Speaking of textbooks— when I was in school in the late 80s to early 90s I remember we had wrap the textbooks ourselves with paper shopping books or newspaper to help protect them.
Is that still a thing?
By the time my kid was a senior in 2023-24 there were almost no textbooks and almost all note taking was on a tablet. Almost all assignments were submitted electronically via some submission system or another. Some of her classes were online. She’d just go to the library and put on headphones. These were AP classes that were not offered at the school.
This was a small but very “high performing” school in a very affluent community (median income over $200k). Extremely competitive with several students going to Ivies + Stanford + MIT + Cal each year. The level of outside help these kids get is staggering. Math after school classes, executive skills coaching, writing clinics, all kinds of private sports coaching, intensive SAT/ACT prep. College application coaches and consultants.
I didn’t attend high school in the US, but my younger siblings did. The school they attended was very, very different. Solid middle class area, much more diverse. 30+ years ago, so a lot less technology, but just the competitiveness now is at a different level. My sister teaches in a similar middle class area school. Even there the number of advanced classes (AP, dual-enrollment) kids are taking was unheard of in the early 1990s. So is the prevalence of outside coaching and tutoring.
Outside of academics the accommodations for food allergies/intolerances and religious/cultural preferences is much greater now. In the 1990s, you didn’t want food that was in contact with peanuts or pork, you bagged your own lunch. If you had a gluten intolerance, you bagged your own lunch. If you had a severe peanut or other allergy, you stayed out of the cafeteria completely. Now in a school of <500 students we have halal/kosher offerings. A nut free kitchen. Gluten free offerings.
Privacy around grades is also huge. Seems like a generation ago everyone knew who was competing for top honors. Now the valedictorian and salutatorian are a big surprise.
There were just two fights in school over the four years she was in high school. Seemed like a daily occurrence in the 1990s (granted a much higher school). The bullying is online now. Vicious rumors and outright false information on social media.
Oh yeah, no drivers ed in school any more. Our local school phased it out over 20 years ago. “Not part of the core mission.”
Lots of people talk about that, but I never did it. I graduated from HS in 1981.
The biggest things I hear about, K-12 inclusive, is “No enforced discipline.” Just today on NPR, I heard about a rural school that had to amend their bullying protocol because kids were, as kids will do, finding loopholes in the policy: “You’re not gay, nonwhite, or visibly disabled, so I can bully you and get away with it!”
Our local high school not only has Driver’s Ed, they offer it to Freshmen. Back in my day, it was a Sophomore only class since that’s when you turned 16. My nephew plans on taking it first semester and will have his completed permit for a good eight months before he can actually get his license.
I can’t address the other things you asked about, although I suspect the answer is “It depends on the school or the district.” But, with much greater concern nowadays about safety (thanks at least in part to all the school shootings we’ve heard about), it’s far less common for schools nowadays to leave their doors open during the day so that people can come and go freely.
We used to skip class and go to a bar that was a block away.
mmm
There’s a middle school that I pass frequently and I’ve noticed that their PE classes consist of some kids playing basketball and the rest walking laps around the tennis courts. No gym uniforms, no teaching apparent, just a class period outside.
I’m not going to say I got a whole lot from my PE classes as I was no good at most sports, but if nothing else, I learned about rules of some games. I think there was more value than just walking laps for 40 minutes.
Until very recently, my daughter was a teacher and most, if not all, assignments were submitted on line. I don’t know what it was like in her classroom - I do think the school issued laptops or chromebooks or something to the students. (I do know she’s glad to be out of schools entirely.)
My son is in 9th grade, a freshman in high school. He does virtually all his assignments on a school-issued Chromebook. The only exception is some math problem sets are done on paper.
Can’t speak to high schools, but some instructors at universities are going back to pen and paper and in-class assignments to avoid assignments being written by ChatGPT
Both my kids are thru college and on to their big girl/boy jobs now, but my wife felt the need to stock-up on supplies each and every summer before the school year started all the way into high school. We have a lifetime supply of post-its, highlighters, spiral notebooks, and pens that the kids rarely dipped into during those years.
My son played a sport at the school and was excused from having to take PE, but my daughter did a non-school affiliated sport and had to do PE.
Hah, yeah. I finally wised up for last year (8th grade) and cobbled together a set of supplies out of previous pens and markers, only buying new notebooks and folders because he had new class names to write on the front. When we spoke to his high school advisor, he said that the kids would use even fewer supplies there since it’s all on the laptops these days. Which I guess fits in with the “No one uses their locker any more” stuff above.
The standard model views textbooks to be too limited and too narrow in scope, thus they are in constant need of updating because they are static in nature. They are also heavy and take a lot of storage space. The standard model now for students is a Chromebook, and that Chromebook has a storage/access app like “Clever” that holds all the apps for their various subject areas. That is their “textbook”. One device with access to everything is obviously much better, much more compact, and much more flexible. We simply add and remove available apps based on curriculum and teaching objectives.
My son is a sophomore at a small, all-boys, catholic HS. Some of the classes are still taught by monks. The curriculum is college-prep focused, so there is an emphasis on taking advantage of honors, AP, and even college courses taught both in-school and on-campus at some of the local universities. Everyone has a school-issued laptop and note-taking tablet, but writing on paper is still the preferred method of note-taking (at least with my son). Assignments are submitted online. They still use actual textbooks for some classes, which was a bit of a shock to us. It was the first time in his entire academic experience that he received actual textbooks, instead of worksheets/workbooks. There’s still a study hall. They have lockers but no one uses them, not even to store coats. Everyone gets dropped off by their parents or drives themselves to school (a small number ride a school bus) so even in the middle of winter here in Cleveland they don’t wear coats.
Sports is big at his school and almost every student plays at least one sport (my son plays hockey and lacrosse). Those who don’t play sports are usually involved in some other way (team manager, media).
At my very good suburban Boston school (80s), almost everyone would have at least SOME study hall. Because as I recall, classes like Phys Ed weren’t every day. So most of the time I’d have that every other day, and that would leave a gap in the schedule on alternating days. Some of that would be filled by things like double-periods for science labs (they’d interweave that irregular period with the phys ed irregular period), but you’d still end up with a few open slots here and there, which would be filled with study hall.
For whatever reason, by Senior Year we would almost all not need to carry a full schedule (ie, phys ed wasn’t required all 4 years, for some reason) to graduate, so I managed to make my schedule such that my last two periods EVERY DAY were study halls. I had learned over the years that if you simply never attended study hall the first couple of weeks, the teacher in charge would assume you’d had a schedule change and you’d be dropped from the rolls, and thus your absence not noticed.
I left after 5th period (I think, might have been an 8 period day) every day my senior year and got away with it until APRIL! That’s when Mr. Hassett saw me sneaking off the jig was up.
“What class are you supposed to be in?”
“um…”
I’ve heard that the lack of vending machines is a requirement for the governmental school-lunch programs… but my school does have a couple of vending machines (one for pop and one for snacks) in the cafeteria. I’m not sure what the full story is.
There’s also a pop vending machine in the teachers’ lounge, that’s cheaper than the one in the cafeteria. Students aren’t allowed in the teachers’ lounge, but some have been known to duck in to use the machine.
Definitely true. It’s hard to tell how many are consuming electronic books (e-read or audio), but I still see a fair number of dead-tree pleasure-reading books.
My school (all-girls) has a required uniform, but students have the option of wearing khakis in place of the skirt, and on most days, they can also wear any school-branded shirt, not just the polos (a few days are “formal uniform days”, when they all have to wear the standard polo shirt and sweater). This includes shirts from clubs or extracurriculars, and we do have an inclusion club. Some students will also wear flair like buttons, and most of them have stickers on their laptops and/or reusable water containers, many of which are political in nature. Flyers for things like club meetings get taped up onto pretty much any open wall space, and I’ve never heard of anyone complaining about any of that. At times when students are not required to be in a class, they’re allowed to be anywhere on the fairly large campus, inside or out, though they’re not supposed to leave campus during the day. Their student IDs will unlock doors to the building.
Recently, the diocese passed an extremely restrictive set of rules for diocesan schools, concerning LGBTQ issues (prohibiting all displays of rainbow flags, requiring use of pronouns assigned at birth, prohibiting same-sex students from attending dances together, etc.). My school was technically not subject to this, since we’re sponsored by an order of nuns, not by the diocese directly, but it still resulted in a lot of opposition, both from the students and the nuns.
You’ll find this sort of thing at a lot of schools. The big difference is in the number of students who choose to take advantage of it.
There’s a phenomenon called the “shrinking middle” in schools. There are more students now at both the high-performing end and the struggling end, and fewer “average” students. I don’t think anyone is sure quite why.
That wouldn’t work nowadays-- Attendance-taking is all online, and so the roster is always up-to-date.
Back then it was a mimeographed list of names, and for study hall they’d call the name and check it off when the student responded. Smaller classes where the teacher knew the students, the teacher would just do it quietly on their own.
Sounds related to the shrinkage of the middle class.
Everything is on a non-linear rubber band being pulled inexorably upwards if you’re on the upper portion or inexorably downwards if you’re on the lower portion. There really isn’t a middle section any more and everything is turning into a barbell distribution. But with very different headcounts in the two lumps at the ends of the long skinny bar.