Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the American P

[Starglider]

I'm all for educating people with disabilities. And if the disabilities are not behavioral in nature, they can be educated in normal schools to a large degree. But students with behavioral disabilities, or just plain badly behaved children, pose a threat to the school environment and the education of other children. If this threat cannot be neutralized by lesser means, then we must be prepared to remove the child from that school environment. And find (or found) a new school where they cannot do harm.

This sentiment is out of compliance with liberal thought leaders. I do not specifically pay attention to US school issues, but of the articles I have read over the last few years the majority have definitely been 'the US suspends and expels too much' and 'we need to replace this with modern, advanced, kind, caring, in-school discipline policies'. That article also confirms that 'behavioural problems' is oldspeak, and as a progressive you must now say 'emotional disabilities' instead.

I recall also that African-American students are disciplined at a higher rate, that the Obama administration along with many civil rights groups want to equalise this (without studying how much of it is bias vs actual behavioural difference due to external cultural factors), and the result will be blanket reduction of disciplinary action applied to non-white students (suspensions and expulsions in particular) until the rates match. So the trend definitely seems to be less discipline rather than more.

[Simon_Jester]

This sentiment is out of compliance with liberal thought leaders. I do not specifically pay attention to US school issues, but of the articles I have read over the last few years the majority have definitely been 'the US suspends and expels too much' and 'we need to replace this with modern, advanced, kind, caring, in-school discipline policies'. That article also confirms that 'behavioural problems' is oldspeak, and as a progressive you must now say 'emotional disabilities' instead.

I know you're very gleeful about telling me what 'the progressive consensus' says, but it's damned annoying when there's no evidence you actually agree with it or are prepared to make a convincing argument for it.

So I don't feel particularly like being trolled today. Sorry.

I recall also that African-American students are disciplined at a higher rate, that the Obama administration along with many civil rights groups want to equalise this (without studying how much of it is bias vs actual behavioural difference due to external cultural factors), and the result will be blanket reduction of disciplinary action applied to non-white students (suspensions and expulsions in particular) until the rates match. So the trend definitely seems to be less discipline rather than more.

Now this, I'll respond to.

I work in a school where all the children, give or take a few, are nonwhite- the first words out of the mouth of a timeskipped '60s civil rights advocate walking into the building would be "who the hell repealed Brown v. Board?"

There is a very noticeable difference between the well-behaved kids and the badly-behaved kids, and it isn't their skin color.

Meanwhile, it is objective, empirical fact that you can get much better results out of an overall school population using positive behavioral measures as well as negative ones- there has to be a carrot as well as a stick. Successful schools have things like "school pride." Students who think of themselves as scholars with a bit of dignity and honor to uphold perform better. Students who are rewarded for doing the right thing keep doing the right thing. This is all true.

The flip side of the coin is that there has to be a stick. There also have to be schools that are qualified to provide the very specific kinds of psychiatric response and supportive upbringing that are needed to heal someone who does have actual emotional disabilities... that manifest as behavior problems.

You can, and should, reach these kids. You can, and should, intervene positively in the lives of all your students so that the basically decent 90% of them get the idea that it's good to be the good person.

But you don't reach the emotionally disturbed minority of kids with the same tools as you reach the more typical majority. They don't respond to those tools- some fault in their neural circuitry, or their upbringing, changes the responses. So you have to, at a bare minimum, remove them from an environment where they are an active impairment to other children's education and put them somewhere you can actually help them in a meaningful way.

Kids who are one bad day away from being (correctly) diagnosed as a violent mental patient don't belong in the same place as the average fifteen year old. Nobody is better off with them being mixed up in the same building in the presence of huge crowds of peers and limited adult supervision.

[Starglider]

I know you're very gleeful about telling me what 'the progressive consensus' says, but it's damned annoying when there's no evidence you actually agree with it or are prepared to make a convincing argument for it.

I don't agree with it. But I don't care about being branded an anticompliant unmutual capitalocriminal (on this board, obviously I am branded communist etc on conservative forums), so I don't have to. However if you self-identify as a person embedded deep in the central current of American left-wing progressivism, disagreeing with such a bastion of mainstream liberalism might be more problematic. I confess, it is a little unfair to tease you in particular about this, as you are not in fact a paid-up member of the SDN far-left groupthink.

I work in a school where all the children, give or take a few, are nonwhite- the first words out of the mouth of a timeskipped '60s civil rights advocate walking into the building would be "who the hell repealed Brown v. Board?" There is a very noticeable difference between the well-behaved kids and the badly-behaved kids, and it isn't their skin color.

I would assume then that you don't have personal evidence for the 'how much of the disciplinary gap is bias vs actual behavioural difference' question then, since there isn't much scope for racial favoritism. Unfortunately with a brief google I can see that there are both local and federal attempts to reduce the gap, apparently solely by reducing discipline levels of black children rather than increasing for white, but I can't find any stats breaking down if the disparity is mainly within mixed schools or mainly a difference in discipline rates between mainly-white vs mainly-black schools. Your statement that only some schools are suffering from the prison mentality and that they tend to be in poor areas suggests primarily the later hypothesis (mostly black schools discipline at higher rates than mostly white schools), rather than discrimination in mixed schools, although I am sure there is a significant element of that.

There also have to be schools that are qualified to provide the very specific kinds of psychiatric response and supportive upbringing that are needed to heal someone who does have actual emotional disabilities... that manifest as behavior problems.

That is contrary to the whole mainstreaming ethos that has been growing in the US since the late 70s and gathered steam in the 90s. I don't know enough about this to quote specific studies but I have seen numerous studies referenced by promoters of mainstreaming showing that it results in better outcomes for disabled children, including mentally disabled children, with the exception of profoundly deaf children where sign language is not available in the mainstream classroom.

In fact here was an article about this that did agree with you, naturally in the definitely-not-liberal-enough Wall Street Joural;

Look into the research on inclusion and you will find that this policy is generally based on notions of civil rights and social justice, not on "best education practices" for all students... Very little work has been done to establish how inclusion affects regular students—whether they are average, English-language learners, advanced, poor or homeless. Studies seem to support the social benefits of mainstreaming for children with disabilities and possibly for regular-education students, but what about the effect on their academic progress? Teachers may tell you (privately) that inclusion often leads them to slow down and simplify classroom teaching. Yet the system is entrenched and politically correct. Many parents remain silent. Some quietly remove their kids from public schools.

and of course the first comment is

Somebody should tell (the author) that she is saying the same things about including students with disabilities that racists were saying 50 years ago about including Black People. "it's not fair to the other kids, "it'll bring their grades down" "they won't be able to learn the way white kids can". She is an ignorant bigot who has made hundreds of thousands of dollars helping school districts break the law and keep our kids from being included. Shame on you, Ms. Freedman.... there's a special place in hell for haters like you.

which seems to be represenative of the reflexive rejection of any kind of exclusion.

So the outcome seems to be, if you want to hold this radical anti-social-justice and possibly racist-equivalent view of 'exclude problematic students to improve overall performance', you need to work at a private school, with parents who 'quietly remove their kids from public schools'.

[Simon_Jester]

Your statement that only some schools are suffering from the prison mentality and that they tend to be in poor areas suggests primarily the later hypothesis (mostly black schools discipline at higher rates than mostly white schools), rather than discrimination in mixed schools, although I am sure there is a significant element of that.

I will note that I work in an overwhelmingly black school population and the school is not a prison-like environment, at least no more so than any other school that has bell schedules and so on.

There also have to be schools that are qualified to provide the very specific kinds of psychiatric response and supportive upbringing that are needed to heal someone who does have actual emotional disabilities... that manifest as behavior problems.

That is contrary to the whole mainstreaming ethos that has been growing in the US since the late 70s and gathered steam in the 90s...

It is, because emotional disabilities are different.

Things like Borderline Personality Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder aren't like, oh... dyslexia or ADHD or deafness or cerebral palsy or even autism. The emotional disabilities represent a fundamental difference in the way the student relates to students around them. Not just an inability to easily learn the appropriate behaviors (as may be found in autism), but a conscious and avowed rejection of them.

Now, that's not necessarily an obstacle to teaching the child. But it's inevitably an obstacle to their ability to function in a classroom environment. Not to perform specific tasks like "read this page" (the dyslexic kid has problems with that) or "work steadily for fifteen minutes" (the ADHD kid has problems with that). That's not the problem, that's not what I mean by 'function in a classroom environment.'

No, the kid with a significant emotional disability has trouble with "be able to occupy the same room as twenty-five other humans and actually get anything done." A lot of the time, they just plain can't do that. It doesn't matter whether the task is something they'd normally be good at, or at least adequate at; they just plain lack the capacity to get shit done when there are so many other humans around. Or when there is a human present (the teacher) who is telling them to do things.

I can devise accommodations to help the dyslexic kid or the ADHD kid, IF I have a basically orderly classroom where people follow directions and so on. But how in Heaven's name do I help the kid with raging emotional problems, except by removing them from the room altogether, and finding them a space where they get the help they need?

Now, you CAN totally educate someone with a major emotional disability. But the emotional disabilities have to be treated, they have to be regarded as genuine mental illnesses that require at least some degree of therapy and possibly medication to help the child calm down enough that they can function in a group and actually listen to what other people are saying rather than spending all their time with fists clenched, a chip on their shoulder, and a "fuck you!" poised on their lips.

I don't know enough about this to quote specific studies but I have seen numerous studies referenced by promoters of mainstreaming showing that it results in better outcomes for disabled children, including mentally disabled children, with the exception of profoundly deaf children where sign language is not available in the mainstream classroom.

Yes. I am 100% in favor of mainstreaming... except when keeping the kid with a mental health problem in the same room/school as other students is seriously impairing their ability to get an education.

I don't mind spending twice as much to give Timmy the Insubordinate Jackass an education.

I do mind having the education of five other children lose its fine edge of high quality because Timmy the Jackass was so disruptive that they hardly ever learned anything.

Look into the research on inclusion and you will find that this policy is generally based on notions of civil rights and social justice, not on "best education practices" for all students... Very little work has been done to establish how inclusion affects regular students—whether they are average, English-language learners, advanced, poor or homeless. Studies seem to support the social benefits of mainstreaming for children with disabilities and possibly for regular-education students, but what about the effect on their academic progress? Teachers may tell you (privately) that inclusion often leads them to slow down and simplify classroom teaching. Yet the system is entrenched and politically correct. Many parents remain silent. Some quietly remove their kids from public schools.

Oh, I can include anybody...

Except the kids who are psychologically compelled to be assholes in a classroom. Or who are not thus compelled, and just act like assholes anyway. And that's because their behavior is harming my other students, and because they need something that is fundamentally different than what I'm providing to my students.

Dyslexic kids and ESOL kids and ADHD kids need something different but not fundamentally different. They don't need to learn how to be semi-responsible proto-adult humans before they can learn how to solve equations; they're already getting the hang of that. I can teach a lesson that reaches the dyslexic kid and the ADHD kid while simultaneously reaching the average kids.

I cannot teach a lesson that reaches Timmy the Asshole while reaching the average kids at the same time. Because Timmy doesn't need and will not accept algebra lessons from me, not when there's an audience of fifteen-year-olds to act defiant in front of. Timmy doesn't need lessons on solving equations right now... he needs lessons on how not to be an asshole.

And of course the first comment is

Somebody should tell (the author) that she is saying the same things about including students with disabilities that racists were saying 50 years ago about including Black People. "it's not fair to the other kids, "it'll bring their grades down" "they won't be able to learn the way white kids can". She is an ignorant bigot who has made hundreds of thousands of dollars helping school districts break the law and keep our kids from being included. Shame on you, Ms. Freedman.... there's a special place in hell for haters like you.

which seems to be represenative of the reflexive rejection of any kind of exclusion.

Except of course that the author was advocating excluding many types of kids who are totally not a problem in the classroom, just because of a fear that I can't teach the ADHD kids and the normal kids at the same time.

Which I can... if both groups of children are following basic directions.

So yes, the liberals are frankly right about inclusion as such, but discipline is still important and never stopped being important. And when inclusion bumps up against discipline, you need to modify the system so that you can have both, not sacrifice one for the sake of the other.

[Zaune]

Yes. I am 100% in favor of mainstreaming... except when keeping the kid with a mental health problem in the same room/school as other students is seriously impairing their ability to get an education.

I don't mind spending twice as much to give Timmy the Insubordinate Jackass an education.

And what do you think the odds are of that happening? Especially where it's a mental health issue rather than something physical, and you've got every reactionary old fool who hasn't had a new idea since the Seventies saying this could all be solved with a few whippings so why waste money on the 'disruptive' kids. At best the 5% of nigh-unteachables would just end up getting warehoused somewhere until they were old enough to drop out.

Maybe that's no worse for them than what they're already getting in mainstream education, and better for the 95% who aren't beyond salvage. But let's not kid ourselves about that 5%'s prospects in 'special schools'.

[Starglider]

I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make, but it is fundamentally at odds with both diagnostics and social trends. You are trying to say 'bad behaviour and mental disabilities are completely separate things'. However the trend is to increasingly attribute bad behaviour to 'emotional disabilities', direct racial discrimination, bad home environment due to indirect racial discrimination, bad home environment due to economic inequality, really anything other than personal responsibility of the child or the parents. Parents are unwilling to be told otherwise and are empowered to sue if the school tries to tell them anyway. Naturally the result of that is requiring a huge paper trail to stave off the possible social objections and legal challenges to expelling a student, and even when that works in individual cases schools are still pressured to do it less often.

Imagine that you and all your fellow teachers did have complete personal discretion to expel any student you judged too disruptive. Would you do so in a perfectly representative fashion across disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, body type, family type, parent's economic status, political views and so on? If the answer is no, then having such discretion is contrary to social justice (though expelling more males than females will probably pass without comment; everything else will draw protest). The theory of having a massively beurecratic process is that it removes personal discretion enough that the statistics should match, but of course it doesn't because the underlying liberal assumption that all social groups experience child behavioural problems at the same rate is unjustified nonsense. That assumption is also one of the sacred cows though, so if the supposedly impartial beurecratic process is still not disciplining equally across social groupings, far-left groups campaign to just ban suspension and explusion altogether.

Of course this is happening in parallel with conservative groups doing even stupider things such as the militarisation mentioned in the OP, ideological interference with science teaching and sex education, homeschooling as an excuse for religious indoctrination etc. SDN has had plenty of threads on those topics and sadly the net result is significant damage to the US educational system, the nature of which varies wildly depending on which political faction is in control of which area.

[Simon_Jester]

And what do you think the odds are of that happening? Especially where it's a mental health issue rather than something physical, and you've got every reactionary old fool who hasn't had a new idea since the Seventies saying this could all be solved with a few whippings so why waste money on the 'disruptive' kids. At best the 5% of nigh-unteachables would just end up getting warehoused somewhere until they were old enough to drop out.

Maybe that's no worse for them than what they're already getting in mainstream education, and better for the 95% who aren't beyond salvage. But let's not kid ourselves about that 5%'s prospects in 'special schools'.

For one, it isn't going to be that long until said reactionary old fools are dead or retired at least, and the dominant trends in education are people who were trained in the '80s and later.

For another, I'm not bothering to talk about what is politically realistic. I'm talking about what should happen. Now, if you want me to acknowledge political realities I will- but the reality is we NEED functioning schools, it is a vital thing that we cannot afford to do without. And children who have behavioral problems (some caused by disabilities, some not) which do not have a straightforward 'cure' are not something we can put in a functioning school, unless that school is quite different from a normal school.

Since we have to have functioning schools, and putting people with serious behavior problems into such a school breaks them, we cannot do that. Not if we actually want anyone to learn anything.

I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make, but it is fundamentally at odds with both diagnostics and social trends. You are trying to say 'bad behaviour and mental disabilities are completely separate things'...

Actually, no, not so much.

A lot of the worst-behaved children behave badly because they are mentally ill. The point is that there's a fundamental difference between a mental illness that makes you behave badly, a learning disability that makes it harder for you to learn, and a physical disability that doesn't do anything to your brain directly but cuts off some of your options for physical or sensory activity.

A learning disability or a physical disability we can work around in a mainstream school, with a few exceptions (like deaf kids who need a sign language interpreter and who MAY well do better in a dedicated school with a teacher who knows sign themselves).

A disability that seriously affects behavior is a whole different ball game. Unless it can be treated in such a way that the symptoms are relieved, such a disability has negative consequences not only for the education of that one child, but for the education of other children in the same area. At least, it has this result unless specific measures are taken. And it is not practical to take those measures in the same building where the generic kids are being educated.

Some of the children who behave badly are mentally ill. Some of them are NOT mentally ill, they've just made a conscious decision (which they consider informed) to do things that are incompatible with functioning in mainstream society. Either way, if the problem with their behavior cannot be 'abated' or 'neutralized' or otherwise prevented from causing trouble in a mainstream school, the only way to keep them in a mainstream school is to resign yourself to never actually producing good educational outcomes in that school.

There are a lot of ways to 'abate' or 'neutralize' or whatever. But one unifying feature is that they all involve using up a lot of man-hours (which means hiring more staff, or accepting reduced man-hours devoted to the large majority of children, which is how you end up never producing good outcomes).

Now, all this I've already said, but I'm trying to spell out my position explicitly here.

However the trend is to increasingly attribute bad behaviour to 'emotional disabilities', direct racial discrimination, bad home environment due to indirect racial discrimination, bad home environment due to economic inequality, really anything other than personal responsibility of the child or the parents. Parents are unwilling to be told otherwise and are empowered to sue if the school tries to tell them anyway. Naturally the result of that is requiring a huge paper trail to stave off the possible social objections and legal challenges to expelling a student, and even when that works in individual cases schools are still pressured to do it less often.

I am quite aware of this. I am intimately aware of this, because I am living smack dab in the middle of it. I can name the forms on that paper trail and the acronyms of the staff who navigate it.

I'm not talking about the politics, I'm talking about the reality; figuring out how to compromise between the reality and the politics is a separate conversation.

Imagine that you and all your fellow teachers did have complete personal discretion to expel any student you judged too disruptive. Would you do so in a perfectly representative fashion across disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, body type, family type, parent's economic status, political views and so on? If the answer is no...

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a paper trail... what I'm saying is that it needs to be used, and to be usable.

Perhaps there should be some district-level official from outside the school who wanders around doing literally nothing but evaluating expulsion cases. Perhaps we should have everything that takes place in the schools on closed-circuit video camera so said official can watch what the child actually does all day. I don't know. I'm throwing ideas at a wall here.

The key point is that, bluntly and simply, if you do not weed your garden, it will not produce good fruit. If a child is bound to act like a weed, they need to be, ideally, transplanted to a place where they can make something of themselves... but they definitely need to be removed from the garden they now occupy.

[Starglider]

Now, all this I've already said, but I'm trying to spell out my position explicitly here.

Ok. It's a sane and sensible position that agrees with both your personal expert experience, statistical research (when looking at the whole population not just the special needs subset) and basic common sense.

I'm not talking about the politics, I'm talking about the reality; figuring out how to compromise between the reality and the politics is a separate conversation.

But the former is pissing in the wind without the later. The challenge is, how can you phrase your sensible position in terms that make it politically acceptable to left-wing voters and policy makers? The conservative tendency to over-exclude is less of a problem because of how far the pendulum has swung towards mainstreaming.

Perhaps there should be some district-level official from outside the school who wanders around doing literally nothing but evaluating expulsion cases.

Here is a eminently practical suggestion. The only problems I can think of is the likely very high burnout rate (would you want that job?), and the tendency in the USA to elect these kind of positions where expertise is much more relevant than popularity.

Perhaps we should have everything that takes place in the schools on closed-circuit video camera so said official can watch what the child actually does all day.

Pretty much all schools are already going down this route, as the costs of doing so become trivial. Of course, some teachers object to constant surveillence, but this will be the norm for all workplaces soon.

If a child is bound to act like a weed, they need to be, ideally, transplanted to a place where they can make something of themselves...

Declaring any child a 'weed' is opening yourself up to instant dismissal, endless attacks and general twitter lynch mobbing by the sizable fraction of society who cannot stand any hint of exclusion or negative judgement (at least against social justice approved groups, of which children as a whole are usually one).

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not talking about the politics, I'm talking about the reality; figuring out how to compromise between the reality and the politics is a separate conversation.

But the former is pissing in the wind without the later. The challenge is, how can you phrase your sensible position in terms that make it politically acceptable to left-wing voters and policy makers? The conservative tendency to over-exclude is less of a problem because of how far the pendulum has swung towards mainstreaming.

This isn't as hard as it sounds because what used to be called 'reform schools' are already a thing, we already have them on a considerable scale. We'd just need to have more of them, and to be more ready to transfer "emotionally disturbed children."

I think the key to this actually would be to mobilize the support of parents- because I'm not sure the average parent fully appreciates how much less their child learns as a result of specifically behavioral actions by other children in the same building.

Perhaps there should be some district-level official from outside the school who wanders around doing literally nothing but evaluating expulsion cases.

Here is a eminently practical suggestion. The only problems I can think of is the likely very high burnout rate (would you want that job?), and the tendency in the USA to elect these kind of positions where expertise is much more relevant than popularity.

Actually, this type of position is almost invariably unelected even in the US and the trend is actually away from elected school boards* even when that is arguably a bad thing. Plus this would be someone appointed by the district, it's a classic mid-ranking civil service position.

You could also rotate people in and out of it fairly frequently. Any school district of respectable size will have a variety of district-level positions with various levels of knowledge in not only teaching but also special education and what I will loosely term 'social worker' skills. There's no reason the same person has to have the Expulsion Vetter job for five years running.

*[There are reasons to favor elected school boards, among them that it makes the school board more accountable to the district's parents than they are to the state governor. Since the state governor has very little personal stake in the long-term solidity of a given district's education systems, while the parents do...]

Perhaps we should have everything that takes place in the schools on closed-circuit video camera so said official can watch what the child actually does all day.

Pretty much all schools are already going down this route, as the costs of doing so become trivial. Of course, some teachers object to constant surveillence, but this will be the norm for all workplaces soon.

Actually at this point the biggest obstacle may be bureaucratic ones interfering with actual use of the surveillance footage. At my school we have cameras and could get a lot more traction out of them, except that security only uses the take from them in the most serious incidents.

It would probably save a lot of time and be to our advantage to have an automated system that flags students who, say, spend an awfully long time loitering in the halls and talking to other kids "on the way to the bathroom."

If a child is bound to act like a weed, they need to be, ideally, transplanted to a place where they can make something of themselves...

Declaring any child a 'weed' is opening yourself up to instant dismissal, endless attacks and general twitter lynch mobbing by the sizable fraction of society who cannot stand any hint of exclusion or negative judgement (at least against social justice approved groups, of which children as a whole are usually one).

Yes, which is why I said what I said on a semi-anonymous web-board, in case you hadn't noticed.

Please, Starglider, I enjoy having actual conversations with you, but all the sarcastic invocations of left wing consensus and how stupid it gets are making me feel like I've abruptly been plunged into sewage every few paragraphs. It's getting tiresome.

[jwl]

Hang on, how is sdn "semi"-anonymous? We don't have to give our real names to mods or anything.

[Simon_Jester]

A person who knew enough about the environs I live and work in, and who had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything I've said on this website, might well be able to deduce my identity. Something similar is probably true of a lot of us long-standing posters.

It's at least possible that if there were someone else who just happened to be an SDN user and already knew me they could associate my comments with me.

But it's vanishingly unlikely.

Thus, 'semi'-anonymous, not 100% totally anonymous.

[Channel72]

Hang on, how is sdn "semi"-anonymous? We don't have to give our real names to mods or anything.

Everything on the Internet is, at most, "semi"-anonymous. Nothing short of an onion router is really fully anonymous (and not even that). Your IP address is available any time you make an HTTP request, and anyone who has access to the server logs or BBS admin panels can see it, which gives away your ISP and potentially your general location, which can then be cross-referenced via a search engine to see other websites with also have logs of the same IP address, etc., thus revealing more information about you.

The point is, you're really not that anonymous. So don't say any crazy shit online that could get you fired.

[Simon_Jester]

Although I'll tell anybody who asks in real life the basic nature of my position, which summarizes as:

"90% of the kids are, if not pure gold, at least okay. But there's that 5% or so who just will not fit into line behaviorally... And whatever we may need to do to help them get their education, putting them in a school with the rest of the kids isn't working."

I get a surprising amount of agreement.