Schools don't have enough money or space to hire more teachers and reduce the size of classrooms so children can get more one on one education time. Giant classrooms reduce the quality of education, and teachers are being forced to teach more and more students. Do you think that might have something to do with it? I personally know teachers that have to spend some of the small amount of money they make on buying supplies for the children they teach because the school won't provide them. That's ridiculous. In America? Absolutely unacceptable.
I also think teachers should make a lot more money. If you want exceptional minds to do an important job you need to pay good money. How many truly gifted people are going to put up with that shit?
Where I live, back in the 50s and 60s, we had as many as 60 kids in a class. We were part of the Babby Boomer generation, so there were plenty of us kids to teach. Maybe we didn't get "individualized attention" per se, but if a teacher was so motivated, we could always get help if we were struggling and we managed to learn.
My brother had a math teacher who was more than willing to work for as long as it took for my brother to understand a difficult concept. I wasn't so lucky. I had one math teacher whose idea of teaching was to tell us kids to open the math book and do the problems from page x to page y. I learned to knuckle down and figure out things on my own. I was also lucky to have parents who took an interest in my education. My father was always available to help with homework
I notice that in many homes nowadays, parents only care about their kids' education when the kids get into a fight or some other trouble at school. I've been told by teachers that there are parents who never show up for parent-teacher conferences. In many of those homes the parents aren't even around. A teacher, even a good one, can only do so much in the 6 hours or so a day they have the kids. Their work is for naught if there is no motivation to learn from the parents at home.
The neighborhood I live in -- the same one I was born and raised in -- has gone downhill over the years. Most of the people who have kids in school don't pay property taxes because either they rent or they live in some kind of subsidized housing. I own my own home, but I don't have any children. Yet, I'm payiing taxes to educate a bunch of other peoples' kids. About 40% of these kids don't graduate and the ones that do -- they can recite every social justice talking point, but they can't read or write, solve a math problem, find our town on a map or know anything about American history. The only "science" they know is the propaganda about this alleged "global warming." So I doubt what I pay in property taxes goes toward actually educating the kids.
Maybe things are different where you live. I know about ten minutes from my house is a school district that is more affluent than mine and the kids are better educated. That district has won an assortment of awards for excellence. It also has more intact families active in their kids' education and can afford to hire the best teachers. Most of the rest of us aren't so lucky.
