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There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP.
Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)?
Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.
This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive.
These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks.
Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.
- The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings.
- No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering).
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I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky.
Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway.
But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.
They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.
There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.
See here's the thing. Not they don't. They forfeit that right by being violent and disruptive.
Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that.
I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere.
But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...
When I judge an educational institution I could not care less why some child being significantly disruptive is tolerated, even slightly. That institution simply becomes a non starter for a place I might send my children.
Of course parents who don't care about such things, or don't have the luxury of being able to choose, would accept such things. As would those who themselves have 'problem children.' Now think about what this does to the quality of that institution over time.
* Tossing around hot potato kids doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Concentrating the proportion of kids interfering with normal income families by removing all the high-income kids from the school doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Letting people choose to send their kids to charters while all the kids of low-involvement parents are still stuck in a situation with a concentrated proportion of problems doesn't either.
Unfortunately there are a several things at play:
* Increased availability of specialized, non-mainstream resources for moderate+ (moderate is pretty severe most of the time IMO) kiddos, gen pop behavior interventions, etc.
* Better general welfare for parents (often unstable/low income ones).
* More push back from districts when parents w/ lawyers demand stuff that's bad for the rest of the classroom.
* Teachers quality needs improving. (Many reasons.)
IMO institutional quality is purposefully damaged by people who hate paying taxes or supporting the general welfare - public schools are basically being purposefully doomed in much the same way that Republicans say "government always bad" and then set out to make it fail on purpose to prove their point, only with a wider variety of motives at play. "I'm sending my kids to private school, why should I pay taxes for public schools?" is not an uncommon strain of thought.
It's a doom loop leading to societal regression into a stratified society unable to properly self-govern IMO.
