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

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.

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

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?

Hard to call it a "society" then if it's just sticks and stones.

> The American Psychological Association completed three National surveys in which the findings reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying)

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.

gentle parenting strikes again

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.

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?

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.

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

> My experience made something painfully clear: violence against educators has become so normalized that society now treats it as an expected part of teaching.

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.

"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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

> A frustrated high-school emotional support student

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?

If you're a teacher in the US, it's kind of on you at this point. There's no sane reason anyone should be teaching in the US without full support from the administration and full control over your curriculum, both of which the US does not give teachers.

I think the author needs to define exactly which piece of society he is referring to, otherwise the article is meaningless.

US schools were restricted from engaging in appropriate disciplinary action without the threat of losing federal funding. Either schools take action against violent students appropriately, or they can lose federal funding. They were financially strong armed to ignore it.

It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.

After reading both the article and the discussion here, it seems to me that this is the symptom of an increasingly transactional America. Call it late stage capitalism or atomisation of society, but when labour is no longer respected, this is the result. Teachers getting bullied and fast food workers getting shouted at, all while scraping to get by. Just like the manufacturing sector, the service sector is hollowed out, entertainment and automation economy is king.

The backdrop of this includes the normalization of mass-shootings in schools. The incredible amount of violence needs to stop. One of the solutions is to ban all guns in America but not even one politician will take it seriously. Also, teachers must be paid as lucratively as defense contractors because in my opinion our children are the biggest priority when it comes to national security.