Comment by munificent

Comment by munificent 4 days ago

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> 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.

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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    • Clubber 4 days ago

      >Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.

      That's really the make-or-break question. IIRC, it was kids who constantly got into fights. Kids caught with knives, drugs, or firecrackers; kids in gangs, etc. It was kids who constantly disrupted the classroom, even after being assigned to after school detention multiple times. It was kids who disrespected teachers (cussing them out, threatening them, attacking them, etc). It was kids that got pregnant. It was even kids that cheated because it was taken more seriously back then.

      The levels were: write sentences on the board after class, get sent to the principal's office with a parent call, get after school detention, get after school detention a whole lot, get expelled. Sometimes like in the case of knives, it would go straight to expulsion.

      Today, teachers will send kids to the principal's office to get them out of the classroom and they just get sent back to continue disruption. Back then, teachers were expected to teach and the administration dealt with unruly kids. Disciplining kids who are bad is hard on the heart, but in the long term, not disciplining them is way worse for them. There's no discipline today in schools (other than getting arrested, which really should be avoided at all costs). There hasn't been discipline in schools for a generation. It shows not only in schools but in society as a whole.

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    • programjames 4 days ago

      > Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them?

      Bad for whom? If you have the two options:

      (A) Bad for people causing negative externalities.

      (B) Bad for people causing positive externalities.

      I will choose the former over the latter every time. Sure, it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since they're expelled from school, but it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since this other kid wasn't expelled from school.

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    • UltraSane 4 days ago

      Your solution it to let disruptive children ruin the education for all students so that no one gets a good education? You are making home-schooling sound much more appealing. Public Schools aren't supposed to be daycare centers, they are supposed to teach children.

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      • munificent 3 days ago

        I think you and many others in this discussion presume that kids fall into a neat binary classification:

        1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.

        2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.

        Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.

        I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time.

        A closer picture of reality is that:

        1. People go through good and bad periods. An "good" kid might become a "bad" kid for a year while going through the divorce of their parents. A "bad" kid might get the structure or diagnosis they need and blossom into their better potential. Kids mature at different rates and times.

        2. Being around "good" kids is good for "bad" kids. If the people in their home life are awful, having a community of mentally healthy kids around them during the day can be very helpful for learning how to behave better.

        3. Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. Obviously, it's not OK for some kid to bully or abuse another. But short of that, it's often useful and educational for kids to be exposed to a variety of personalities and maturity levels. Do we want our kids to grow into adults that have the skills to take care of and help other people who are struggling? I do. They can learn many of those skills in school by being part of the support network for bad kids.

        Often, when they do, it turns out that kid wasn't so bad in the first place.

        Overall, this simplified mindset is one I see all the time where we look at situations as a consumer: Is this a thing I want to "purchase" or not? Instead, it's better to look at the entire situation as an environment that you are both consuming and yourself part of.

        They always talk about "it takes a village". We all both need a village and are the village for each other.

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