Re:Texas Teen Still Suspended Despite No Charges, Will Chang...
by ChuckMcM on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @07:00PM
(#10230553)
In the ideal world, the school administrator would be reprimanded and a note put into their personnel file. The best punishment for a lifelong bureaucrat is to put them in fear for their job.
They however will just say they were following the rules. The rules put student safety high on the list, and events like Columbine and others only make the risk/fear higher.
Schools are limited in what they can do to/for problem students. What that means in practice is that to limit the threat from a problem student they suppress the privledges of all students. This avoids the stigma of "singling out" someone for special rules.
In a more functional system the rules would allow for things like electronics projects and pocket knives and what not, and when a student did some damage that student would be pulled from the school and moved elsewhere. Unfortunately that puts students with an unstable home life more at risk of being expelled than students with a stable home life, and if, through suspension, you end up segregating the school along student problem lines, it often correlates with other student traits which you can specifically not discriminate against. You can take on the burden of defending a bunch of lawsuits from suspended students, or you can just strip all the students of the opportunities.
And this leads to zero tolerance policies for non-obvious reasons.
What we haven't internalized as a society yet is that this is much more damaging to the societies eventual stability than the whole segregating thing would be. We have yet to learn how to run a system where people can readily move back and forth from the 'offender' side of the street to the 'cooperates' side of the street. Thus a trip to the offender's side leaves a stain that gets harder and harder to erase, regardless of maturity, later. It can be really hard to listen to people who have been imprisoned for life because of a mistake they made in their teens, which now prevents them from ever reaching their potential.
They however will just say they were following the rules. The rules put student safety high on the list, and events like Columbine and others only make the risk/fear higher.
Schools are limited in what they can do to/for problem students. What that means in practice is that to limit the threat from a problem student they suppress the privledges of all students. This avoids the stigma of "singling out" someone for special rules.
In a more functional system the rules would allow for things like electronics projects and pocket knives and what not, and when a student did some damage that student would be pulled from the school and moved elsewhere. Unfortunately that puts students with an unstable home life more at risk of being expelled than students with a stable home life, and if, through suspension, you end up segregating the school along student problem lines, it often correlates with other student traits which you can specifically not discriminate against. You can take on the burden of defending a bunch of lawsuits from suspended students, or you can just strip all the students of the opportunities.
And this leads to zero tolerance policies for non-obvious reasons.
What we haven't internalized as a society yet is that this is much more damaging to the societies eventual stability than the whole segregating thing would be. We have yet to learn how to run a system where people can readily move back and forth from the 'offender' side of the street to the 'cooperates' side of the street. Thus a trip to the offender's side leaves a stain that gets harder and harder to erase, regardless of maturity, later. It can be really hard to listen to people who have been imprisoned for life because of a mistake they made in their teens, which now prevents them from ever reaching their potential.