Too many liberals feel such guilt about expelling disruptive kids, when the reality is just what you've said: if they stay, they don't improve and they ruin genuine learning for everyone else.
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.
And this feel-goodism causes serious long-term harm. It's better to discipline people displaying rogue behavior when they're young. This feel-goodism just pushes the consequences to when these people get old, and they end up in prison, unemployed, working dead-end jobs, or something similar...at that point no one cares because they assume the person is an adult that can take care of themselves.
I think it’s correct to feel guilty about expelling disruptive kids. Majority of cases they’re disruptive as a direct result of their home life, which you’re now throwing them into full time.
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 school cannot fix the home life, so it should not try.
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.
I personally suspect that it would work better if schools had dedicated staff to deal with that side of stuff rather than only having those people in the separate child services organisation - maybe in such a way that it's the school social care team who directly work with the children & families (with a separate team at child services to do the same for any kids not attached to a school), while being able to call on support from central child services for either advice and guidance or for the use of an expert in a specific area when needed.
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".
I literally said “I agree that keeping them in general education is bad too” but I feel like you have a point you want to make irrespective of anything I’m saying so go on.
And I agree with you. It's right to recognize that there are no good options here. In such situations, it's important to consider the bad effects and victims on both sides, not fixate on one as the only morally correct one to consider.
This is life though, that spillover doesn't disappear when you're an adult. You will always be subject to someone else's dysfunctional life unless you isolate yourself from society completely.
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.
Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional lives early so that they grow up with the capability of empathy towards others. Too many people are in their own bubble about how the world works.
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?
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.
What about the second question? Is it desirable to tolerate abusive employees? Should managers who do something about it be considered problematic because they're shielding people from the real-life learning experience of being bullied?
These are not gotcha questions. I'm honestly trying to understand your worldview here.
It's not desirable, no, but there are other employers to go work for.
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.
But you've defined education as learning how things are out there in the real world, including bullying which prevents children from getting what people traditionally called education.
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?
Nah, looking back on it, there was no learning about dysfunctional lives, it was just absolutely misery. Emotional and physical bullying, fear, intimidation, and misery. If a child is disruptive to other students and impinging on their opportunity to learn they should be removed from the classroom. It's not the school's job to teach discipline. Removing them from the class puts the burden on the parents and the administration, instead of the kids.
School isn't really just there to teach you facts, it's to prepare you for life as an adult. You are going to deal with bullies your whole life and you'd better be well prepared for it before you're out on your own as an adult.
> You are going to deal with bullies your whole life
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.
Cannot echo this enough. Not once in the 20 years since high school have I had to deal with with the same kind of bullies, intimidation, and violence. School was like a prison and going each day, steeling myself to deal with misbehaving kids, apathetic teachers, and an administration that thought ignoring the problem, social promoting, and punishing anyone who fights back was the best strategy.
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.
> 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.
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.
>It's not the school's job to teach discipline. Removing them from the class puts the burden on the parents and the administration
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.
Also it's not always the kid's home life that's the problem.
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.
Everyone votes too. The government lacks empathy towards me by forcing me to have an equal vote with morons and criminals.
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.
I hear you. It's no good for chronically disruptive kids to be in juvie all the time, but it's also no good for them to remain in classrooms. Any amount of pay won't salve the sheer stress of attempting to teach those who won't learn. It would be great if someone could just snap their fingers and give those kids stable homes or something. Unfortunately, I suspect the solution requires efforts on multiple fronts (ample food, housing, social support, etc.) and will be expensive, difficult, and slow.
The callousness of the HN commentariat towards those who "don't behave according to the rules" is off the charts these days.
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.
This is sympathy ethics run amok. Being unable to protect yourself or your family from disruptive influences because of some sympathetic property of the disrupter is self-undermining. Presumably you would quarantine a kid who contracted some highly contagious and potentially deadly disease. This is really no different. One can be sympathetic to the plight of an innocent and not be willing to suffer significant hardship for their benefit. There is no contradiction here.
No, it's just that "disruptive" is a pretty broad and subjective spectrum of behavior and a lot of kids get a raw deal from school administrators for really harmless shit. See zero-tolerance policies. Everyone in this thread is using broad weasel language with a blanket response of "expulsion" when really that should be reserved for heinous offenses.
By "weasel language", you make it seem as if we're intentionally lumping in kids who aren't really problematic and being sneaky about it. We could all stand to be more nuanced, and there may be some people here who are just that harsh, but I think you're reading too much into our intentions. I doubt most of us support zero-tolerance policies (if informed about it). Frankly, I think administrators have to be willfully perverse to actually enforce such policies.
> Frankly, I think administrators have to be willfully perverse to actually enforce such policies.
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.
> Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional lives early so that they grow up with the capability of empathy towards others.
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.
> Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional lives early so that they grow up with the capability of empathy towards others.
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..
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?
No, the parent is. Worst case, they can be home schooled.
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.
We might want it to work that way, but depending on which state it is, and the she of the child, the district's legal responsibilities might be what the GP wrote.
In places with mandatory public education, parents suing the district for not providing education for their expelled child are likely to win.
The problem is that it just moves the issue around. If you expel a 5th grader, they will be at SOME school for at least several more years, since that is the law. 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
A Republican Congress with a Republican President in 2004 enacted the federal law that makes it difficult for public schools to expel disruptive children.
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.
> A Republican Congress with a Republican President in 2004 enacted the federal law that makes it difficult for public schools to expel disruptive children.
The Republicans only had a slight majority. And after a change, the bill passed in both chambers almost unanimously.
Anytime something becomes political there becomes two sides. If conservatives want to expel students, liberals want to keep them. If conservatives say no, liberals say yes, this is America at its core. We cannot agree on anything so when it comes to public education, it's better to ignore the politics and focus on results.
While much of what Bush did as President was not at all compassionate, he actually did believe in and try to practice compassionate conservatism. He made major concessions to liberal ways of thinking, some good and some not so good. A major good one was fighting AIDS in Africa. His education policies were on the not so good side.
I think it is. Part of liberalism is seeing all people as worthy of compassion and help, even if they're not closely related to you. While the contrasting tendency in conservatism is to help people closer to / more similar to us and protect ourselves from outsiders who we do not understand, may not benefit from our help, or may even exploit us. Both of these tendencies are valid and adaptive in different situations, they're just different and at least somewhat in opposition. Do you disagree?
I would think a truly liberal policy would be to provide funding for the “compassionate” policies.
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?
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.
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.