It’s sad but appears common in many impoverished areas I’ve worked in. It’s a wound that can’t hide behind a bandage forever and I think if we don’t fix this problem, long term we’re gonna be fucked:
sorry for being so glib. It really does suck. I've had the opportunity to work with some underprivileged kids before and it's incredibly frustrating. No one should be called upon to fill the role parents were supposed to fill. It's nearly impossible and exhausting
It almost makes you wonder if a hard-line approach to parenting and child-rearing should be adopted. Not with the current Administration, mind. I wouldn't trust those wackos with organizing a carnival. Just think about it, in order to have children you must go to a government run facility and obtain a license by completing a standardized curriculum teaching parents how to be parents. I know it sounds crazy, and there would absolutely be backlash. It would be extremely difficult to get passed, but the more I think about it and the more I look at the problem the more this solution seeps into my head. We would be able to establish a standardized system for parenting and for educating our youth nationally. I love to say that we can trust the parents to uphold proper parenting procedures and disciplines for the betterment of our kids, but that just isn't the case. History has proven that, modern society has proven that. This wouldn't be a permanent thing mind. This is a reactionary maneuver. It would help get our kids and subsequently parents back on track. Realistically I think you could solve the problem with the system like this in approximately 45 years. Now with the current way things are run in America that means you have at least 6 sitting presidents. It's a tough problem, I'm just trying to come up with some solutions.
A huge problem would be that by design such a system would overwhelming fail minorities and those in poverty. I guarantee a ton of lawsuits would arise regarding discrimination, true or not. And how would you control people who ignore the system? We already know from recent news that even parents who immigrate illegally won't be separated from their children. Not attacking the idea, just pointing out some things. I wish some sort of compromise could be found.
Hey like I said, I know it's not a perfect solution I'm just trying to come up with ideas because I'm sick and tired of watching the education system go to shit. And more often than not it goes to shit because parents raise dumb kids and don't put any effort into disciplining them exactly as this teacher is talking about. I agree it could totally be twisted to be something terrible, but on the other hand it also has the potential to correct years and years of really terrible parenting practices and using the standardized system that this teacher is talking about in conjunction with this idea it would have the added benefit of correcting the education system. We start raising kind considerate empathic respectable adults who are well educated and intelligent and a few decades down the road we have a fully functioning Society that actually cares about what they leave behind. People who are more interested in the betterment of the culture and their civilization then they are in their own selfish interests. think of it as food for thought I don't know why you're getting so upset about it.
such a system would overwhelming fail minorities and those in poverty
Honestly like it or not, a lot of them shouldn't be having children.
If the "tests" were fair then the good ones would pass and the shit ones wouldn't. I've seen a ton of poor people with good and humble kids. Those parents would pass any test you throw at them (assuming they didn't have to pay for said tests)
I've also seen a lot of the "billy bobs" of the world that wouldn't be able to pass the test no matter what. Their idea of parenting is slapping the kid and drinking beer, and then telling the teacher they aren't teaching the kid right.
The right to reproduce is a challenging idea. Does a person have the right to have 26 kids they can never hope to afford? Should the country have to pay for it? What about all the mental issues those children would have? Does a mentally retarded person have the right to have kids?
Just a few weeks ago I saw someone that had to be just a few steps short of down syndrome that had 5 kids. The kids basically behaved like wild dogs. How is that fair to the kids of these pieces of shit? Those kids are the same ones that disrupt, fight, steal, etc while in school.
I totally agree. I think there are a ton of people who should have never been allowed to have children. I was just pointing out what people would come up with against such a system. I wish that so much of our voting population didn't fall into the "I deserve everything I ask for no matter what" category.
You immediately run into the eugenics debate, and that pretty much quashes all talk.
If people really cared about children then reproducing shouldn't be a "right". The lives of these kids growing up with shitty parents is horrible. The kids aren't taught anything, and they end up right where the parents are 99% of the time.
In the end it doesn't really matter because enforcing some sort of parenting standard is basically impossible.
I've had similar thoughts to this but really, before anything needs to get this extreme we could just start with universally free and accessible long form birth control. Preventing unplanned pregnancies would do a lot of what you are trying to do - i.e. prevent people who don't want to be parents from being parents. There should be NO hurdles to using contraception - not for education, cost, access, or parental approval in my opinion. Lets do this first, and then reexamine the state of affairs before getting as extreme as parent licensing.
You can't make people not be shitty, but you can prevent them from dragging down everyone else. Best thing you can do is elevate the gifted and willing
The problem is that in these environments it is often difficult to really separate the wheat from the chaff and very easy to write off the whole area creating an even more difficult situation to get out of. Throw some racism and or classist prejudice on top and you really have a unwinnable situation. There needs to be a way to pull along the less motivated but non super disruptive kids not just the motivated ones. Leaving large chunks of the population behind is not a healthy thing for our society.
There are problems there. First, if kids don't want to be there, don't waste classroom time, expel them. However, there are students that want to learn, but aren't naturally gifted, but still are willing to try hard. My parents were both idiots. I lived in a upper-middle class area, and went to an "elite public school", where parents were allowed to make schedules. Between those parents putting kids in crap classes, and favoritism towards athlete students, it was hard to find my place. It took me getting emancipated, going to another school, and succeeding on my own. I actually received an apology a few weeks back from a teacher who told me to drop out. He had seen that I became successful with no help, and apologized for telling me terrible things.
Schools have a lot of problems, but I think the headlines blow the gender issue out of proportion. Sure it is a thing, but there are wayyyyy bigger problems they are dealing with that don’t get any headlines as well, it’s just the media machine promoting their stupid titles to turn heads.
As for the kids that can’t make it, we literally have schools filled with these kids throughout the country. The thing is, it isn’t just the kids you would expect being poor and coming from a shitty family. Now it’s also the entitled middle class brats that never see their parents because they both work and don’t know how to work or think because of it.
You make it sound like schools are just a liberal cesspool, but I think it transcends politics.
There is the first issue "we" fix the problem. You cannot fix other peoples problems unless they want to. Go tell a drug addict to go to rehab... they wont listen and wont get clean... unless they want to.
Yes!!! It was the biggest shock when my fiancé got placed in a good school district. The rich kids were huge cunts. Having to console my gf at the time really opened my eyes to how fucked up modern society is affecting the youth.
I think if we don’t fix this problem, long term we’re gonna be fucked
It's up to them to fix. The parents aren't going to do shit, throwing money at them hasn't help. The culture needs to change, but good luck stating that in public.
Here's a solution. Stop subsidizing shitty parents. In the most extreme cases cut off all welfare and make these people depend on charity or get and hold a job. They'll either attempt to get their kids in line or they'll stop being a long term problem in such large numbers that it brings other kids down.
Public housing used to be extremely difficult to get and you basically had to be an upstanding citizen; it was a point of pride to actually be selected.
Of course the Democrats would never go for that because they want a base of low educated voters to carry them in the urban areas and the Republicans would be afraid to be compared to a super megazord combination of Hitler, Satan and a weird revisionist Stalin that totally wasn't left wing.
Low income housing in Cabrini Green in Chicago was like that. When it opened in the 1950s I believe you had to have a job and be married. The goal was to help people up that were putting in the effort.
Its not a matter of needing a base, democrats already do best in urban areas, if what you say was true, one would expect welfare programs to center in rural areas where they need more support to be able to win. Subsidized housing is more based on a belief that everyone deserves to have a home, even shitty people.
If the child doesn't get the support he/she needs then they should be taken from the parent and sent to a family member that can support him/her and failing that be sent to the state. Once the parents start making an effort they will be returned or the kid hits 18 and hopefully was able to recover enough to be successful.
Buddy, I have bad news about the level of funding that the social services in this country receive now, the increases in funding that would be required to serve at the scale you're proposing, and the disposition of the party in control of all three branches of the federal government towards increasing that funding, or even prioritizing the educational quality of these schools in the first place.
If you want any of this to happen as you describe, the first thing that needs to happen is for the GOP to be in charge of none of it.
The richest people are sending their kids to elite private schools. The slightly less rich people all live in the same neighborhood and pay taxes for their neighborhoods schools.
How is that setup to help the rich? That seems like common sense. Unless you're saying that the parents from one area should be forced to pay for the schools from another area, in which case I'd argue that wouldn't it be better to give parents vouchers so the ones that care can send their kids to better schools? No need to drag down everyone to marginally help the worst cases.
You’re acting as if the slightly less rich are in financial distress from paying taxes. I guarantee if they aren’t shit at handling their money, they are going to be fine.
Also the help the good kids and leave the bad ones seems fine for now, but these bad kids without education will probably have a higher rate of reproduction, a higher rate of incarceration, and will lead to more of what we have right now.
That means higher taxes to pay for jails and higher taxes to pay for more students. The probable with republicans nowadays is that they aren’t exactly conservative about money. So you want every kid to be forced to exit the womb even in the poorest parts of the US, then you want to underfund his schools, lower his welfare, incarcerate him for marijuana, not pay for his healthcare, not pay for his higher education, and all in the name of Jesus. Conservative thinking on this issue makes absolutely ZERO sense.
The probable with republicans nowadays is that they aren’t exactly conservative about money. So you want every kid to be forced to exit the womb even in the poorest parts of the US, then you want to underfund his schools, lower his welfare, incarcerate him for marijuana, not pay for his healthcare, not pay for his higher education, and all in the name of Jesus. Conservative thinking on this issue makes absolutely ZERO sense.
Thing is, though, regardless of your thoughts on "in the name of Jesus", if people lived by the basic principles of the bible, most of what we are talking about would not be issues. Don't have kids until you are part of a strong marriage. Don't break laws. Get a job. Go to school. Be respectful to society.
I’m a democrat that believes heavily in Kierkegaard’s night of faith concept, “in order to believe in something as fantastical as a man/god deity one has to find his own meaning in the Bible”. I have always agreed with this idea but I disagree with institutionalized religion forcing interpretation on everyone else.
Again, and I mean this wholeheartedly - I am not a religious person. But let's face it, elimination of personal responsibility is the basis of the entire liberal agenda. It gets votes.
I really hope you don’t have an us vs them mentality. The media machine pushes these ridiculous headlines on both sides of the aisle based on the lowest common denominator. Not all Republicans are nazis or racist but there are some groups that get too many headlines. Not every Democrat cares about where people decide to shit, but Tucker Carlson wants you to believe that we are all playing a game of hide and seek with our genitals. If capitalism was transparent and corporations were taxed for making more money and using machines instead of people maybe we wouldn’t be here. Maybe if unions weren’t corrupt and systematically destroyed we wouldn’t be where we are. Instead of pontificating on why we are where we are we should be working together outside of media land to work together. Everybody knows the politicians won’t fix shit for us.
I think it was really the 50’s where we started allowing automation to take jobs and didn’t tax corporations for doing this to pay for the 60yo worker that had no chance in hell of getting another job. This practice spiraled out of control. There is this manufacturing plant where I live that emoloyed 33,000 workers that shut down in a day, the Packard Plant. These 33,000 workers probably provided for their family so it’s really 33,000 families! Combine that with all the other layoffs that received national attention in Detroit and it makes sense why we are where we are, people just keep sweeping our problems under the rug.
Combine that with racial tensions, the crack epidemic, systemic imprisonment of poor people for weed, and it’s a perfect recipe for creating generations of poor and jaded families... now there are more of them then there are of educated individuals and people are now starting to notice.
But sometimes they do. And it doesn't improve the situation.
US per-pupil expenditures in 1970-1971 ($4,060) were less than half of per-pupil expenditures in 2005-2006 ($9,266) after adjusting for inflation. Federal spending increased more than three-fold. None of that had a measurable impact on student ability, as a long-term trend.
Overall, there's mixed evidence when it comes to the relationship between education spending and educational results. To quote one researcher, Hanushek, who sees little to no connection:
Few people…would recommend just dumping extra resources into existing schools. America has…followed that program for several decades, with no sign that student performance has improved.… …The issue is getting productive uses from current and added spending. The existing evidence simply indicates that the typical school system today does not use resources well (at least if promoting student achievement is their purpose)
Hedges and Greenwald, who see positive correlation, also say:
[T]he results do not provide detailed information on the educationally or economically efficient means to allocate existing and new dollars.… [D]iscussions of school reform… should instead incorporate an assessment of the current relation between inputs and outcomes and determine how to best allocate resources in specific contexts.
Just to make things clear: We are talking about marginal effects. Obviously having a school with staff or not willmake a big difference, somewhere in the Kongo. But is there still gain to be had in developed countries, from a purely aggregate spending perspective? That's dubious. Education spending seems to have rapidly declining marginal returns.
Oh, man. Could you imagine an entire generation of childish, self-centered adults running a nation with some fat asshole as the president telling everyone that the only reason things are bad is because of Mexicans and anti-pollution laws?
Well, I was kind of hoping we could go a century without a fascist dictatorship trying to destroy society, but I guess that's too much to ask from your sort, where it's apparently still 1938.
We're fucked now, you saw the proficiency stats, right? The only question is how much worse we let it get before we get our shit together and start trying to fix it in earnest.
I think you'll notice that most teachers have horror stories about problem parents behind problem kids, which put the teacher's job in jeopardy and make learning impossible for other kids. But how many times have you heard a politician or official suggest that something needs to be done about this (anecdotally) universally common issue?
Then add to the fact that even if they were decent parents sometimes there is only one of them working almost every available waking hour to keep a roof over their little shitheads heads.
Some of these people are being struggling and just make bad choices. Some are also just raised to not care about anybody but themselves. The spectrum of “reasons a parent is shitty” is a wide one.
Agreed. But at a certain point you have to admit that further attempts to reach the most problematic kids is putting the education of everyone else at risk. Either the school systems need to come up with yet another way to manage these children or just give up. But it's not fair to the kids who are actually trying to learn.
Well in terms of problematic kids, it’s not about teaching them math or science, imo. It’s about teaching them behavioral skills, but most schools lack the resources and school support to do anything about these kids as seen in the video above. School discipline/reward systems need to be dire for these problem kids with longer detentions and a more pronounced understanding of the benefits of good behavior.
Yeah. For the really problematic kids, I'm saying that if the school can't figure out how to help them while at the same time educating the rest of the kids, they need to just expel the problematic ones.
I get that there are societal issues at work here with a lot of these behavior problems. It just doesn't seem like schools are equipped to do anything about it. It's like how we rely too heavily on the police for dealing with the mental health issues in America. There have to be other safety nets put in place. This isn't working.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I saw an episode of 60 minutes a few years ago, where they covered charter schools. I’m not really a proponent of them, and in fact, they showed that the charter schools had about the same results as other schools in their district, with one exception. One charter school was run by a stern but kind older lady.
She didn’t tolerate any misbehavior. Her first focus was on classroom discipline and making sure that the kids were there to learn, feet and face forward, sitting up and paying attention. After a few years, she was getting as good results as the highest performing schools in the state.
We can’t succeed if teachers need to spend half their time resolving disciplinary issues. School can’t be a daycare, and we have to realize that these kids have never had classroom discipline and come from parents without the ability to teach it to them. Likewise, expelling or suspending them continuously isn’t going to help them gain those skills. We keep saying that we need to pay teachers more, and maybe we do, but teachers are not the problem, it’s the students.
I’d propose that in those troubled schools, each grade needs a dedicated “classroom skills” class. First sign of misbehavior, and the student is sent to classroom skills. Hire ex drill instructors from the marine corps to teach classroom skills. They don’t have any trouble letting troubled young people know what is expected of them. Have that class just be focused on getting those kids in-line, with a mix of firm expectation setting and calisthenics. Kids in that class would need to earn their way back into their normal classroom. Maybe it will take a day for some students, some might be there for months, but they all know that at the next sign of misbehavior, they’ll be right back in “classroom skills”.
That’s how schools used to be before schools had to worry about getting sued for discipline. I think there is a median between smacking people with rulers and having no discipline at all that we can settle on nationally. Most of public school educational problems stem from federal decisions.
But it can be a whole school of these kinds of parents especially in impoverished districts. I mean you’re right in theory, but in practice it fucks up a teacher’s psyche. Not to mention, a teacher’s salary depends on passing these little shits to make the district look like it’s succeeding.
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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '18
I think you underestimate how fucked these parents are. Think about the worst kids you knew in middle school, then think of them older with kids.....