That's very much true. I remember very clearly that when I was a new 1st grade student in a poor southeast asian country that the kid that yelled back at my teacher in my 60-person class didn't come back next week, whereas I suspect the same would not fly in US public schools. The things I've read (threatening violence, etc) would've never happened in my home country's schools, and if it did would've led to corporal punishment (caning was regularly practiced) and expulsion, not necessarily in that order, and very quickly at that.

My impression is also that the academic culture is very different - even in my poorly funded primary school full of poor kids, there was a sense of academic accomplishment being of the highest importance -- all the students knew the importance of good grades, and students that disagree were socially shunned. Smart kids were the popular kids, and the people who ranked the top 10% got into a special class and were widely admired.

This is how it should be here too.

Inequality is accepted in so many other places in the USA, in ways that are far worse than this.

The anti-intellectualism is a very, very real thing in the USA. In not good schools, you WILL be bullied for being cerebral.

At this point, no amount of understanding of "oh the bad kids grew up in poverty and had social/economic reasons for being bad" is going to fix these kids up.

You want to disrupt education for the rest? Teachers will disrupt the rest of your earning potential. Seems like a fair trade too, since the criminals are all getting laid and the MIT kids are all staying virgins. It takes 15 years to mint another "elite" educated individual. Just a few bad apples can destroy all of this work of trying to get someone to the MIT level. Get the bad apples out.