Chapotraphouse

I'm not in the US, but a very similar country, and I don't work with kids; I work with adult learners (the majority of whom have learning disabilities and/or external learning barriers). So my learners are all people who have been entirely failed by the education system. And from my experience it starts really early. Those first few years of educational development are completely cocked. Most parents can't (the majority) or won't (fewer, but still exists) take any of the early education on as a parental responsibility. So the very beginning of someone's educational journey doesn't start until like, five years old, where they are already behind their peers.

And then, and I will especially focus on math here, those early ages of number sense development are abysmal. Under-resourced and over-populated classrooms, a complete lack of necessary supports, and often just terrible pedagogical practices lead to kids falling behind immediately. But they're pushed through, though of course without the early number sense they can't understand the arithmetic. And this continues the entire time they're in school.

Essentially set up to fail from the start. And of course many of them develop math aversion because they never mastered the fundamentals so every subsequent step just grew farther out of their comprehension until they internalize that they're just not good at math, or aren't math people, without considering that math is a skill that can be learned like any other.

I'm very fortunate that my work lets me teach math in a very different way, from number sense to trig; I've seen people who have spent thirty, forty years thinking they would never do arithmetic grow comfortable and confident in algebra. For those working with kids and knowing that they are going to leave that school without having learned, for instance, basic financial skills...that's gotta be bleak as hell. Kids are getting majorly screwed over.