[naet]

Not sure what you mean by solutions to education problems being "racist" and not allowed.... Also seems rude to assume you know better about this person's motivation for leaving teaching than they do.

I am a former California educator switched to software engineer. The reasons I switched careers is directly because education is underfunded and under supported by school administration and I didn't see a sustainable future for myself there. Many other brilliant teachers I knew have also left or are leaving because it isn't worth the effort and stress for bare minimum pay. Teachers aren't leaving because of the students, they're leaving because of the systems. You're severely overworked and underpaid, with no backup or support from the institution, in overly large class sizes, and have poor curriculums that teach to outdated standardized tests that you have to stick to so the school can try to bargain for more funding.

I think a good system of well funded schools and teachers can get almost any student to a good place if they're enrolled at an early enough age and properly educated. Unfortunately there are increasingly common situations where a student has been let down by the school system for years and ends up falling too far behind their grade level to catch back up, but that is a failing of the school system and not their race or home life. I know because I have first hand experience in those elementary or middle schools, they just aren't able to serve students well with what they have (low wages lead to inexperienced or uneducated teaching staff, overfilled classrooms leads to not enough individual attention, poor learning environments, etc).

[ericd]

I’m helping to run a preschool right now, I don’t think it’s a matter of “early enough” - if there are family issues, if they’re feeding the kid crap, not helping them get enough sleep, sending the kid to school with crap food, there’s frequently not too much the school can do, even with very high ratio of highly dedicated staff per student.

The school can work on behavioral issues, but then they go away on break, and come back with big regressions.

We should stop blaming everything on the schools. There are ways to raise a kid that are conducive to behaving well in that environment, and there are ways that are not conducive to that.

But we can’t blame it all on the parents either, they seem to have a lot less slack than I think US parents have had historically.