[morkalork]

My sister-in-law is a teacher dealing with this in a pretty rough school district. The admin does not want to expel or fail students because of very sensitive political reasons and there are many students that just don't give a fuck. In the end, she's marking entire semesters worth of work and assigning extra attempts at the end of every semester. It's insane.

[orwin]

There is one way to "bypass" a bad admin: involve the parents. And do not actually bypass the admin, keep them in the loop, but this allow an educator to mitigate the issues.

You will find mostly three types, with a percentage that change depending on the area: Those who want to get involve but do not know how, those who want to get involved but do not have time (single moms are a part of that, but poor working class nuclear family too), and those who don't care. Luckily the third type is not that common (but it exist).

On way of involving the parent is sending them a mail with what was aborded in class and the two-three main points their children should know about. Cc the child. One hidden benefit is that if you're a new teacher, you will have to do that anyway to understand the notions you're teaching better (at least that's waht my teacher friends do).

The children do not have to know those point perfectly, and it has to be clear for the parent. You don't want to be the cause of home dissension. a rough idea is enough, because the next ideas will refine the first one, that's how learning work.

Then improvise on that. I have a friend who started that this year, it's a method that was tried like 5 years ago and that's slowly gaining ground in my country. My friend added "Email hour" where he garranteed to be on his computer between 18 and 19 four days a week, and try to respond as much as he could. He also changed from putting both notions and explaination in the body to notions in the body and explanations in attachment. There is a lot of details to be ironed out, and he also do not want to take too much time from the parents. He likes his job better since he started doing that, and the parents are grateful.

But now my government want him to participate in clubs and other stuff to have his augmentation, so i guess that method might be in jeopardy.

[mrguyorama]

>There is one way to "bypass" a bad admin: involve the parents. And do not actually bypass the admin, keep them in the loop, but this allow an educator to mitigate the issues.

A student in the US who is struggling usually comes from a home that does not give a crap about education in general. Involving the parents just results in them not caring, or blaming you as the teacher. Your admin will then side with the parent, because they also DGAF, superintendent is usually not a merit based position.

[orwin]

Not my experience tbh. It could be cultural differences, but parents disengage because they don't know how to help their children w/o creating tensions and/or without neglecting the rest of their life. If the teacher provides a cheap way (low time investment) for parents to have a view on what's done in the classroom and what their children are supposed to know, they usually embrace it, from what I've seen.

There is some cases where yes, the parents shouldn't have had kids, and disengage because they don't care. I do not believe this is the majority (my friend teach in middle school, but the technique cale from a high school teacher BTW).