8 ms·

There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view. For example, CA schools hav

There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view. For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP. Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to. And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)? Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.

UltraSane 2y ago
The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. See here's the thing. Not they don't. They forfeit that right by being violent and disruptive.
- autoexec 2y ago
  Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive", and it would be insane if they could because they can't possibly begin to understand what they'd be giving up. Clearly that right is sometimes taken from them anyway, but that's neither the fault or a failure of the child. Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive" They can. And do. We have 12-year-old "children" literally robbing stores around here. If this happens, they should exercise their right to education from inside a locked institution.
    - gunian 2y ago
      sometimes i think im sheltered and i am but then i see stuff like this and feel good
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    What about the other children's right to education this being impinged by the disruptive students?
    - frereubu 2y ago
      It isn't an either / or. Expelled children have to go somewhere. So you provide education / rehabilitation facilities where they hopefully manage to get their behaviour under control and can be brought back into mainstream education or stay in those institutions where they can at least get a bit of an education rather than just being left to roam the streets. Whether there's the appetite to fund that kind of institution properly is another matter.
      - Clubber 2y ago
        This is what they did in my school district when I was growing up. You had 3 tiers. First tier is regular school. If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled. If you get expelled from there, you go to tier 3 school, which is where all the really bad kids go. This worked pretty well, keeping in mind all the students' needs in mind. They did away with that since I was young and now they just let the disruptive kids run rampant. Keep in mind, you only have one chance really to get an education. If your learning is impeded by uncontrollable children, you now have a greater risk of life failure because you weren't able to learn the fundamentals, because a class of 30 was always being disrupted by one or two people. Say you didn't learn pre-Algebra well because of disruption; now you're behind when it comes to the higher level math for the rest of your school tenure and ultimately, life. These disruptions could have major long term consequences for other kids trying to learn. Finally, teachers' average turnaround is 4 years last time I checked. That means there are very few veteran teachers available to show new teachers the ropes and how to manage a classroom full of teenage kids. Not that it matters, the new teachers will look for other careers within 4 years on average. The cycle continues.
- smogcutter 2y ago
  Thank you for demonstrating the point that there are constraints and complications that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. The law generally disagrees with you.
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    And that really hasn't turned out very well. Letting the most disruptive students ruin the education of other students isn't fair at all to those students AND is pretty damn stupid when you consider how much tax money is spent educating those students and the harm to society from not educating them.
- arkey 2y ago
  To be clear, I am not about to justify any sort of violence anywhere. That said... Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that. I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere. But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
  - programjames 2y ago
    I think we should focus on students already trying to be a positive influence in the school, rather than catering to the bottom quintile. After all, that is how schools got in this situation in the first place.
    - arkey 2y ago
      My point was not clear. What I'm saying is that often it would be better for a certain profile of people to not be forced to attend what in my country is mandatory secondary education, and that it would be better to put them to work on stuff they might enjoy. But of course that would mean the system needs to contemplate individuals, instead of collectives, and the system doesn't like that.
ConspiracyFact 2y ago
>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.
- ty6853 2y ago
  They have a right to education much like one has the right to bear arms or publish a book. You can have it, but your rights end where you demand someone else give it to you involuntarily, particularly with violence.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Notably, the courts say children don’t have those rights. Also, essentially not ‘the right to an education’ but rather a legal mandate to be educated. The specifics of which vary by state.
- smogcutter 2y ago
  Which is where an expulsion often leads, similar to how adults unable to function in society are channeled into SSDI, homelessness, or prison in some combination. There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
- programjames 2y ago
  "Rights" only exist through the will of an omnipotent force, which is an undefined concept. I think it's better to respond to ill-defined arguments with simply that: "interpretation error, argument 'right' is ill-defined."
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    Yes, I was 14 once, too. Moral nihilism is obvious and not helpful. Everyone knows that our moral language is just a manner of speaking. We nevertheless engage with moral concepts because we reject moral nihilism at least from a pragmatic point of view. Pointing out that things like rights, justice, etc., have no real existence is not clever.
hilux 2y ago
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.
- hcurtiss 2y ago
  In my experience, they start caring if the racial composition of the expulsions (or other discipline) does not match the study body.
tlonny 2y ago
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...
windexh8er 2y ago
> The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to. This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive. These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks. Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.
- camgunz 2y ago
  A couple things are true here: - The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings. - No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering). --- I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky. Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway. But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.

UltraSane 2y ago

The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. See here's the thing. Not they don't. They forfeit that right by being violent and disruptive.

autoexec 2y ago
Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive", and it would be insane if they could because they can't possibly begin to understand what they'd be giving up. Clearly that right is sometimes taken from them anyway, but that's neither the fault or a failure of the child. Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
- cyberax 2y ago
  > Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive" They can. And do. We have 12-year-old "children" literally robbing stores around here. If this happens, they should exercise their right to education from inside a locked institution.
  - gunian 2y ago
    sometimes i think im sheltered and i am but then i see stuff like this and feel good
- UltraSane 2y ago
  What about the other children's right to education this being impinged by the disruptive students?
  - frereubu 2y ago
    It isn't an either / or. Expelled children have to go somewhere. So you provide education / rehabilitation facilities where they hopefully manage to get their behaviour under control and can be brought back into mainstream education or stay in those institutions where they can at least get a bit of an education rather than just being left to roam the streets. Whether there's the appetite to fund that kind of institution properly is another matter.
    - Clubber 2y ago
      This is what they did in my school district when I was growing up. You had 3 tiers. First tier is regular school. If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled. If you get expelled from there, you go to tier 3 school, which is where all the really bad kids go. This worked pretty well, keeping in mind all the students' needs in mind. They did away with that since I was young and now they just let the disruptive kids run rampant. Keep in mind, you only have one chance really to get an education. If your learning is impeded by uncontrollable children, you now have a greater risk of life failure because you weren't able to learn the fundamentals, because a class of 30 was always being disrupted by one or two people. Say you didn't learn pre-Algebra well because of disruption; now you're behind when it comes to the higher level math for the rest of your school tenure and ultimately, life. These disruptions could have major long term consequences for other kids trying to learn. Finally, teachers' average turnaround is 4 years last time I checked. That means there are very few veteran teachers available to show new teachers the ropes and how to manage a classroom full of teenage kids. Not that it matters, the new teachers will look for other careers within 4 years on average. The cycle continues.
smogcutter 2y ago
Thank you for demonstrating the point that there are constraints and complications that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. The law generally disagrees with you.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  And that really hasn't turned out very well. Letting the most disruptive students ruin the education of other students isn't fair at all to those students AND is pretty damn stupid when you consider how much tax money is spent educating those students and the harm to society from not educating them.
arkey 2y ago
To be clear, I am not about to justify any sort of violence anywhere. That said... Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that. I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere. But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
- programjames 2y ago
  I think we should focus on students already trying to be a positive influence in the school, rather than catering to the bottom quintile. After all, that is how schools got in this situation in the first place.
  - arkey 2y ago
    My point was not clear. What I'm saying is that often it would be better for a certain profile of people to not be forced to attend what in my country is mandatory secondary education, and that it would be better to put them to work on stuff they might enjoy. But of course that would mean the system needs to contemplate individuals, instead of collectives, and the system doesn't like that.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago

>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.

ty6853 2y ago
They have a right to education much like one has the right to bear arms or publish a book. You can have it, but your rights end where you demand someone else give it to you involuntarily, particularly with violence.
- lazide 2y ago
  Notably, the courts say children don’t have those rights. Also, essentially not ‘the right to an education’ but rather a legal mandate to be educated. The specifics of which vary by state.
smogcutter 2y ago
Which is where an expulsion often leads, similar to how adults unable to function in society are channeled into SSDI, homelessness, or prison in some combination. There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
programjames 2y ago
"Rights" only exist through the will of an omnipotent force, which is an undefined concept. I think it's better to respond to ill-defined arguments with simply that: "interpretation error, argument 'right' is ill-defined."
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  Yes, I was 14 once, too. Moral nihilism is obvious and not helpful. Everyone knows that our moral language is just a manner of speaking. We nevertheless engage with moral concepts because we reject moral nihilism at least from a pragmatic point of view. Pointing out that things like rights, justice, etc., have no real existence is not clever.

hilux 2y ago

> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.

hcurtiss 2y ago
In my experience, they start caring if the racial composition of the expulsions (or other discipline) does not match the study body.

tlonny 2y ago

> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...

windexh8er 2y ago

> The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to. This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive. These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks. Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.

camgunz 2y ago
A couple things are true here: - The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings. - No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering). --- I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky. Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway. But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.