Idaho Education Problems Point Directly to Solutions

It is also worth noting that Idaho has some of the most crowded classrooms in this country and don’t we rank 45th in the country for spending per child? Politicians in Idaho (and I am mainly referring to one party) think that public education is a privilege and a burden to the State. No, education is a right and it is time they realize that.

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What’s sad is the amount of remediation going on all the way up through the 12th grade. Students seem to be able to know less and less every decade and still move on to graduation. I have witnessed far too many high school teachers spending a good portion of the semester re-doing what should have been learned in junior high or elementary school.

Not to mention the increased behavior issues, kids who mouth off and have a sense of entitlement (usually matches the parent attitude), as well as the amount of migrant students who speak little English taking up mass amounts of a teacher’s time. We would not have dared say to teachers in the 70’s and 80’s what gets said now, much less wear the skimpy clothes they do in many schools.

If you have a gifted or at least pretty smart kid, it’s almost like you have to look at private school options or supplementing their public school education at home.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen a lot of good in schools, but teachers are being asked to put up with and do far more than I think they should.

I agree with the author kindergarten should be made mandatory in Idaho. Also, there should be passing requirements to go to the next grade for every school. As it stands now, if a child is recommended to be held back, the parent can fight it and move them on. Students in junior high can flunk/D their way through and make it to high school easily (in many districts). The end result for Johnny in high school is disastrous. Wrong, just wrong.

the problem also lies with the poor wages the teachers get. In todays world no one really wants to be a teacher because they can’t afford it. we need to up the teacher salary statewide and maybe we can retain teachers on the longterm scale.

I think salaries are very important. I taught school, and it got to every month that we could not even pay our bills. We cut corners, canceled Internet, TV, and basic home phone services, and we still could not pay our monthly bills! It becomes difficult to stay motivated to teach and inspire your kids when I struggled daily to provide for my own kid.

When I moved to Idaho Falls I was offered two jobs at the same time: one was teaching and one was a private-sector job making lots of money. I wanted to teach, but decided I could not put my family through that anymore. It is difficult to want to put your own family through that hardship when Idaho clearly does not even appreciate the teachers they do have.

There is always more to a situation than the bumper sticker slogans. “Work 9 months part-time” is one of those mistaken impressions. There are many unpaid hours that teachers work beyond what they are required to do, and the districts do not pay many benefits.

Increasing teacher salaries will be a critical success factor for Idaho to pull itself out of the 19th century, but it is certainly not the only change we need to make.

Other critical success factors include funding early childhood education, emphasizing personal financial education and information literacy, and providing state income tax waivers for the year a person graduates from an Idaho college.

All of it is going to take money though, and Idaho is too cheap to make the investments in our own kids. I foresee Idaho falling ridiculously farther behind America in the next 10 years.