Society is to blame for this, lots of parents are also being crushed.
We've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
I'm not debating whether or not some parents are able to do the right thing despite hardship or busy schedules. I'm sure there are thousands of people who will come out of the woodwork to tell me anecdotally that their single parent with every disadvantage would kick their ass if they looked at a teacher the wrong way.
What I'm aiming to say is that given more time and space a lot of people who aren't good parents could be better parents. Some of them would be. There used to be more space for this in society, and we can have more space for this now.
My mom received threats of rape and assault and direct violence against her vehicle as a teacher in los Angeles public schools. Turned her from a bleeding heart liberal into a die hard conservative.
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
One uncomfortable truth you should probably confront is the hostility of conservatives. Education and educators specifically have been targets of hate campaigns for the last 40 years.
People who went to college in the past 15 years saw something very different from others. Even Fox boomer news complaining about liberal colleges doesn't know the full extent of it.
For the most part they deserve it. My mom went in to teaching in her older years after a successful career in corporate America. She also thought teachers were being unfairly targeted, but after interacting with teachers and administrators, she believes the targeting is not enough. She thinks we should blame them more. By and large the normal people end up leaving the profession.
That the reason the kids are violent is because they come from cultures where violence is glorified. The problems causing violence are not societal ones as the progressives claim but ones innate to those particular subcultures.
I agree with the author, violence against educators has become normalized, but it's also been a fault on both sides. Both sides have lost respect for one another, and the reasons why depend a lot on politics and social issues. It almost mirrors the strife between citizens and cops: each side entrenching believing they "know what's best" and the other side be damned.
Workplace violence in general is becoming normalized. I think of healthcare workers and fastfood employees as well as teachers with this trend
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
When you use the term "workplace violence" it seems like this is something between co-workers or between boss and worker, when it's actually nothing like that.
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
Through my observations this has been completely normalized and with terrible pay as a reward. The justification is that it’s the students’ home life causing it and the teachers are there to fill in as a stable adult.
All our politicians go out of their way to claim that they don't like school shootings while guaranteeing that absolutely nothing can ever be done about it. Gun lovers are angry about it getting pointed out.
> The American Psychological Association completed three National surveys in which the findings reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying)
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
Imagine parents still parenting we wouldn't be in this shity situation. Most of you have kids as a lifestyle accesoire and externalize way to much of their upbringing and raising.
I remember James Talarico talking about how a very aggressive student completely transformed from an angry kid into a thriving one once he had the therapy and support. Of course republicans cut the funding and the therapy ended and he was eventually expelled.
Yeah its the same with prisoners. Obviously with the right targeted support they do very well at rehabilitation. Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost, and the cost of individual targeted support is only increasing. I'm sure with infinite money we could educate everybody to an amazing standard, and reform every prisoner. It is a shame that our wellbeing as a society has become an act of taxation budgeting.
Well if you look at how much prisons cost per day (median of 167$ / day in the US), it's quite obvious that therapy combined with confinement at home would be magnitudes cheaper... My personal guess: it's got to do with the fixation on reward / punishment that's so present in our societies.
> Unfortunately in our society it always comes down to an issue of cost
A ugly way to say that our society has limited resources.
Working hours especially are a zero-sum choice.
We require some way to choose between different usages of people's time. All choices are suboptimal. Our societies have slowly developed something that mostly works.
Money as a topic is distracting: instead think about how we allocate the lives (time) of people: especially when trading one person's life/work against another's rights.
This article so very poorly written, to the point that I wonder whether this is real or just AI generated. One whole sentence in the 2nd paragraph is repeated nearly verbatim in the 3rd. In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online. There is an Elizabeth Martin who comes up as a writer, but she is a script-writer. I am not sure that this is a real story. Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
The entire site is suspect, IMO. Pangram says that the entirety of TFA save the paragraph beginning "The American Psychological Association" is AI-generated.
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
Yes and nothing will be done with it because intentional or not, teachers being treated like shit from both ends furthers the goal of the people in charge, which is to dismantle the public school system completely, let rich kids go to private schools, and pipe poor kids straight into the serf class.
My understanding is that it’s normalized by administrators, and the public doesn’t think much about it. Another issue is that some schools have heavy police presence and prison-like rules. I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers.
It's society's problem regardless. Not expelling them just means the school itself is an incubator and breeder for antisocial behavior, and when they get out of school, they're still a problem.
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
Even if expelling students doesn't reform them: first, it protects other students; second, ex ante, it's an incentive to behave better in the first place. In fact there's quite good evidence that this works well. (You can check the evidence yourself, by asking ChatGPT "What's the evidence on expelling badly behaved students from schools?" or a similar question.)
They are already societies at large problem keeping them in the school degrades the function of the school for everyone while providing nothing of value to violent students.
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
If the behavior of children was meaningfully driven by career consequences that are a whole lifetime in the future (from their point of view), then parents would have a very easy job.
This is obviously not the case.
Violent behavior obviously has to be sanctioned and hopefully corrected, but excluding children from education is not especially helpful there and has insanely costly side-effects.
How will they become productive in school? Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need. School shouldn’t be that therapy, it degrades the other students’ education.
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
> Instead of wasting at home or on the streets, we could send them to the therapy they need.
I'm not advocating against this. But keeping their education timeline somewhat on track is highly preferrable in my view (inserting "fixed delinquents" into classes of younger children seems very undesirable to me).
> And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I honestly don't see how this could ever apply.
You have basically an average >$200k investment from the parents alone, plus all the direct/indirect subsidies starting with day care. Between low-wage working adult and "worthless person" there is at least a $50k/year swing in expected value to society every year they work, too.
Even if your success rate of "fixing" child delinquents is laughably low (say 15%), and costs you like $100k per attempt it is easily worth it; its not even close.
My high school principal once told me after expelling me for a few days, don't worry it's not a big deal. When I was your age I was permanently expelled from half the schools in the county.
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
You lost me at "incorrigible" and honestly just mentioning phrenology will get every non-moron to just dismiss any argument.
Do you believe that my argument is on a slippery slope towards eugenicist nonsense? I disagree on that and would argue the reverse; children are too valuable to immediately "discard" (by exclusion from education) because of delinquency.
I had assumed that your hyperbole was directed at my paragraph you quoted, and ment to insinuate that said paragraph was only a few exaggerations apart from eugenicist nonsense.
That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.
Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.
Probably because what this poster seems to be implying is a sort of inconvenient or unpopular truth. The kinds of things that there's no point actually saying out loud no matter how true they are, because they just make people angry and being explicit about it just paints a sort of target on you instead of actually driving anything towards a solution
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
I'll volunteer: in every single video of American teachers being assaulted I've glimpsed over the years, the assailants were black.
I'm sure someone could take their time and find a few rare instances of that not being the case (if they can manage to do it before I inevitably get -4 points [flagged][dead] for this callous sacrilege), to which I will preemptively reply that someone equally invested in the argument could as easily find ten videos confirming my anecdotal observation for each one you provide.
I am reminded of a former boss's niece who was a kindergarten teacher in a rural, very white district. No physical abuse, but she was very surprised the first time a kid started cussing her out.
It's not a race issue so much as a poverty and cultural issue. Any racial correlation is a proxy for those two things.
Sundar, Elon, and Zuck have my best interests in mind and at the forefront of their goals. Xi wants nothing more than the downfall of my glorious Western values. He’ll stop at nothing, even stooping so low as to violate the Anthropic terms of service.
Let's take aside the charged component of this and just suppose hypothetically that 100% of the assaulting students belonged to some subgroup. So what?
They may be 100% black, or 100% male, or something, but it's not like you can reasonably just say "So no males at our school." Regardless of whether you can find a subgroup who this belongs to with a very low specificity, you still need policies that tackle the behavior itself rather than trying to find some really weak predictor.
I'll bite. The importance is this: if you do not acknowledge a disproportion of a certain group committing the offenses, then you cannot enforce punishments without them seeming inequitable. If 90% of the suspensions of students come from a certain protected group, if you refuse to believe they are 90% of the offenders, we must roll back the policies because they are clearly bias.
Or the simpler way is to not acknowledge what group is committing offenses and not care what group is receiving punishment. People rightfully get suspicious when it's about groups.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Trump revoked the Obama/Biden which didn't allow schools punish black students unless they punished an equal amount of whites:
Saying you're too lazy to actually check if these videos are genuinely all black students, but someone could do it, and you know the answer even without checking somehow, isn't exactly convincing.
There just aren't enough blacks in the US for them to completely dominate any crime. To be at your imagined rate of 90% of instances being black, when only 13 or 14% of the population, would require a ridiculously high rate compared to every other group.
Because these things are for unfortunate reasons of historical happenstance, correlated with race. And if you let race into the discussion the evil people who peddled all this bad metrics and bad policy can use it to sow division and get everyone arguing with each other while they quietly dodge blame.
Preemptively jail minority and special ed children and make them work their way up from prison to school.
OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate, so idk if it’ll work.
Listen buddy, I make $350k programming. Obviously I’m an expert in something as simple as knowing what’s wrong with black kids and schools.
I get what you’re saying. Even if we already punish black kids at a higher rate, it’s not high enough, because they could be committing offenses at and even higher rate than that. And we can’t possibly know that, because everyone is afraid of the DEI man, so they only report white offenses in school.
That’s why my solution was brilliant, we side step all that by putting them in jail from the start, and they work their way out from first principles.
> My experience made something painfully clear: violence against educators has become so normalized that society now treats it as an expected part of teaching.
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Serious question. Do you know any teachers, especially any special education teachers? They all have stories about the violence they receive, and a lot of them.
Special Ed is a special case- those kids are specifically segregated because they cannot be taught at grade level or be expected to behave safely for their size.
To be fair, the precise reason violence against teachers is normalized is because liberalism (I.e. the supporting ideological structure of modern Western society) posits a theory of human psychology and sociology on the basis of the fact that this theory feels good.
It essentially just asserts a particular model of human psychology and sociology and the moral structure of the universe and also makes discussion about its assumptions impossible.
The fundamental tenet of liberalism being that people are basically good and any sort of bad behavior from someone is the fault of a societal failing inflicted upon them. So when a student attacks a teacher this is society failing the student, the teacher being an agent of society and therefore at least partial responsible for being attacked.
To question this is to question liberalism itself which no one, not even the people who do have a sense that this is wrong, are prepared or have the capacity to do.
I don’t know what you’re calling a strawman, but the point is that wxw’s response is simply an epitome of the underlying problem. He’s just engaging in political discourse completely in line with the ideological superstructure which is ultimately responsible for this very problem (violence against teachers being normalized). You can’t expect the typical person to be able to transcend that, hence “to be fair”.
I'd modify this take: modern (not classic) liberalism was meant as a commitment, not as a truth. Something collectively agreed on as good, valuable and important, as opposed to something as true like the "sky is blue".
The issue, as I think history will judge it, is the truth that precedes liberalism has been "spent" or forgotten. In the absence of the "why", commitment became the truth and that becomes the perception/prism/the water on the way people see themselves, others, the world, etc. From there, as you said, the logic proceeds mechanically (fact: kids are blank slates, results: parents, teachers, environment are to blamed[1]). Because we can't reason our way out of the truth even if our senses and experiences are screaming at us to stop.
It is a consuming, comfortable and above all, reasonable truth, held all the more tightly because the alternatives are seen as unreasonable. In this way, I don't fault modern liberalism for being a stopgap measure.
What you’re describing is basically a people + a covenant + a system of law. That is basically the structure of the Jews, the covenant they have with G-d, and the Torah.
The question is then to what extend that particular system is an accurate reflection of reality, and to answer that question you would have the analyze the delta between them, both in terms of how it was initially conceived vs how it evolved.
In the case of the US, at a very basic level for example the founders did not envision the US as a multiracial society or that everyone, including non-landowners could vote. Also that the US constitution itself looks very different today in terms of its amendments and more importantly the case law and jurisprudence around constitutional law which is de facto the constitution of the US. I don’t mean that these are right or wrong necessarily, just that the initial conception is very different.
Basically I think you are right but that also the basic premise of liberalism and the liberal system even in its initial conception is flawed and therefore doomed to fail.
I do think fundamentally liberalism does assert a view of human psychology and sociology that assumes that properly organizing and orienting the human mind is at least 3 orders of magnitude easier than it really is. If you actually study anthropology, like the anthropological studies that were done in the 19th century and if you study depth psychology which heavily makes use of those anthropological studies, you find a very terrifying and very chaotic and complex picture of the human psyche, as revealed in the religions, mythologies, and rites of pre-civilization peoples which liberalism has virtually absolutely no awareness of.
To be fair, liberalism says none of these things. People that call themselves liberal but are not, do often believe in these things, but they don't vote for liberals anymore so its a moot point.
I've heard a lot of stories like that, where the teacher gets the short end of the stick and the student gets 0 consequences because of age. At the same time, the article looks like AI writing, so I backed out.
"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
> but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
If it has gotten to a jury, it has already taken a significant amount of time and resources from the district and the teacher.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
That is a problem but it’s definitely not the root. The root is our increasingly high tolerance for violence, especially in schools. We should also stop shying away from the gendered aspects of the thing: this is done by boys and men FAR more than girls and women. We just don’t like to talk about it.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
The education profession in the United States has become a black hole that gives people who don’t plan the illusion of a career.
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
It's not like the parents are wrong. But it's a structural issue, a product of the way schools are set up, and not of the actions of a given staff/faculty member.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.
Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.
My wife works for a school system that at one point had the following proclamation handed down:
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 50.8 ms ] threadWe've cut the system down to the bone to fit the shape of two full-time employed parents, "women should be able to have careers too" has been perverted into some monkey's paw outcome.
Somehow a 40 hour workweek supporting a family turned into two 40 hour workweeks supporting the same family instead of two 20 hour workweeks.
We've let our productivity be stolen from us and relationships of many different forms have suffered as a result.
What I'm aiming to say is that given more time and space a lot of people who aren't good parents could be better parents. Some of them would be. There used to be more space for this in society, and we can have more space for this now.
Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths
The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
It is violence from the public directed at people who are in their workplace. The employer should have no involvement in it, except for helping file police reports and providing the police with evidence.
>nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work
The "at work" part is redundant. Put a period after the word abuse.
This is at a tipping point.
https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic.
And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back.
And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word!
And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark.
I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery.
Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x2PsFWrwCDI
I know its a single data point, but I think those situations would happen a lot less if students had access to the right support.
A ugly way to say that our society has limited resources.
Working hours especially are a zero-sum choice.
We require some way to choose between different usages of people's time. All choices are suboptimal. Our societies have slowly developed something that mostly works.
Money as a topic is distracting: instead think about how we allocate the lives (time) of people: especially when trading one person's life/work against another's rights.
Buddy, it's a magazine for teachers - it's not a piece for the NY Times.
>In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online
Elizabeth Martin is a common name, there are many. She has 1 other article on this website about the same topic from 6+ months ago. This is probably an issue that is important to her and has no other reason to write articles.
>Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?
Are you skeptical that teachers are being assaulted by students? What exactly are you skeptical of?
just sit kids in front of well written books and the job is done.
Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.
These schools certainly aren't reforming misbehaving students.
You are just pushing the problem down the road if you have an increasing number of violent kids and expel them all from school-- how are they ever going to become productive members of society? You just end up with society either paying for them being in prison, subsidizing them (because uneducated and unmotivated labor is close to worthless) or paying to literally clean up their shit because you basically routed them into a "careeer" as homeless person.
If parenting standards have slipped so much that violence in schools becomes a significant problem, you need to either fix this by getting the parents to do better or by having the education system itself patch those deficits; any other "simple solution" is just gonna result in immense costs to your whole society that compound for decades.
By learning, for likely the first time in their lives, that actions have consequences.
This is obviously not the case.
Violent behavior obviously has to be sanctioned and hopefully corrected, but excluding children from education is not especially helpful there and has insanely costly side-effects.
And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I'm not advocating against this. But keeping their education timeline somewhat on track is highly preferrable in my view (inserting "fixed delinquents" into classes of younger children seems very undesirable to me).
> And maybe subsidizing them is the cheapest outcome: better we give them a small amount of money and get them to leave us alone, than spend more trying and failing to get them into schools, the workforce, or prison.
I honestly don't see how this could ever apply.
You have basically an average >$200k investment from the parents alone, plus all the direct/indirect subsidies starting with day care. Between low-wage working adult and "worthless person" there is at least a $50k/year swing in expected value to society every year they work, too.
Even if your success rate of "fixing" child delinquents is laughably low (say 15%), and costs you like $100k per attempt it is easily worth it; its not even close.
Expulsions are not a sentence to prison. There are other schools. The objective is not to correct the behavior of the violent minority but to protect the rest of the student body and educators.
The expelled student will eventually learn to tone down their behavior, they don't need to become saints or model students just to stop hitting people.
That's how all other organizations work in the world, try hitting a waiter and then returning to the same restaurant. Why would hitting a teacher be different?
Some neofascists like eugenicist talking points?
You lost me at "incorrigible" and honestly just mentioning phrenology will get every non-moron to just dismiss any argument.
Do you believe that my argument is on a slippery slope towards eugenicist nonsense? I disagree on that and would argue the reverse; children are too valuable to immediately "discard" (by exclusion from education) because of delinquency.
I had assumed that your hyperbole was directed at my paragraph you quoted, and ment to insinuate that said paragraph was only a few exaggerations apart from eugenicist nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.
Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.
Sounds racist. And exactly the way people want it.
"weird" is two years ago. Time to update your firmware.
We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.
I'm sure someone could take their time and find a few rare instances of that not being the case (if they can manage to do it before I inevitably get -4 points [flagged][dead] for this callous sacrilege), to which I will preemptively reply that someone equally invested in the argument could as easily find ten videos confirming my anecdotal observation for each one you provide.
It's not a race issue so much as a poverty and cultural issue. Any racial correlation is a proxy for those two things.
Yeah, no.
Let's take aside the charged component of this and just suppose hypothetically that 100% of the assaulting students belonged to some subgroup. So what?
They may be 100% black, or 100% male, or something, but it's not like you can reasonably just say "So no males at our school." Regardless of whether you can find a subgroup who this belongs to with a very low specificity, you still need policies that tackle the behavior itself rather than trying to find some really weak predictor.
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/education-department-...
There just aren't enough blacks in the US for them to completely dominate any crime. To be at your imagined rate of 90% of instances being black, when only 13 or 14% of the population, would require a ridiculously high rate compared to every other group.
OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate, so idk if it’ll work.
I get what you’re saying. Even if we already punish black kids at a higher rate, it’s not high enough, because they could be committing offenses at and even higher rate than that. And we can’t possibly know that, because everyone is afraid of the DEI man, so they only report white offenses in school.
That’s why my solution was brilliant, we side step all that by putting them in jail from the start, and they work their way out from first principles.
I don’t think this is normalized at all.
Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.
Oh good, wxw disagrees. They've supplied zero supporting arguments, making discussion impossible, but at least Hacker news knows wxw's position.
It essentially just asserts a particular model of human psychology and sociology and the moral structure of the universe and also makes discussion about its assumptions impossible.
The fundamental tenet of liberalism being that people are basically good and any sort of bad behavior from someone is the fault of a societal failing inflicted upon them. So when a student attacks a teacher this is society failing the student, the teacher being an agent of society and therefore at least partial responsible for being attacked.
To question this is to question liberalism itself which no one, not even the people who do have a sense that this is wrong, are prepared or have the capacity to do.
Opening with “to be fair” doesn’t make a straw man fair.
The issue, as I think history will judge it, is the truth that precedes liberalism has been "spent" or forgotten. In the absence of the "why", commitment became the truth and that becomes the perception/prism/the water on the way people see themselves, others, the world, etc. From there, as you said, the logic proceeds mechanically (fact: kids are blank slates, results: parents, teachers, environment are to blamed[1]). Because we can't reason our way out of the truth even if our senses and experiences are screaming at us to stop.
It is a consuming, comfortable and above all, reasonable truth, held all the more tightly because the alternatives are seen as unreasonable. In this way, I don't fault modern liberalism for being a stopgap measure.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226329
The question is then to what extend that particular system is an accurate reflection of reality, and to answer that question you would have the analyze the delta between them, both in terms of how it was initially conceived vs how it evolved.
In the case of the US, at a very basic level for example the founders did not envision the US as a multiracial society or that everyone, including non-landowners could vote. Also that the US constitution itself looks very different today in terms of its amendments and more importantly the case law and jurisprudence around constitutional law which is de facto the constitution of the US. I don’t mean that these are right or wrong necessarily, just that the initial conception is very different.
Basically I think you are right but that also the basic premise of liberalism and the liberal system even in its initial conception is flawed and therefore doomed to fail.
I do think fundamentally liberalism does assert a view of human psychology and sociology that assumes that properly organizing and orienting the human mind is at least 3 orders of magnitude easier than it really is. If you actually study anthropology, like the anthropological studies that were done in the 19th century and if you study depth psychology which heavily makes use of those anthropological studies, you find a very terrifying and very chaotic and complex picture of the human psyche, as revealed in the religions, mythologies, and rites of pre-civilization peoples which liberalism has virtually absolutely no awareness of.
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.
Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution.
You know, ==your budgets are your values==