I know what you’re talking about–and I think that such cultural attitudes, to the extent that they exist, are overwhelmingly in response to the racist, plutocratic cultural attitudes that hold the lion’s share of power in our society.
It’s very important to understand that keeping schools segregated is a harmful thing to do to African-American children, and is part of the shitty racist, plutocratic cultural environment that hurts our country.
There were kids who did benefit from getting out, there were some kids (my nine year old recollection was about half of the kids bussed in) who came to school willing and ready to learn. However, the kids who weren’t made a highly disruptive environment for those who were there to go to school.
Perhaps instead of sorting by income, we should sort by behavior and ability. If your behavior impacts someone else’s right to an education, you get to go to a room where they aren’t bothering to teach, they just babysit with provided learning materials. And sort by ability, because teaching to the middle impacts the ability of both ends to get the education they deserve.
This is completely fucking horrifying, Dangerosa. We’re talking in many cases about kids who are suffering mental illnesses related to trauma related to their parents’ socioeconomic status related to our shitty racist/plutocratic culture, and you’re willing to doom these kids to a lack of a sound basic education, rather than searching for alternatives that help such kids turn things around.
This is EXACTLY what I was getting at when I said that a kid making good grades in the cruddy school would get no resources.
So some kid is making Ds and Fs and gets $500 for getting their grades up to an improved, but still decidedly mediocre B-. What about the kid whose worst grade is a B-? Why shouldn’t they get $500 for being, you know, actually GOOD at what they’re doing, rather than merely not sucking at it? If you’re going to tie cash rewards to grades like that, you have to have a way to reward a kid who goes from a C to an A in the same way- after all, it’s the same number of letter grades. You really ought to have the same thing in place for the kids who start out with As to begin with- they’re the ones doing the best of all.
We were talking about primary education. Plus, if a student can raise his grade from an F to a B-, he will qualify for the grants already.
But that goes back to something touched on earlier, which is that we can spend more on the worst students and hopefully make some of them less than the worst. Or we can spend the same amount on the average-or-above students, and get a much better ROI. Because the poor performance of the worst students is caused by things like parental involvement that are not, and can’t really be, affected by education spending.
It is, but we need to figure out a way to give each kid what they need…and that includes the rich kids from two parent households who do not have special need and with the proper education and motivation, can cure cancer or invent the microprocessor. And THAT isn’t happening if you end up with a bunch of poorly behaved kids monopolizing the classroom.
Check out this article and then ask yourself - if you are a kid trying to get an education in this school (which is the next school over from the ones my kids go to), will you succeed. Or have the inmates taken over the asylum.
(This article ties it to a racial equity policy - but its anytime you don’t enforce sufficient discipline).
I’m pretty sure primary school kids aren’t getting internships. That proposal was clearly for high school students.
Sure, but teenagers don’t do long term delayed gratification well. (Hell, most adults don’t do long term delayed gratification well.)
That proposal was not for education spending. It was for philanthropic and/or private investment, depending on details which are unavailable at the moment.
But yes, I agree it goes back to the question of who we spend money on for the best ROI. And that goes back to what ROI really means. If spending $500 keeps an F kid out of jail and gets him on a path to a retail job, how do you compare that to $500 getting a B student on a path to a private college instead of a state college? (Numbers and goals rectally derived, of course.) Should we try to make sure everyone has a basic education, or that the brightest kids have the best education? I’m not sure.
Of course I won’t succeed if I’m trying to get an education at that school. Why is the solution to remove middle-class white kids from the school, and leave it to impoverished black kids?
You say that we need to get every kid what they need. If you really believe that, you need to look for policies that try to do that, not policies that allow rich families to get out and pull the ladder up after them.
It hopes to what it means to be a parent. A parent should be making the best decisions for their children. Would you be happy if a kid of yours who had the ability to be a surgeon would up being a middle manager someplace pushing papers? I think it’s valid to say that you’d be improving the culture that your kid will be living in as an adult, but that’s hard to really put your finger on. Especially when you’re faced with the immediate decision to put your kid into a school where he or she has a greater chance of making it to an elite college.
While I do think we owe it to kids born to unfortunate circumstances to give them a good basic education, I don’t think that grumps a parent’s responsibility to situate his children so they have the greatest chance of success of reaching their full potential.
Maybe I misunderstood you - I thought Pell grants were for college.
That would imply that payiing them $500 wouldn’t work either, since that is also delayed gratification.
In failing schools, like the one Dangerosa’s article described, the disruptive students aren’t getting a basic education, and their disruption is preventing the good students from getting a good education and the average students from getting an average education. The teachers are too busy with the disruptive ones, or going to workshops where they learn to apologize for being white. In extreme cases, what the school needs is the equivalent of triage. The disruptors aren’t going to get educated in any case, mostly because of the lack of parental involvement and a subculture that does not value education (read, they are being raised in poverty by poor single mothers). Therefore, get them the hell out of the schools they are disrupting so that the other students have a chance to be taught by someone who can act as a teacher and not as a prison guard. Thus my idea for a voucher system, where the public schools have to accept anyone. Yes, that means the public school is more likely to wind up as Harding is described as being. At least the other students have a chance to end up in a school where they have a chance at some kind of education.
But I suspect such a system is going to be what one of the school board members in the article said shouldn’t happen -
You’re damn right they are going to be racially predictable. I can predict that whatever race is disproportionately causing trouble is going to get suspended.
I would suggest the addition in schools that are not college focused. Some kids are not going to be interested in traditional education, but might be highly interested in a trade: woodworking, auto mechanics, metalwork, etc. The notion that “every kid should go to college” sounds good, but causes real problems for kids that don’t have either the aptitude or the interest.
The question becomes, from a public policy standpoint, how do you separate the disruptive students from the other students? The way it generally works today is that we separate the wealthy/middle class students from the poor students.
Poor students who would otherwise be good or average students get stuck in a school with a high percentage of disruptive students, and there isn’t much effort made to get them into a more stable environment. For those students, the educational system is a failure, and the answer for them is, maybe you shouldn’t have been born so poor.
The final issue is that the disruptive students need education too, even if they’re not going along willingly. Abandon them as lost causes, and they’ll grow up to be adults who can’t handle a normal life in our society, that’s not a positive outcome.
Sure, but the fundamental issue is that the needy, disruptive and unmotivated students’ educations shouldn’t come at the expense of any other children who aren’t disruptive or unmotivated. I mean, if you take a kid who needs free lunches, is a discipline problem and unprepared for kindergarten due to shitty parents, you’re going to be spending a LOT of money, time and effort just to get that kid to the baseline, and then hoping that somehow, at that point, he’ll overcome whatever bad habits and attitudes he has, and perform adequately.
I have a feeling that there’s got to be some kind of tipping point in schools- they can support some proportion of students like that without it materially affecting the rest of the student body’s educational treatment, but past that tipping point, and that’s all the school concentrates on, to the detriment of the students who fall into that category.
Another thing to consider, and it’ll probably aggravate some of you, is that everyone can’t be middle class. A large proportion of the population kind of has to be working class or poor. Maybe a better plan might be to have something like vocational programs for non-trade type jobs- like offering some kind of waitstaff certification, or a line-cook certification that’s not even close to a hotel & restaurant management degree or a culinary school degree, but far better than just hiring some random schlub off the street. That’s something I’ve wondered about- high-end private schools and wealthy area high schools don’t even offer stuff like auto shop or metal shop, and I suspect that those programs may even be too aspirational for a lot of the students in question, so why not tailor their educations for what they might reasonably be expected to do, with a little bit of stretching? It’s absurd to expect any but a tiny proportion of most poor students to go to college, so why not give them an education that works, and start at a young age, rather than the last couple of years of high school? That way, they’d be effectively set apart from the college track kids, but not kind of abandoned like they are in many schools.
Nearly 30 years ago, I was signing up for classes at the local public high school. They had a “college track” degree plan which had fairly high academic requirements in terms of classes you had to take and pass. Then there was the other one- which was just enough to meet the state’s requirements. There wasn’t a serious vocational component, and there wasn’t much in the way of serious academics either. And most students opted for this path- maybe 35-40% went college track. WTF were they going to do with this non-college, non-vocational high school education? Not much. So why not identify students earlier and give them the option to do something more useful with their compulsory educations?
Maybe I don’t understand the question. Disruptive students are separated from the others by being expelled. They are then relegated to some default which is run more llike a reform school. Granted that they are being mostly warehoused. At least they are not roaming the hallways and punching people and kicking over trash cans and disrupting other classes.
I expect they are growing up that way under our current system, with the drawback that they are disrupting the education of the rest. It’s not going to be all that much worse for them to be warehoused, and it is going to be better for everyone else.
Why are you so willing to write off everyone, warehousing them and ignoring them for the benefit of the majority?
I went to school with a kid who was a total dickbag. Getting high during class, getting in fights, and generally being a superdouche. He should have been warehoused under your approach. Except he turned into this guy, a productive member of society following his dreams. And you know what? Good for him. I’m glad he isn’t out robbing people and spending time in jail. You know why he is an actor now? Because he and his brother were in my theater classes and they went off to Hollywood together, found they love it, and made a life for themselves. Why is it more important to point a finger at kids like him and say that someone else didn’t become a doctor because of them instead of him not becoming another orange jumpsuit on the side of the road? Why is it more important to stop them from being a disturbance than to stop whatever is going on at a societal level that caused them to be a disturbance in the first place?