous churn, as rebounds in the job market vacuum people out as fast as downturns dump them in.
Metricization is used as an excuse to conduct these wholesale purges. HISD is ground zero for this experiment in privatization, as the state takes over local school boards, fires teachers by the dozen, and consolidates students into larger and large class sizes with fewer resources.
Standardized testing is used to justify the initial purges. Then rebounds in testing (as students are purged and private testing companies manipulate exam scores) are used to validate the decisions of newly installed administrators. Don’t look at college placement or applied skills tests, just focus on Pearson’s latest “Number go down / Number go up” announcements, as the state leaders funnel more and more money to the testing companies.
By the metrics these districts are degrading and collapsing. But through propaganda, school residents are brow-beaten into doubting their own eyeballs.
You can blame “parenting” for a single kid’s mistakes.
Once you start blaming “parenting” in the aggregate, you’re inevitably full of shit.
The common denominator in these school districts isn’t “parents” and its absurd to pretend otherwise.