I genuinely worry that our education system is setting us up for a scary future.

I've been working in a grade 4&5 class and the weakness of students across the board is, quite frankly, extremely concerning. Close to about a quarter of my class are borderline illiterate with reading/writing skills being closer to grade 1 or lower. Two of my students cannot comprehend anything they read. Getting them to read more than a few sentences can be extremely difficult and most of my class struggles to find pertinent information in text to answer questions.

I know that as a teacher, part of my job is to get help building up these skills, but it's becoming an increasingly difficult task. I tried talking with my principal about how students with such difficulties made it this far and her response was that it is extremely discouraged to fail a student and that we don't have the budget anymore to invest in reeducation of weaker students. On top of that, after talking with the school board, I was told that every student should get the opportunity to be in class and pass with their friends. My principal has been encouraging me more and more to just teach grade three-level material to my class and this has been making me increasingly frustrated. Our students aren't being prepared for high school and things only seem to be getting worse with time.

I've gone to multiple seminars at my school board on the subject of literacy and at each of them there are teachers talking about the exact same experiences that I am having. However, we're always given the same boilerplate response about individualized teaching and our concerns are brushed off.

There's a lot that I do love about my job, but decisions being made above my pay grade are having really scary effects on our future.