Comment by windexh8er

The purpose for "blame" or "fault" is to know who to punish to best improve society. The "what if" and "what is" scenarios stem from treating "blame" as a mysterious entity that leads to punishment, and then pathological (pathos) appeals that no one is really to blame. It seems rather tautological that society should adopt rules for blame that improves society, not rules that make people feel good inside.

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).

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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.

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.

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.

"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."

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

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.

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.

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.

I do think it's totally fair to put pressure on the school to reduce mainstreaming of kids with major behavior issues. But it's really not about "tolerating" or "not tolerating"- you're witness a system failure and responding by making the problems worse for everyone but the wealthy in a society where governance is premised on the population at large being well educated.

* Tossing around hot potato kids doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.

* Concentrating the proportion of kids interfering with normal income families by removing all the high-income kids from the school doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.

* Letting people choose to send their kids to charters while all the kids of low-involvement parents are still stuck in a situation with a concentrated proportion of problems doesn't either.

Unfortunately there are a several things at play:

* Increased availability of specialized, non-mainstream resources for moderate+ (moderate is pretty severe most of the time IMO) kiddos, gen pop behavior interventions, etc.

* Better general welfare for parents (often unstable/low income ones).

* More push back from districts when parents w/ lawyers demand stuff that's bad for the rest of the classroom.

* Teachers quality needs improving. (Many reasons.)

IMO institutional quality is purposefully damaged by people who hate paying taxes or supporting the general welfare - public schools are basically being purposefully doomed in much the same way that Republicans say "government always bad" and then set out to make it fail on purpose to prove their point, only with a wider variety of motives at play. "I'm sending my kids to private school, why should I pay taxes for public schools?" is not an uncommon strain of thought.

It's a doom loop leading to societal regression into a stratified society unable to properly self-govern IMO.