Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?
theeducatorsroom.com"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
My wife works for a school system that at one point had the following proclamation handed down:
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution. It takes an endless amount of time before it's clear "problem is the parent" and by the time that is decided they're gone and on to the next parent who submitted their 6th absurd complaint this year and everyone starts over wagging fingers at the teacher's.
Nurses have the same shit they have to go through (they get questioned by their own hospital legal team when the nurse is the one that got assaulted).
It's wrong. We need to stand up for educators and healthcare providers.
At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?
As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?
I think you are exactly right. This is the product of society which has more empathy towards the bullies, because they are the real victims, ignored and left behind by the society. On the other hand there is very little empathy towards actual victims themselves. And to go further probably the majority of teachers believe, support and vote for people holding such ideas.
I don't think society has sympathy for the bullies, in specific instances. It has sympathy for the bullies in aggregate, to the extent they represent societal social problems (especially in today's US).
That sympathy towards the aggregate seems to be a byproduct from apathy about fixing the underlying issue -- government ensuring positive social outcomes broadly across the population.
Post-90s US conservatism made it verboten to talk about the government's responsibility to create healthy social environments, especially for poor children, so there's no response portion of the conversation.
And because we can't talk about the home situation of the child who assaulted this teacher, in the sense of policy towards fixing that, the two political parties are left debating whether or not we feel sympathy for the assaulter.
... with true sympathy for teachers, front line medical professionals, and other social first responders lost in the shuffle.
If there was an inkling of a plan to strengthen the social safety net (e.g. funding mental healthcare for kids, recapitalizing shared public spaces, strengthening SNAP, universal kindergarten, mandating more parental leave), then we could face the problem honestly instead of treating teacher assaults as an awkward inconvenience of dysfunctional social policy.
Zero semblance of customer service.
Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.
I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".
They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.
Disagree. When you admit to a mistake you just took on a bunch of liability and risk being sued. Worker bees are not empowered to take on that liability. It is much cheaper to let things get bad and maybe get sued but the plantiffs have to prove their case versus hand people a slam dunk 'we messed up' in the eyes of management. Simple things I could address in the past I now have to just shut up and no longer talk to the customer at all. It all comes back to lawsuits causing societal level changes that yet again remove slack/productivity/the previous way a functioning society works.
Along these same lines, it seems to me that patients in the US can rarely afford the exorbitant and escalating cost of medical care, so with increasing frequency they expend considerable effort trying to identify any possible error that they think could get them a break on their bill or enough of a legal case to give them a fighting shot at beating medical bankruptcy.
I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.
> I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.
+1 of providers eating the cost of care due to insurance misfilings (e.g. failure to secure prior auth when the patient's plan required it, which for-profit plans are increasingly using as a disingenuous bullshit way to legally and effectively limit payouts for care that should be covered)
I don't work in medical or a hospital, but I am the person whose job it is to limit liability at my workplace. We have a bunch of language we have to advise people not to use when an incident happens.
It might come off a little impersonal, but unfortunately one wrong word in the wrong place can give someone an entire case when maybe they didn't have one before, unfortunately.
The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.
A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.
highly recommend you watch it.
Wild how much of the successful entertainment coming out of South Korea (like Squid Game), is basically them dramatizing facets of their dystopian society, that a lot of it is actually based on real issues they face, and it's not all just made up fantasy.
Indeed. I haven't been to Korea but when I was in China, I met many Koreans and when I was taking Chinese lessons, some Koreans were in my class.
They are generally less friendlier than all the other foreigners I met, closed to outsiders, and somewhat racist (I asked a group of Koreans if I could join their game of Basketball, but they said they preferred to play by themselves. No Chinese ever said anything like that, nor any other foreigners I had joined to play with).
Also, they are quite a violent people. My classmates and I nearly came to blows over the window in the class; I wanted to open it because the indoor air was stale and probably toxic, but he didn't want the window open (for whatever reason, though the weather wasn't cold). Another non-Asian foreigner got into a fight with a Korean puncturing his eardrum which resulted in deafness. Outside the university, too, when they get drunk they become aggressive and seek fights. I guess it must be all the stress they're to put up with in their Dystopian country?
Hellbound was on Netflix around the time of Squid Game. Less popular obviously, but an entertaining take on the cults they are famous for.
True, but that show had a too many fantasy/horror elements to it for people in the west to read into the cult aspects of Korean society.
piggyback to recommend a classic: Battle Royale
The common thread is that nursing and grade-school education are both female-dominated professions.
A lot of hospital have armed tactical teams. Though I would guess that in major metro areas they would be more hidden, and so less used.
I seriously doubt any hospital in the US outside of a major metro area has an "armed tactical team". I've never even heard of such a thing despite working in a major metro area for most of my adult life.
If by tactical team parent means SWAT, no.
If they mean explicitly stationed armed and vested police officers in level 1 trauma centers, absolutely.
Personally, I'm in favor. An ED deals with a lot of situations that would normally be met with force by law enforcement, every average Tuesday.
Having someone who's trained and comfortable with hospital procedures, staff, and "normal" there can mean avoiding prematurely escalating a confrontation and knowing when to immediately escalate to prevent injury or loss of life.
Not SWAT or SRT. They just called it the tactical team to differentiate them against regular security guards. The ones I've been around are not sworn peace officers, but are nonetheless armed. Usually they were previously peace officers or military combat arms, but I don't think that was a legal requirement. So they don't have the same use-of-force or arrest authority as peace officers, but can still act within the rights of the property owner.
We have one here, in a town of 60,000.
Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own. I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
(last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
Schools across the U.S. are trying a 4-day week. Why? To retain teachers - https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the... - November 8th, 2023
Teachers are calling it quits amid rising school violence, burnout and stagnating salaries - https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/us/teachers-quitting-shortage... - May 31st, 2023
Four day school week? In rural Missouri, more districts see it as a way to recruit teachers - https://www.kcur.org/education/2022-06-11/four-day-school-we... - June 11th, 2022
> teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own
Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
How much of that goes to the teacher? It seems to be soaked up by administration.
Well, what does the administration do? What programs does it have to manage? How are administrators paid compared to teachers?
The teachers who didn't grade homework and passed students who hadn't actually learned anything? They're utterly powerless and more funding won't help them. The schools need to radically change their approach to education, top to bottom.
Those teachers wanted to fail the kids, but administration told them they couldn't.
Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
I'm calling BS here. The article on NHJ would have had the failure rate around 50% or higher based on how poorly the students performed. The school literally cannot accommodate so many students failing a grade level and being held back.
Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
Schools are for education. They are not for raising kids. That is the parents job.
If the home situation is fucked up it doesn't matter how much money you throw at the schools.
> 52K of funding per student
This gets kinda tricky to analyze, and especially hard to compare to other countries, which may have very different ways of accounting for things.
That money goes to:
1) Salaries for school administrators.
2) Salaries for teachers.
3) Salaries for office support staff (e.g. secretaries)
4) Depending on how the accounting is done, that may include a fraction of the salaries of district admin (super and assistant superintendents, and Nb there can be several of the latter, even in smallish districts) and their office support staff.
5) Facilities construction and renovation, and/or servicing debt on bonds for past facilities construction and renovation.
6) Property and building maintenance. Mowing, fixing potholes and re-painting lines in parking lots, roof leaks, playground maintenance, whatever.
7) Transportation for students (e.g. busses). This can get pretty expensive in sparsely-populated areas.
8) Extracurriculars, including supplemental pay for coaches and sponsors, and maybe an equipment budget.
9) Supplies for "specials" classes, including stuff like band instruments and maintenance of those instruments (lots of places you bring your own, but that's not true for all instruments, often the really big ones, especially, will be school-provided) and art supplies and all that.
10) Electronics and computer services. Powerschool licenses, laptops, "smart" projectors, all that stuff.
11) Special educators and paraprofessionals who will have much smaller student-counts they're responsible for than classroom teachers. This can get as low-count as a dedicated para for a single student, following around and helping them all day.
12) ESOL services. Districts with lots of students speaking English as a second language (if at all...) bear higher costs.
13) Special services for kids who can't fit into the mold of ordinary school. This can look like a district budget paying for transportation to and from a fairly distant magnet or private school, which school will probably cost a lot more than ordinary public schools because they'll have far lower student-to-staff ratios.
14) School lunches, and maybe breakfasts. The food, the staff to serve it, health code compliance and appliance maintenance, all that. IDK if the spending figure would include money students put into accounts for their kids to use for this purpose, but lunches are often subsidized to at least some degree, if not 100%.
15) Other support staff and services (nurses, counselors and psychologists, librarians, janitors)
16) Other supplies. Books, paper, toner, et c.
(and probably more stuff I'm forgetting about)
The result is that actual spending for a given student, if we restricted it to only the things they're directly benefiting from, can be a ton lower than average per-student spending. Meanwhile, some students soak up well over $100k in spending per year, all on their own.
Also, it's easy to pick out some of the above that might plausibly not count as part of the school's budget, in, say, another country that simply made different choices about what budget each thing belongs in, or might just naturally have far lower costs due to geography or demography or whatever.
TL;DR average spending per-student doesn't tell you a lot on its own, and you definitely can't usefully compare one school to another based on such a figure without gathering a lot more context.
Also doesn't capture parental spend in places where the per-student cost is "lower". The district only spends $nK, but then the parents add in private tutoring, study materials like books and computer programs/subscriptions, etc. Even something as basic as the monetary value of "supervision during study", where another child is on their own because both parents have to work just to afford rent and food.
In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
Whose responsibility is a kid's behavior if not his/her parents'?
Being a parent is a big responsibility, and (barring rare exceptions) you don't become one unintentionally.
Unfortunately, I see plenty of people out in the wild who act like their kids' behavior is none of their business. There was a time when parents unable to control their children would be asked to leave public establishments, but now, everyone is supposed to stand by impotently, and anyone who dares speak up is accosted by the bad parent(s).
Long are the days when if a kid did something wrong, he would get a whooping from the teacher and then at home from a parent.
> In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
~40 percent of pregnancies annually are unintended in the US (per the Guttmacher Institute), so lots of folks parenting who didn't want to or didn't intend to parent. As unintended pregnancies are driven down over time (via education and contraceptives), this should reduce aggregate load off the system of people who do not want to or cannot parent effectively. We avoid, to the best of our ability, people who don't want kids having them, we get parents to success to the best of our ability with the kids that are here today (because there is no other option). We can predict future demand for systems needed to support children based on the US projected fertility rate curve (US total fertility rate stands at ~1.58 as of this comment, and will continue to trend down into the future: https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...).
Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says - https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate... - April 9th, 2026
> There are approximately 7.3 million standalone single mothers and about 15.7 million single-mother family households in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data tracking. Roughly 23% of children under 18 in the U.S. live with a single mother.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-economic-status...
> More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate
https://fortune.com/2026/06/28/student-parents-workforce-tal... | https://archive.today/NZQRZ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709130 (0 comments)
> The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/24/kindergar... | https://archive.today/Fm1nG | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867716 (1 comment)
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... (~60% of US households consist of adults with no children in them)
(think in systems, and overlay this issue with how many K-12 schools are closing across the US every year due to structural demographics and total fertility rate decline)
Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S: Limited funds and low enrollment forced districts to close more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/07/20/school-c... | https://archive.today/4r4uo - July 20th, 2026 ("We call it the big shrink," said Marguerite Roza, who tracks school funding as director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Enrollment at public schools is declining, partly because there are fewer kids in the U.S.")
> Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further reducing the number of kids at some schools.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...
(TLDR pay teachers a living wage, get class ratios to whatever the science says is best before diminishing returns to optimize for student success, and continue solving for avoiding unwanted children with education and contraceptives; k-12 schools, as well as colleges [https://college-cuts.com/], will continue to close well into the future due to structural demographics, optimize accordingly)
> Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own.
Teachers are not underpaid. We live in a free market society and they have extensive collective bargaining agreements. If anything, they’re overpaid vs a totally free market.
Those who can and want to use those same talents in a different progression are free to do so. Nobody is forced into the progression (okay maybe grad students but that’s something else…).
> I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
Teachers in my state are lucky to crack $75,000 salary after 10 years. Yes, they are underpaid.
I happen to have a friend group that has a few teachers in it.
Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount. In a few of our local districts, on average teachers are making $130k/yr if you scaled their pay to a normal 48 week career schedule. This is on top of gangbusters benefits.
Beyond that, once you get a few years into it and have your scaffolding built, you can kinda just cruise control for the rest of your career with only minor changes.
Yes, the job is challenging and stressful, but lowkey most $130k/yr jobs are.
The real devotion of teaching is being willing to have so much unproductive time which would be filled in a different higher paying career.
14-16 weeks off a year is no compensation for dealing with little shits 5 days a week (and their parents), while attempting to teach the minority that want to learn.
> Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount.
Teachers in my district take extra work for the district doing maintenance and tutoring and drive doordash to pay their bills during that time.
it's very dependent on state and most states are underpaid even including getting summers off. The benefits aren't very good in my state and we're one of the better paying states in the region.
There are some huge outliers like California but most states teachers are just treading water. I know this in my state because I was trying to get accredited earlier this year.
Why do you claim they are underpaid?
If there’s plenty of people willing to do the job, that’s simple supply and demand.
“I think educators should be paid more” or “I want us to pay them more” does not mean they’re underpaid.
1) There aren't plenty. It's hitting the lowest-paying and least-otherwise-desirable areas first, but there's an ongoing staffing crisis that's been worsening for years. Enrollment in teaching programs has plummeted.
2) People often talk about wanting the median teacher quality to be higher, and to be able to fire more bad teachers. A nigh-necessary early step toward addressing that complaint is to increase pay. A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
> A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
This would be a fine argument if we could somehow align incentives, fire low performing teachers, and rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
> fire low performing teachers
Why can't we fire them? The typical answer is "unions" but a bunch of states de facto don't have teachers' unions (as far as unions with any ability to collectively bargain or meaningfully protect teachers from firing), and still have to retain all but the very worst teachers... because the supply of good teachers is too low. These same states tend to have poor educational outcomes, further suggesting that ability to fire, on its own, isn't helping much.
> rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
This, unfortunately, turns out to be a really hard problem. It's been sincerely attempted in a bunch of ways and they've all turned out to suck, is the short history of the notion.
Almost all states offer pensions, or hybrid pensions and direct contribution plans. You have to add 1/3-1/2 or more (especially for states with retirement health plans) to yearly salary to appreciate real compensation.
In my state the pension plan is pretty mediocre, it does not make up for the low pay.
I think you need to do some reading on externalities and how they lead to misallocation of resources in a free market.
> Teachers are not underpaid.
A teacher with 20yr of experience in my district makes $5,000-$10,000 less than the state median wage.
And their retirement actually sucks.
> but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
They don’t have budget to put food on their teachers tables or supplies in the classroom.
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
Our world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare.
The ugly secret is that vast amounts of teachers are leaving the field, but there's also an inexplicably vast fresh supply of new teachers coming out of universities, so it sort of perpetuates the conditions.
I don't anticipate change until this fresh supply dries up and people start asking why.
> world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare
Of note that Kafka-esque is predicated on an impenetrable morass of regulations and procedures.
Imho, we've overly and prematurely optimized to address negative outcomes without remembering that adding red tape also decreases the efficiency of delivering good outcomes.
It'd be nice to see a lot of professions move back towards 'we'll regularly audit to see if there are problems, then address them if they appear' postures.
Time spent in pre-compliance when there would have been no problem is simply lost efficiency.
That is a problem but it’s definitely not the root. The root is our increasingly high tolerance for violence, especially in schools. We should also stop shying away from the gendered aspects of the thing: this is done by boys and men FAR more than girls and women. We just don’t like to talk about it.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
Your dog whistling argument can be easily countered by peeling a few more layers of the onion... The trouble is, as usual, some things we just dont talk about.
It's not like the parents are wrong. But it's a structural issue, a product of the way schools are set up, and not of the actions of a given staff/faculty member.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
Classic bleeding-heart prog backwards thinking.
The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.
Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.
They mandated prison-style policies at my alma mater, which is one of the nation's top public schools, as part of a blanket policy for the county. It was clearly not a good fit for that particular school, and my observation was that incidents rose after. I was speaking partially from that anecdote, and remain convinced that prison-style discipline is the issue (even if it precedes metal detectors).
Also, you might not be on the right website.
I wonder if the student faced any consequences, none were mentioned in the article. Another slap on the wrist I assume?
You can't even touch student and don't even think about slap. Some years ago I witnessed the case where teacher grabbed the student (14y old) who ran around screaming, kicking things and other students. A teacher was charged with a criminal offense (physical violence against a minor) and must now comply with behavioral supervision. What happened with kid? Nothing. He had a bad day and don't have skills to regulate his emotions yet.
He's not going to develop the skills if he doesn't face consequences for his actions
Nothing a $190k/yr school behavioral counselor can't fix with a handful of 1 hour weekly sessions where they ask the child to discuss their feelings.
/s
Really wonder if corporal punishment wasn't such a bad idea after all
For the rare few cases it may have been warranted, it wasn't a bad idea. The problem is that for the vast, vast majority of cases in which it was used, it wasn't warranted.
Remember: schools don't have tribunals to judge which student was or wasn't actually guilty of what, to which extent, with which attenuats if any, etc., to then decide who was going to be beaten and how much. The teacher merely looked at you, decided you were guilty because you didn't look into his eyes while he was speaking (autistic children were typical cases of this), and decided to traumatize you for life, fully unjustly.
When modern schools do the same but in the opposite direction, unjustly punishing teachers, that simply shows they haven't changed one iota from what they have always been.
As far as I can tell, the problem is that abusive adults with a power imbalance really enjoy dishing out corporal punishment.
I'm guessing you're supporting when a loving parent smacks their kid in outlier circumstances.
Your comment includes the abusers.
A deeper question: why can they even have these lawsuits? Why don't the judges or juries reject the lawsuit?
If it has gotten to a jury, it has already taken a significant amount of time and resources from the district and the teacher.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
The education profession in the United States has become a black hole that gives people who don’t plan the illusion of a career.
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
Tell that to London County Public Schools. https://www.google.com/search?q=loudoun+county+abuse+failure...
I advise against using Google for things like that, because Google results are very dependant on how Google classified you, and it might differ from how Google classified me.
Are you sure you wanted to point me to some Facebook post, which is the nr. 1 result for me?
Wow thanks for pointing that out. I figured the ai response would give you something. But a Facebook post as your #1 result that is really something haha.
Try this https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-a-virginia-district-fa...
Well, I know at least one EU country where this story could have happened exactly like this :-X
The legal system is meant to be a backstop, not a standard mode of operation. What I despise, and what makes me feel embarassed by proxy, is when the imagined solution involves using the legal system as a deterrent (to either the kids or their parents). I think there's a systemic cultural failure if parents are not emparting proper morals and imposing proper consequences, so much so that we need the law to be involved to protect teacher from harm.
> school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
No different than any other employer-employee relationship - the school has a responsibility to protect itself. Teachers have rights too, if she believes her employer contributed to harm or has taken retaliatory action against her she can bring her own suit.
Having been a student in the mid-late 90s in US public school I can say I witnessed this often. Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with. Instead the public school is forced to try and deal with these delinquents. They take time and resources away from the smarter youth who are trying to do the best they can in the public school system.
Having been a student in the late 90s in US public school, I can say I did not witness this at all, and my high school had several thousand students.
However, my district also had a school specifically for troublemakers (with fences and extra security and all of that) so the other schools wouldn't have to deal with them.
I wonder what the troublemakers learnt?
Although for self-selected friends my personal saying is that "All the smartest left school at 15". My other friends are academically educted which doesn't smarten up anyone.
> Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with... They take time and resources away from the smarter youth...
You seem to have a severe deficit of compassion. Also a deficit of strategic thinking.
Some significant fraction of those "delinquent kids" are that way due to some generational cycle of poor treatment and/or bad circumstances. If, as you advocate, little attempt is made to break those cycles, you'll just leave the problem to fester and get worse.
Also you're advocating punishing kids for being the victim of their own circumstances, which is just heartless.
The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
>The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.
With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.
> With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.
FYI, you're not a decent person, you're a problem person. You lack compassion.
If someone beats you and leaves you for dead in a ditch, when the paramedics find you, what should they say? It pretty obvious: "a dollar spent helping this guy could be used to help someone better, leave him for dead."
>With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that capital is apportioned with regard to virtue. Anything but. Thus, we shouldn't decide how that capital is used based on whether or not someone "deserves" it, but by whether or not it's better for society. I'd prefer "delinquents" under supervision, versus LARPing The Warriors.
OR
Elon Musk is a trillionaire, we're spending hundreds of billions to build data daycares; appealing to sanity in capital distribution was out the window years ago.
People following your logic is why we still have these problems in public school.
The fact that your comment is downvoted and the parent is not tells everything I need to know about "people" attending this website.
I went to a high school in California. The school district had a separate dedicated campus where they sent all of the violent and antisocial kids in the rest of the school district. They weren’t hesitant to use it either, repeat offenders weren’t a thing. All of us were aware of it.
The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.
I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.
That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.
Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.
Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.
>Hiding DEI/civil rights issues because you might actually be forced to fix them, and pay for the fix.
Sounds racist. And exactly the way people want it.
Vagueposting is a new term online for this kind of behavior - it stems from people getting absolutely destroyed online for various opinions, resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean. Sometimes it's hateful opinions, sometimes it isn't. The end result is people will become unable to simply state their opinions and we won't be able to pick apart people with terrible ideas from the good ones, because no one wants to talk!
> resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean
This is hacker news, most of us are anonymous. People say all sorts of vile things on here. Come on, Ambolia, have the courage of your convictions.
It's more effort than courage. Saying vile things takes no effort for many people. Saying a difficult truth takes more effort.
In any case, his caution birthed a comment tree that's normally verboten.
This isn't Reddit, you aren't going to get softbanned by downvotes
We're talking about schools in the US, which means we're talking about black and latino students. This trips the culture war wires, so people get wink winky.
Because some things are politically incorrect to say.
If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.
Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.
Probably because what this poster seems to be implying is a sort of inconvenient or unpopular truth. The kinds of things that there's no point actually saying out loud no matter how true they are, because they just make people angry and being explicit about it just paints a sort of target on you instead of actually driving anything towards a solution
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
It's not rocket science, certain kids showing up as getting impacted by punitive measures looks bad on certain government measures. So they stop getting punished. Problem solved!
Which ones?
Does it matter which kids is it? Just remove the metrics, apply the punitive measures fairly, and let the dice fall where they may. Or don't and allow the safety of teachers and the quality of public education to keep degrading. We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
Punitive measures only work if you believe you have something to lose, a lot of these kids don't. Sure, you can þunish them for their infraction, and you'll have justice, but it's not going to stop them from doing it again unless they feel like the lost out on something. And if you have nothing in the first place why do you care?
And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.
> þunish
Today I learned that the Icelandic keyboard has a dedicated key for typing þ
The British one doesn’t, so I’ve no idea how I did that.
Conpiracy theory: someone wants to track you. It looks like a typo but switching one letter in an uncommon word can make the word a unique enough fingerprint to track an account. Of course I'm assuming you're typing on a computer that has been compromised.
Alternatively you have fat fingers and use Linux (is there a correlation?) and you hit AltGr+T. From Wikipedia about British keyboard:
It appears your brain has been compromised and needs an antivirus scam.Using the AltGr key on Linux produces many other characters and symbols, e.g. ¹²³€½{[]}@łe¶ŧ←↓→øþæßðđŋħjĸł«»¢“”nµΩŁE®Ŧ¥↑ıØÞƧЪŊĦJ&Ł<>©‘’Nº×÷· (If reconfigured as a compose key, an even larger repertoire is available)
> We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.
Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?
From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know
OK — Under-represented minorities would be expelled at higher rates than whites and asians, and the district would get sued for discrimination.
Yeah I read that and gave up. It's also one of those "let me explain Smittywergermanjensen's Law to you"
Because these things are for unfortunate reasons of historical happenstance, correlated with race. And if you let race into the discussion the evil people who peddled all this bad metrics and bad policy can use it to sow division and get everyone arguing with each other while they quietly dodge blame.
Because he would immediately get massively downvoted and flagged.
"...so weird".
"weird" is two years ago. Time to update your firmware.
What are the "obvious rules" that could be applied here? (They aren't obvious to me.)
[flagged]
Comparing raw punishment rates tells you nothing, because transgression rates can vary.
[flagged]
you didn't capitalize black so you're racist btw
Some people are saying I’m the least racist to ever do it
Through my observations this has been completely normalized and with terrible pay as a reward. The justification is that it’s the students’ home life causing it and the teachers are there to fill in as a stable adult.
This is at a tipping point.
I always hear it's because they don't have breakfast. As iff when we deliver them a free meal they are going to become honor-roll students.
My understanding is that it’s normalized by administrators, and the public doesn’t think much about it. Another issue is that some schools have heavy police presence and prison-like rules.
I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers. Other commenters are blaming parents, and sure we should incentivize and facilitate better parenting, but in the short term what is more successful at reducing violence is expelling violent students.
lol yea expel them and make it society at large problem because you expeling students reforms them
Even if expelling students doesn't reform them: first, it protects other students; second, ex ante, it's an incentive to behave better in the first place. In fact there's quite good evidence that this works well. (You can check the evidence yourself, by asking ChatGPT "What's the evidence on expelling badly behaved students from schools?" or a similar question.)
They are already societies at large problem keeping them in the school degrades the function of the school for everyone while providing nothing of value to violent students.
The bottom quintile (of stock, not of class) has always been society's problem. What changed is how they're dealt with.
It's society's problem regardless. Not expelling them just means the school itself is an incubator and breeder for antisocial behavior, and when they get out of school, they're still a problem.
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
What do you propose other than “lol” and sarcasm?
Society at large has tools and systems in place to better deal with a violent person, student or otherwise.
> Society at large has tools and systems in place to better deal with a violent person, student or otherwise.
really? for minors?
Yes.
Disagree with this.
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
How will they become productive in school? Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need. School shouldn’t be that therapy, it degrades the other students’ education.
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
> Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need.
I'm not advocating against this. But keeping their education timeline somewhat on track is highly preferrable in my view (inserting "fixed delinquents" into classes of younger children seems very undesirable to me).
> And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I honestly don't see how this could ever apply.
You have basically an average >$200k investment from the parents alone, plus all the direct/indirect subsidies starting with day care. Between low-wage working adult and "worthless person" there is at least a $50k/year swing in expected value to society every year they work, too.
Even if your success rate of "fixing" child delinquents is laughably low (say 15%), and costs you like $100k per attempt it is easily worth it; its not even close.
My high school principal once told me after expelling me for a few days, don't worry it's not a big deal. When I was your age I was permanently expelled from half the schools in the county.
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
What about the kids they assault while not being expelled?
Exactly this. Some people seem not comprehend that infinite compassion for aggressors isn't "free"; it comes at the expense of their victims.
They will likely never become productive members of society.
how are they ever going to become productive members of society?
By learning, for likely the first time in their lives, that actions have consequences.
If the behavior of children was meaningfully driven by career consequences that are a whole lifetime in the future (from their point of view), then parents would have a very easy job.
This is obviously not the case.
Violent behavior obviously has to be sanctioned and hopefully corrected, but excluding children from education is not especially helpful there and has insanely costly side-effects.
>You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
That's letting things go way too far. If an incorrigible can be identified, whether that be via their bad behavior, phrenology and/or an excess of melanin, we can weed them out by age nine or ten, sterilize them to make sure they don't pollute our society even more, separate them from the decent, hardworking folks and, if they won't work for the benefit of the society that's footing the bill for their palatial accommodations, summary execution would certainly be warranted.
The above is satire and quite disgusting. The sad part is all of you (and you know who you are) who nodded along with the above paragraph and thought, "Finally! someone is making sense and telling the truth!" are far too many and far too pleased with your hatred and disdain for your fellow humans. Have you no vestige of humanity within you? Shame on you!
I'm honestly not sure what exactly your point is?
Some neofascists like eugenicist talking points?
You lost me at "incorrigible" and honestly just mentioning phrenology will get every non-moron to just dismiss any argument.
Do you believe that my argument is on a slippery slope towards eugenicist nonsense? I disagree on that and would argue the reverse; children are too valuable to immediately "discard" (by exclusion from education) because of delinquency.
Reading comprehension not your strong suit?
I said:
>The above is satire and quite disgusting
about my statement. And I followed it up with:
>The sad part is all of you (and you know who you are) who nodded along with the above paragraph and thought, "Finally! someone is making sense and telling the truth!"
Do you fit into that category? If not, then my bile wasn't directed at you. Or did you miss that part?
Sorry for the needlessly adversarial tone.
I had assumed that your hyperbole was directed at my paragraph you quoted, and ment to insinuate that said paragraph was only a few exaggerations apart from eugenicist nonsense.
>I had assumed that your hyperbole was directed at my paragraph you quoted, and ment to insinuate that said paragraph was only a few exaggerations apart from eugenicist nonsense.
No, you made it clear that you understand that warehousing children who have socialization issues was pretty stupid and a drain on the economy. And I agree.
There were several comments I could have used to platform my satire, yours was almost at random and not a reflection on your take. Apologies if I made it seem like I was associating you with my vile blather.
As I originally said, the sad part was all the folks "nodding along" with my "solution", of which there were, I'm sure, far too many.
It makes you wonder WTF is wrong with some people. :( :( :(
> My experience made something painfully clear: violence against educators has become so normalized that society now treats it as an expected part of teaching.
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Serious question. Do you know any teachers, especially any special education teachers? They all have stories about the violence they receive, and a lot of them.
Special Ed is a special case- those kids are specifically segregated because they cannot be taught at grade level or be expected to behave safely for their size.
It happens more often in special education, but non special ed teachers have plenty of stories too. Also, special ed teachers are not some underclass and are also deserving of a safe workplace.
I've heard a lot of stories like that, where the teacher gets the short end of the stick and the student gets 0 consequences because of age. At the same time, the article looks like AI writing, so I backed out.
Yeah given that I don't see any statistics in this article, I'm not convinced of a systemic problem.
> I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Oh good, wxw disagrees. They've supplied zero supporting arguments, making discussion impossible, but at least Hacker news knows wxw's position.
If it’s unclear, this isn’t for or against any position, but rather a reminder to post an actual rationale rather than tell people your opinion. wxw’s post contributes nothing not because of ours position but because of its lack of content.
I remember James Talarico talking about how a very aggressive student completely transformed from an angry kid into a thriving one once he had the therapy and support. Of course republicans cut the funding and the therapy ended and he was eventually expelled.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x2PsFWrwCDI
I know its a single data point, but I think those situations would happen a lot less if students had access to the right support.
Yeah its the same with prisoners. Obviously with the right targeted support they do very well at rehabilitation. Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost, and the cost of individual targeted support is only increasing. I'm sure with infinite money we could educate everybody to an amazing standard, and reform every prisoner. It is a shame that our wellbeing as a society has become an act of taxation budgeting.
We don't need indefinite money, we just need to realize that spending more on care has better outcomes than doing what's immediately cheaper. A rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to re-enter the system, but we don't measure that cost.
This is the same with healthcare and schools. We let the system be run by a bunch of short-term get rich quick charlatans who get in the way of more long-term prosperity for everyone. It's easier to measure the immediate cost, so we cut there and ignore the long-term expense it creates.
What's worse is that there are many examples for the US to learn from abroad but generations of propaganda have lead us to believe that our deficiencies are what makes us exceptional.
Yes, the "fiscal conservatives" show their hands over and over again when they simply choose policies that cost us more money, punish more people, lead to worse health outcomes, lead to worse societal outcomes, and just fail to produce the world we want to live in.
Well if you look at how much prisons cost per day (median of 167$ / day in the US), it's quite obvious that therapy combined with confinement at home would be magnitudes cheaper... My personal guess: it's got to do with the fixation on reward / punishment that's so present in our societies.
> Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost
A ugly way to say that our society has limited resources.
Working hours especially are a zero-sum choice.
We require some way to choose between different usages of people's time. All choices are suboptimal. Our societies have slowly developed something that mostly works.
Money as a topic is distracting: instead think about how we allocate the lives (time) of people: especially when trading one person's life/work against another's rights.
How often, though, are these not really "cost saving" measures so much as "nobody gets a free ride" measures?
Some schools spend a lot of staff effort managing bad behavior, to everyone's harm, that could be greatly reduced by just making sure every kid had breakfast and lunch. Feeding the kids is "communism", so it's bad, but needing to spend more on non-teaching staff to manage behavior, and getting less instruction out of teaching staff because they spend half their time dealing with behavior issues is worse.
This article so very poorly written, to the point that I wonder whether this is real or just AI generated. One whole sentence in the 2nd paragraph is repeated nearly verbatim in the 3rd. In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online. There is an Elizabeth Martin who comes up as a writer, but she is a script-writer. I am not sure that this is a real story. Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
>This article so very poorly written
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
I'm not skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students, and there's nothing unbelievable about this story, just not getting the impression that it's real.
Shouldn’t we be holding the writing of a teacher in a published magazine to a high standard? If they can’t write well, why are they teaching?
is writing the same skill as teaching?
just sit kids in front of well written books and the job is done.
So the.magazine for teachers - FOR TEACHERS - should be okay with having poor writing style? Is that all they deserve? And you accept that?
The entire site is suspect, IMO. Pangram says that the entirety of TFA save the paragraph beginning "The American Psychological Association" is AI-generated.
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
Probably not a popular opinion but I feel the same way about police officers. Teachers aren't the cause of the vast majority of this, they're just the front line of people who have to deal with it. If it weren't educators, it'd just be whoever these dysfunctional kids / parents run up against next.
And sometimes those are police officers, who then get blamed for metrics we don't like. So we cut back on policing and now it'll be somebody else who gets the short end of the stick.
It has and parents are very much to blame for this.
Society is to blame for this, lots of parents are also being crushed.
We've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
nah dude, my mom and dad both worked full time, if they ever dreamed i was disrespectful to a teacher i'd be grounded for a month.
I'm not debating whether or not some parents are able to do the right thing despite hardship or busy schedules. I'm sure there are thousands of people who will come out of the woodwork to tell me anecdotally that their single parent with every disadvantage would kick their ass if they looked at a teacher the wrong way.
What I'm aiming to say is that given more time and space a lot of people who aren't good parents could be better parents. Some of them certainly would be.
There used to be more space for parents in society (or at least a parent in a middle class double parent household), and we can have more space for this now without some tradwife reductionist nonsense. We have more resources than ever to help parents be good parents but they're very unevenly distributed. Resources for poor parents often focus on getting poor parents a job and childcare rather than spending time with kids, for example.
Workplace violence in general is becoming normalized. I think of healthcare workers and fastfood employees as well as teachers with this trend
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
When you use the term "workplace violence" it seems like this is something between co-workers or between boss and worker, when it's actually nothing like that.
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
Do not not forget delivery workers. There are "funny" videos of violence on youtube; "look how dog chases postman".
Hard to call it a "society" then if it's just sticks and stones.
Agreed. I came here to post "If so, then you have ceased to be a civilized society."
To be honest, in the Netherlands there are more and more teachers dropping out because of stress and burnout, largely due to increasing criticism and demands from parents. But I haven't yet heard of cases of actual violence.
I see in Switzerland teachers being constantly required to fill in for missing colleagues. They might be lured in with good pay, but in the end are unable to cope - so they leave. And then the administration keeps wondering "how much money they want???" instead of hiring more teachers...
Speaking as a former teacher, as long as schools can find someone willing to stand at the front of a classroom, the terrible pay and working conditions will persist.
I finished my career in the UK, where a third of all teachers leave the profession within five years. I started that career in Australia, where half of all teachers leave the profession within five years. It's not a 'calling' or a 'vocation', it's just the post-university equivalent of a gap year.
Some of the teachers I meet in the UK are very unhappy with conditions (bureaucracy, pressure to hit metrics), but violence is rare.
US schools were restricted from engaging in appropriate disciplinary action without the threat of losing federal funding. Either schools take action against violent students appropriately, or they can lose federal funding. They were financially strong armed to ignore it.
It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.
My wife is a college level teacher and she is continuously receiving disrespect and open challenges in her classroom. Fortunately it has not come to physical violence. But the environment created by a large number of students who have a bloated sense of entitlement is problematic. Feeling entitled all the time is a sure way to living a sad life divorced from reality.
That’s wild to me. Where I went to college they’d be like “lol you’re expelled and we’re keeping your tuition. Being here is a privilege not a right.” Maybe, maybe you’d get one hearing if you were outright disruptive, but I honestly doubt it.
Schools decided to try this experiment in post-liberal ethics where violence is simultaneously never justified under any circumstance including self defense, while also failing to punish the worst offenders in a meaningful way. This is one of many results of that experiment.
Obama "Dear Collegue Letter"[0] policy threatened civil rights enforcement if schools disciplined more black and latino students than white students, assuming that disparities of the rate of discipline implied injustice, rather than matching up with disparities in the rate of behavior meriting punishment.
This was a disaster for schools; many students who would have been expelled were kept around disrupting teachers and students who had to bear their presence in classrooms, hallways, fighting each other, bullying students and teachers.
For about 5 years after this went into effect, my local school district that also allowed open enrollment around this time got an influx of students with bad behavior from previous schools enrolling and not being expelled for fighting and other repeated misbehavior and disruptions. There was huge wave of teachers and families leaving and enrolling in the rural school close by so both could actually do teaching and learning without interference. The schoolboard had a lot turnover until the now head got elected promising to drastically curtail open enrollment and apply whatever discipline policy they could get away with to revoke open enrollment rights from non-residents due to bad behavior.
Here is a great account [1] from a teacher about her experience in schools where discipline was severely limited and prevented expulsion of disruptive and violent students, and the obvious consequences to the degraded learning environment that resulted.
[0] https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/let...
[1] https://quillette.com/2019/02/10/public-educations-dirty-sec...
Violence should be unacceptable on every level (personal, social, inter/national). But it still happens because we are humans. Now, violence against teachers, doctors/nurses and other service professions is more acceptable than in the past, simply because the mass shows less respect to everything, including these services.
Is it "accepted" by society? Answering that depends on the definition of "accepted."
Is it reasonably expected? Yes, definitely, if that means "much more likely than violence against non-teachers": a random K-12 teacher in the USA is ~2.5-7x more likely to be assaulted than a random person in the USA.
My mom received threats of rape and assault and direct violence against her vehicle as a teacher in los Angeles public schools. Turned her from a bleeding heart liberal into a die hard conservative.
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
I wonder how conservatism is the answer to this crisis.
When it’s bleeding hard progressivism that causes these issues, it’s pretty obvious!
It wasn’t republicans that trashed California public schools in the name of ‘racial equity.’
I know they did this to public universities, but what exactly does DEI mean in public primary schools?
In her case her suggestion that certain kids be sent to the police or removed from the classroom for rape threats were met with accusations of racism.
Wow, that's egregious
Right to self defense. It is much harder to attack someone who can fight back!
Yep. All states have a right to self defence, and we can see what good it does to the crime rate, compared to let’s say any other European country.
She was threatened with police action by her principal were she to attempt to fight back.
Not that she'd stand a chance against a group of determined post pubescent males.
What do we mean by saying “fight back”? How could she fight back someone who is 6ft2
Nothing. She recognized there was no way to fight back. Her principal just felt the need to tell her that if she were to try to defend herself, she would be the one held to be at fault by the principal. The union similarly did nothing. There is no quicker way to radicalize a pro-union liberal than to be told from their union that they will not defend you against threats of sexual assault at work.
Sounds like the school admins and unions are the radical ones here
Well exactly, and the democratic party is basically a mouthpiece of the teacher's unions. To criticize the teachers union at all would quickly remove you from the democrat party. My mom has shifted rightward a lot but is not a die-hard republican. She is a die-hard never democrat though. She votes straight ticket against the voter's pamphlet issued by the California's teacher's association every year.
So the teachers’ union who is there to protect the teachers, is against the teacher? Do we have a source for that?
I've read some other stories like this commented throughout the post. It's not far-fetched, cause even if a union is really for the teachers, it has to choose its battles.
Is this about giving teachers guns?
I don't think you need to go that far but not punishing teachers for defending themselves from violence would be a good start honestly. Defend yourself from a kid hitting you and you're the one in trouble in most places.
Yeah that's true. Though wouldn't help if the student is stronger.
Conservatives believe that people need to meet the same standards, and that it is racist to not hold people to those standards. This means if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher it's treated the same as if a white kid at a rich school hits a teacher - very seriously.
Liberals believe in intersectionalism, and that marginalized groups need unique affordances. This means accepting that if a black kid at a poor school hits a teacher, it may be because of poverty and racism and we should understand the issue in that context.
Conservatives believe in defunding public education, social security and perpetuating root causes of a lot of issues like this that can directly be linked to, racism, poverty and lack of access to education. Conservatives believe in double standards when it comes to "holding people to the same standards". White kids get off scott free way more often for the same crimes than kids of color. Do your research.
I don't think this is consistent with reality. Are the historical inequities causing a lot these issues as you mention, or are you arguing there actually are no issues because in fact white kids are committing just as many crimes?
In a world where we solve racism, poverty, and lack of access to education do we expect white kids to now be committing way more crimes than non-whites?
"Liberals believe in intersectionalism"
I must have missed that part of Voltaire. Its progressives (socialists) that believe in intersectionalism and they don't agree with liberals on almost anything. If you think otherwise, you just don't know what any of those terms actually mean.
Your correct in those terms actual meaning, but no, that’s now how they’re used in current mainstream political discourse in the USA. Do you live here?
Also if you’re disputing word definitions- you’re using ‘progressive’ in its political meaning rather than its logically correct one, the political meaning assumes all movement towards the left is progress.
Conservative people are definitely more favorable of tough punishment against students and giving teachers more power, but do conservative politicians actually pass laws to this effect? I'm wondering what a bad school looks like in a red vs blue district.
liberalism tends to see all of these issues as the results of the students being victims of something. She believes her students suffered from poor parenting and placed the blame on the families.
In her case, she's a brown woman teaching brown and black kids. She used to think the police were being racial in their interactions. Now she's like... Well they are hurting people and we can't help if the races of the perpetrators just so happen to be whatever
A whole slew of things she just changed her mind on essentially. She felt lied to by the progressive establishment. Moreover when she tried to do something or complain to the union, she was basically thrown under the bus. So her final bit of union sympathy also left her.
I would argue conservatism is the cause of this problem. Their constant attacks on educators and education in general are so pervasive.
Additionally, there's no world in which they want these parents to actually succeed. If there's ever a scenario where someone tries to improve the lives of these people, conservatives will argue that they do not deserve it because they don't contribute to society like conservatives do.
What uncomfortable truths?
That the reason the kids are violent is because they come from cultures where violence is glorified. The problems causing violence are not societal ones as the progressives claim but ones innate to those particular subcultures.
How do threats against teachers have anything to do with corporate regulatory issues or questions of tax structures or social spending?
I believe they meant the administrations of the schools/districts
Government has a lot of control over public schools
One uncomfortable truth you should probably confront is the hostility of conservatives. Education and educators specifically have been targets of hate campaigns for the last 40 years.
For the most part they deserve it. My mom went in to teaching in her older years after a successful career in corporate America. She also thought teachers were being unfairly targeted, but after interacting with teachers and administrators, she believes the targeting is not enough. She thinks we should blame them more. By and large the normal people end up leaving the profession.
People who went to college in the past 15 years saw something very different from others. Even Fox boomer news complaining about liberal colleges doesn't know the full extent of it.
Indeed, reality has a conservative bias. Liberals co-opted the phrase for their own social engineering ends.
I am many decades out of public schools, but I wonder, is this in specific school districts, or is it nationwide?
higher frequency of violence in schools in urban districts. but suburban and rural districts are dealing with it too. [1]
That source has nothing to do with 'on teacher' violence, just general violence. A school fight would count as an incident for instance.
It's worse, it happens all over the world. Just one of many examples - https://yle.fi/a/74-20239397
Nationwide. It goes along with how guns have more rights than children do.
Which rights? What does that mean?
All our politicians go out of their way to claim that they don't like school shootings while guaranteeing that absolutely nothing can ever be done about it. Gun lovers are angry about it getting pointed out.
https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
Men don't have the right to bear children
On a tangential note, I come from a society where violence against students was pretty normalised. 90s kid from your run of mill CBSE school in Chennai. My crimes were being piss poor at Maths and Hindi. I’ve dealt with face slappings, foot ruler on the knuckles, ears being pinched and twisted, kneeling down for the hour, wooden dusters hurled, slaps to the head, verbal abuse, humiliation, earned a few nicknames. All this came from teachers, vice principal, PT masters etc. I’ve had to carry a lot of baggage all these years. I’m 41 and fine now but if met certain people from the past, it would be really hard to not to confront them. Anyhow, I hope India is a changed place these days and I sincerely hope parents stick up for their children in the face of abusive teachers. Not all teachers were bad, there were some wonderful teachers in the early standards (1-7) I hope teachers love their students regardless of their academic performance.
If it has, chalk it up to the normalisation of the slow degradation of everything.
> A frustrated high-school emotional support student
What does that mean. Is it a diagnosis or a term schools use for some students but not others? Don't all students need emotional support?
Yes, I wanted to ask what that is too. I don't think we have that term here either and I'm finding that sentence a bit hard to parse.
Without trying to be funny, it reads like a student who's job it is to support another student's emotions. That can't be right though, is it?
It shouldn't be accepted, maybe it's relative to the amount education (and educators) are valued by a society.
I thought this would be focused on the parents coming in to assault the teachers.
Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
tl;dr yes, also water is now even wetter.
I was in middle school when iPhones first came out, was saying day 1 this is a cancer. My intro to AI slop videos was sitting next to a 3yo who was watching YouTube Kids on an iPad, and it was https://www.youtube.com/shorts/goZrTf-YYjY
Yeah no that can't be good
This is obviously going to be regional, because it's cultural.
I'm old enough to have adult children, although I never did have kids of my own.
My parents would have gone to school in the knowledge that if they acted up, words would be had with their parents, and there would be consequences.
At some point, something changed, and we decided that teachers were there to be put in their place by parents, and if a teacher suggested a child was doing something wrong the parent would expect to challenge that and the teacher would be put in their place.
We're now in a situation where children being taught sometimes think its their right - perhaps even obligation - to not be instructed in appropriate behaviour, and so feel free to react the way that they do.
There's a microcosm natural experiment for this in the Pennines, the North of England. There's a small town called Hebden Bridge, which for a while had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the UK. Some thought it was related to the environment - it sits in a valley, the persistent low grey cloud can make it feel claustrophobic - but I think another theory holds up: parents there didn't bother parenting. A community was drawn to the town by adults who were in essence, hippies: they believed in freedoms their parents didn't including for their children.
That meant that many of the kids growing up there did so in an environment without real structure, and became adolescent in an environment with easy supply to plentiful drugs and a relaxed attitude to its use.
I'm not a parent, that was an active choice I made, and so I wouldn't deign to tell parents how to bring up their children, but I would suggest parents look at the data: children thrive with structure and rules and gentle consequences for non-compliance (the naughty step, etc.), and recognition of genuinely outstanding behaviour (winning things, not participating in them). They struggle to develop as emotionally secure people without those. Hell, I'm a data point there - took me years to realise I needed therapy, and years more to benefit from it. As the old poem starts: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don't mean to, but they do."
Anyway, teachers play a part in that journey, but they can't do the whole thing, and the sooner parents (and society in general), restore the respect to the profession it once had, the better. Are all teachers good? No, but they are professionals who have more data on more children than any parent, so maybe just respect that.
Structure, seems to be a recurring pattern.
A friend of mine is on their way to becoming a teacher and already teaching at a school for one year part-time.
He tells tales about his children mostly from low income families, where school is the only structure they have as their families are completely dysfunctional. Thorn apart by the family trying or not trying to integrating into German society as well as themselves.
When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
> When he gives structure to them they behave much better, while interesting enough behaving at home worse. At least he told from stories about the parent-teacher meetings he had.
Could be. A lot of kids only have so much good behavior for a day... act out at school or at home, pick one.
But also, the student who has to live with expectations at school may set expectations at home, and that may be seen as worse behavior by the parents.
On Hebden, it does seem the lax attitude to and wide social acceptance of doing drugs is a key issue.
But IMO the other issues such as the geography, unemployment, gentrification etc play a part
It's a strange place for parents to be so free about drug usage given the climate, location, geography and economy.
I think the author needs to define exactly which piece of society he is referring to, otherwise the article is meaningless.
Imagine parents still parenting we wouldn't be in this shity situation. Most of you have kids as a lifestyle accesoire and externalize way to much of their upbringing and raising.
This feels very US centric. The title or link should reflect as much.
After reading both the article and the discussion here, it seems to me that this is the symptom of an increasingly transactional America. Call it late stage capitalism or atomisation of society, but when labour is no longer respected, this is the result. Teachers getting bullied and fast food workers getting shouted at, all while scraping to get by. Just like the manufacturing sector, the service sector is hollowed out, entertainment and automation economy is king.
gentle parenting strikes again
Nah, absent parenting. There’s a lot of shitty parents glued to their phones, which has short-circuited the innate desire to parent.
Gentle Parenting is full of uncertainties. There are times when you need to skip the gentle crap and be a parent.
It works on a small scale, where parents are dedicated to the cause, but it falls apart as soon as it hits genpop: someone watches a TikTok summary and thinks they’re an expert.
This approach is completely reasonable because kids are completely reasonable.
> The American Psychological Association completed three National surveys in which the findings reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying)
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
> Because the bottom tier of teachers have done wrong, it invalidates the whole system?
Potentially, yes. Doubly so when those terrible teachers are kept in those roles year after year. The whole system defends and backs these teachers, even knowing they create horrible outcomes and dread for everyone.
> We all have a story of a favorite teacher, someone who inspired through story, who asked more from us, even when ourselves didn’t believe we’d achieve.
Nope. We all dont. It also depends on if you went to a "good public school" or a "bad public school", or rather worse or well funded.
> Violence is not acceptable, verbal and physical.
True. But saying bad words is *not* violence. However threatening violence is absolutely actionable.
> Even if their home life is a train wreck. It can be an explanation, but not a justification.
Again, this is looking at individual choices over what im arguing as a system based failure. The whole way the system is constructed is a failure to students and teachers both.
Look at how schools are funded. Property tax. Means poor property locations get shittier schools, worse teachers, low funded classrooms. And this also shows the students' housing is also likely just as poor. Food insecurity, whole lot of trickle down poverty effects. I came from a poor funded rural school. I had no choice in that matter.
Not invalidating your point, but I personally don’t have a story of a teacher like that.
Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I present exhibit A.
If you're a teacher in the US, it's kind of on you at this point. There's no sane reason anyone should be teaching in the US without full support from the administration and full control over your curriculum, both of which the US does not give teachers.
So, blame the teachers for becoming teachers? What's the alternative?
Yes. At this point they know what they're getting into, and if they don't it's because they don't pay attention.
Hence why the majority of people I know that currently occupy teaching positions have another motive, or regret their career choice.
The backdrop of this includes the normalization of mass-shootings in schools. The incredible amount of violence needs to stop. One of the solutions is to ban all guns in America but not even one politician will take it seriously. Also, teachers must be paid as lucratively as defense contractors because in my opinion our children are the biggest priority when it comes to national security.
Yes and nothing will be done with it because intentional or not, teachers being treated like shit from both ends furthers the goal of the people in charge, which is to dismantle the public school system completely, let rich kids go to private schools, and pipe poor kids straight into the serf class.
I agree with the author, violence against educators has become normalized, but it's also been a fault on both sides. Both sides have lost respect for one another, and the reasons why depend a lot on politics and social issues. It almost mirrors the strife between citizens and cops: each side entrenching believing they "know what's best" and the other side be damned.
Ah yes, the two equally immoral sides of "stop killing unarmed black men" and "no we like doing it". I simply don't know who to side with!
27 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 according to the Mapping Police Violence database. (Despite this, 53.5% of people identifying as "very liberal" estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were killed. Only 15.71% correctly estimated "about 10."[1]) There are 800,000 police officers in the United States, so I am not sure you can say they generally enjoy killing unarmed black men based on a few dozen deaths a year.
[1]https://research.skeptic.com/content/files/2025/02/Research-...
I don’t think that view holds up to data, for instance you’re more likely to get shot by police as an unarmed white person than black person, when adjusted for population/crime. Even ignoring this, the number of unarmed black people shot per year is usually <20, so it’s not like the problem is endemic.
"unarmed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
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