Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021
I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best colleges for the very top students. There was honors, accelerated, standard, and remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning. Nobody cared what happened to those kids including in many cases their own parents.<p>Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.