Eulogy wrote:
That's just fucking horrible. I'm surprised the "lower" students didn't apparently ambush the bullies and the teachers/admins, or just plain set the school on fire. This abomination of a system, sadly, is what I'd suspect to be a mere symptom of a much larger tumour.
Like I said, it's a vicious cycle. Those without power are stopped at every turn from protecting themselves, much like in real life. People without money are punished by being poor, but also in that the country is run by rich fucks and the belief that Money is proportional to morality. Basically, you wouldn't have to deal with this if you were more popular: so be more popular, even though everyone will do everything they can to stop you from doing so. And they begin to believe this: it's their fault they are unpopular. Fix it or be content.
Kids don't firebomb the school because they understand right from wrong, usually specifically, because their parents taught them well but also because they know what it's like to be on the short end of the shit-stick by being fucked with. This kind of shit teaches them empathy and generally makes them better people (or drives them to suicide, which is still thankfully rare in this case).
This is why you see so many popular athletes from high school fall flat on their asses if their connections end with high school: they literally cannot interact with people because they've never really had to. Everyone (parents, teachers, peers, administrators) has kissed their ass so much, they try their same high-handed attitude when looking for a job or dealing with college (if they even go) and people just don't put up with that shit because who the fuck cares about high school? You may have been there: some jock at a college party (still wearing his letter jacket) makes a fucking terrible joke, then laughs maniacally at it while everyone nervously take a sip of their drink. He doesn't understand why no one is laughing because, in high school, everyone would have laughed because they were supposed to, just like you laugh nervously at your bosses shitty jokes.
But dealing with bullying as it stands now in schools is damn near impossible. Schools either deny it's existence or place the blame on the one being bullied after he finally fights back either physically or verbally, because they are upsetting the status quo.
Norade wrote:That can be true, though in some schools you can't be popular without being a bully. Those tend be bad the schools where they trickle the kids who were expelled and suspended a long time back into though. The ones that the rich kids don't go to.
Those schools are basically prisons/daycares anyway, with the emphasis being to get the kids to graduate, in any way possible, as quickly as possible. In the case of kids over the age of 18, they'll force them to "Drop out" by making them take their GED, but still counting them as graduating.
The big issue is that kids = money. Kids that keep up their grades and graduate = more money. This is why no Child Left Behind has lead to more graduates (even considering the massive amounts of fraud in the system) by just cramming kids into the most basic of classes. It wouldn't surprise me if Texas ditches it's AP (Advance Placement) classes at some point due to this problem. It takes an act of God to get a kid expelled or placed into special classes/system because that's lost money, because it's generated through kids in the "core" school system, not the extra stuff. Your kids are $$$ to administration. To be honest, I wouldn't give a shit in this day and age if public education became privatized because it's basically that way already. And, unless it's changed, Special Education (and autistic kids) don't generate money and drag down a schools performance, so administrators won't exactly cry if they can transfer them or find a way to get the parents to pull them out of school.
And personally, fucking parents need much less power over the school system. You would not believe the shit they pull, although, judging by the posts, some of you do. I single out autism because a rant by a parent about how they're eating up all the money for normal kids. I almost said it.... yea... almost just yelled out "Yea, fuck em'! How dare they be born different in America!?" But I got paid to fix electronics and it was lunch time......
"Inner City schools™" are kind of an outlier and to be honest, I have little experience with them as we never got any work with the Houston ISD. The schools we did do work for in Houston were charter schools and mostly elementary (K-5). Their tier structure isn't all that different from what I've read. Those at the top-top still don't get involved in much physical or emotional violence because it's beneath them. Like in prison, that's what lackey's and "hanger-ons" are for. These schools also aren't as violent and bloody as the movies make them out to be, mainly because campus cop will wreck your shit for looking at them wrong.
