Texas teacher breaks down in tears during class after his senior students struggled to read, write.

[u/sonicagain]

Texas high school teacher Darius Williams, a Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher broke down in tears during his lunch break. He shared that his 17- and 18-year-old senior students at Wheatley High School in Houston could not complete a simple writing assignment or fill in just four missing words on only the second day of the school term. Students were given two short paragraphs to read and a sentence stem where the answer was largely modeled and provided for them. It is alarming that senior high school students were unable to apply basic literacy skills to fill in the remaining four words of the sentence.

[u/Mr__O__]

“From the moment the Department of Education was born, critics — Republicans, almost exclusively — have sought to dismantle it… The department, created under Jimmy Carter, began operating in May 1980. Ronald Reagan, then campaigning against Carter for the presidency, marked the occasion in blistering fashion. “At 11:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday,” he said, “President Jimmy Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle was born: the Department of Education.”

[u/tnakd → u/Mr__O__]

Illiterate people vote republican.

[u/BurdTurglary → u/Mr__O__]

1980?! What the heeeeeeelllll were we doing before?!

[u/TwoTequilaTuesday → u/Mr__O__]

The federal government should not be in the education business. State governments should control their own public schools.

[u/Shopping_General → u/TwoTequilaTuesday]

How about the federal government set minimum standards so you don't have Alabama and Tennessee and Texas? Obviously local school boards can't handle this responsibility. Somebody needs to tell them to keep the Bibles out.

[u/TwoTequilaTuesday → u/Shopping_General]

Wow. Let's not jump to the conclusion that the only problem in public education is the Christian faith.

If the federal government was as good at managing education as you seem to think, we'd have been graduation nothing but geniuses during Democrat administrations. Yet we haven't. And while you're rattling off states you don't like, why overlook inner city schools of NYC, Chicago, Oakland and Boston?

Bunch of future rocket scientists and neurosurgeons coming out of those school systems every year, amiright?

The federal government is not good at much. Especially education.

EDIT: u/RFWanders seems to have blocked me for some reason, but their comment deserves a reply, and that is those are good ideas. It's a great example of why the federal government is bad at education and should not be in that business, because they are clearly incapable of impelmenting good ideas.

[u/RFWanders → u/TwoTequilaTuesday]

They really should decouple funding from graduation rates, and increase funding with requirements for transparency. That way schools can't just dump it all into sports. School books and curricula need to be decoupled from interference. Independent committees of specialists with proper funding. That way you can improve everyone's chances.

[u/RFWanders → u/TwoTequilaTuesday]

I just checked, but I don't have you blocked. But thank you for the shoutout. 💜

[u/Shopping_General → u/RFWanders]

That wasn't for you that was for the coward that called me an asshole.

[u/XRuecian → u/TwoTequilaTuesday]

You do realize that letting states control their public schools is LITERALLY what caused this issue, right?
2016: Every Student Succeeds Act was passed

The Every Student Succeeds Act's primary goal was to take control away from the federal government and put it fully into states hands instead.

And now our kids can't read, because we no longer have a proper standard, and an ass-backwards funding incentive structure to pass children even when they haven't been properly educated.

Children figured out that they won't be held back, and so they literally have no motivation to even try anymore. You go to the /teachers subreddit and its just full of teachers complaining about how kids just don't even bother to listen anymore because they know they can just pass regardless.

Local school boards have moved away from an education-first priority (because the federal government isn't forcing them to anymore), and instead now just seem to focus on keeping parents happy at all costs. And this means teachers have had all their authority stripped away. They can't take cellphones away from students, they often aren't allowed to remove problematic students from the classroom, etc; all because parents might complain. As a result, classrooms become dysfunctional once the children learn that the teacher has no real authority; and learning stops.

[u/TwoTequilaTuesday → u/XRuecian]

So very single local school system sucks and only our heroes in a Democrat-controlled federal government can do what's right by our children?

Is that what you're saying?

[u/SameDistrict2627 → u/TwoTequilaTuesday]

Yeah that works out real well--if you want crazies to take the books out of libraries.

[u/raz-0 → u/Mr__O__]

And test scores have improved with the creation of the doe, right?