No Child Left Behind. If a kid failed a grade, the school got less money, which eventually leads either to the school going into a financial death spiral and closing, or just passing kids regardless of whether they understand the work. There are teachers who failed kids, only for the principal overrule them and pass the kid anyway. The next teacher inherits the kid, can’t make up the various learning deficits, and is also forced to pass the kid.
Teachers have been warning about this for like 20 years. Several years ago, college professors also started warning about it. If you read through some of the threads on /r/teachers, you’ll see some common comments: kids struggle to read and do math. They have no reading comprehension skills. They want everything spoonfed to them, and have no curiosity or drive to find things out for themselves. There’s a group in college now that has no social skills: when they show up to class, they never talk to their classmates, they just sit there staring. They want step by step instructions on how to things, but they often don’t mentally retain those instructions for subsequent exercises, and they rarely generalize that knowledge. They don’t look at manuals to follow processes or resolve issues. When they hit a roadblock on doing something, they just sit there and wait for someone to come, figure out the issue, and tell them how to proceed.
/r/teachers has been saying for a while now that they’re graduating cohorts of students that are unprepared for the world and explicitly unprepared for working independently.
It’s not every kid, of course: there’s occasional talk that they’re seeing kids move from a bell curve distribution to a K-shaped distribution: that the classes divide between kids who are curious, or have learning support at home, or whatever, who are doing fine as always; and the other half just aren’t.
I don’t know what to tell you: mentorship programs help some who are struggling, but businesses don’t want to spend money training people anymore. Questioning candidates about how they’d solve individual problems, or their approach to solving problems in general, may filter out some of the bad candidates but (as with “what’s your worst quality”) that’ll only last until they come up with a standard answer.
No Child Left Behind. If a kid failed a grade, the school got less money, which eventually leads either to the school going into a financial death spiral and closing, or just passing kids regardless of whether they understand the work. There are teachers who failed kids, only for the principal overrule them and pass the kid anyway. The next teacher inherits the kid, can’t make up the various learning deficits, and is also forced to pass the kid.
Teachers have been warning about this for like 20 years. Several years ago, college professors also started warning about it. If you read through some of the threads on /r/teachers, you’ll see some common comments: kids struggle to read and do math. They have no reading comprehension skills. They want everything spoonfed to them, and have no curiosity or drive to find things out for themselves. There’s a group in college now that has no social skills: when they show up to class, they never talk to their classmates, they just sit there staring. They want step by step instructions on how to things, but they often don’t mentally retain those instructions for subsequent exercises, and they rarely generalize that knowledge. They don’t look at manuals to follow processes or resolve issues. When they hit a roadblock on doing something, they just sit there and wait for someone to come, figure out the issue, and tell them how to proceed.
/r/teachers has been saying for a while now that they’re graduating cohorts of students that are unprepared for the world and explicitly unprepared for working independently.
It’s not every kid, of course: there’s occasional talk that they’re seeing kids move from a bell curve distribution to a K-shaped distribution: that the classes divide between kids who are curious, or have learning support at home, or whatever, who are doing fine as always; and the other half just aren’t.
I don’t know what to tell you: mentorship programs help some who are struggling, but businesses don’t want to spend money training people anymore. Questioning candidates about how they’d solve individual problems, or their approach to solving problems in general, may filter out some of the bad candidates but (as with “what’s your worst quality”) that’ll only last until they come up with a standard answer.