lizkat
Watching March roll out real winter
Leaving aside guesses on how the parallels have developed between the ways of Trump and Putin: I have certainly underestimated "the power of idiots" in the USA... and my concern now extends to wondering how we will fare going forward, even if we do once again reach some point of more political will to support education properly.
It's not going to be just about money: it's where do we get decent teachers from if we look at educational outcomes currently? Add in our polarized politics and how will we ever agree again on what should be in textbooks that deal with history and social studies? We can't even agree that a newspaper may contain some facts.
And then there's Trump's hard core base that really would tolerate his shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, and the reason is apparently because it would piss off liberals. Somewhere along the line, this breakdown in both moral compass and enlightened self-interest reflects directly upon American education, whether homebrew or formal.
Be that as it may, any student who graduates from a US K-12 school can borrow money and go to college and then have the option to become a teacher, sometimes without requirement for specialized teacher training. The pay sucks, so lacking pedagogical skills won't be the half of it. Knowing something worth teaching is already the problem.
There was a joke in medical schools back in WWII, during a general shortage of doctors, about teaching surgical procedures: "watch one, do one, teach one." Well it very likely applies these days to K-12 teacher training in the crunch of budgets and shortages due to covid-19. Here's the classroom, here's the book, here's the lesson plan the last teacher had, good luck.
As a sidebar I will note that I just read that a lot of US K-12 schools lack regular, special-ed and substitute teachers as an effect of the covid-19 pandemic. Some in the south have reduced requirements so that what's needed in some cases is as little as a high school diploma, no teacher training credits needed. Others including Nevada require only up to enough credits for an associate's degree (2 yrs college) to run a classroom as a substitute teacher, with no insistence on particular subject majors. The crunch is a shortage of money AND teachers, and that was the case even before covid with respect to school budgets. Now there's health-related reluctance to teach also thrown into the mix.
Meanwhile even back in the 1990s I remember when one of my brothers was a per diem adjunct instructor at a SUNY college, teaching English composition to freshmen. The papers he was grading from 18-year olds were about what 10-yos were capable of writing on average back in the 1950s. So we were already running at a bad deficit in terms of preparation for college even then,
Bottom line I always figured that one day in the USA we'd get what we didn't feel like paying for in terms of good basic education. But it was only after the 2016 election that I realized we're already getting it. This despite clues offered up all along if one observed changes in focus and preparation of assorted Congress critters: it would seem that we are what we elect. Devin Nunes anyone? And now a couple of folks from QAnon...
To tie it all back to the demise of RBG and the matter of a successor high court justice, we are not the same America that saw her elevated to that bench. We are something else now. We have different expectations, highly partisan ones that --so far, if only for the most part-- are not consistently matched by the decisions of the justices on the court, no matter that their respective appointments have been increasingly partisan. That should make us happy, but instead often disappoints, which is another worrisome sign to me that we have really dumbed ourselves down in the USA.
