"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
My wife works for a school system that at one point had the following proclamation handed down:
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution.
At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?
As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?
Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.
I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".
They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.
The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.
A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.
Wild how much of the successful entertainment coming out of South Korea (like Squid Game), is basically them dramatizing facets of their dystopian society, that a lot of it is actually based on real issues they face, and it's not all just made up fantasy.
It's not like the parents are wrong. But it's a structural issue, a product of the way schools are set up, and not of the actions of a given staff/faculty member.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
That is a problem but it’s definitely not the root. The root is our increasingly high tolerance for violence, especially in schools. We should also stop shying away from the gendered aspects of the thing: this is done by boys and men FAR more than girls and women. We just don’t like to talk about it.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
Your dog whistling argument can be easily countered by peeling a few more layers of the onion... The trouble is, as usual, some things we just dont talk about.
> but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
They don’t have budget to put food on their teachers tables or supplies in the classroom.
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
The education profession in the United States has become a black hole that gives people who don’t plan the illusion of a career.
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
If it has gotten to a jury, it has already taken a significant amount of time and resources from the district and the teacher.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
You can't even touch student and don't even think about slap. Some years ago I witnessed the case where teacher grabbed the student (14y old) who ran around screaming, kicking things and other students. A teacher was charged with a criminal offense (physical violence against a minor) and must now comply with behavioral supervision. What happened with kid? Nothing. He had a bad day and don't have skills to regulate his emotions yet.
I advise against using Google for things like that, because Google results are very dependant on how Google classified you, and it might differ from how Google classified me.
Are you sure you wanted to point me to some Facebook post, which is the nr. 1 result for me?
Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own. I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
(last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
Whose responsibility is a kid's behavior if not his/her parents'?
Being a parent is a big responsibility, and (barring rare exceptions) you don't become one unintentionally.
Unfortunately, I see plenty of people out in the wild who act like their kids' behavior is none of their business. There was a time when parents unable to control their children would be asked to leave public establishments, but now, everyone is supposed to stand by impotently, and anyone who dares speak up is accosted by the bad parent(s).
> In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
~40 percent of pregnancies annually are unintended in the US (per the Guttmacher Institute), so lots of folks parenting who didn't want to or didn't intend to parent. As unintended pregnancies are driven down over time (via education and contraceptives), this should reduce aggregate load off the system of people who do not want to or cannot parent effectively. We avoid, to the best of our ability, people who don't want kids having them, we get parents to success to the best of our ability with the kids that are here today (because there is no other option).
> There are approximately 7.3 million standalone single mothers and about 15.7 million single-mother family households in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data tracking. Roughly 23% of children under 18 in the U.S. live with a single mother.
> The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
(think in systems, and overlay this issue with how many K-12 schools are closing across the US every year due to structural demographics and total fertility rate decline)
Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S: Limited funds and low enrollment forced districts to close more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/07/20/school-c... | https://archive.today/4r4uo - July 20th, 2026 ("We call it the big shrink," said Marguerite Roza, who tracks school funding as director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Enrollment at public schools is declining, partly because there are fewer kids in the U.S.")
> Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further reducing the number of kids at some schools.
(TLDR pay teachers a living wage, get class ratios to whatever the science says is best before diminishing returns to optimize for student success, and continue solving for avoiding unwanted children with education and contraceptives; k-12 schools, as well as colleges [https://college-cuts.com/], will continue to close well into the future due to structural demographics, optimize accordingly)
> teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own
Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
The teachers who didn't grade homework and passed students who hadn't actually learned anything? They're utterly powerless and more funding won't help them. The schools need to radically change their approach to education, top to bottom.
Those teachers wanted to fail the kids, but administration told them they couldn't.
Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
I'm calling BS here. The article on NHJ would have had the failure rate around 50% or higher based on how poorly the students performed. The school literally cannot accommodate so many students failing a grade level and being held back.
Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
> Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own.
Teachers are not underpaid. We live in a free market society and they have extensive collective bargaining agreements. If anything, they’re overpaid vs a totally free market.
Those who can and want to use those same talents in a different progression are free to do so. Nobody is forced into the progression (okay maybe grad students but that’s something else…).
> I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
I happen to have a friend group that has a few teachers in it.
Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount. In a few of our local districts, on average teachers are making $130k/yr if you scaled their pay to a normal 48 week career schedule. This is on top of gangbusters benefits.
Beyond that, once you get a few years into it and have your scaffolding built, you can kinda just cruise control for the rest of your career with only minor changes.
Yes, the job is challenging and stressful, but lowkey most $130k/yr jobs are.
The real devotion of teaching is being willing to have so much unproductive time which would be filled in a different higher paying career.
Almost all states offer pensions, or hybrid pensions and direct contribution plans. You have to add 1/3-1/2 or more (especially for states with retirement health plans) to yearly salary to appreciate real compensation.
The legal system is meant to be a backstop, not a standard mode of operation. What I despise, and what makes me feel embarassed by proxy, is when the imagined solution involves using the legal system as a deterrent (to either the kids or their parents). I think there's a systemic cultural failure if parents are not emparting proper morals and imposing proper consequences, so much so that we need the law to be involved to protect teacher from harm.
> school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
No different than any other employer-employee relationship - the school has a responsibility to protect itself. Teachers have rights too, if she believes her employer contributed to harm or has taken retaliatory action against her she can bring her own suit.
Having been a student in the mid-late 90s in US public school I can say I witnessed this often. Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with. Instead the public school is forced to try and deal with these delinquents. They take time and resources away from the smarter youth who are trying to do the best they can in the public school system.
> Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with... They take time and resources away from the smarter youth...
You seem to have a severe deficit of compassion. Also a deficit of strategic thinking.
Some significant fraction of those "delinquent kids" are that way due to some generational cycle of poor treatment and/or bad circumstances. If, as you advocate, little attempt is made to break those cycles, you'll just leave the problem to fester and get worse.
Also you're advocating punishing kids for being the victim of their own circumstances, which is just heartless.
The correct response to this situation is to beat you until you're emotionally fucked up, blame you for the consequences and abandon you, and then focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
Having been a student in the late 90s in US public school, I can say I did not witness this at all, and my high school had several thousand students.
However, my district also had a school specifically for troublemakers (with fences and extra security and all of that) so the other schools wouldn't have to deal with them.
"and then what" is the common retort to when people suggest removing the problem students, it's practically a cliche now.
Then what is the students are held accountable now and won't be able to harm the education of their classmates and continue to harass their teachers. Then what is we don't have to pad grades as much and lie so that we can meet a fake metric. Then what is we stop doubling down on an approach that doesn't work.
>they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid
That often happens regardless. You might as well spare the poor teacher from dealing with them so they can focus on kids that are still redeemable, because otherwise, if you force them, the teachers will just choose to leave the system entirely, only because you had misplaced empathy for the irredeemable bottom % of society, when you weren't the one actually having to deal with that problem you want fixed. It's easy to write cheques you don't have to cash but most people, just like you and me, have limits to the amount of abuse they will take at work, even for humanitarian jobs like nurses and teachers.
> and then what? they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid.
And if they stay, they become adults who live large on food stamps and medicaid, and on top of that seriously hurt or permanently disable teachers, staff, or other students. It's as if letting them pummel teachers in the face will somehow result in them becoming upstanding citizens.
We're getting off-topic here, but while "unemoloyed" I worked part-time as a cashier at one of the local grocery stores. Now I can't see how people on food stamps live, but I CAN confirm what they buy. Mostly, its pretty reasonable. But "welfare queens" do, in fact, exist. They buy shrimp and steaks with those stamps. Weekly.
I won't go into my theories as to causes or reasons or whatever. Just know that it IS a thing amongst a small subset of welfare recipients despite propoganda otherwise.
buddy will be so surprised to learn how many people on social programs like that hold down a job and are some of the nicest, sweetest people in the world who just got screwed over by circumstances
in the same way people are delusional in thinking they're just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, they also don't realize how precarious their own financial positions are, and how they'll definitely want a safety net that helps them to survive if it happened to them
Well, not exactly. Have you ever seen the quality of life of someone on substantial government assistance? It’s not a life I’d want. No one lives on food stamps and Medicaid because they enjoy it.
I've had two people try to sell me their food stamps while I was buying groceries, something along the lines of "let me buy your groceries with my food stamps and you can give me 80% in cash". I presume they were getting money from selling drugs and didn't need the food stamps, hence willing to sell them, but I didn't actually ask.
My partner was also a single mother who utilized wic and food stamps and food pantries until she was able to work full time again.
When the system works, it works well. When it gets abused, there's less for the people who need it.
> No one lives on food stamps and Medicaid because they enjoy it.
Unfortunately, this is also not true. My best friend's mother stayed on benefits because she didn't want to work, and moved out of state because her assistance ran out. She was nominally capable of working, though she also abused drugs and was more comfortable using and getting benefits than getting clean and a job.
It's more likely they wanted to buy something that isn't able to be purchased with food stamps. Probably alcohol. Or smokes. Something to let them journey to oblivion and blot out their reality.
Nah, I've seen people like that too, and that's not the guys I ran into. Were I to stereotype, they looked more like gangbangers than strung out druggies.
So if we are going to pick on people who live off of a government-sponsored subsidy, can I ask if the home interest mortgage deduction also counts as a government-sponsored subsidy?
and if not, why not? is it because people who have a house are good people and deserve it, while CHILDREN who are born to the wrong parents are bad people and don't?
That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.
Vagueposting is a new term online for this kind of behavior - it stems from people getting absolutely destroyed online for various opinions, resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean. Sometimes it's hateful opinions, sometimes it isn't. The end result is people will become unable to simply state their opinions and we won't be able to pick apart people with terrible ideas from the good ones, because no one wants to talk!
Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.
We're talking about schools in the US, which means we're talking about black and latino students. This trips the culture war wires, so people get wink winky.
It's not rocket science, certain kids showing up as getting impacted by punitive measures looks bad on certain government measures. So they stop getting punished. Problem solved!
Does it matter which kids is it? Just remove the metrics, apply the punitive measures fairly, and let the dice fall where they may. Or don't and allow the safety of teachers and the quality of public education to keep degrading. We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
> We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?
From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know
Punitive measures only work if you believe you have something to lose, a lot of these kids don't. Sure, you can þunish them for their infraction, and you'll have justice, but it's not going to stop them from doing it again unless they feel like the lost out on something. And if you have nothing in the first place why do you care?
And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.
I'll volunteer: in every single video of American teachers being assaulted I've glimpsed over the years, the assailants were black.
I'm sure someone could take their time and find a few rare instances of that not being the case (if they can manage to do it before I inevitably get -4 points [flagged][dead] for this callous sacrilege), to which I will preemptively reply that someone equally invested in the argument could easily find ten videos confirming my anecdotal observation for each one you provide.
I am reminded of a former boss's niece who was a kindergarten teacher in a rural, very white district. No physical abuse, but she was very surprised the first time a kid started cussing her out.
It's not a race issue so much as a poverty and cultural issue. Any racial correlation is a proxy for those two things.
Probably because what this poster seems to be implying is a sort of inconvenient or unpopular truth. The kinds of things that there's no point actually saying out loud no matter how true they are, because they just make people angry and being explicit about it just paints a sort of target on you instead of actually driving anything towards a solution
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
Preemptively jail minority and special ed children and make them work their way up from prison to school.
OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate currently, it’s currently his vibes based hypothesis that he’s afraid to openly state.
I went to a high school in California. The school district had a separate dedicated campus where they sent all of the violent and antisocial kids in the rest of the school district. They weren’t hesitant to use it either, repeat offenders weren’t a thing. All of us were aware of it.
The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.
I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.
Through my observations this has been completely normalized and with terrible pay as a reward. The justification is that it’s the students’ home life causing it and the teachers are there to fill in as a stable adult.
My understanding is that it’s normalized by administrators, and the public doesn’t think much about it. Another issue is that some schools have heavy police presence and prison-like rules.
I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers. Other commenters are blaming parents, and sure we should incentivize and facilitate better parenting, but in the short term what is more successful at reducing violence is expelling violent students.
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
How will they become productive in school? Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need. School shouldn’t be that therapy, it degrades the other students’ education.
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
My high school principal once told me after expelling me for a few days, don't worry it's not a big deal. When I was your age I was permanently expelled from half the schools in the county.
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
Even if expelling students doesn't reform them: first, it protects other students; second, ex ante, it's an incentive to behave better in the first place. In fact there's quite good evidence that this works well. (You can check the evidence yourself, by asking ChatGPT "What's the evidence on expelling badly behaved students from schools?" or a similar question.)
It's society's problem regardless. Not expelling them just means the school itself is an incubator and breeder for antisocial behavior, and when they get out of school, they're still a problem.
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
They are already societies at large problem keeping them in the school degrades the function of the school for everyone while providing nothing of value to violent students.
I remember James Talarico talking about how a very aggressive student completely transformed from an angry kid into a thriving one once he had the therapy and support. Of course republicans cut the funding and the therapy ended and he was eventually expelled.
Yeah its the same with prisoners. Obviously with the right targeted support they do very well at rehabilitation. Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost, and the cost of individual targeted support is only increasing. I'm sure with infinite money we could educate everybody to an amazing standard, and reform every prisoner. It is a shame that our wellbeing as a society has become an act of taxation budgeting.
Well if you look at how much prisons cost per day (median of 167$ / day in the US), it's quite obvious that therapy combined with confinement at home would be magnitudes cheaper... My personal guess: it's got to do with the fixation on reward / punishment that's so present in our societies.
We don't need indefinite money, we just need to realize that spending more on care has better outcomes than doing what's immediately cheaper. A rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to re-enter the system, but we don't measure that cost.
This is the same with healthcare and schools. We let the system be run by a bunch of short-term get rich quick charlatans who get in the way of more long-term prosperity for everyone. It's easier to measure the immediate cost, so we cut there and ignore the long-term expense it creates.
What's worse is that there are many examples for the US to learn from abroad but generations of propaganda have lead us to believe that our deficiencies are what makes us exceptional.
Yes, the "fiscal conservatives" show their hands over and over again when they simply choose policies that cost us more money, punish more people, lead to worse health outcomes, lead to worse societal outcomes, and just fail to produce the world we want to live in.
How often, though, are these not really "cost saving" measures so much as "nobody gets a free ride" measures?
Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.
> My experience made something painfully clear: violence against educators has become so normalized that society now treats it as an expected part of teaching.
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Serious question. Do you know any teachers, especially any special education teachers? They all have stories about the violence they receive, and a lot of them.
Special Ed is a special case- those kids are specifically segregated because they cannot be taught at grade level or be expected to behave safely for their size.
It happens more often in special education, but non special ed teachers have plenty of stories too. Also, special ed teachers are not some underclass and are also deserving of a safe workplace.
I've heard a lot of stories like that, where the teacher gets the short end of the stick and the student gets 0 consequences because of age. At the same time, the article looks like AI writing, so I backed out.
To be fair, the precise reason violence against teachers is normalized is because liberalism (I.e. the supporting ideological structure of modern Western society) posits a theory of human psychology and sociology on the basis of the fact that this theory feels good.
It essentially just asserts a particular model of human psychology and sociology and the moral structure of the universe and also makes discussion about its assumptions impossible.
The fundamental tenet of liberalism being that people are basically good and any sort of bad behavior from someone is the fault of a societal failing inflicted upon them. So when a student attacks a teacher this is society failing the student, the teacher being an agent of society and therefore at least partial responsible for being attacked.
To question this is to question liberalism itself which no one, not even the people who do have a sense that this is wrong, are prepared or have the capacity to do.
I don’t know what you’re calling a strawman, but the point is that wxw’s response is simply an epitome of the underlying problem. He’s just engaging in political discourse completely in line with the ideological superstructure which is ultimately responsible for this very problem (violence against teachers being normalized). You can’t expect the typical person to be able to transcend that, hence “to be fair”.
Probably not a popular opinion but I feel the same way about police officers. Teachers aren't the cause of the vast majority of this, they're just the front line of people who have to deal with it. If it weren't educators, it'd just be whoever these dysfunctional kids / parents run up against next.
And sometimes those are police officers, who then get blamed for metrics we don't like. So we cut back on policing and now it'll be somebody else who gets the short end of the stick.
This article so very poorly written, to the point that I wonder whether this is real or just AI generated. One whole sentence in the 2nd paragraph is repeated nearly verbatim in the 3rd. In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online. There is an Elizabeth Martin who comes up as a writer, but she is a script-writer. I am not sure that this is a real story. Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
The entire site is suspect, IMO. Pangram says that the entirety of TFA save the paragraph beginning "The American Psychological Association" is AI-generated.
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
Workplace violence in general is becoming normalized. I think of healthcare workers and fastfood employees as well as teachers with this trend
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
When you use the term "workplace violence" it seems like this is something between co-workers or between boss and worker, when it's actually nothing like that.
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
Society is to blame for this, lots of parents are also being crushed.
We've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
US schools were restricted from engaging in appropriate disciplinary action without the threat of losing federal funding. Either schools take action against violent students appropriately, or they can lose federal funding. They were financially strong armed to ignore it.
It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.
Agreed. I came here to post "If so, then you have ceased to be a civilized society."
To be honest, in the Netherlands there are more and more teachers dropping out because of stress and burnout, largely due to increasing criticism and demands from parents. But I haven't yet heard of cases of actual violence.
I see in Switzerland teachers being constantly required to fill in for missing colleagues. They might be lured in with good pay, but in the end are unable to cope - so they leave. And then the administration keeps wondering "how much money they want???" instead of hiring more teachers...
Speaking as a former teacher, as long as schools can find someone willing to stand at the front of a classroom, the terrible pay and working conditions will persist.
I finished my career in the UK, where a third of all teachers leave the profession within five years. I started that career in Australia, where half of all teachers leave the profession within five years. It's not a 'calling' or a 'vocation', it's just the post-university equivalent of a gap year.
My wife is a college level teacher and she is continuously receiving disrespect and open challenges in her classroom. Fortunately it has not come to physical violence. But the environment created by a large number of students who have a bloated sense of entitlement is problematic. Feeling entitled all the time is a sure way to living a sad life divorced from reality.
Is it "accepted" by society? Answering that depends on the definition of "accepted."
Is it reasonably expected? Yes, definitely, if that means "much more likely than violence against non-teachers": a random K-12 teacher in the USA is ~2.5-7x more likely to be assaulted than a random person in the USA.
This is obviously going to be regional, because it's cultural.
I'm old enough to have adult children, although I never did have kids of my own.
My parents would have gone to school in the knowledge that if they acted up, words would be had with their parents, and there would be consequences.
At some point, something changed, and we decided that teachers were there to be put in their place by parents, and if a teacher suggested a child was doing something wrong the parent would expect to challenge that and the teacher would be put in their place.
We're now in a situation where children being taught sometimes think its their right - perhaps even obligation - to not be instructed in appropriate behaviour, and so feel free to react the way that they do.
There's a microcosm natural experiment for this in the Pennines, the North of England. There's a small town called Hebden Bridge, which for a while had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the UK. Some thought it was related to the environment - it sits in a valley, the persistent low grey cloud can make it feel claustrophobic - but I think another theory holds up: parents there didn't bother parenting. A community was drawn to the town by adults who were in essence, hippies: they believed in freedoms their parents didn't including for their children.
That meant that many of the kids growing up there did so in an environment without real structure, and became adolescent in an environment with easy supply to plentiful drugs and a relaxed attitude to its use.
I'm not a parent, that was an active choice I made, and so I wouldn't deign to tell parents how to bring up their children, but I would suggest parents look at the data: children thrive with structure and rules and gentle consequences for non-compliance (the naughty step, etc.), and recognition of genuinely outstanding behaviour (winning things, not participating in them). They struggle to develop as emotionally secure people without those. Hell, I'm a data point there - took me years to realise I needed therapy, and years more to benefit from it. As the old poem starts: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don't mean to, but they do."
Anyway, teachers play a part in that journey, but they can't do the whole thing, and the sooner parents (and society in general), restore the respect to the profession it once had, the better. Are all teachers good? No, but they are professionals who have more data on more children than any parent, so maybe just respect that.
A friend of mine is on their way to becoming a teacher and already teaching at a school for one year part-time.
He tells tales about his children mostly from low income families, where school is the only structure they have as their families are completely dysfunctional. Thorn apart by the family trying or not trying to integrating into German society as well as themselves.
When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
> When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
Could be. A lot of kids only have so much good behavior for a day... act out at school or at home, pick one.
But also, the student who has to live with expectations at school may set expectations at home, and that may be seen as worse behavior by the parents.
My mom received threats of rape and assault and direct violence against her vehicle as a teacher in los Angeles public schools. Turned her from a bleeding heart liberal into a die hard conservative.
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
I don't think you need to go that far but not punishing teachers for defending themselves from violence would be a good start honestly. Defend yourself from a kid hitting you and you're the one in trouble in most places.
Conservatives believe that people need to meet the same standards, and that is is racist and weak to not hold people to those standards. This means if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher it's treated the same as if a white kid at a rich school hits a teacher - very seriously.
Liberals believe in intersecionalism, and that marginalized groups need unique affordances. This means accepting that if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher, it may be because of poverty and racism and we should understand the issue in that context.
Yeah but what's the concrete policy difference? Like is this about expelling the student vs not, or jailing vs not? The article doesn't say what state this is in, was curious about that.
Conservatives believe in defunding public education, social security and perpetuating root causes of a lot of issues like this that can directly be linked to, racism, poverty and lack of access to education.
Conservatives believe in double standards when it comes to "holding people to the same standards". White kids get off scott free way more often for the same crimes than kids of color.
Do your research.
I would argue conservatism is the cause of this problem. Their constant attacks on educators and education in general are so pervasive.
Additionally, there's no world in which they want these parents to actually succeed. If there's ever a scenario where someone tries to improve the lives of these people, conservatives will argue that they do not deserve it because they don't contribute to society like conservatives do.
One uncomfortable truth you should probably confront is the hostility of conservatives. Education and educators specifically have been targets of hate campaigns for the last 40 years.
Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
After reading both the article and the discussion here, it seems to me that this is the symptom of an increasingly transactional America. Call it late stage capitalism or atomisation of society, but when labour is no longer respected, this is the result. Teachers getting bullied and fast food workers getting shouted at, all while scraping to get by. Just like the manufacturing sector, the service sector is hollowed out, entertainment and automation economy is king.
Obama "Dear Collegue Letter"[0] policy threatened civil rights enforcement if schools disciplined more black and latino students than white students, assuming that disparities of the rate of discipline implied injustice, rather than matching up with disparities in the rate of behavior meriting punishment.
This was a disaster for schools; many students who would have been expelled were kept around disrupting teachers and students who had to bear their presence in classrooms, hallways, fighting each other, bullying students and teachers.
For about 5 years after this went into effect, my local school district that also allowed open enrollment around this time got an influx of students with bad behavior from previous schools enrolling and not being expelled for fighting and other repeated misbehavior and disruptions. There was huge wave of teachers and families leaving and enrolling in the rural school close by so both could actually do teaching and learning without interference. The schoolboard had a lot turnover until the now head got elected promising to drastically curtail open enrollment and apply whatever discipline policy they could get away with to revoke open enrollment rights from non-residents due to bad behavior.
Here is a great account [1] from a teacher about her experience in schools where discipline was severely limited and prevented expulsion of disruptive and violent students, and the obvious consequences to the degraded learning environment that resulted.
If you're a teacher in the US, it's kind of on you at this point. There's no sane reason anyone should be teaching in the US without full support from the administration and full control over your curriculum, both of which the US does not give teachers.
Imagine parents still parenting we wouldn't be in this shity situation. Most of you have kids as a lifestyle accesoire and externalize way to much of their upbringing and raising.
> The American Psychological Association completed three National surveys in which the findings reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying)
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
> Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
Potentially, yes. Doubly so when those terrible teachers are kept in those roles year after year. The whole system defends and backs these teachers, even knowing they create horrible outcomes and dread for everyone.
> We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Nope. We all dont. It also depends on if you went to a "good public school" or a "bad public school", or rather worse or well funded.
> Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
True. But saying bad words is *not* violence. However threatening violence is absolutely actionable.
> Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Again, this is looking at individual choices over what im arguing as a system based failure. The whole way the system is constructed is a failure to students and teachers both.
Look at how schools are funded. Property tax. Means poor property locations get shittier schools, worse teachers, low funded classrooms. And this also shows the students' housing is also likely just as poor. Food insecurity, whole lot of trickle down poverty effects. I came from a poor funded rural school. I had no choice in that matter.
Nah, absent parenting. There’s a lot of shitty parents glued to their phones, which has short-circuited the innate desire to parent.
Gentle Parenting is full of uncertainties. There are times when you need to skip the gentle crap and be a parent.
It works on a small scale, where parents are dedicated to the cause, but it falls apart as soon as it hits genpop: someone watches a TikTok summary and thinks they’re an expert.
The backdrop of this includes the normalization of mass-shootings in schools. The incredible amount of violence needs to stop. One of the solutions is to ban all guns in America but not even one politician will take it seriously. Also, teachers must be paid as lucratively as defense contractors because in my opinion our children are the biggest priority when it comes to national security.
Yes and nothing will be done with it because intentional or not, teachers being treated like shit from both ends furthers the goal of the people in charge, which is to dismantle the public school system completely, let rich kids go to private schools, and pipe poor kids straight into the serf class.
I agree with the author, violence against educators has become normalized, but it's also been a fault on both sides. Both sides have lost respect for one another, and the reasons why depend a lot on politics and social issues. It almost mirrors the strife between citizens and cops: each side entrenching believing they "know what's best" and the other side be damned.
27 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 according to the Mapping Police Violence database. (Despite this, 53.5% of people identifying as "very liberal" estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were killed. Only 15.71% correctly estimated "about 10."[1]) There are 800,000 police officers in the United States, so I am not sure you can say they generally enjoy killing unarmed black men based on a few dozen deaths a year.
This type of puerile thinking is so common, there really aught to be severe social consequences for saying this type of thing in a public forum.
A 6’6”+ unarmed man of any race could easily kill 90% of the population in a 1 on 1 encounter. We’re talking about a basic physiological reality and we have adults who can freely assert the opposite of this to the extreme detriment of society.
Having someone who thinks that simply being “unarmed” makes them a non-threat is actually a dangerous person to have around other people because they don’t have a theory of human relations that understands the role of physicality and violence and how that should be properly understood and mediated. This is someone too dangerous to operate in an office environment for example.
I don’t think that view holds up to data, for instance you’re more likely to get shot by police as an unarmed white person than black person, when adjusted for population/crime. Even ignoring this, the number of unarmed black people shot per year is usually <20, so it’s not like the problem is endemic.
"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
My wife works for a school system that at one point had the following proclamation handed down:
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution.
Nurses have the same shit they have to go through (they get questioned by their own hospital legal team when the nurse is the one that got assaulted).
It's wrong. We need to stand up for educators and healthcare providers.
At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?
As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?
Zero semblance of customer service.
Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.
I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".
They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.
The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.
A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.
highly recommend you watch it.
Wild how much of the successful entertainment coming out of South Korea (like Squid Game), is basically them dramatizing facets of their dystopian society, that a lot of it is actually based on real issues they face, and it's not all just made up fantasy.
Hellbound was on Netflix around the time of Squid Game. Less popular obviously, but an entertaining take on the cults they are famous for.
True, but that show had a too many fantasy/horror elements to it for people in the west to read into the cult aspects of Korean society.
piggyback to recommend a classic: Battle Royale
A lot of hospital have armed tactical teams. Though I would guess that in major metro areas they would be more hidden, and so less used.
It's not like the parents are wrong. But it's a structural issue, a product of the way schools are set up, and not of the actions of a given staff/faculty member.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
That is a problem but it’s definitely not the root. The root is our increasingly high tolerance for violence, especially in schools. We should also stop shying away from the gendered aspects of the thing: this is done by boys and men FAR more than girls and women. We just don’t like to talk about it.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
Your dog whistling argument can be easily countered by peeling a few more layers of the onion... The trouble is, as usual, some things we just dont talk about.
I agree that boys are on average more violent ... but young men violence was going down for years overall.
Yes, conservatives are trying to make it go up, but statistically speaking, they are not succeeding.
How are “conservatives” to blame for increasing violence in school systems that are overwhelmingly run by liberals?
> but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
They don’t have budget to put food on their teachers tables or supplies in the classroom.
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
Our world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare.
The education profession in the United States has become a black hole that gives people who don’t plan the illusion of a career.
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
A deeper question: why can they even have these lawsuits? Why don't the judges or juries reject the lawsuit?
If it has gotten to a jury, it has already taken a significant amount of time and resources from the district and the teacher.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
I wonder if the student faced any consequences, none were mentioned in the article. Another slap on the wrist I assume?
You can't even touch student and don't even think about slap. Some years ago I witnessed the case where teacher grabbed the student (14y old) who ran around screaming, kicking things and other students. A teacher was charged with a criminal offense (physical violence against a minor) and must now comply with behavioral supervision. What happened with kid? Nothing. He had a bad day and don't have skills to regulate his emotions yet.
He's not going to develop the skills if he doesn't face consequences for his actions
Nothing a $190k/yr school behavioral counselor can't fix with a handful of 1 hour weekly sessions where they ask the child to discuss their feelings.
/s
Really wonder if corporal punishment wasn't such a bad idea after all
Tell that to London County Public Schools. https://www.google.com/search?q=loudoun+county+abuse+failure...
I advise against using Google for things like that, because Google results are very dependant on how Google classified you, and it might differ from how Google classified me.
Are you sure you wanted to point me to some Facebook post, which is the nr. 1 result for me?
Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own. I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
(last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
Schools across the U.S. are trying a 4-day week. Why? To retain teachers - https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the... - November 8th, 2023
Teachers are calling it quits amid rising school violence, burnout and stagnating salaries - https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/us/teachers-quitting-shortage... - May 31st, 2023
Four day school week? In rural Missouri, more districts see it as a way to recruit teachers - https://www.kcur.org/education/2022-06-11/four-day-school-we... - June 11th, 2022
In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
Whose responsibility is a kid's behavior if not his/her parents'?
Being a parent is a big responsibility, and (barring rare exceptions) you don't become one unintentionally.
Unfortunately, I see plenty of people out in the wild who act like their kids' behavior is none of their business. There was a time when parents unable to control their children would be asked to leave public establishments, but now, everyone is supposed to stand by impotently, and anyone who dares speak up is accosted by the bad parent(s).
> In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
~40 percent of pregnancies annually are unintended in the US (per the Guttmacher Institute), so lots of folks parenting who didn't want to or didn't intend to parent. As unintended pregnancies are driven down over time (via education and contraceptives), this should reduce aggregate load off the system of people who do not want to or cannot parent effectively. We avoid, to the best of our ability, people who don't want kids having them, we get parents to success to the best of our ability with the kids that are here today (because there is no other option).
Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says - https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate... - April 9th, 2026
> There are approximately 7.3 million standalone single mothers and about 15.7 million single-mother family households in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data tracking. Roughly 23% of children under 18 in the U.S. live with a single mother.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-economic-status...
> More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate
https://fortune.com/2026/06/28/student-parents-workforce-tal... | https://archive.today/NZQRZ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 (0 comments)
> The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/24/kindergar... | https://archive.today/Fm1nG | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 (1 comment)
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... (~60% of US households consist of adults with no children in them)
(think in systems, and overlay this issue with how many K-12 schools are closing across the US every year due to structural demographics and total fertility rate decline)
Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S: Limited funds and low enrollment forced districts to close more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/07/20/school-c... | https://archive.today/4r4uo - July 20th, 2026 ("We call it the big shrink," said Marguerite Roza, who tracks school funding as director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Enrollment at public schools is declining, partly because there are fewer kids in the U.S.")
> Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further reducing the number of kids at some schools.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...
(TLDR pay teachers a living wage, get class ratios to whatever the science says is best before diminishing returns to optimize for student success, and continue solving for avoiding unwanted children with education and contraceptives; k-12 schools, as well as colleges [https://college-cuts.com/], will continue to close well into the future due to structural demographics, optimize accordingly)
> teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own
Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
How much of that goes to the teacher? It seems to be soaked up by administration.
Well, what does the administration do? What programs does it have to manage? How are administrators paid compared to teachers?
The teachers who didn't grade homework and passed students who hadn't actually learned anything? They're utterly powerless and more funding won't help them. The schools need to radically change their approach to education, top to bottom.
Those teachers wanted to fail the kids, but administration told them they couldn't.
Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
I'm calling BS here. The article on NHJ would have had the failure rate around 50% or higher based on how poorly the students performed. The school literally cannot accommodate so many students failing a grade level and being held back.
Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
> Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own.
Teachers are not underpaid. We live in a free market society and they have extensive collective bargaining agreements. If anything, they’re overpaid vs a totally free market.
Those who can and want to use those same talents in a different progression are free to do so. Nobody is forced into the progression (okay maybe grad students but that’s something else…).
> I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
Teachers in my state are lucky to crack $75,000 salary after 10 years. Yes, they are underpaid.
I happen to have a friend group that has a few teachers in it.
Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount. In a few of our local districts, on average teachers are making $130k/yr if you scaled their pay to a normal 48 week career schedule. This is on top of gangbusters benefits.
Beyond that, once you get a few years into it and have your scaffolding built, you can kinda just cruise control for the rest of your career with only minor changes.
Yes, the job is challenging and stressful, but lowkey most $130k/yr jobs are.
The real devotion of teaching is being willing to have so much unproductive time which would be filled in a different higher paying career.
Almost all states offer pensions, or hybrid pensions and direct contribution plans. You have to add 1/3-1/2 or more (especially for states with retirement health plans) to yearly salary to appreciate real compensation.
I think you need to do some reading on externalities and how they lead to misallocation of resources in a free market.
The legal system is meant to be a backstop, not a standard mode of operation. What I despise, and what makes me feel embarassed by proxy, is when the imagined solution involves using the legal system as a deterrent (to either the kids or their parents). I think there's a systemic cultural failure if parents are not emparting proper morals and imposing proper consequences, so much so that we need the law to be involved to protect teacher from harm.
> school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
No different than any other employer-employee relationship - the school has a responsibility to protect itself. Teachers have rights too, if she believes her employer contributed to harm or has taken retaliatory action against her she can bring her own suit.
Having been a student in the mid-late 90s in US public school I can say I witnessed this often. Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with. Instead the public school is forced to try and deal with these delinquents. They take time and resources away from the smarter youth who are trying to do the best they can in the public school system.
> Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with... They take time and resources away from the smarter youth...
You seem to have a severe deficit of compassion. Also a deficit of strategic thinking.
Some significant fraction of those "delinquent kids" are that way due to some generational cycle of poor treatment and/or bad circumstances. If, as you advocate, little attempt is made to break those cycles, you'll just leave the problem to fester and get worse.
Also you're advocating punishing kids for being the victim of their own circumstances, which is just heartless.
The correct response to this situation is to beat you until you're emotionally fucked up, blame you for the consequences and abandon you, and then focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
Having been a student in the late 90s in US public school, I can say I did not witness this at all, and my high school had several thousand students.
However, my district also had a school specifically for troublemakers (with fences and extra security and all of that) so the other schools wouldn't have to deal with them.
and then what? they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid.
"and then what" is the common retort to when people suggest removing the problem students, it's practically a cliche now. Then what is the students are held accountable now and won't be able to harm the education of their classmates and continue to harass their teachers. Then what is we don't have to pad grades as much and lie so that we can meet a fake metric. Then what is we stop doubling down on an approach that doesn't work.
>they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid
That often happens regardless. You might as well spare the poor teacher from dealing with them so they can focus on kids that are still redeemable, because otherwise, if you force them, the teachers will just choose to leave the system entirely, only because you had misplaced empathy for the irredeemable bottom % of society, when you weren't the one actually having to deal with that problem you want fixed. It's easy to write cheques you don't have to cash but most people, just like you and me, have limits to the amount of abuse they will take at work, even for humanitarian jobs like nurses and teachers.
> and then what? they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid.
And if they stay, they become adults who live large on food stamps and medicaid, and on top of that seriously hurt or permanently disable teachers, staff, or other students. It's as if letting them pummel teachers in the face will somehow result in them becoming upstanding citizens.
This is hilarious, LIVE LARGE ON FOODSTAMPS. Insane tier words.
We're getting off-topic here, but while "unemoloyed" I worked part-time as a cashier at one of the local grocery stores. Now I can't see how people on food stamps live, but I CAN confirm what they buy. Mostly, its pretty reasonable. But "welfare queens" do, in fact, exist. They buy shrimp and steaks with those stamps. Weekly.
I won't go into my theories as to causes or reasons or whatever. Just know that it IS a thing amongst a small subset of welfare recipients despite propoganda otherwise.
"live large on medicaid" is more funny than "live large on foodstamps". Just sitting back and enjoying getting a bunch of medical procedures?
buddy will be so surprised to learn how many people on social programs like that hold down a job and are some of the nicest, sweetest people in the world who just got screwed over by circumstances
in the same way people are delusional in thinking they're just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, they also don't realize how precarious their own financial positions are, and how they'll definitely want a safety net that helps them to survive if it happened to them
It's always "someone over there is getting something they don't deserve". Every. Single. Time.
Yeah, they are
Everyone deserves to eat. It’s unfortunate that we can’t all agree to this
Everybody deserves the right to work for their own upkeep. Nobody deserves to eat off somebody else's labour.
ah, hacker news. the place I go to see people saying disabled people should starve.
Tell me. What do they not deserve to be getting?
Well, not exactly. Have you ever seen the quality of life of someone on substantial government assistance? It’s not a life I’d want. No one lives on food stamps and Medicaid because they enjoy it.
I've had two people try to sell me their food stamps while I was buying groceries, something along the lines of "let me buy your groceries with my food stamps and you can give me 80% in cash". I presume they were getting money from selling drugs and didn't need the food stamps, hence willing to sell them, but I didn't actually ask.
My partner was also a single mother who utilized wic and food stamps and food pantries until she was able to work full time again.
When the system works, it works well. When it gets abused, there's less for the people who need it.
> No one lives on food stamps and Medicaid because they enjoy it.
Unfortunately, this is also not true. My best friend's mother stayed on benefits because she didn't want to work, and moved out of state because her assistance ran out. She was nominally capable of working, though she also abused drugs and was more comfortable using and getting benefits than getting clean and a job.
It's more likely they wanted to buy something that isn't able to be purchased with food stamps. Probably alcohol. Or smokes. Something to let them journey to oblivion and blot out their reality.
Nah, I've seen people like that too, and that's not the guys I ran into. Were I to stereotype, they looked more like gangbangers than strung out druggies.
They'd have done that anyhow. By removing them, you improve the outcomes of everyone else.
Bingo!
So if we are going to pick on people who live off of a government-sponsored subsidy, can I ask if the home interest mortgage deduction also counts as a government-sponsored subsidy?
and if not, why not? is it because people who have a house are good people and deserve it, while CHILDREN who are born to the wrong parents are bad people and don't?
> live large on food stamps Are you satirizing retarded republican talking points, or are you this delusional?
That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.
Vagueposting is a new term online for this kind of behavior - it stems from people getting absolutely destroyed online for various opinions, resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean. Sometimes it's hateful opinions, sometimes it isn't. The end result is people will become unable to simply state their opinions and we won't be able to pick apart people with terrible ideas from the good ones, because no one wants to talk!
> resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean
This is hacker news, most of us are anonymous. People say all sorts of vile things on here. Come on, Ambolia, have the courage of your convictions.
This isn't Reddit, you aren't going to get softbanned by downvotes
Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.
We're talking about schools in the US, which means we're talking about black and latino students. This trips the culture war wires, so people get wink winky.
Because some things are politically incorrect to say.
If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.
Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.
It's not rocket science, certain kids showing up as getting impacted by punitive measures looks bad on certain government measures. So they stop getting punished. Problem solved!
Which ones?
Does it matter which kids is it? Just remove the metrics, apply the punitive measures fairly, and let the dice fall where they may. Or don't and allow the safety of teachers and the quality of public education to keep degrading. We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
> We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?
From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know
Punitive measures only work if you believe you have something to lose, a lot of these kids don't. Sure, you can þunish them for their infraction, and you'll have justice, but it's not going to stop them from doing it again unless they feel like the lost out on something. And if you have nothing in the first place why do you care?
And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.
I'll volunteer: in every single video of American teachers being assaulted I've glimpsed over the years, the assailants were black.
I'm sure someone could take their time and find a few rare instances of that not being the case (if they can manage to do it before I inevitably get -4 points [flagged][dead] for this callous sacrilege), to which I will preemptively reply that someone equally invested in the argument could easily find ten videos confirming my anecdotal observation for each one you provide.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Don_t_Make_the_Black_Ki...
I am reminded of a former boss's niece who was a kindergarten teacher in a rural, very white district. No physical abuse, but she was very surprised the first time a kid started cussing her out.
It's not a race issue so much as a poverty and cultural issue. Any racial correlation is a proxy for those two things.
Have to be careful forming your world view based on worldstar TikTok, you might be getting Chinese psy-opped
What's the metric optimized here, minimize black students expelled?
Yeah I read that and gave up. It's also one of those "let me explain Smittywergermanjensen's Law to you"
Probably because what this poster seems to be implying is a sort of inconvenient or unpopular truth. The kinds of things that there's no point actually saying out loud no matter how true they are, because they just make people angry and being explicit about it just paints a sort of target on you instead of actually driving anything towards a solution
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
OK — Under-represented minorities would be expelled at higher rates than whites and asians, and the district would get sued for discrimination.
"...so weird".
"weird" is two years ago. Time to update your firmware.
Because he would immediately get massively downvoted and flagged.
What are the "obvious rules" that could be applied here? (They aren't obvious to me.)
Preemptively jail minority and special ed children and make them work their way up from prison to school.
OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate currently, it’s currently his vibes based hypothesis that he’s afraid to openly state.
Comparing raw punishment rates tells you nothing, because transgression rates can vary.
I went to a high school in California. The school district had a separate dedicated campus where they sent all of the violent and antisocial kids in the rest of the school district. They weren’t hesitant to use it either, repeat offenders weren’t a thing. All of us were aware of it.
The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.
I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.
Through my observations this has been completely normalized and with terrible pay as a reward. The justification is that it’s the students’ home life causing it and the teachers are there to fill in as a stable adult.
This is at a tipping point.
My understanding is that it’s normalized by administrators, and the public doesn’t think much about it. Another issue is that some schools have heavy police presence and prison-like rules.
I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers. Other commenters are blaming parents, and sure we should incentivize and facilitate better parenting, but in the short term what is more successful at reducing violence is expelling violent students.
Disagree with this.
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
How will they become productive in school? Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need. School shouldn’t be that therapy, it degrades the other students’ education.
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
My high school principal once told me after expelling me for a few days, don't worry it's not a big deal. When I was your age I was permanently expelled from half the schools in the county.
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
What about the kids they assault while not being expelled?
Exactly this. Some people seem not comprehend that infinite compassion for aggressors isn't "free"; it comes at the expense of their victims.
They will likely never become productive members of society.
how are they ever going to become productive members of society?
By learning, for likely the first time in their lives, that actions have consequences.
lol yea expel them and make it society at large problem because you expeling students reforms them
Even if expelling students doesn't reform them: first, it protects other students; second, ex ante, it's an incentive to behave better in the first place. In fact there's quite good evidence that this works well. (You can check the evidence yourself, by asking ChatGPT "What's the evidence on expelling badly behaved students from schools?" or a similar question.)
It's society's problem regardless. Not expelling them just means the school itself is an incubator and breeder for antisocial behavior, and when they get out of school, they're still a problem.
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
They are already societies at large problem keeping them in the school degrades the function of the school for everyone while providing nothing of value to violent students.
The bottom quintile (of stock, not of class) has always been society's problem. What changed is how they're dealt with.
What do you propose other than “lol” and sarcasm?
Society at large has tools and systems in place to better deal with a violent person, student or otherwise.
> Society at large has tools and systems in place to better deal with a violent person, student or otherwise.
really? for minors?
Yes.
I remember James Talarico talking about how a very aggressive student completely transformed from an angry kid into a thriving one once he had the therapy and support. Of course republicans cut the funding and the therapy ended and he was eventually expelled.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x2PsFWrwCDI
I know its a single data point, but I think those situations would happen a lot less if students had access to the right support.
Yeah its the same with prisoners. Obviously with the right targeted support they do very well at rehabilitation. Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost, and the cost of individual targeted support is only increasing. I'm sure with infinite money we could educate everybody to an amazing standard, and reform every prisoner. It is a shame that our wellbeing as a society has become an act of taxation budgeting.
Well if you look at how much prisons cost per day (median of 167$ / day in the US), it's quite obvious that therapy combined with confinement at home would be magnitudes cheaper... My personal guess: it's got to do with the fixation on reward / punishment that's so present in our societies.
We don't need indefinite money, we just need to realize that spending more on care has better outcomes than doing what's immediately cheaper. A rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to re-enter the system, but we don't measure that cost.
This is the same with healthcare and schools. We let the system be run by a bunch of short-term get rich quick charlatans who get in the way of more long-term prosperity for everyone. It's easier to measure the immediate cost, so we cut there and ignore the long-term expense it creates.
What's worse is that there are many examples for the US to learn from abroad but generations of propaganda have lead us to believe that our deficiencies are what makes us exceptional.
Yes, the "fiscal conservatives" show their hands over and over again when they simply choose policies that cost us more money, punish more people, lead to worse health outcomes, lead to worse societal outcomes, and just fail to produce the world we want to live in.
How often, though, are these not really "cost saving" measures so much as "nobody gets a free ride" measures?
Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.
> My experience made something painfully clear: violence against educators has become so normalized that society now treats it as an expected part of teaching.
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Serious question. Do you know any teachers, especially any special education teachers? They all have stories about the violence they receive, and a lot of them.
Special Ed is a special case- those kids are specifically segregated because they cannot be taught at grade level or be expected to behave safely for their size.
It happens more often in special education, but non special ed teachers have plenty of stories too. Also, special ed teachers are not some underclass and are also deserving of a safe workplace.
I've heard a lot of stories like that, where the teacher gets the short end of the stick and the student gets 0 consequences because of age. At the same time, the article looks like AI writing, so I backed out.
> I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Oh good, wxw disagrees. They've supplied zero supporting arguments, making discussion impossible, but at least Hacker news knows wxw's position.
To be fair, the precise reason violence against teachers is normalized is because liberalism (I.e. the supporting ideological structure of modern Western society) posits a theory of human psychology and sociology on the basis of the fact that this theory feels good.
It essentially just asserts a particular model of human psychology and sociology and the moral structure of the universe and also makes discussion about its assumptions impossible.
The fundamental tenet of liberalism being that people are basically good and any sort of bad behavior from someone is the fault of a societal failing inflicted upon them. So when a student attacks a teacher this is society failing the student, the teacher being an agent of society and therefore at least partial responsible for being attacked.
To question this is to question liberalism itself which no one, not even the people who do have a sense that this is wrong, are prepared or have the capacity to do.
> To be fair
Opening with “to be fair” doesn’t make a straw man fair.
I don’t know what you’re calling a strawman, but the point is that wxw’s response is simply an epitome of the underlying problem. He’s just engaging in political discourse completely in line with the ideological superstructure which is ultimately responsible for this very problem (violence against teachers being normalized). You can’t expect the typical person to be able to transcend that, hence “to be fair”.
Probably not a popular opinion but I feel the same way about police officers. Teachers aren't the cause of the vast majority of this, they're just the front line of people who have to deal with it. If it weren't educators, it'd just be whoever these dysfunctional kids / parents run up against next.
And sometimes those are police officers, who then get blamed for metrics we don't like. So we cut back on policing and now it'll be somebody else who gets the short end of the stick.
This article so very poorly written, to the point that I wonder whether this is real or just AI generated. One whole sentence in the 2nd paragraph is repeated nearly verbatim in the 3rd. In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online. There is an Elizabeth Martin who comes up as a writer, but she is a script-writer. I am not sure that this is a real story. Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
The entire site is suspect, IMO. Pangram says that the entirety of TFA save the paragraph beginning "The American Psychological Association" is AI-generated.
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
>This article so very poorly written
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
I'm not skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students, just not getting the impression that this in particular is a real story.
Shouldn’t we be holding the writing of a teacher in a published magazine? If they can’t write well, why are they teaching?
is writing the same skill as teaching?
just sit kids in front of well written books and the job is done.
So the.magazine for teachers - FOR TEACHERS - should be okay with having poor writing style? Is that all they deserve? And you accept that?
Workplace violence in general is becoming normalized. I think of healthcare workers and fastfood employees as well as teachers with this trend
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
When you use the term "workplace violence" it seems like this is something between co-workers or between boss and worker, when it's actually nothing like that.
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
Do not not forget delivery workers. There are "funny" videos of violence on youtube; "look how dog chases postman".
It has and parents are very much to blame for this.
Society is to blame for this, lots of parents are also being crushed.
We've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
US schools were restricted from engaging in appropriate disciplinary action without the threat of losing federal funding. Either schools take action against violent students appropriately, or they can lose federal funding. They were financially strong armed to ignore it.
It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.
Hard to call it a "society" then if it's just sticks and stones.
Agreed. I came here to post "If so, then you have ceased to be a civilized society."
To be honest, in the Netherlands there are more and more teachers dropping out because of stress and burnout, largely due to increasing criticism and demands from parents. But I haven't yet heard of cases of actual violence.
I see in Switzerland teachers being constantly required to fill in for missing colleagues. They might be lured in with good pay, but in the end are unable to cope - so they leave. And then the administration keeps wondering "how much money they want???" instead of hiring more teachers...
Speaking as a former teacher, as long as schools can find someone willing to stand at the front of a classroom, the terrible pay and working conditions will persist.
I finished my career in the UK, where a third of all teachers leave the profession within five years. I started that career in Australia, where half of all teachers leave the profession within five years. It's not a 'calling' or a 'vocation', it's just the post-university equivalent of a gap year.
Some of the teachers I meet in the UK are very unhappy with conditions (bureaucracy, pressure to hit metrics), but violence is rare.
My wife is a college level teacher and she is continuously receiving disrespect and open challenges in her classroom. Fortunately it has not come to physical violence. But the environment created by a large number of students who have a bloated sense of entitlement is problematic. Feeling entitled all the time is a sure way to living a sad life divorced from reality.
Is it "accepted" by society? Answering that depends on the definition of "accepted."
Is it reasonably expected? Yes, definitely, if that means "much more likely than violence against non-teachers": a random K-12 teacher in the USA is ~2.5-7x more likely to be assaulted than a random person in the USA.
If it has, chalk it up to the normalisation of the slow degradation of everything.
I am many decades out of public schools, but I wonder, is this in specific school districts, or is it nationwide?
It's worse, it happens all over the world. Just one of many examples - https://yle.fi/a/74-20239397
higher frequency of violence in schools in urban districts. but suburban and rural districts are dealing with it too. [1]
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a06
That source has nothing to do with 'on teacher' violence, just general violence. A school fight would count as an incident for instance.
Nationwide. It goes along with how guns have more rights than children do.
Which rights? What does that mean?
Men don't have the right to bear children
> A frustrated high-school emotional support student
What does that mean. Is it a diagnosis or a term schools use for some students but not others? Don't all students need emotional support?
Yes, I wanted to ask what that is too. I don't think we have that term here either and I'm finding that sentence a bit hard to parse.
Without trying to be funny, it reads like a student who's job it is to support another student's emotions. That can't be right though, is it?
I think the author needs to define exactly which piece of society he is referring to, otherwise the article is meaningless.
This is obviously going to be regional, because it's cultural.
I'm old enough to have adult children, although I never did have kids of my own.
My parents would have gone to school in the knowledge that if they acted up, words would be had with their parents, and there would be consequences.
At some point, something changed, and we decided that teachers were there to be put in their place by parents, and if a teacher suggested a child was doing something wrong the parent would expect to challenge that and the teacher would be put in their place.
We're now in a situation where children being taught sometimes think its their right - perhaps even obligation - to not be instructed in appropriate behaviour, and so feel free to react the way that they do.
There's a microcosm natural experiment for this in the Pennines, the North of England. There's a small town called Hebden Bridge, which for a while had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the UK. Some thought it was related to the environment - it sits in a valley, the persistent low grey cloud can make it feel claustrophobic - but I think another theory holds up: parents there didn't bother parenting. A community was drawn to the town by adults who were in essence, hippies: they believed in freedoms their parents didn't including for their children.
That meant that many of the kids growing up there did so in an environment without real structure, and became adolescent in an environment with easy supply to plentiful drugs and a relaxed attitude to its use.
I'm not a parent, that was an active choice I made, and so I wouldn't deign to tell parents how to bring up their children, but I would suggest parents look at the data: children thrive with structure and rules and gentle consequences for non-compliance (the naughty step, etc.), and recognition of genuinely outstanding behaviour (winning things, not participating in them). They struggle to develop as emotionally secure people without those. Hell, I'm a data point there - took me years to realise I needed therapy, and years more to benefit from it. As the old poem starts: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don't mean to, but they do."
Anyway, teachers play a part in that journey, but they can't do the whole thing, and the sooner parents (and society in general), restore the respect to the profession it once had, the better. Are all teachers good? No, but they are professionals who have more data on more children than any parent, so maybe just respect that.
Structure, seems to be a recurring pattern.
A friend of mine is on their way to becoming a teacher and already teaching at a school for one year part-time.
He tells tales about his children mostly from low income families, where school is the only structure they have as their families are completely dysfunctional. Thorn apart by the family trying or not trying to integrating into German society as well as themselves.
When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
> When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
Could be. A lot of kids only have so much good behavior for a day... act out at school or at home, pick one.
But also, the student who has to live with expectations at school may set expectations at home, and that may be seen as worse behavior by the parents.
I thought this would be focused on the parents coming in to assault the teachers.
My mom received threats of rape and assault and direct violence against her vehicle as a teacher in los Angeles public schools. Turned her from a bleeding heart liberal into a die hard conservative.
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
I wonder how conservatism is the answer to this crisis.
When it’s bleeding hard progressivism that causes these issues, it’s pretty obvious!
It wasn’t republicans that trashed California public schools in the name of ‘racial equity.’
I know they did this to public universities, but what exactly does DEI mean in public primary schools?
Right to self defense. It is much harder to attack someone who can fight back!
Is this about giving teachers guns?
I don't think you need to go that far but not punishing teachers for defending themselves from violence would be a good start honestly. Defend yourself from a kid hitting you and you're the one in trouble in most places.
Yeah that's true. Though wouldn't help if the student is stronger.
Conservatives believe that people need to meet the same standards, and that is is racist and weak to not hold people to those standards. This means if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher it's treated the same as if a white kid at a rich school hits a teacher - very seriously.
Liberals believe in intersecionalism, and that marginalized groups need unique affordances. This means accepting that if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher, it may be because of poverty and racism and we should understand the issue in that context.
Yeah but what's the concrete policy difference? Like is this about expelling the student vs not, or jailing vs not? The article doesn't say what state this is in, was curious about that.
Conservatives believe in defunding public education, social security and perpetuating root causes of a lot of issues like this that can directly be linked to, racism, poverty and lack of access to education. Conservatives believe in double standards when it comes to "holding people to the same standards". White kids get off scott free way more often for the same crimes than kids of color. Do your research.
I would argue conservatism is the cause of this problem. Their constant attacks on educators and education in general are so pervasive.
Additionally, there's no world in which they want these parents to actually succeed. If there's ever a scenario where someone tries to improve the lives of these people, conservatives will argue that they do not deserve it because they don't contribute to society like conservatives do.
What uncomfortable truths?
How do threats against teachers have anything to do with corporate regulatory issues or questions of tax structures or social spending?
I believe they meant the administrations of the schools/districts
One uncomfortable truth you should probably confront is the hostility of conservatives. Education and educators specifically have been targets of hate campaigns for the last 40 years.
Indeed, reality has a conservative bias. Liberals co-opted the phrase for their own social engineering ends.
Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
tl;dr yes, also water is now even wetter.
This feels very US centric. The title or link should reflect as much.
It shouldn't be accepted, maybe it's relative to the amount education (and educators) are valued by a society.
After reading both the article and the discussion here, it seems to me that this is the symptom of an increasingly transactional America. Call it late stage capitalism or atomisation of society, but when labour is no longer respected, this is the result. Teachers getting bullied and fast food workers getting shouted at, all while scraping to get by. Just like the manufacturing sector, the service sector is hollowed out, entertainment and automation economy is king.
Obama "Dear Collegue Letter"[0] policy threatened civil rights enforcement if schools disciplined more black and latino students than white students, assuming that disparities of the rate of discipline implied injustice, rather than matching up with disparities in the rate of behavior meriting punishment.
This was a disaster for schools; many students who would have been expelled were kept around disrupting teachers and students who had to bear their presence in classrooms, hallways, fighting each other, bullying students and teachers.
For about 5 years after this went into effect, my local school district that also allowed open enrollment around this time got an influx of students with bad behavior from previous schools enrolling and not being expelled for fighting and other repeated misbehavior and disruptions. There was huge wave of teachers and families leaving and enrolling in the rural school close by so both could actually do teaching and learning without interference. The schoolboard had a lot turnover until the now head got elected promising to drastically curtail open enrollment and apply whatever discipline policy they could get away with to revoke open enrollment rights from non-residents due to bad behavior.
Here is a great account [1] from a teacher about her experience in schools where discipline was severely limited and prevented expulsion of disruptive and violent students, and the obvious consequences to the degraded learning environment that resulted.
[0] https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/let...
[1] https://quillette.com/2019/02/10/public-educations-dirty-sec...
If you're a teacher in the US, it's kind of on you at this point. There's no sane reason anyone should be teaching in the US without full support from the administration and full control over your curriculum, both of which the US does not give teachers.
Hence why the majority of people I know that currently occupy teaching positions have another motive, or regret their career choice.
So, blame the teachers for becoming teachers? What's the alternative?
Imagine parents still parenting we wouldn't be in this shity situation. Most of you have kids as a lifestyle accesoire and externalize way to much of their upbringing and raising.
> The American Psychological Association completed three National surveys in which the findings reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying)
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Not invalidating your point, but I personally don’t have a story of a teacher like that.
> Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
Potentially, yes. Doubly so when those terrible teachers are kept in those roles year after year. The whole system defends and backs these teachers, even knowing they create horrible outcomes and dread for everyone.
> We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Nope. We all dont. It also depends on if you went to a "good public school" or a "bad public school", or rather worse or well funded.
> Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
True. But saying bad words is *not* violence. However threatening violence is absolutely actionable.
> Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Again, this is looking at individual choices over what im arguing as a system based failure. The whole way the system is constructed is a failure to students and teachers both.
Look at how schools are funded. Property tax. Means poor property locations get shittier schools, worse teachers, low funded classrooms. And this also shows the students' housing is also likely just as poor. Food insecurity, whole lot of trickle down poverty effects. I came from a poor funded rural school. I had no choice in that matter.
Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I present exhibit A.
Violence against poor people has been normalized, and teachers tend to get paid just above welfare levels, so.
You know, ==your budgets are your values==
gentle parenting strikes again
Nah, absent parenting. There’s a lot of shitty parents glued to their phones, which has short-circuited the innate desire to parent.
Gentle Parenting is full of uncertainties. There are times when you need to skip the gentle crap and be a parent.
It works on a small scale, where parents are dedicated to the cause, but it falls apart as soon as it hits genpop: someone watches a TikTok summary and thinks they’re an expert.
This approach is completely reasonable because kids are completely reasonable.
The backdrop of this includes the normalization of mass-shootings in schools. The incredible amount of violence needs to stop. One of the solutions is to ban all guns in America but not even one politician will take it seriously. Also, teachers must be paid as lucratively as defense contractors because in my opinion our children are the biggest priority when it comes to national security.
Who does this? Oh, right..
poors?
Yes and nothing will be done with it because intentional or not, teachers being treated like shit from both ends furthers the goal of the people in charge, which is to dismantle the public school system completely, let rich kids go to private schools, and pipe poor kids straight into the serf class.
I agree with the author, violence against educators has become normalized, but it's also been a fault on both sides. Both sides have lost respect for one another, and the reasons why depend a lot on politics and social issues. It almost mirrors the strife between citizens and cops: each side entrenching believing they "know what's best" and the other side be damned.
Ah yes, the two equally immoral sides of "stop killing unarmed black men" and "no we like doing it". I simply don't know who to side with!
27 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 according to the Mapping Police Violence database. (Despite this, 53.5% of people identifying as "very liberal" estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were killed. Only 15.71% correctly estimated "about 10."[1]) There are 800,000 police officers in the United States, so I am not sure you can say they generally enjoy killing unarmed black men based on a few dozen deaths a year.
[1]https://research.skeptic.com/content/files/2025/02/Research-...
This type of puerile thinking is so common, there really aught to be severe social consequences for saying this type of thing in a public forum.
A 6’6”+ unarmed man of any race could easily kill 90% of the population in a 1 on 1 encounter. We’re talking about a basic physiological reality and we have adults who can freely assert the opposite of this to the extreme detriment of society.
Having someone who thinks that simply being “unarmed” makes them a non-threat is actually a dangerous person to have around other people because they don’t have a theory of human relations that understands the role of physicality and violence and how that should be properly understood and mediated. This is someone too dangerous to operate in an office environment for example.
"unarmed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
I don’t think that view holds up to data, for instance you’re more likely to get shot by police as an unarmed white person than black person, when adjusted for population/crime. Even ignoring this, the number of unarmed black people shot per year is usually <20, so it’s not like the problem is endemic.