This is 95% of why we send our kids to private school. In the rare case a disrupter makes it in, they're "counseled out." It's a travesty that schools permit a handful of bad apples to ruin the learning experience of everyone else.

It’s not the schools permitting it, it’s the justice system making getting rid of disruptive students impossible.

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/public-sch...

> Wonder what allows a school to at least consider permanent expulsion? The student has to be convicted of:

> murder drug dealing aggravated assault rape possession of a deadly weapon

> But expulsion can be permanent if and only if he or she is over 16 or older. And of course, forget all those criteria for the disability manifestation exclusion–if the student was convicted but disability is the reason for the behavior, no action can be taken.

That's for expulsion, which makes a certain amount of sense. A student with home life problems or a psychological condition is still entitled to an education. But why is it incumbent on every other student that they receive their education in the same classroom?

Because there’s only so much money to go around and trying to educate people who don’t want to be educated is expensive. They need very small class sizes to show any improvements and you get very high staff turnover if you concentrate them because teaching apathetic students is bad but teaching hostile or violent ones is just awful.

And any kind of discipline or moving them to special classes or special schools leads to being sued.

Education is not the first or second priority in the school system or things would look quite different.

It's short sighted of course, because the money will be spent many times again over a lifetime for every botched kid. Both on the giving and receiving end of abuse.

Yes, but how would that work in practice? Special schools for high performers is much more palatable than special schools for quarantining children who aren't going to amount to anything (no matter what you call it and how you design it, this is how it will be perceived).

We have them - even in my small town there was a high school where the kids who were in and out of juvi would attend - everyone at the school knew it’s reputation. It’s where you went if you were expelled.

Yeah we had one too. Though, the one we had actually tried. It had an auto mechanics program and a few different trades classes and other more specialized stuff the regular high school didn't have. A lot of those kids actually started doing better themselves when they got expelled and were sent there.

If mandatory school attendance were repealed, it would work itself quite quickly.

All well and good, but those people still get to vote.

There is no difference between voters who attended school only because they were forced to, and hypothetical voters who weren’t forced to attend school.

We don’t trust kids with the choice to smoke, drink or have sex. Hell, we don’t trust them to watch certain films. Why should we trust them with the choice of education any more than other choices that can screw up the rest of their life?

Who's trusting kids with anything? Do they not have parents?

The point is that students who are not engaged themselves, and whose parents are not engaged enough to ensure that they go, will no longer make school less valuable for all by their very presence.

This seems like it's probably very wrong.

But would bring other problems. The cure is likely worse than the disease.

Most of history? I'd argue three Rs is the basics everyone needs, and then they can find their own way.

Most of history was a very different place before advancements outright snapped assumptions in half. Before most of the population was farm laborers and societal hierarchical complexity and knowledge was limited by this.

Industrialization was raising pollution and standards of living and making it clear that a lack of education wasn't a healthy option - although partially driven by wrong reasons - paranoid anticatholicism that ignores basically all of European history of how much influence the church /actually/ has over secular power.

Even post WW2 industrialization the population was still at a high school diploma as an actual advantage but "optional".

We need more informed not less. Problematically the populace also needs more critical thinking and self guidance while there are many unhealthy attitudes towards learning.

Why do you believe public schooling improves critical thinking?

Compared to nothing on those who try to fill the void? Hell yes. Look at those raised in literal cults for example or among fundamentalists. Now I know these are tripping hazards for ants low goal posts but for once "it could be worse" is pertinent. An education can provide the prerequisites to evaluate and enable it.

Often they do try to put their bullshit in it but their hamhandedness in practice often backfires by adolescence - especially with their own twisted priorities and misrule related discontent.

Yes, it can help, but do you think public school can provide its own 'cult'?

If you look at the opportunities and statistics for high school dropouts, it makes a compelling case to the contrary.

And I argue this as an education system skeptic and college dropout myself.

Presumably most people who “find their own way” would not drop out of high school, and their experience would be better — because there would be no one present who was only attending because the law mandates that they do so.

Reading and writing are unnecessary for much of the population given the progress in speech to text and text to speech algorithms. We can go straight to learning how to express ideas in speech and learning how to locate, access and understand information.

And calculators have rendered arithmetic unnecessary for some time. The focus should be on how to use calculation for financial and technical purposes.

I wonder if inability to do mental math explains the enormous debt people have these days...

Most of history was pretty bad.

On what do you base that claim? Some say other periods and places were much more idyllic than our current state.

I had a history class in school? No period sticks out even remotely comparable to modernity by any metric: violent deaths per capita, general life expectancy, education, leisure time available..

If some future historian were to look at the 20th century he would observe a huge amount of violence and death dwarfing anything that came before. I am not certain the modern age is altogether superior.

Just such a thing is done in Season 4 of HBO's The Wire. It profiles just such a class where the disruptive students are pulled out. Yes, it's fiction but you can see how it'd work and it's pretty interesting to see the changes in attitudes among the "gen pop" class and the special class.

Both exist. There are "last chance" public schools in some areas for those expelled from the main schools, in addition to charter and private schools for the higher achievers.

I don’t think the number of those disrupters is as small as you think it is. It really depends on the school though, for me it was much higher for 7th-10th grade in Vicksburg MS than it was for 11th-12th grade in Bothell WA (a much richer school district).

Disruptive kids can very well be gifted and are bored by school. Doesn't mean every disruptive kid is a genius in hiding of course.

The “disrupters” are usually “pulled out” disproportionately if they are poor or minorities while kids who do the same thing but have more influential families get a “counseling”.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/4/5/17199810/school-disc...

Yes, some demographics have it worse than others but that's a totally separate variable of the equation though. A rising tide lifts all boats. Not bettering the system because a particular group/groups will not do better relative to some other group even though both groups do better relative to their past position is foolish. This is true for systemic improvements in general, not specific to education.

How does a rising tide lift all boats when you systematically take people off the boat?

Say the education system takes an input of children with a value of 1 and outputs educated people with a "value" between 5 and 10. Even if the system is overtly racist and only outputs minorities of values 5 and 6 it is still beneficial to everyone if the system is improved so that everyone gets a +1

So you mean a system that in practice separates kids by race. Didn’t we already try that before in the South? Ever heard of Jim Crow?

Where do you think all of the funding and resources go when you do that?

Stop trying to put words in my mouth. I'm saying that the fact that a system produces unfair outcomes is not a reason to not make improvement that cause the system produce better outcomes across the board. No more, no less.

It doesn’t produce better outcomes for the people you pull out of the system then get ignored and they don’t get the resources, access, or networking opportunities they need. That’s exactly what happened during segregation.

It was a relief when some of the worst bullies finished 9th grade and dropped out.

That’s illegal.

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/public-sch...

> Wonder what allows a school to at least consider permanent expulsion? The student has to be convicted of:

> murder drug dealing aggravated assault rape possession of a deadly weapon

> But expulsion can be permanent if and only if he or she is over 16 or older. And of course, forget all those criteria for the disability manifestation exclusion–if the student was convicted but disability is the reason for the behavior, no action can be taken.

> That's illigal.

That is irrelevant.

This is done, to some extent, via auxillary schools in many affluent areas. If a student is problematic in any myriad of ways, off they are sent to the school with lower standards (often within sight of the other campus). For example, 1994 presidential blue ribbon Brea HS has the Canyon high school meters from its campus, specifically for this purpose.

> murder drug dealing aggravated assault rape possession of a deadly weapon

Without punctuation, this sounds like a ridiculously specific and esoteric crime.

To be fair you're lucky if murder-drug merely deals aggravated assault. The means by which the deadly weapon became possessed (who knew this was going to take a turn for the supernatural?) is pretty distasteful, though.