[fzeroracer]

It's a combination of a lot of different factors. I've had multiple friends I've known for over a decade speak about how bad their teaching experience has become. COVID just further accelerated things.

* A lot of parents treat schools as daycare rather than a place to learn. They're more disengaged than ever when it comes to helping out their kid, for fairly guessable reasons.

* There's been a lot of political attacks on our schooling systems which results in discouraging or outright convincing teachers to leave. Teachers are retiring and we're not replacing them with similarly passionate teachers

* The usual pay issues

* School admins hide a lot of trouble boiling underneath the surface because they're afraid of lawsuits. One example is that more and more kids are bringing guns to school [1].

* Private schools are growing in popularity which pulls funding from public schools due to school voucer programs despite a lot of private schools not having the same level of oversight or level of teaching

As a result we're seeing literacy rates decline [2] and in general students are simply just not graduating as capable as they were before. We're failing the next generation and the fix requires radically improving and funding our public school systems.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/10/10/guns-sch...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/22/1183653578/u-s-reading-and-ma...

[nradov]

In most schools, bringing a gun is one of the few offenses that will actually be punished with real severity. Prior to the Columbine High School massacre it was actually fairly common for rural high school students to bring rifles or shotguns to school so that they could go hunting on the way home. It was totally normal, and violence in those schools beyond minor fistfights was unknown. Many schools also had competitive shooting teams. But the change in attitudes, increased paranoia, and break down in social norms has made that situation untenable.

Most public school teachers are great people and do their best to educate every student. But a small minority of teachers, and a larger number of the administrators and union leaders whom they answer to, increasingly see schools as a channel to indoctrinate students on controversial social and political issues. It only takes one encounter with a situation like that to turn a parent off of public schooling entirely and move their child to a private school that better aligns with their values.

California has also banned suspending students for willful defiance. While those suspensions were over used in some schools, they did at least serve to get disruptive students out of the way so that others could learn. So, the situation here is likely to deteriorate further.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-law-wil...

[pests]

That bill let's teachers remove students from the classroom still. They just cant be suspended from school. It would be up to the schools to figure out an in-school punishment or improvement program.