My cousin was a NYC school teacher. Very rigid curriculum and everything was kept under lock and key. She worked in a school with lots of foreign kids, most of which wanted to learn, according to her. But the curriculum was disastrous and the kids did poorly on exams. Being a bit of a nerd, she still had her textbooks from when she was in that grade. Against policy, she started teaching them with the material she was taught with and the same methodologies. Improvement across the board.
Fast forward, my nephew isn’t but a few years removed from high school. While no rocket scientist or angel, he went to school, sat in class and tried to pay attention as much as any jock could. He said that of a 50 minute class, his teachers spent about 30+ minutes just trying to break up fights, get kids off their cell phones or stop talking. And God forbid the kids involved were black. There was whole different set of rules for them and it wasn’t uncommon for momma, in slippers and house coat, to show up at the school because her kid was disrespected and they were going to sue.
Far cry from when and where I went, with Marist Brothers that were allowed to beat the hell out of you.
On a side note, since becoming a homeowner and being forced to pay school taxes(over 50% of my tax bill), I ask myself....Why continue to try and educate those that do not want to be educated? Why do we continue to feed kids breakfast, lunch and sometimes a dinner when they don’t want to be there anyway? I’m sure 1 or 2 might “wake up” one day, but the rest will be just as delinquent, disruptive and criminal if they didn’t even attend. And it would save all us a lot of money.
My Mom started working at an inner-city Jr Hi (Baker, now a Middle School) in Denver in 1970. She and her aide struggled hard to bring 8th graders' reading skills up from a 4th grade level to 8th.
With those students who wanted to learn, they made great strides.
Then one day, all DPS Jr Hi Reading Teachers were informed they were switching to a wonderful new reading program, named "Amadon" (spelling?) It had been developed in the L.A. area.
It was a disaster from the start, and their students' progress was almost completely halted. It was a great mystery - at first - as to how this program ever saw the light of day.
Later, someone who had friends in LA education circles discovered that the curriculum had had a single pilot-program test to prove its worth, and had utterly failed.
Given the well-known corruption in the DPS HQ building (eg rampant nepotism among other things), it was obvious to the reading teachers that "money had exchanged hands under the table," with the Amadon people bribing someone downtown so that they could recoup some of the investment they'd sunk into an abject, abysmal failure of a program.
And just like your cousin did, my Mom and her aide secretly defied orders and reverted back to the old reading program which had been working fine. Some materials were reusable - eg books & cassette tapes & headphones & these huge cassette players. But other expendable materials they sometimes had to spend their own money on.
It was obvious that none of the other Jr Hi reading teachers did the same thing as my Mom, because a few years later there was an editorial in the Denver Post that my Mom clipped and proudly displayed at home (but not at work!)
The editorial board noted that for yet another year, Jr Hi reading proficiency had continued its freefall. And they noted that there was a single bright spot among all the Denver Junior Highs, and suggested that the other reading teachers all trek over to Baker JrHi to find out what it was that they were doing different.
Of course, if any of them ever did, Mom would have to be tight-lipped about her defiance of DPS HQ, or else risk her job! :-)
"And God forbid the kids involved were black."
Same for Hispanics *and* Blacks in my Mom's school, which was around 80% "Chicano" and around 15%+ Black students, with the remaining 3-5% being white kids of parents too poor to join the White Flight.
And around the time she started, in 1970, things had taken a steep turn downwards wrt teachers' & principals' options to use physical discipline, so that the charge of "RACISM!" would be hurled at any white teacher who so much as firmly grabbed the elbow of an out-of-control student to escort them away from trouble. Since the vast majority of the teachers were white, and virtually all of the students were brown or black, this led to a mojor breakdown in discipline, as students realized there would never be serious consequences for almost ANYthing they did.
But there was one teacher to whom this limitation did not apply. He was a shop teacher by the name of Floyd Ewing, I believe. He was very tall and very strong and very black. He refused to take any lip at all from his students, even the boys who were very large & strong themselves due to being 16-17 years old but still stuck in Jr Hi (FYI, there was a whorehouse across the street from them, with some of the older students being customers).
Nobody got away with talking/disruption in his class. Nobody got away with disrespect, ESPECIALLY not talking back to him or insulting him. Floyd was famous for picking up students by both shoulders, and ramming them hard into the wall. My Mom said that she and the other teachers were all green with envy of Floyd's ability to get away with what they could only dream about in their happiest dreams.
Reminds me of the tiny principal in Kindergarten Cop who vicariously imagines herself in place of the Schwarzenegger character, punching the lights out of the guy who beat up his wife & 5yr old son.
“Why continue to try and educate those that do not want to be educated?“
They’re not trying. They’re running detention centers.