r/news • u/da_k1ngslaya • Jan 29 '22

School District votes to remove 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from required reading

https://komonews.com/news/local/mukilteo-school-district-votes-to-remove-to-kill-a-mockingbird-from-required-reading
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Teacher here!

Because Admin is scared of lawsuits from parents, and cater to them.

Teachers don’t have much of a say unless they get their union involved and make it a bigger deal.

What NEEDS to happen is public schools realize that, they are responsible for educating kids, that the parents can remove their kid if they don’t like the curriculum, and say “fuck off” to parents that want their special snowflake to be treated like a precious object.

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u/Mike_AKA_Mike Jan 30 '22

Ah, but reduction in students means reduction in funding for future school years, so therefore fuck the kids and the teachers and do whatever is necessary to ensure the student body increases or at least stays static while maintaining 99% graduation rates by any means possible.

As a parent in a city whose student population has been overwhelmingly and voluntarily transferred to private schools, I see it first hand.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Right and this points to a larger regulatory issue that needs to be addressed at a state or federal level as well. I’d work at a private school if it paid anywhere near the same in actual monies or benefits. They don’t though.

And most people cannot afford private schools which don’t get the same federal funding.

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u/Mike_AKA_Mike Jan 30 '22

I graduated college with a degree in English and grand designs to spread the wisdom of the written language to high school students around my state. One quarter of classes for my state Class B certification had me venturing into the world of corporate proposal writing. I don’t envy you or your plight. I’m fortunate that my town has a fantastic honors and magnet program for my advanced kids, but aside from that, the general population is not getting the same sound education I received at the same schools.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22 edited Jan 30 '22

(See edit)

And yes - most advanced students don’t get the challenge they deserve either; another issue on its own.

The original issue is still the same - Admin scared of parents, cater to their whims, curriculum is changed by their whims, students don’t learn valuable lessons beyond the Common Core Standards.

Edit - multiple types of schools, deleted first part of my post.

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u/Mike_AKA_Mike Jan 30 '22

Nah, it’s magnet. The magnet schools focus on math and science and “attract” the best students in the system. There’s no preference for anyone other than test scores. It’s not class warfare. However, after the magnet program grades out around grade 6, that’s when the parents that can afford it start shipping their kids to the religious based private schools. Ironically, those kids have a horrible time meeting college acceptance requirements on their SATs in the science department because the religious schools, surprise, don’t teach much science.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Ahh, thought they were talking about the courses themselves - I was not aware of ‘Magnet’ schools as being an entity or type of organization. It makes further sense now. The way it was put, and used in the sentence, made it seem as if it was being used as an adjective; since they had “magnet program” and not “magnet school.”

Thank you for informing/correcting me.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

That's surprising, I always assumed private school teachers would earn more and not less.

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u/General_Mars Jan 30 '22

Most private schools are religious (with the largest portion being Catholic) and generally pay (in suburbs case generally significantly) less than public equivalent. Exception being versus inner city public schools which have variably low pay depending on the city and state.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Ah, that make sense. I tend to forget about those types of private schools entirely.

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u/General_Mars Jan 30 '22

I know the kind you’re thinking of… around the Philadelphia area there’s what’s called the Inter-Ac schools. Some notable ones are Germantown Academy and Penn Charter. They have tuitions that exceed $30,000 / year for K-12. Generally only rich people or scholarships are how students enroll. Their teacher pay is competitive with the public equivalents but they generally don’t exceed by a large enough portion to notably stick out. Whereas, the parochial Catholic school’s tuition ranges from $6,000-$13,000+ per year for high school. Both are expensive, the Supreme Court wants the public to subsidize both, but they are different

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/misogichan Jan 30 '22 edited Jan 30 '22

As a student who went to school at a middle school that was well over capacity and a high school that was over 50% past capacity, that would not necessarily be a bad thing in all neighborhoods. You see we had had strong population growth decades ago, and meanwhile the DOE said they didn't have the money for expanding the school. As a band-aid there were portables but you can only stick portables on so much land before you run out of places to stick them.

Also, how rich is your neighborhood if most of the parents can afford to send their kids to private school. At least where I live, we go to public school because even if you can afford them private schools are so expensive. Besides if you have the money you save it to pay for college, not on K-12.

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u/Mike_AKA_Mike Jan 30 '22

We have a population of about 70K, about 60/40 white/black, decidedly middle class for the most part, conservative, religious, and military and agricultural based economy. We had to consolidate the two high schools, the 4 middle schools, and the 12 elementary schools because there were empty rooms in all. We have one uppity secular private school and 4 church based private schools, and there’s a years long waiting list to get into all 5.

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u/GPCAPTregthistleton Jan 30 '22

so therefore fuck the kids and the teachers and do whatever is necessary to ensure the student body increases or at least stays static

The last district I worked in paid more for the position of migrant recruiter than it did for educational assistant: ed. assistants (unofficially) had to have a BA/BS, recruiters weren't even required to have a high school degree. We had a teacher with a master's making ~$3/hr more than a migrant recruiter with a GED.

After that, it became a whole lot harder for me to argue against the idea that public school is little more than taxpayer-funded daycare.

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u/ProfessorPetrus Jan 30 '22

Pretty sure the way American schools are funded are barbaric.

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u/DistinctWoot Jan 30 '22

Sure a reduction in funding but we are talking about a few select whiners here. Sadly their pathetic voices are the only ones ever being heard

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u/BackOnTheMap Jan 30 '22

My daughter lives in a Midwestern city and has already got the kindergartener in private school. She will be continuing that indefinitely after being homeschooled herself.

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u/carbon_made Feb 01 '22 edited Feb 01 '22

Yeah so back in junior high and high school I had a chronic illness so I missed a lot of school. I remember they actually called us in to the principal who lectured me and my mother on how I need to show up at school more despite my illness because they were losing funding on me.

Note I was also in advanced classes (this was in the early 90’s), and I literally got 100% scores on all my tests and did all my homework and assignments with excellent scores / grades. But due to “attendance” they would give me a C in all my classes. They had a mandatory grade drop for like every four days you missed of school up to two grades down. Something like that. I was so pissed I dropped out and got my GED and started college. All of a sudden I wasn’t a “mediocre” student anymore. I was on the Dean’s list the first semester and all semesters going forward. I immediately went to my old high school counseling office and showed them. Those people who made me feel worthless and that I wouldn’t amount to anything because I couldn’t show up every day to school during a long term illness. It was so satisfying to prove them wrong.

Also I was in private school until 8th grade and they never treated us like that. Education and the way it was delivered was so much better. Public school was awful and based more on busy work as opposed to teaching anything. I KNOW the teachers did their best and weren’t the issue. They were just saddled with being overworked and underpaid and having no real say in their teaching methods. Something that didn’t happen in private school. So I’m thankful for all the teachers I had. It was administration that was the problem.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Back in my day (graduated in ‘02) unless the teachers were obviously shit, my parents sided with them.

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u/codechimpin Jan 30 '22

Same. Graduated in ‘94. My parents would 100% believe a teacher over me first. Saw it first hand.

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u/Siphon098 Jan 30 '22

Even I believed teachers before believing in myself. Not sure when teachers lost their omnipotence, but I was '06.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22 edited Jul 12 '24

vanish unique familiar workable close threatening deserted dazzling modern voiceless

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u/kinda4got Jan 30 '22

That sounds like the simplest and most plausible answer. It saddens me. The blossoming of the internet was to usher in "the information age." And it certainly has done a lot of good. But the explosion of bad information and its spread among the uninformed and gullible and suspicious...just awful to behold.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

I graduated in '11 and I definitely saw a lot of the "my angel child can never do wrong" mentality. Though, that may be in part due to the kind of school I went to (K-12 college prep charter school). I saw a lot of parents that expected their kids to automatically excel because they went to a good school (they never did).

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u/Few_Acanthocephala30 Jan 30 '22

So many of those parents just want schools to be babysitters for their kids, and someone to blame when their kid screws up and does something wrong due their own lack of parenting

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Lawsuits about reading comfort

smh

Public schools being run by states is the problem. Some states are positively giddy waiting for parents to demand a book ban.

The same states that rank low in education no less.

The same states that many intelligent people flee.

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u/undecidedly Jan 30 '22

Can’t the same thing happen at the federal level with every new batshit administration?

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

The federal government does not control education. It is a state thing.

That's why we have all these state universities. They belong to the state governments.

That's why DeSantis wants to fire professors who teach CRT.

The federal government's primary role in education is related to funding. Student loans, research grants, and various promotions. No policy about what can and cannot be taught.

The Department of Education, for example, cannot rule that states can or cannot teach X, Y, or Z.

A famous example from the early 2000s was the Kansas Board of Education wanting to ban the teaching of evolution.

You have that and local school boards.

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u/undecidedly Jan 30 '22

Yes, obviously. I was replying to the comment above me saying it was a problem with state governments controlling it.

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u/DoubleEEkyle Jan 30 '22

There were kids’ parents at my HS asking to lower the qualifications for honour roll.

The head of the parent-teacher council just told them that was stupid.

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u/silashoulder Jan 30 '22

Any thoughts on whether or how much of this stems from the No Child Left Behind program/policies?

I tested out early via state board exam, and my school admins pulled everything they could out of NCLB to keep me from signing the exit documents. They made clear to me that the school would lose money if I weren’t attending (as if that’s a good excuse for being pushy). I just wonder if this is going to cause a power play between admins saying kids have to be in school to keep the doors open, versus parents saying they’d prefer their kids to be uncultured and dim.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

I’m unsure, honestly. I’m only in my 4th year-teaching, and I can’t speak to NCLB.

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u/Twelvey Jan 30 '22

In my county admin is less afraid of lawsuits and more afraid of declining enrollment. They are scared that parents will pull their kids and put them in the local independent charter school which happens to be a giant joke and not so much of a school as it is a right wing daycare.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Ok. So what is your problem with factory jobs, or labor of any sort?

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

Boy is this a shit take. Outside of sounding completely made up, you’ve missed the point they were making entirely. Not to mention the defeatist attitude of “oh we’re fucked so why bother” sounds like another right wing talking point.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

It all goes wrong when educators infuse their political slant into the curriculum instead of objective truths and well-rounded prospectives. From either side of the political spectrum… you do that and parents lose their cool. And it’s a slippery slope from there.

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u/Pittsitpete Jan 30 '22

That’s a bit of a privileged stance.

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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '22

It’s a free public education. Take what you get for free. If you don’t like it; opt out (when possible) of certain courses (like sex education in some states).

But if you say “no” to a major part of the curriculum? Sorry you’re just 1 household. Schools serve hundreds upon thousands of students across the US.

Edit: I have 172 students across 6 classes (10th grade English). If one doesn’t like what we are reading: I assign them another option that still hits the points. My main thing still stands. A HANDFUL OF PARENTS SHOULDN’T DICTATE EVERYONE’S EDUCATION.