> All you're doing is making life more miserable for their parents as they have to arrange transportation to increasingly far flung school districts, and for the child as they are ripped away from all their friends every year when they are sent to a new school.

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 we suppose that this theoretical child is a problem that is disrupting their classroom, then we are not saving any children from that disruption, merely spreading it around. They will be a problem for one classroom this year, a different one next year, and so on. Assuming class sizes are the same, we will have on average the same number of disrupted-pupil-hours with the expulsions as without them, just a different distribution.

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).

I agree that spreading it around is not clearly better. In many districts there are special-ed schools where these students are placed. I don't know what it's like in these schools. Some of them are probably terrible. But I think I'm obligated to weigh that against the disruption to a much larger body of students.

Making life more miserable for the parents is, in some senses, an encouragement for the parents to straighten up and spend a little more effort on their kids. If it were completely painless, fewer would bother.

Changing behavior requires pressure and people generally do not like it when they notice it.

There used to be regional boys schools and girls schools that had a military-style ethos and were quite effective in reforming bad students. They would still interface with the local school system in sports and dances, etc. So in some cases expelled students didn't necessarily have to travel too far, just to the shared alternative school for the area.