It is so wrong for adults to fail to protect children who want to learn simply because they want a facade of feel-good egalitarianism.
I agree that keeping them in general education is bad too, though. A caring society would take that kid somewhere with specialised staff that will help them work through their issues.
The problem is the selective and performative guilt:
Why don’t kids who have a terrible home life, but are studying diligently to better themselves and improve their lives equally deserve our help?
For this same reason I've always hated (since a kid) the way anti-drug education has been presented to children. It's not taken seriously and doesn't present the reality of how prevalent drug (even prescription) use is among adults in society. It doesn't treat prescription drug use, alcohol, nicotine or caffeine abuse with any weight whatsoever and doesn't prepare children for the reality of having to deal with people who are on drugs.
Are people with a pattern of disruptive, dysfunctional behavior allowed to be present in your workplace?
Is this something you would see as desirable to experience, for the same reasons you've given that children should experience it?
Yes, actually. The standard to fire people is high and HR wants these people constructively managed out rather than fired. This is incredibly common in large corporations.
Had a bad hire once that abused an entire engineering department for 2 years while they had no responsibilities and did no work until they were finally bored enough to quit.
These are not gotcha questions. I'm honestly trying to understand your worldview here.
If you get expelled _by a public school system_ you may not have another option.
My worldview is that all kids have the right to an education, regardless of how "manageable" adults interpret their behavior. "Disruptive children" are more often a failure of the adult to meet the needs of the child. Also they're children. They haven't learned how to behave like adults yet. Expecting them to do so is cruel.
What if most people don't want this type of education? Are they wrong? Do you have the moral authority to force it on them?
They should learn by being subjected to the effects of their dysfunction? I honestly don't grasp this strategy. It's like saying that we should learn that some people are psychopaths by going to live with them..
Never dealt with them again once I left high school. Not even any close calls.
That shit's like living in a war zone. No one sends their kids to a war zone so they can "learn to survive". No good lessons exist in a war zone, not even in between people stepping on landmines or getting pulverized by airstrikes.
All that exists in such a place is a bunch of trauma, and yes, debilitating/mutilative injuries, for those that somehow manage to get sneak back out of them.
Bullying is like this too, though obviously to a lesser degree.
I strongly suspect that most people get their ideas about what bullying is from the same half-dozen made-for-tv movies and other narrative fragments thereof on the subject.
It's not just the constant picking and poking that bullies do, it's the way they make the entire school environment like a prison yard. You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react. Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless, they mostly threw up their hands because they were not allowed to send the student out of the class.
Public school in America is, in a word, prison.
It wasn't the only way that schools were like prisons, just the most uncomfortable of those. We can be honest now, we're well distance from it at this point.
> You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react.
Did you ever have any of the teachers join in? Not just decide that it was your fault, but to actually pick up on the name-calling and contempt? When it happens during class, that's the cue for everyone else to join in too, even those who'd always be too timid.
But pretty much the whole administration does this in more subtle ways, you know? For me, this happened on the school bus more than anywhere else. I was in second grade, they were in highschool. An hour's bus ride to school every morning, an hour home each afternoon. Bus driver was an old asshole of a curmudgeon and from his driving I doubt he could see 6ft in front of his face (let along 14ft back through a mirror). When my mama went to the administration to try to have a stop put to it... they threatened her with me being thrown off the school bus. We lived in a rural area, she didn't have a car at the time. The implication was that if/when I missed school, it'd be truancy. She'd be arrested, I'd be put in foster care.
You know, me. The second-grader who is a troublemaker just provoking the 16 yr olds into beatings, into having my clothes torn and stained with god knows what, into having my hair snipped off whenever my head was turned.
I can't even tell anyone about this shit. No one believes me. I don't believe it myself. My memories seem like lies to me.
> Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless,
Sounds alot more like "only following orders" to me.
As to how 18 years of being forced into a small room with them helps prepare you for that, I hope you'll enlighten me.
No, all it does is make sure that any child with a bad home life has no future. Sure, it solves the "problem" of making one teacher manage 30 kids meaning one kid can DDoS the system but it does that by ignoring it all together.
Mom's a teacher, and "bad" kids LOVE her because she's extremely good at her job. Those bad kids pretty much universally just need attention because they get none in normal life. There are still occasionally young psychopaths but they generally do get expelled at some point. Otherwise most bad kids would come do their homework in her class because she was basically the only adult in the building they respected. She was literally "just" a french teacher but because she understands what it means to be a teacher she was an intervention for many a "bad" kid.
You want one bad kid to not spoil the bunch? Stop making undertrained, underpaid "teachers" without even an education degree oversee a class of 30 kids. How good could one person possibly manage 30 adults, let alone kids. Stop hiring glorified baby sitters because that's all you can get for $30k a year in salary. Stop treating teaching like a disposable profession.
Teachers can be bad and do have the capability to pick on children. Having these kinds of outcomes totally allows a teacher to single out a child they don't like and wreck their whole life.
Adults are intentionally victimizing the majority of students to cater to their own shallow virtue signaling.
There are scenarios in life where we're all in this together and excising people for their inconvenience isn't what's best for society.
You don't just cast off disabled people into the void, for example. Unless you have a solution for where to put these problem public school kids that isn't juvenile detention, I don't want to hear it.
We're talking about children here. They don't know how to behave like adults yet. Cutting them out of society where they fail to meet expectations is cruelty.
I think you misunderstand what a zero-tolerance policy is and how it's applied. There literally is no tolerance. There is no nuance to them. If an incident is reported they are required to take action. There isn't a decision-making process past the point of the incident being reported. Everyone involved and any witnesses literally have to keep their mouths shut.
You say children should learn this, and then you say that this is because they will have some new capacity for empathy they wouldn't otherwise have.
I see no reason to believe this proposition is true. What if instead, when they learn this, it just makes them more vulnerable to various kinds of dysfunction themselves? What if, even if learning about this is a good thing, it's only a good thing when they're well on their way to adulthood?
You have no real evidence of cause and effect here. Just a lazy asumption. "But when I learned of this, I immediately had intense feelings of empathy!" doesn't mean much because you're not even a single data point, but an anecdote. Self-reported. And not a young child.
> or caffeine abuse with any weight whatsoever
This is coming from someone who would legalize heroin, cocaine, and meth and sell it from liquor stores: no one ever sucked cock in the alley behind the pawn shop for a hit of caffeine. It's not in the same category.
Public education is like Lord of the Flies. There is no room for empathy, only survival.
We need to have structures that can address this behavior in a way that fosters societal integration. This "spillover" might not be a problem given proper staffing... but a 1:25 ratio is never enough to handle problems and never will be.
Is that really possible in the US? IIRC, the government has a mandate to educate every child, including those that are extremely developmentally disabled (which is why special education is such a huge item in school budgets). If a kid is expelled from school, wouldn't the district be legally required to find some alternative arrangement?
Despite being treated as such, schools are not day cares, and parents still have some responsibility for the upbringing of their children. If the kid misbehaves enough, it is on the parent.
In places with mandatory public education, parents suing the district for not providing education for their expelled child are likely to win.
Home life should be addressed by child services, etc. Granted in reality they are often as understaffed or as incompetent and corrupt as any other government service, but at least that's their mission. School teachers should not be doubling as social workers.
But underfunding is a big problem whichever way it's structured, and I of course agree with you that it's not something you can just say "this is the responsibility of the teachers to do on top of their existing responsibilities".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEA_2004
All a parent has to do is ask for an individualized education plan, IEP, and a public school will have to do a metric ton of cover your ass to be able to expel a child.
This is not making concessions to "liberal ways of thinking".
On the other hand, federally legislating that local school taxing districts provide services costing $x and if they do not, open up local taxpayers to litigation of $y where x and y are quite large is…something else.
How is a poor school district serving poorer taxpayers supposed to provide expensive IEP for every problem child and/or collect all the evidence to expel them, and at the same time provide quality education to well behaved kids?
The Republicans only had a slight majority. And after a change, the bill passed in both chambers almost unanimously.
I don't know what the answer is, but "all children are owed a public education and in fact we'll arrest their parents if they drop out" and "public schools can kick children out" are self-evidently not compatible policies.
That's not all we're doing. We're also protecting an entire classroom of children from disruptive behavior.
If it's gotten to the point where we would consider expulsion, then some of those children, or their families, likely find that disruption so intolerable that they themselves would need to arrange transportation to far flung school districts. That's why so many underprivileged families are desperate to get their kids into charter schools.
As I keep trying to point out in this comment tree, people seem to have learned that it's morally appropriate to talk about only one type of victim here. I don't agree. I think it's morally necessary to always discuss both the disruptive child and the classroom they are disrupting, always in the same breath.
If you want to argue it's a better distribution, or that there is some reason to believe expulsions will push "problem children" to smaller classrooms on average, then fine, but absent those arguments it's very clearly worse for the student and their parents but not better for anyone else (or rather, it's maybe better for specific other people, but also worse for yet other ones, and on average no better for anyone).
Changing behavior requires pressure and people generally do not like it when they notice it.
Some aspects do give me pause.
Such as Any regiment which makes things worse. We're all just guessing; people need to be empowered, so hopefully they can muddle thru things.
Thresholds need to be obvious and ruthlessly enforced. Not fuzzy and optional. (eg If a student assaults a teacher, insta removal, to never come back. And so forth.)
Alas, forging these kinds of rulesets, and then sticking to them at scale, is all but impossible.
Also, most people blathering about public education are repeatedly proven worse than wrong. (Including me.) So am deepyly skeptical of fixes and silver bullets. I insist there's at least some existence proof before supporting any reforms.
The next year I was at the private school across the street. Suddenly I wasn't a problem child anymore there.
I had already been taught algebra at home by first grade. I was in the "gifted program" in public school and the curriculum was still boring and slow. Teachers lasered in on my boredom and made my life miserable despite (or perhaps because of) being able to answer anything. I thrived a little more in private school in part because the children were on-average smarter but also because instead of the school treating everyone like they were special and going to save the world (and rewarding only the kids they liked) they taught children the value of group conformity and not being the nail that sticks up.
How/why were students they liked rewarded? Teaching is a job, there are tests and many times grading is subjective. The only factors I thought would come into play are.
1. How much the student tried, cared, or showed interest during class
2. The content of the test (answers-objective, writing-subjective)
3. If they were disruptive in class which normally led to 1 and 2 being negative
What unjustified reasons would a teacher have to show favoritism to a portion of students excluding rare situations like sexual relations and nepotism?
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"because instead of the school treating everyone like they were special and going to save the world"
How? When I was in school I went from class to class where the teacher would read material, show examples (i.e.) math, or have a class discussion. Do you mean they inflated grades? Then you wouldn't have done poorly in public school as you said.
If you mean they verbally told students they were doing good when they weren't why would they do that? Public school students have to take standardized test which are so important for the school that it's a common complaint that teachers only teach the test. If this is the case how does rewarding unworthy students benefit the teacher or school. Why would they do that?
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Your comment hit a nerve because it is very dense with political talking points.
- public school teachers are corrupt (i.e.favoritism )
- public school teachers are bad at their job
- public school teachers are too soft and treat kids like snowflakes and this has a negative affect.
Between my experience and the data I would say it comes down to class and gender, but maybe in the reverse order.
In my primary school education, both public and private, there was a pervasive and often oppressive favoritism towards the girls in just about all situations.
We've been starting to see the results of this in the data for the last couple of decades where men have worse education outcomes by a sizable percentage.
That seems like an awful lesson to impose on children. "Keep your head down and don't do anything to attract attention. Go to your grave having spent your life hiding among the faceless crowd".
Shitty teachers that play favorites won't not exist in a private setting. Shitty teachers that demand abject compliance from students to soothe their egos won't not exist in a private setting.
It sounds like a bored student was disrupting the education of 30 others, so teachers punished them more than the other students? They should have probably kicked you ahead a grade if you were so far ahead of your peers, but that would require someone in the situation to attribute your behavior to boredom rather than mere defiance. Did your parents not suggest such a thing? Was it not an option for some other reason? It sounds like a change of environment brought you away from old grievances and that the increased coursework gave you something to do. It's completely possible that a grade skip in the same school could have done the same.
It's a crucial survival skill. You learn when and where in your life to apply it. The "lesson" is that the whole world doesn't revolve around you. Please keep me away from the karens that _haven't_ yet learned that about life.
> It sounds like a bored student was disrupting the education of 30 others, so teachers punished them more than the other students? They should have probably kicked you ahead a grade if you were so far ahead of your peers, but that would require someone in the situation to attribute your behavior to boredom rather than mere defiance. Did your parents not suggest such a thing? Was it not an option for some other reason? It sounds like a change of environment brought you away from old grievances and that the increased coursework gave you something to do. It's completely possible that a grade skip in the same school could have done the same.
Most of my time in that school was fine, I just got unlucky one year and got a nasty old tenured b* of a teacher who decided from day one that she hated me and directed constant negative attention towards me. I just wanted to be left alone. I had had 5 consistent years at that school already without problems, but she was besties with the principal. Later on in her career she got rubberroomed by the school board, so I don't think the problem was me here.
>The "lesson" is that the whole world doesn't revolve around you
These strike me as very different things.
Teaching kids to remain grounded, respectful of others and how to live within an existing system is one thing.
The former sounds like teaching them to avoid garnering attention at all, which is quite another.
I've read about cultures where standing out, for good or bad, is socially punished. "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be mowed down". I would not want us to foster such a culture here.
I could agree with "don't stand out for the wrong reasons".
>Most of my time in that school was fine
It doesn't seem this has much to do with the debate between public and charter schools at all. Just a poor experience you unfortunate enough to have gone through.
In reality, it did not actually work this way. I did get into at least one fight where administration got involved, and they let me off the hook. (Neither of us got suspended, in fact.) In my own view, I 'started' that fight although I did not 'instigate' it, not that the difference matters much. Some kid in line for PE kept kicking the back of my shoes, and after the fourth or fifth time, I started punching him.
Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, I don't know but I have to at least consider that a few innocent kids getting suspended unfairly for being attacked might be worth it if it prevents more attacks that escalate further.
You could even argue the opposite, that if you're going to get suspended for being attacked you might as well try to bite their ear off and go down fighting, but no one does, they just focus on the innocent kid getting suspended.
But I would suggest that in a debate over whether or not it's a good idea to punish children who are innocent (e.g. being attacked in a one-sided "fight"), the onus is on you to demonstrate that there are benefits to the approach, not on others to demonstrate that punishing innocent kids, or people in general, isn't a bad idea.
On another note I highly suspect residual trauma is a reason for teachers having issues with parents, and schools with willingness to fund. The tree remembers and assumes the worst of teachers based upon their own experience.
What is it with education that makes people so willing to internalize well known Fascist values?
Acceptance of that thought is common; of collective punishment is common; blatant repression is advocated everywhere. If you take the values of a common school and try to apply them to adults, you will get either punched away or arrested.
Kids being unfairly punished for being attacked encourages more attacks, though, especially if it is punishing all participants regardless of role in a manner that is less of a punishment for the kind of people who would be inclined to attack and more of a punishment to those who would not.
I categorically oppose "zero tolerance". It removes judgement, ignores context. It's a strategy for bureaucrats to absolve themselves of responsibilty.
But I actually don't know if it's better, worse, or indifferent. If it proves a net win, I might change my stance.
Please share if you find any such research. Thanks.
If only disruptive kids were expelled instead of placated MANY of us might have had a better education.