People who can afford to do so will already put their kids in private school or select good school districts. All that’s left in the others are poor kids who want to learn but are at the mercy of kids who don’t.
There are other "bad" students which might not be a problem, but it's clear that the efforts to educate them are a waste[1]:
> In the last four years, France’s son passed three classes, failed 22 and was late or absent 272 days, the teen’s transcript shows. ** > France’s son has a 0.13 GPA, which traditionally places a student near the bottom of their class. But in his case, it put him 62nd out of 120, which would indicate a wider-spread academic performance issue going on at the school.
You can't just drop some good kids into this failing system and expect students like that to suddenly do well.
I think people should reconsider trade schools, including ones that start at relatively young ages. Include an opportunity to earn money at a young age. Just paying teachers to teach kids like that classes that they keep failing doesn't help the kids or anyone else.
[1] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/baltimore-area-student-passed-on...
Tracking folks earlier would also probably help. A lot of my peers growing up worked 4 hours of their school day their senior year, those guys all own homes way before my college bound peers did.
If public schools were permitted to prevent the harms of disruptive students from impacting classroom management by informing parents, "You child is no longer welcome in our classroom, you are required to find someone who will put up with them" and handing them a voucher; then I strongly suspect we would learn that the quality increased and the number of disruptive students went down as parents were forced to deal with the costs those students had imposed on us.
I don't think the parent poster is making a diversity argument here (ie. having "bad" students alongside "good" students enriches the experience for everyone involved). He's more making an argument that a society should engage in redistribution from the "healthy/privileged/lucky/etc" to the "less fortunate ones".
I do this and do question whether or not it’s the right choice (financially it’s saving me a few million, but that’s just money).
Yes, I think that's the idea. I don't think it's inherently a "problem", though [1]. Lots of good things in society have this same pattern. I pay taxes for the fire department, but have never had a fire myself. Compare to the highly-problematic privatized fire departments of years past. Lots of examples in that vein.
A movie quote comes to mind: "When he reached the New World, Cortéz burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated."
There is something to be said for the power of a "we're all in it together" mentality, whether forced or not.
Maybe that makes me a communist, I don't know (:
> At what point does society end and individual rights begin?
Great question. I imagine the answer varies by person, by culture and sub-culture, by time, and by many other factors. I wonder if someone has done work in quantifying where to draw that line. For instance, with the fire department example, some private ones do still exist, mostly in rural areas, where there's less risk of a fire from one neighbor endangering the next one. But in more crowded areas, such as cities, the "forced rider" approach is far superior. There're probably some formulas that could describe that trade-off.
[1] Aside: I was unfamiliar with the term "forced riders", so I'm going off of the Wikipedia page[2]; not sure if there is some inherent negative association with the term in typical usage.
Just to spell it out some more for any other readers: this is the same reason you want (for example) a large health insurance pool, including young healthy people who don't need that insurance. The idea is to have the healthy/privileged/lucky/etc help the less fortunate ones, at any given moment, to the benefit of everyone in the longer term.
There's a necessary tension between individual choices/freedoms and a system like that, though. "Good of the one vs. good of the many," and soforth.