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It has and parents are very much to blame for this.
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
Indeed, reality has a conservative bias. Liberals co-opted the phrase for their own social engineering ends.
I wonder how conservatism is the answer to this crisis.
Right to self defense. It is much harder to attack someone who can fight back!
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 public primary schools?
I would argue conservatism is the cause of this problem. Their constant attacks on educators and education in general are so pervasive.
Conservatives believe that people need to meet the same standards, and that is is racist and weak 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 intersecionalism, 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.
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
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.
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!
"unarmed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
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.
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-...
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
Do not not forget delivery workers. There are "funny" videos of violence on youtube; "look how dog chases postman".
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.
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
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 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]
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a06
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?
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.
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.
haha
reading the rest of your rant the only thing I honestly have as feedback is to seek mental help.
Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I present exhibit A.
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.
Not invalidating your point, but I personally don’t have a story of a teacher like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
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.
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
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.
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
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.
really? for minors?
The bottom quintile 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.
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.)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.
Yeah I read that and gave up. It's also yet another "let me explain Smittywergermanjensen's Law to you"
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!
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?
Because he would immediately get massively downvoted and flagged.
OK — Under-represented minorities would be expelled at higher rates than whites and asians, and the district would get sued for discrimination.
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.
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.
Oh good, wxw disagrees. They've supplied zero supporting arguments, making discussion impossible, but at least Hacker news knows wxw's position.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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…).
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
https://x.com/shit_hn_says
You are free to ignore the data (literally cited in the comment you replied to), I am free to point out you are ignoring it. Teachers are underpaid to the point that ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers. That is a fact, backed up by data.
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.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
I wonder if the student faced any consequences, none were mentioned in the article. Another slap on the wrist I assume?
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.
What kind of society are you building when you say everyone should be suing everyone at all times? Moreover, do you live in the same reality as the rest of us, or do you come from an alternate timeline where courts dispense justice fairly, timely, and equitably to rich and poor alike?
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.
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.
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.
Tell that to London County Public Schools. https://www.google.com/search?q=loudoun+county+abuse+failure...
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.
Violence against poor people has been normalized, and teachers tend to get paid just above welfare levels, so.
You know, ==your budgets are your values==
Who does this? Oh, right..
poors?
I thought this would be focused on the parents coming in to assault the teachers.
It shouldn't be accepted, maybe it's relative to the amount education (and educators) are valued by a society.
This feels very US centric. The title or link should reflect as much.
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.
and then what? they become adults that live large on food stamps and medicaid.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If it has, chalk it up to the normalisation of the slow degradation of everything.
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.
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.
What does that mean. Is it a diagnosis or a term schools use for some student but not others? Don't all students need emotional support?