If that's the case, it seems like it would be a pretty easy problem to fix: allow schools to suspend/expel students who are repeatedly disruptive or violent in class. From a utilitarian perspective this would probably be a net win, in that whatever the disruptive students lost from being expelled would be more than made up for by what the students who actually wanted to learn gained from not having the disruptive students interrupting the learning process.
It's not just the disruptive students - you've got the special-ed students, and all the students that are what my mother (an elementary special-ed teacher) refers to as "dull-normals" - those who don't really have learning disabilities that would get them labeled, but are just not very smart (80-100 IQ). Then there are the ESL students, and all the other categories I can't think of at 3AM...
Public schools have to service all of these students, until they graduate, drop out, or age out.
Well there must be private schools somewhere that admit children of below-average intelligence, due to the profit to be had from rich parents with said children, so perhaps it would be instructive to look at how those schools handle it.
In the UK, I've seen richer parents simply send their children who didn't not meet private school's admissions and performance requirements to state school (the one I attended!) whilst their siblings passed the requirements and remained at the private school.
I remember two kids from primary school seemed to have disappeared and then reappeared a few months down the line from school year start. They didn't make the cut like their siblings. I think one of those kids, thinking back, was the son of the managing director of the company that is now TalkTalk pre-acquisition.
It's not. Private schools I've heard of and experienced have strong academic selection criteria on top of being incredibly expensive.
My son had funding for a time for nursery and was moved into the prep school. It was like seeing a foreign school. Class sizes were naturally smaller and I noted things such as their morning 'prayer', which went along the lines of "I vow to work hard today in everything I do", where as my morning prayer in an RC school was the Our Father.
I also saw kids in my sons class who, at 3 years old, were able to compute divisions in their head and articulate in a way that I've never seen a child that age speak.
These places are optimised for kids who have a lot of money backing them up and the brain power to boot. In some respects, their parents ability to simply hire help to ensure their kids do well academically must be noted too.
Not exactly, you've not demonstrated that the private schools have any incentive to even try. They can cream off the healthy, docile and rich and make money from that, so why should they accept any more challenge than that? After all, once you've done the initial skim, you don't actually need to be good educationalists, the filter has done all the work for you, and every kid you reject makes your competition look worse.
Plus the research shows private schools don't actually help you educationally, so they (like charter schools) must actually be worse at their jobs once you factor in the head start that selection gives them.
As a nation, we've decided that every child should be educated. I think that's a good goal to have, although there may be a more efficient way to do it. We kind of have a system in place with magnet schools and selective enrollment, but that's for high school.
>allow schools to suspend/expel students who are repeatedly disruptive or violent in class
I think education and patience are helpful in teaching kids to vent their frustrations in more productive ways, so depriving them of those things seems likely to make it a vicious cycle.
>As a nation, we've decided that every child should be educated.
The key point is that the current approach is failing at this. It's possible that by giving up on the really hard cases and focusing more on the average cases, it would be possible to educate more children than the current approach achieves. Better to reach for a good outcome and succeed than to reach for a perfect outcome and fail, so to speak.
>I think education and patience are helpful in teaching kids to vent their frustrations in more productive ways, so depriving them of those things seems likely to make it a vicious cycle.
The problem is that spending time in school doesn't necessarily equal education, especially for the most difficult students. As a hypothetical, if it could be known that a particular student is 99% likely not to gain anything from being forced to spend the next 3 years in a classroom, and it's also known that this student harasses other students, reducing their ability to benefit from learning, would the benefit of keeping this student in class on the 1% chance they'd gain something outweigh the downsides?
No one is very well served by the current system, I would agree. But if you start thrusting out the bottom end of students without even the increasingly value-less credential of a high school diploma, you're effectively consigning them to the prison system for life. With so many under-employed liberal arts college grads and aged-out boomers sucking up the low-end jobs, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find jobs for those who have only high school diploma, let alone those who don't have even that thin sheet of paper to their name.
>But if you start thrusting out the bottom end of students without even the increasingly value-less credential of a high school diploma, you're effectively consigning them to the prison system for life.
This wouldn't be a case with something like a basic income system. Or, the alternative more politically palatable to conservatives: make-work programs. Where people are paid to do work that, while not necessarily economically productive, nevertheless gives them the psychological satisfaction of feeling like they're working and contributing to society, and possibly helps them develop the discipline required to pursue further education in future.
Every kid needs to study and learn. But not every kid needs to study and learn the same things the same way. I believe until we figure that out we are going to have the same problems.
