How is the public education system in your area?

[SandyinMonterey]

We choose the town we live in because of the public school system. Highly rated. My daughter is a junior in high school. I did notice in one of the emails from the principal that there were a lot of new hires, mostly teachers.

 

[MamaMermaid]

I'm a public high school teacher at an A rated school in suburban south Florida and am sending my son to private school (after years of saying "never"). That should tell you all you need to know.

 

[Minnesota!]

Our district is good, haven't noticed shortages at my son's school.

However, almost all of my teacher friends are looking at leaving the profession based on "issues"...parents, unsupportive admin, burnout.

 

[TipsyTraveler]

The schools are very good where I am. Highly ranked, well-funded, well-staffed, extremely diverse. I recently looked up the average teacher-to-student ratios for the schools my kids are/will be attending and it was 1:12, 1:11, and 1:14 for elementary, middle, and high school respectively which is so strikingly different than the average class sizes of 33-35 when I was in school. My oldest is only in his first year in this school system (so we still have plenty of time to become disillusioned ) but thus far the experience has been positive. The staff members have all been exceptionally invested and enthusiastic, and the school has been very engaged with the students not just academically but also in the sense of building a community atmosphere with many special events and social meet ups.

Honestly, the schools here are better than what my husband and I needed them to be when we were looking for places to relocate. We wanted our kids to have a solid education, and certainly better than they would have had access to if we had stayed where we were, but we weren’t looking to get them into the very best schools possible. We were drawn to the area for other reasons and the excellent schools were just a bonus. Since moving here, I’ve asked many people for their opinions/experiences with the school system and not one person has had anything negative to say. Seriously, not one. A number of them said they moved here specifically for the schools. Such a night and day difference from what I’m used to.

The bus driver shortage, though… Oof, that situation needs improvement.

Absolutely!

My son's girlfriend was a math teacher in Anne Arundel County, Maryland up until the end of last school year. She couldn't do it anymore. Administration wasn't supportive, the parents that were involved in their kids education, the majority were not supportive-some were even combative - many of the kids themselves were disrespectful and rude. There was no discipline and politics handed down from the admin & teachers union filtered down into the classrooms. Yes, of course there are schools systems where it is not this bad, but it was there and those are her words verbatim.

The days of school are long behind us, and I'm glad to say it. I do not recall there being a lot of teachers leaving or problems with retention when our boys were in school-we moved from public to private when they started High School, and don't recall much issues there either. With that being said, in our (rather rural) area, I think they've managed to hold on to enough teachers. We have two elementary, one middle & one high school in the county we used to live in, and in the neighboring one where we live now (physically bigger county, still rather rural for the most part) there is 4 middle schools & 2 high schools. I think they are hanging in there with teachers, too - but in both counties there is a shortage of bus drivers, which I think it common in many places.

This is the school system we moved away from. My husband and I came up through PG County Schools. Unsurprisingly to you, I’m sure, getting our kids into a better school system was one of our main reasons for moving out of Maryland. Curiosity has the better of me — would you be willing to share roughly which area of Anne Arundel your son’s girlfriend worked in?

 

[easyas123]

Curiosity has the better of me — would you be willing to share roughly which area of Anne Arundel your son’s girlfriend worked in?

hmmm I'm not 100% sure, but somewhere along the Rt. 2 corridor area I think. She lives near Glen Burnie, but I think the school(s) she taught in might be a touch S or S/E of that?

 

[TipsyTraveler]

hmmm I'm not 100% sure, but somewhere along the Rt. 2 corridor area I think. She lives near Glen Burnie, but I think the school(s) she taught in might be a touch S or S/E of that?

Ha, the area we were fleeing was also along the Rt. 2 corridor, a touch SE of Glen Burnie. (Pasadena)

 

[Moliphino]

Good. What usually dings it in the rankings is diversity, but not much you can do about that when it's a public school district for two towns that are not at all diverse themselves.

 

[easyas123]

Ha, the area we were fleeing was also along the Rt. 2 corridor, a touch SE of Glen Burnie. (Pasadena)

What a coincidence! Well, we were lucky to find decent schools on the upper eastern shore, half luck half desperation!

 

[HopperFan]

Always relative to your state and education spending but for us ...

We sit between two high schools, the one my kids attended and one my kid teaches at. Both are in top ten in the state. Our system has 5 of the top ten in the state. It is a very large system spread over a very large county. It is a popular district for teachers. With COVID shutdown and the offering of online school they slowed hiring until this year. Then they actively filled just about every teacher position other than Special Ed and a couple career tech. Not bad for a district with 90,000 students. It is a district teachers want to teach in, jobs can be very competitive to get.

It is difficult to compare systems based on most pay rankings because they all factor in "benefits". My kid changed systems last year and got an instant $10,000 raise. But the old system matched higher to retirement but you had to stay longer to be vested. I think they banked on teachers not making it so saved money on the lower salary, he would be an example.

Teachers in our state also have gotten stipends for supplies and COVID "pay" as well. Some districts matched. If you add Supplements that varies widely. A football coach in one district might make double what they do in another district.

Behavior issues are hurting some and I don't know the answer. Relative left a big district she had been at about 15 years because of behaviors, and no punishments. Think she took a pay cut but she feels safer now. Sad because good teachers will continue to go elsewhere or leave the profession.

We bought our house specific to the HS location (even though my kids were just starting elementary school). We chose a location we were sure we would never get re-districted and we didn't. Right now they are ranked 5th in the state. What we find here is that most teachers have their masters or doctorates, many have a resume that they could teach college so some of the courses, even on level, are rigorous.

 

[Lumpy1106]

Agreed this needs more consideration;

Next which I think should get more studying on it to see if there were multi-faceted reasons (which I suspect there was) says the study reflected:

• "Other recent studies have found that students who spent longer periods learning online suffered greater setbacks. But the NAEP results show no clear connection. Areas that returned to the classroom quickly still saw significant declines, and cities — which were more likely to stay remote longer — actually saw milder decreases than suburban districts, according to the results."

I can only speak for my own kids and LA County, but here's what we are seeing; kids are 2 years behind DEVELOPMENTALLY. Seniors act like Sophomores, 7 graders act like 5th graders etc. There are 2 YEARS of normal kid activity that are just gone. I feel so bad for these kids and they don't really even know what they've lost.

but...

The statement you quoted does not consider things like what I described above, but also what about the kids that just plain vanished out of the system? In LA County that number tops 20,000(!). They are no longer considered in this very limited set of data. Just how much do you think their math and English scores have gone down? That alone explains the "milder decreases". They've eliminated the very bottom scores altogether!

One thing is for absolutely certain; you will not find a single instance, not even one set of cooked data that shows that any of the schools BENEFITTED from being shut down. I really hope we've learned something. Sadly I don't think we have. It's just the same business as usual and it's alarming to me how long it has taken to even get an admission that anything was wrong.

 

[greeneyedchick]

Happy with my kids' school district, Seminole County - Florida

 

[Lumpy1106]

Can we talk about grade inflation? Is it as bad where you are as it is here? My kids go to roughly the same size HS I did, and their school is considered to be far more "urban" than mine was. There were 38(!) Valedictorians in DS class in 2021. That's 38 kids with straight As in AP classes. In my class there was 2, and this was before there was an AP class for everything. How can that be? The AP classes are supposed to be harder, much harder than the "normal" classes I took as a kid. They obvious to me, are not. What about today's "normal" classes? That would be fine if the bar was level, but it's not. As I mentioned, DS went to a private HS for a year. Maybe not the classes, but certainly the grading was much harder in the private school. How do College Admission counselors even begin to decide who gets in when that is going on?

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

Agreed this needs more consideration;


I can only speak for my own kids and LA County, but here's what we are seeing; kids are 2 years behind DEVELOPMENTALLY. Seniors act like Sophomores, 7 graders act like 5th graders etc. There are 2 YEARS of normal kid activity that are just gone. I feel so bad for these kids and they don't really even know what they've lost.

but...

The statement you quoted does not consider things like what I described above, but also what about the kids that just plain vanished out of the system? In LA County that number tops 20,000(!). They are no longer considered in this very limited set of data. Just how much do you think their math and English scores have gone down? That alone explains the "milder decreases". They've eliminated the very bottom scores altogether!

One thing is for absolutely certain; you will not find a single instance, not even one set of cooked data that shows that any of the schools BENEFITTED from being shut down. I really hope we've learned something. Sadly I don't think we have. It's just the same business as usual and it's alarming to me how long it has taken to even get an admission that anything was wrong.

In fairness LA county schools actually were one of the ones to show an improvement but they had decreases elsewhere. "Los Angeles can claim one of the few bright spots in the results. The nation’s second-largest school district saw eighth-grade reading scores increase by 9 points, the only significant uptick in any district."

I did consider the move to private school, the move to home school or online school (in my state it's considered private unless connected to an accredited public venue like an existing public school or K12 online program). It's something worth knowing were those higher or lower performing students and I suspect the answer to that very much depends on where you live. Like the findings (and what we harped about a lot during a lot of the school closures) was access to basic learning things like computers tablets internet as well as even supervision drastically varied where you lived.

Although I think it's reasonable to assume even the most accomplished student depending on where they were at in their schooling has had setbacks. I suspect if you were a junior or senior in high school your social game may have been more impacted since a lot of "rites of passages" can happen then but in elementary and middle/junior high those are more building blocks and gaps more evident. That's just my thoughts though.

As for your last comment I agree with you as a whole, I understand what they were up against but never agreed with widespread closures without cause, I say this as being in a state that was the first one to shut down all school buildings within the entire state. Try telling the rural county with 2,000 people in it they are the same as a county with 613,000+ people. But even within my area (the one that has 613,000 people) I felt things could have been adjusted. I think the infrastructure has been improved slightly for things like internet access but we're flirting with something grave IMO if things get rough this soon after such problems. In the article I read an employee for Cleveland Metro Schools said “I’m not concerned that they can’t or won’t recover,” Gordon said. “I’m concerned that the country won’t stay focused on getting kids caught up.” and I agree that's a big concern.

 

[VandVsmama]

Re: grade inflation & college admissions:
Colleges pretty much know which schools do grade inflation and which ones do not. Another factor that's included in that determination is the difficulty level of the courses taken by the student. So somebody who got straight A's with regular english, history, etc. is not looked at in the same light as a straight A student with all honors & AP classes. Our school's guidance counselor has said that with every teacher's letter of rec gets included an add-on summary of the school's curriculum, general student demographics, what % go to college, etc. Our school definitely does NOT do grade inflation. But the public high school down the road? Definitely yes.

Pandemic effect on children:
I totally agree about the developmental delay and learning loss experienced all over the place during the pandemic. When our kids' school gave us the option to go back in person, we jumped at the chance because my kids just do not learn as well with only online instruction. My kids' grades improved a lot when they returned to in person instruction.

The upside of that whole experience for my kids has been that now they KNOW that they learn better with in person teaching, which will be factor into decisions later on for where they go to college. My kids are also just happier people when school is done in person.

When our school returned to in person instruction and gave parents the choice between online or in person, many other families thought we were nuts for going back in person. Yeah, my kids wore masks to school each day. They adapted. But it was worth it. They said that it was just SO much easier to ask questions and get your questions answered than compared to doing it all online.

 

[martikus]

Thankfully we are in top district in state (don’t get excited our state is something like 45th in nation) so we attract teachers. Still have more openings than I’d like - but teachers stay and for most part are good. The lesser funded districts are struggling. It’s a shame but it isn’t going to change in
My state based on politics.

 

[Lumpy1106]

In fairness LA county schools actually were one of the ones to show an improvement but they had decreases elsewhere. "Los Angeles can claim one of the few bright spots in the results. The nation’s second-largest school district saw eighth-grade reading scores increase by 9 points, the only significant uptick in any district."

I did consider the move to private school, the move to home school or online school (in my state it's considered private unless connected to an accredited public venue like an existing public school or K12 online program). It's something worth knowing were those higher or lower performing students and I suspect the answer to that very much depends on where you live. Like the findings (and what we harped about a lot during a lot of the school closures) was access to basic learning things like computers tablets internet as well as even supervision drastically varied where you lived.

Although I think it's reasonable to assume even the most accomplished student depending on where they were at in their schooling has had setbacks. I suspect if you were a junior or senior in high school your social game may have been more impacted since a lot of "rites of passages" can happen then but in elementary and middle/junior high those are more building blocks and gaps more evident. That's just my thoughts though.

As for your last comment I agree with you as a whole, I understand what they were up against but never agreed with widespread closures without cause, I say this as being in a state that was the first one to shut down all school buildings within the entire state. Try telling the rural county with 2,000 people in it they are the same as a county with 613,000+ people. But even within my area (the one that has 613,000 people) I felt things could have been adjusted. I think the infrastructure has been improved slightly for things like internet access but we're flirting with something grave IMO if things get rough this soon after such problems. In the article I read an employee for Cleveland Metro Schools said “I’m not concerned that they can’t or won’t recover,” Gordon said. “I’m concerned that the country won’t stay focused on getting kids caught up.” and I agree that's a big concern.

You can throw out the whole study if one of the conclusions is that LA County schools had any improvement. No way. They were already bad compared to the rest of the country and even in CA, LA County schools were among the last to open and the last to relax restrictions. Maybe the 8th graders had more time to read? Nah - that doesn't even sound right. When I say LA County lost 20k students, that's not the ones that home schooled or went to private schools - they just vanished. They didn't log in to "remote learning" and they didn't return when the schools reopened.
As for having access to computers etc., for my eldest it just meant cheating was a whole lot easier and it was rampant (he was a SR so who cares? the grades were already in for college). DS (Soph at the time) refused to cheat and struggled, then spiraled into depression as she fell behind. I spent multiple weekends trying to help her catch up. Mentally she was too far gone. It was frightening. I was able to sit down with her one (full) weekend and go through a History assignment. We did finally figure it out and I was proud of her (and us) for the effort. DS comes into her room and questioned why we had gone to so much trouble. In 5 minutes he had found the link to the completed assignment on-line - we could have just copied it like everyone else. FWIW - we did get it right, but still, there's remote learning, in a nutshell.
We have found positives - but even those are dubious. CA allowed kids to report pass-fail grades for all the remote learning classes. DD failed 2 classes and barely passed the rest. She repeated the failed classes (ironically, in packed summer school classrooms just 1 month after schools were allowed to reopen - no social distancing there!), and reported the whole year as pass-fail. Her GPA went up (huh?) to a 4.3 when all was said and done. I do feel slightly bad about reporting that GPA on her college apps but it's helping her get max scholarships to out-of-state schools. I can't begin to explain the #s. Sports (Lacrosse) pulled her out of the depression more than anything. We got her on a club team when it looked like CA wasn't going to let the HS team play (more irony there - it was OK to play as long as you weren't on a school property?!?). She got A LOT better on that team and it sparked her interest in playing in, and going to college. "Everything happens for a reason" and it looks like it's all going to work out, but I just can't wrap my head around it. I absolutely believe the social disparity got a lot worse - where would DD be if we weren't able to do that for her?

 

[Cogswel_Cogs]

Things went down here when common core started. Really is the stupidest teaching Ive ever seen, but I am guessing that is everywhere. To me all common core seems to do is to show you why the tricks you pick up in math work.. You don't need to know why.
They want to raise math and science levels switch to metrics, Right there you would be reenforcing 10's. Maybe that is part of why we are falling behind.

 

[Magical2017]

It was excellent when my kids first started school. In recent years we have seen a decline county-wide, but their individual schools are good. ODS high school is under enrolled, so he has 12-13 kids in his classes. We are less pleased with the middle school but YDS is in 8th grade and we decided not to move him to another school.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

You can throw out the whole study if one of the conclusions is that LA County schools had any improvement. No way. They were already bad compared to the rest of the country and even in CA, LA County schools were among the last to open and the last to relax restrictions. Maybe the 8th graders had more time to read? Nah - that doesn't even sound right. When I say LA County lost 20k students, that's not the ones that home schooled or went to private schools - they just vanished. They didn't log in to "remote learning" and they didn't return when the schools reopened.
As for having access to computers etc., for my eldest it just meant cheating was a whole lot easier and it was rampant (he was a SR so who cares? the grades were already in for college). DS (Soph at the time) refused to cheat and struggled, then spiraled into depression as she fell behind. I spent multiple weekends trying to help her catch up. Mentally she was too far gone. It was frightening. I was able to sit down with her one (full) weekend and go through a History assignment. We did finally figure it out and I was proud of her (and us) for the effort. DS comes into her room and questioned why we had gone to so much trouble. In 5 minutes he had found the link to the completed assignment on-line - we could have just copied it like everyone else. FWIW - we did get it right, but still, there's remote learning, in a nutshell.
We have found positives - but even those are dubious. CA allowed kids to report pass-fail grades for all the remote learning classes. DD failed 2 classes and barely passed the rest. She repeated the failed classes (ironically, in packed summer school classrooms just 1 month after schools were allowed to reopen - no social distancing there!), and reported the whole year as pass-fail. Her GPA went up (huh?) to a 4.3 when all was said and done. I do feel slightly bad about reporting that GPA on her college apps but it's helping her get max scholarships to out-of-state schools. I can't begin to explain the #s. Sports (Lacrosse) pulled her out of the depression more than anything. We got her on a club team when it looked like CA wasn't going to let the HS team play (more irony there - it was OK to play as long as you weren't on a school property?!?). She got A LOT better on that team and it sparked her interest in playing in, and going to college. "Everything happens for a reason" and it looks like it's all going to work out, but I just can't wrap my head around it. I absolutely believe the social disparity got a lot worse - where would DD be if we weren't able to do that for her?

I'm not sure why you're disagreeing with me personally about the study. It's been done since 1969, it is the measure we've had before the pandemic and after the pandemic. It is meant as a measure for national understanding.

We all have antidotes to go off of but it is the largest understanding of how things impact our education system and has been for decades.

You and I agree more fleshing out should be done because well we haven't had a global pandemic before but it's not worthless just because you disagree with it now.

 

[xdan0920]

Other recent studies have found that students who spent longer periods learning online suffered greater setbacks. But the NAEP results show no clear connection. Areas that returned to the classroom quickly still saw significant declines, and cities — which were more likely to stay remote longer — actually saw milder decreases than suburban districts, according to the results."

This part of the study has been thoroughly debunked FWIW.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1584704405836034049