What is it like being an alumni of a school that’s underfunded or neglected? Even if the school is “good” (as in well funded or private), does the learning environment reflect that? Also, the dark side of American schools (shootings) dampens peace of mind for parents since at any given moment some gun wielding individual can storm in murdering those inside (students, teachers, custodians, etc.)
We start with 50 different school curriculums, even though 2+2=4, and CAT spells Cat in every state in the union. That’s bad enough, but then those schools are treated differently depending on which neighborhood they serve.
So the biggest problem is that it’s hit or miss, from state to state, school to school, and even teacher to teacher. We pay teachers so little, show them so little respect, and abuse them so badly, that it suppresses the desire to become a teacher. It is NOT considered a prestigious job. Many see it as a job for losers who can’t do anything else. They just have to be smarter than a kid, which is frankly a challenge in America. People often start out as smart kids, and then get DE-educated by the Conservative Propaganda Machine, and become voluntary morons.
It’s always been like that, but it has gotten worse lately. It used to be that if you curated your high school classes carefully, getting the best teachers in your school, you could get a great public school education. My brother is a bonafide genius, and he got a great public school education, and a full-ride bachelors and masters scholarships at great, and expensive, private colleges. The way some states behave toward education, I’m not sure that’s possible today.
Not all of it is the fault of the government, at least of the immediate situation. Covid blew a giant hole in the education of an entire generation. Those kids lost about 2 years of real education and social skills, that they’ll never get back, and it shows.
My son went back to college at 26, to get a more “versatile” degree (one that encourages employment), so he has a lot of 18-20 year olds in his classes, and he’s not only appalled by how little they know, but also their behavior. They are practically feral, watching YouTube or Tok Tok videos with headphones while the prof is teaching, being openly hostile to the profs teaching choices, refusing to do the homework, sabotaging the class with ignorant arguments, etc. In a film analysis class, the class was openly, loudly hostile about the choice of film they’d be studying for the entire semester, even though it was clearly listed in the course description. They knew it wasn’t a Marvel movie going in, why did they even sign up?
And he’s seeing profs be openly hostile to his classes, too. Luckily, he stands out (he’s distinctive looking), and he’s extremely intelligent, so his teachers have already pegged him as the one to have a class discussion with, so the rest can watch, and maybe learn how to learn.
And before Covid, there was Bush’s 2008 Economic Crash, which happened while he was in elementary school. Years later, my son talked about what an impact it had on his class, kids were suddenly leaving, new kids coming in, etc. because of losses of jobs and houses, relocating, trying to fit into a new course curriculum, classes were constantly changing, kids were losing their friends (impacting even those that weren’t directly affected), etc. The mental strain on the youngest kids was enormous, and nobody noticed it, or cared, or helped them, and it put a bad dent in their early personality formation. Now the current generation is about to experience another economic crash that is almost certainly going to be worse.
And today we have a Department of Education that is in total disarray, by design. Eventually they will eliminate it all together, using a profoundly stupid Sociopathic Wrestling Industry Oligarch as the hit man. MAGA is openly hostile to education and intelligence, because stupid people, without Critical Thinking Skills, are much easier to manipulate. As Trump himself said: "I love the uneducated "
Its literally as good as you can afford it to be
Ok I’ll bite. I’ve gone to public schools in italy and in the USA. Italy was in Roveredo (north Italy) and I went up to 1st grade there. Texas for 2nd-4th, RI for the rest but went to school for primary in a nicer area, high school was basically in the slums. The worse education I received was in italy, up until 1st grade it was glorified daycare. I didn’t know the concept of a spelling test, or how to read more than a few basic words when I got to the usa. Learned a lot in Texas and in ri at more well funded schools, then when I was going to school in South prov where surrounding buildings had bullet holes it was basically a joke. So the USA education system can be fantastic if your in the right district, properly funded. Or it can be junk in a poor underfunded and over populated area. Worst education I received was in Europe though. Ymmv but asking how it is in America is too broad to answer, as I am sure asking how it is in Europe would have a wide range of answers too. I’m sure the education in Sweden is vastly different than in italy. And I don’t know enough to know if the school I attended in Italy was particularly bad, how consistent they are etc. I will say though the USA EDU system is in decline as more schools implement chrome books and online learning the kids test scores are dropping. It was better than it is and our administration has been gutting funding the last few years.
I look at your post with a bit of suspicion- do you want to learn something, or do you just want to talk negatively about America and provoke others to join in? There are terrible and absolutely fantastic schools from infant care to postgraduate education. Many of the world’s best universities are in America. About half of the students in those universities come from American schools. The US has by far the highest number of Nobel laureates, many of whom immigrated after previous education abroad, but not all.
While it is difficult to say anything general about K12 education in a continent-spanning country consisting of 50 states, I wouldn’t summarize it in one word as “crap”.It’s more honest to compare the American education system to itself over the years. Has it significantly improved or worsened over the past few decades?
The strongest evidence-based conclusion is this: the American school system has improved on attainment and spending, but not consistently on academic achievement; and by the most important recent measures, it has degraded, especially for low-performing students. In plain terms, the system became better at producing diplomas and credentials than at reliably improving literacy and numeracy.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/coi/high-school-graduation-rates
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmb/public-school-expenditure
Personal anecdotes from someone with ties to academia:
- Quality teachers are underpaid, overworked, unhappy, and quitting.
- Universities are more lenient on quality of dissertations, and I’ve been told first hand that professors raised concerns of AI papers are ignored and new “teachers” are graduating with education degrees with significant quality concerns.
- My local schools are significantly degraded. Halls smell of weed, students graduate with very low critical thinking skills and no plans, they have no clue what’s happening in the world.
- Universities are hemorrhaging quality professors, and turning to diploma mills at a slower but visible rate.
The thing is, there is no national education system. Each state does their own thing, and even within a single state there is a huge variance based on socio-economic level.
There are excellent schools and there are awful schools all over. There is no one standard.
Each state does their own thing
Kind of…
92% of American k-12 use the same textbooks published by McGraw-Hill, and they’ve always played to the lowest common denominator. Which is often Texas.
If Texas says they won’t buy a history/science/whatever textbook that says _____ then the rest of the 92% who learned from McGraw-Hill books also never learned it from their textbooks.
With the rise of standardized testing, nothing is taught except what’s on the text. If a student gets that done they’re “done” and the focus is on the kids who can’t pass it yet.
Shits fucked and it’s 100% an institutional problem.
And that’s not even getting into how involved Ghislene Maxwell’s dad was with it in the 80s, and his connection to all the spy work and child rape during the same time.
To think people haven’t been manipulating the American education system to get the result (idiots) that they want for generations would be woefully naive.
It’s not about teaching kids to think, it’s teaching them not to question authority.
That doesn’t mean we stop educating, it means we start actually educating instead of indoctrinating.
Quick edit:
This is why things like:
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
Is ingrained in multiple US generations.
It was in all the same textbooks, all the same homework, all the same quizs, and tests, even the annual standardized tests.
We all got the same information presented in the same way with the same context/interpretations and exact phrasing.
The American education is incredibly homogeneous, even if states could technically do different things.
The real difference is private schools who usually make up the 8% not being served up the same slop.
The American education is incredibly homogeneous, even if states could technically do different things.
Only in things that are objective, like 2+2=4, or CAT spells cat. That’s going to be same in every school.
Things start to get different when you get to subjects with a subjective perspective like history. Then we end up with 50 different curriculums, being taught from a substandard Texas history book. So teachers in some states like to “supplement” their personal course curriculum with their personal research, and we end up with 150 years of many kids being taught that the Civil War was a war of northern aggression who wanted to take away States Rights, and Slavery had nothing to do with it, blunting the effects of the Civil War, and preserving that same systemic racism that has finally broken free and is rampaging across our nation.
You had me until you got to a private school, which is largely affiliated with a religion. Those cess pools preach mumbo jumbo to impressionable minds and pretend it’s factual.
Me:
There’s only 8% that are different
You:
That doesn’t mean they’re better!!!
Strong argument for public education…
I like to think I got the benefit of said private school, while thankfully the religion didn’t stick past the age of forming critical thinking skills.
Further helped that I pursued a degree in science afterwards.
I did have a number of instances throughout my college career where I realized how many others, likely from public schools previously, struggled in classes that I saw as review from high school, so I’m also thankful for the quality of education it provided. It also gave me more perspective on christianity having read a decent chunk of the Bible over those k-12 years… More well rounded perspective is never a bad thing. Now I’m just better equipped to recognize the bullshit.
I don’t take exception to learning about religions and their histories. I took an Eastern religion class in college and quite enjoyed it. The difference is that it wasn’t presented as factual but as an explanation for cultural and societal behaviors.
I mean teachers can always print their own worksheets or like make slides… you can deviate from textbooks…
I don’t know how other school systems did things, but for me not every class every year was 100% straight out of the textbooks. Some certainly were, usually math subjects or science could be.
It’s anecdotal but I often find the “why weren’t we taught x” type of statements, I remember learning whatever thing in school. I know people will forget stuff and just say they never learned it (I mean, kids do that all the time IN school let alone a decade later) but there’s got to be bigger differences than just public vs private. (I was public)
I don’t know what though.
but for me not every class every year was 100% straight out of the textbooks.
You may have been lucky enough to learn a few things not from the text or on a standardized test…
But the kids who do, what they learn isn’t always right, and when it is, no one else believes them.
Example:
The civil war was about states rights.
Most kids who learn that, learn it as the South was fighting for states rights.
A very very small subset learn that it was the North on the side of states rights, because the South wanted to force northern free states to deport all Black citizens to the South so they could be enslaved.
The northern states refused because they had outlawed slavery.
The southern states wanted Lincoln to do it with the Fed.
Lincoln said he would try to outlaw it in the South, or force Free states to comply.
And that refusal is why the South started the war.
But even when it type the whole thing out, someone will eventually chime in to say “it was slavery” which is reductionist and 200+ year old propaganda that still makes it into our text books to frame the Fed and North as the aggressors. When the South started it to force slavery on the whole country.
Just like trump is using ICE in blue states, we literally fought and won a civil war over if he could be doing this
And the excellent school and awful school can only be a few miles apart.
Our schools are funded via local taxes overwhelmingly, so the wealth of your town is the biggest determiner of how good your school system is. States governments are supposed to make up this difference and give more money to poorer schools, but it has a limited affect.
The feedback loops that local funding creates are vicious too:
desirable neighborhood -> higher prices -> more taxes -> better funded school -> desirable neighborhood (for families)
undesirable neighborhood -> low prices and no population increase -> worse funded school -> undesirable for families
As you said, next to one another. By sheer luck I happened to live in an apartment building that somehow belonged to a rich school district. Next building over was in the poor school district.
I dunno, that idea you just posted sure sounds like Sociology to me…which is now banned in Florida.
Yeah, there is a ‘loop’ in that some people live in cheaper areas, but send their children to private schools.
But the ‘tax’ on really good pubic schools commands such a premier, that often it is more expensive to send your kids to a really god public school than it is to a private one. The top 10 districts in my state all have home values that are over a million dollars, but all those schools are better than most private schools.
Then you have parents that have a million in assets but refuse to spend money so their kids can go to private school…
Private school is not automatically better. I live in a million dollar house and very much intend to use the public school district here.
I mean when your public school’s rating is 1/10, anything else is surely gonna a lot better.
Funny thing is: In China, the “private” school I went to was actually worse (according to mom)… its made for migrant parents whose kids did not have a Hukou where the parents worked (in cities, parents are from rural areas where there were no jobs) and since the parents want to keep their kids close to them so these “private” schools were the only options since public school didn’t allow them without a local hukou.
(Cuz the other option would be to leave their kida behind with grandparents so they can go to school where their Hukou is registered… which means kids arent gonna be able to see parents for a long time… which is very sad…)
Also the house is not a million dollars, its barely like 100k, taxes are low, I’m saying they have like 1 mil in like… small bussiness investments that turns 100k profits every year…
I could’ve been spared the fears of getting into a fight every day…
And I did end up getting into a fight…
And I ended up just using a public defender lol…
Cuz “it’s just a highschool fight, not that serious, you don’t need a private defence attorney for it”
I mean sure… I had derivative citizenship from mon’s naturalization so its not like they could deport me…
So I just… I felt like a burden… since I got mom having to run around to talk to the school then pick me up from the local police station… so I felt like I cause her too much trouble and didn’t feel like I needed a private defence attorney…
Ended up with charges dismissed anyways…
But had I been a non citizen, I’d probably have insisted in a private defence attorney to make sure the record is as clean as possible… I mean imagine getting deported over a highschool fight when you acted in self defence lmfao…
I feel like my mom had an OBSESSION with money… like numbers go up = happiness…
The house I live in still has a lot of broken stuff…
Like… this is the OceanGate type of shit with Video Game Controllers as controls… that type of shit…
That’s how they live life… like they’re in the Titan Submarine… lmfao…
(Sorry if I’m rambling, I do that a lot…)
In the Des Moines area all the difference schools share the same funding. Some schools are still vastly better than others.
As I’ve said before the largest factor seems to be parents that don’t value education teach their kids to not learn much in school.
the largest factor is how rich your parents are. parental income overwhelmingly predicts student outcome, like 90% of it.
Only about 10 percent of students are gifted or ungifted enough to significantly over or under perform the baseline their parental income establishes
That doesn’t establish a cause though. well off parents teach their kids to value education.
No, they pay the schools to do that for them.
It’s a total mixed bag. You can easily have the best school and the worst school just miles apart. The best school imaginable is probably in an affluent area, in a progressive state, and is private. The worst is probably in a public school in a low-income rural area in a red state. The country is so huge you’re going to have the whole spectrum of school quality, it’s the social inequality that’s the hallmark of American education
its kinda funny because I live in a suburb with good schools with no kids and yeah our taxes are high but my brother in law lives way out where the schools are crap and his taxes are lower but not lower than his taxes plus his private school tuition of just one kid. Its like the tax difference between crap schools and great schools is not all that much. In both cases the schools are the majority of the cost but turns out its fairly expensive to have anything at all but having a bit more quality is not that much more.
I interned at a private school for a few months. The quality of education difference is not that stark. Most of the money is spent on non-educational luxuries such as fancy sports facilities, libraries, school plays put on by professional theatre companies, and lavish trips abroad for the students (spend a semester studying in Paris).
I encountered all the same issues with disinterested students multiple grade levels behind on reading and math that I’ve seen at public schools. The difference is that these students take month long vacations with their families and play extracurricular sports in fancy gyms, rather than struggling with issues at home (both parents working, needing to care for young siblings instead of studying, addiction to social media, etc).
I did also encounter really advanced students at the private school who were placed in special classes with fewer than 10 students per teacher and fancy giant touchscreens in the classrooms instead of whiteboards. How much did they benefit from that? Very little, I imagine, as in my experience the best students I’ve met were all extremely self-motivated and needed few resources other than writing materials and a large supply of challenging assignments to work on. I’ve seen those students everywhere and the ones at the private school weren’t getting much out of all the fancy stuff.
A funny thing when I went to college. I was sorta funny. Had like half accelerated courses and half not. I could get sorta screwed in the accelerated because in the normal courses I was A/B with A being pretty likely and in accelerated I was B/C with C being likely. So because of the rules an A was a 5, a B was a 4, and a C was a 2 grade point average wise. Anyway that is all sorta an aside. When I got to college I started out strong but semester by semester was burning out. You could sorta see a semester to semester drop such that like my first semester was all A+ and by the time I graduated I had a D or two and boy did I ever need to graduate while my gpa was still decent. I had this friend and he had screwed around in high school so he had to come in as a PE major as he did not have the gpa or test scores to get into some of the more prestigeous colleges at the university. He worked his ass off and was just getting his paces. Eventually he transfered into my major and as we got near the end we compared transcripts. His was the opposite. His grades got better and better each semester. So in the end I had some of those fancy classes and came out at a pretty respectable rank and a pretty respectable high school. He came out of a typical high school (could not claim highly ranked or anything) at a pretty typical level. We ended up with the exact same degrees at the exact same institution for our bachelors with pretty close to the same gpa.
his taxes are lower but not lower than his taxes plus his private school tuition of just one ki
It’s almost like profit-driven businesses cost customers more so the owners can get more money. It’s almost as if the saying “private businesses are incentivised to cost customers less” is complete horseshit
Ding ding ding!
My high school was in the nicer part of town, literally separated by a river from the rest of the city. Back then for second languages our school had Spanish, French, ASL, German, and even Latin! Our school had science teachers that won statewide awards, our football team was very competitive, the marching band (and music program in general) was phenomenal.
This was just a public school, and I’ve more than come to terms that the experience I had is nowhere near the norm compared to the rest of the country.
Yeah the honest answer is there is no single “American education system”. Primary education is splintered into thousands of different counties, each with their own curriculum and funding, with varying degrees of state and national oversight. Some are good, some are terrible. My public school education was pretty solid overall, despite the clear shortage of funding.
On the other hand, despite rising costs, the US university system is still world-class.
There’s no one “American” educational system.
Under the Federal system, each State regulates itself, and each town can do what it wants. Two towns in the same state can have wildly different standards and outcomes, depending on the local Board of Education.
While accurate, that’s also misleading. While true, there is not a single American education system, there are certain federal regulations, and the disparate systems tend to all use the same or similar books. The fun part of that is that large states like texas can influence what is(n’t) printed in them, which affects just about all districts. The educational quality received by students across the country is degraded by the politics of one of the largest Republican states.
Yep.
It’s like technically there is no federal drinking age.
A state could set it at 12 if they wanted.
But for decades the Fed have said if any state deviates from 21, they don’t get anymore interstate funding which would cripple a state within a few years, but not before voters would kick out every state level politician who caused the mess.
Especially in 2026, people need to get real about how shit works instead of just glancing at the surface.
Quality is highly variable by region, and within region by wealth of the area for public schools. Then, there are also private schools in the mix for even deeper opt-in segregation by wealth
My highschool served a metric fuckton of kids, 2,000 kids, 9th-12th grade yet at one point couldn’t afford paper. A couple of my teachers didn’t even fully understand the subject they were teaching, my math teacher was constantly being corrected by the students who actually knew what they were doing. My graduating class was almost 800 kids, ~400 actually graduated.
Not so much related to the education, but a general rule of thumb was to carry popcorn with you because there was always a fight going on and occasionally students would throw their desks at a teacher.
Fun fact: the current head of the EPA graduated from that school. Nothing good comes out of that school.
This comment here is the answer.
The sports teams got most of the funding and they’d have sports coaches “teaching” the science classes which was a complete and total joke.
You could read the McGraw Hill book on your own if you were bored though.
Yes, it’s pretty terrible. This doesn’t mean the teachers are bad. Most of them are doing their best to work within a system that doesn’t care about them or their students.
Gestures wildly at fucking everything.
It depends on the neighborhood. The poorer the neighborhood, the worse the schools. The poorer the state, the worse the schools. I don’t think it’s really that much different from any other country in that respect. It’s just that America has extremely high income inequality, so there are a lot of blighted areas with blighted schools. Some states in the US are developed and some are rural backwater. The more rural backwater your state is, the worse the overall standard for the schools is going to be. Meaning, in general, even the best schools in a backwater state will be worse off than an average school in a wealthy city.
While what you says it true, beware that some of the worst schools are well funded. The issue isn’t money to schools, it is the people on poor areas don’t value education and teach their kids learning doesn’t matter
I feel like nobody in American schools care about learning except for Asian Americans… which is probably because of strict parenting lol.
I know one Cantonese speaker that got very Americanized (had an English nickname on top of a Pinyin birth name) and didn’t about about grades very much either.
Like the classroom is just chaos…
Like I often just hated going there…
Especially when we moved to Philly, these schools dropped from like a 8/10 to like 1/10 rating
Bullying, casual racism, constant fighting in hallways, like every day, teacher be trying to teach then kids be yelling and its like a riot and so everyone end up having to deal with consequences, and also authoritarian staff… felt like a prison…
Highschool literally had airport style security lmfao
Horrible…
Why is probably why houses here are so cheap…
Probably could learn more from the internet too
Also the “school shooter” thing is statistically not gonna happen to you… you’re much more likely to get buillied and possibly get dragged into a fight and that school bullying issue is probably is much bigger thing to worry about…
Replace the “school shooting” with the constant fear of getting beaten up in school…
and also the casual racism against Asian Americans…
Also funny thing: High school required 2 years of language class. At first I got put into the spanish class… it was fucking hell… kids literally be fighting with the teacher… so I transferred from the spanish language class to a Chinese language class and the behavior is like 99% better… lmfao (Hint: cuz half of the class is like ethnic Chinese)
I’m not from USA, but it’s tragically bad there. I sometimes see indexes come out for things like education or literacy rates, I look further down past my own country on the list and see the USA. For a nation that can fund corporations and military up to their eyeballs, it is an absolute choice and systemic problems to allow that to continue.
And before anyone mentions things like poverty - those are intrinsically linked to education. A nation that takes education seriously takes poverty seriously. user givesomefucks has an interesting comment on other systemic problems contributing to it.
