Comment by frereubu

Comment by frereubu 4 days 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 4 days 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.

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munificent 4 days ago

> If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled.
So if you're a kid who's already struggling, you get sent to be surrounded by other kids who are already struggling.
> you only have one chance really to get an education.
That's true for the bad kids too.
I 100% get where you're coming from. My kids come home from school and tell stories about disruptive stuff other kids do and how much it gets in the way of the school functioning effectively.
At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? The kids that have behavioral problems are much more likely to be that way because they have a bad home life. So if you expel them, they're missing out on education and they're spending more time in a bad environment. They're not going to get any better after that. Then what? Now they're a year behind academically and have the shame of being expelled. Their behavior is likely even worse because they spent a year not being socialized in a bad environment. So they're even worse next year, and they get expelled again.
Eventually, they stop going to school entirely. But at least here in the US, the number of jobs available to people without any kind of school degree gets smaller every year. So now they can't find work.
What do desperate people do? Commit crimes. So now we have a system that effectively just produces uneducated mentally unhealthy criminals.

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- Clubber 4 days ago
  
  >Now they're a year behind academically
  I think you're missing something. Getting expelled doesn't mean you didn't attend school for the remainder of the year. Getting expelled meant you were sent to a school for expelled kids. If you got expelled from there, you went to a school for expelled x2 kids. In the US, it's illegal to not attend school under the age of 16.
  >and have the shame of being expelled.
  Shame is a powerful motivator, but only works sometimes. The alternative is to ignore the behavior or reward it, both worse solutions IMO.
  I think the idea is if kids are disruptive, put them with other disruptive kids so the amount of disruption is minimized. All the kids in the disruption school are already disruptive. Also, you don't want to teach the current non-disruptive kids that being disruptive is acceptable, otherwise, you'll just create more disruptive kids by inaction.
  
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- UltraSane 4 days ago
  
  "So if you're a kid who's already struggling,"
  Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools? Do you understand just how bad your behavior has to be to actually get expelled?
  "At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? "
  The most important thing is to NOT allow them to prevent other kids from getting an a good education.
  
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  munificent 4 days ago
  
  > Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools?
  Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
  Do we send them home where they are statistically much more likely to be abused and not have access to reliable nutrition? Imprison them? Ship them to some sort of Lord of the Flies island?
  Do I want disruptive kids in the same room as my kids? Not really. Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them? Unfortunately, yes.
  This is a deeply hard problem. Sure, if you only care about well-behaved kids it's easy: kick out the bad eggs and forget they ever existed. But if you consider that those bad kids are actual people who will still participate in your society, you need some solution for how to help them.
  
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