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I moved this from the "Kasich" thread, since the last few pages of discussion were not directly about Kasich at all:
gramarye wrote >>
ChrisSunami wrote >>
gramarye wrote >>
The topic was whether giving public schools the same ability that private and some charter schools have to control their student populations (by "firing their students," as it were) would be better for the school system as a whole. I argue that it would be, because some students are such negative influences that they not only ruin any opportunity that school might present them, but they also ruin it for others, and the interests of the whole should prioritize the larger collective success of the group over the slim chance of "saving" students who reach a certain threshold of antisocial behavior. The standard counterargument is that if not in school, they'll end up in jail--but all too often, they seem to end up in jail anyway, and after being given a few more years to poison the school environment.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.As well argued as this is, there are several problems both practical and moral with this stance:
A (practical): Many of the kids I've worked with over the years have been labeled as incorrigible discipline problems by their schools. Yet the side I see of those same kids is quite often helpful, intelligent and cooperative. I'm personally yet to meet a kid who is actually incorrigible. So as a practical matter, you would need to convince me that the schools are accurately labeling kids, and that the problem doesn't actually lie with the school itself.Fair, but labeling problems exist in any system and will never allow perfection.
"Labeling problems" is far too facile a response to a substantive problem. What this boils down to is that you're willing to let a certain number of kids with the potential to do well in school and society be collateral damage to your problematic labeling process.
B (practical): In my experience, the schools that do best with the hardest cases --the kids with the most extreme special needs --also do the best with the rest of the population. I think you rapidly get diminishing returns by casting out students. All kids are individuals, a school that can only thrive with a one-method-fits-all approach is not a good school.
Diminishing returns on what? Are you suggesting that there's a causal relationship here--that by somehow learning how to do better with the hardest cases, that the schools are somehow learning things that make them better able to educate normal and gifted children? Why should we assume that any such causal relationship, if it exists at all, goes in that direction instead of the reverse?
If you can run a mile, you can run 100 yards, and if you can educate a special needs child, you can educate a "normal" child.
And I'm not advocating a one-method-fits-all approach any more than those who are advocating leaving those students in place in regular classrooms are. "Get them out of the classrooms" is no more one-size-fits-all than "keep them in the classrooms."
My assumption was that you were getting rid of the kids you weren't able to educate properly with your teaching methodology. However, we're already working from incompatible assumptions here, since you're assuming the kids in question are wholly uneducable under any methodology whatsoever.
C (moral): You'd be turning your back on the long-held American value of education for all, and creating --or I should say solidifying --a permanent, immobile underclass. Perhaps you're fine with that, but we should be up front about what we're giving up.
We should be, and I am. The long-held American belief in education for all is expensive, wasteful, and I do not believe it is particularly morally salutary. It is also something of a weak value already, given current dropout rates, and I don't really think that it was ever as strong as the most aspirational of public writers wished. We do give up on people eventually--expulsion does exist in the current system. I simply advise making it easier, and making the standards more descriptive and less normative (in other words, I don't think it should matter that a child has a diagnosed medical condition that makes him stab people or throw them into lockers or swear at teachers in the middle of class; I only think it should matter that he does those things at all, regardless of the reason).
I believe in doing the greatest good for the greatest number. I believe that a substantial majority of other students would profit by being rid of the small handful of the worst of the worst--the most disruptive influences in any learning environment. It's well known that teachers spend the vast majority of their disciplinary attention on a small minority of students.
I applaud your honesty. However, the problem with an approach such as this one is that you may not be aware of what you're really losing. While no one wants their child in a chaotic, unsafe learning environment, I don't think it's much more positive for children to be placed in an artificially sanitized environment that hasn't solved it's problems but merely exported them.
D (practical): Regarding the "send them off to jail early" idea: It's well known that prison is also, in a manner of speaking, a school --providing an education in advanced criminal behaviors. So moving children from school to jail at an early age is likely to reap the social benefit of an enlarged, ever-younger pool of highly trained criminals --not exactly a recipe for a peaceful, safe community.
I'm not advocating moving them straight from school to jail. I'm acknowledging the reality that many of these same behavior-problem children will end up there, since I anticipated that others would raise that point if I didn't. What I'm also adding to that is that I don't see that additional years in school, at least after a certain point in the child's development of antisocial behavior, materially alters the chances of that unhappy outcome--not enough to justify the negative externalities that their continued presence in school continues to impose on others.
I was asking whether you were ready to reap the social consequences of that stance.
I speak for the interests of normal children and their parents over those with "special needs." The current system has become far too solicitous of the latter. I believe that that is one reason that people flee to private schools, as well as to charter schools whose charters allow them to filter out such students. Therefore, I believe that we would ameliorate one competitive disadvantage that traditional public schools face vis-a-vis such more selective schools if we allowed some or all traditional public schools to do likewise.
When we, as a society, speak of uneducable children, what we mean is poor children. However, since it doesn't fit with American values to discriminate based on economics, we legitimize our desire to abandon those children by first stigmatizing them as lost causes.
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