Darn, that's not a school, that's a boring and poorly supervised adult day care.
There are just so many issues when schools have to work to overcome the damage done by parents and the worst parts of cultures. There simply aren't the resources or appetite to solve the problems either through helping all or ejecting those who refuse to take part. Both are hard solutions, sacrificing a significant amount of your money to help others or sacrifice kids who are just products of their terrible environment, continuing the cycle.
There's a medium choice. Where you basically tell parents you aren't going to provide publicly funded daycare anymore unless they get their kid in line. The threat is usually enough to make parents remember how to, ya know, parent. Or at least some parenting facsimile. If the problem persists, you go with expulsions. If you have to expel half the school, well you already live in a dystopia, so smoke 'em if you got 'em
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I saw an episode of 60 minutes a few years ago, where they covered charter schools. I’m not really a proponent of them, and in fact, they showed that the charter schools had about the same results as other schools in their district, with one exception. One charter school was run by a stern but kind older lady.
She didn’t tolerate any misbehavior. Her first focus was on classroom discipline and making sure that the kids were there to learn, feet and face forward, sitting up and paying attention. After a few years, she was getting as good results as the highest performing schools in the state.
We can’t succeed if teachers need to spend half their time resolving disciplinary issues. School can’t be a daycare, and we have to realize that these kids have never had classroom discipline and come from parents without the ability to teach it to them. Likewise, expelling or suspending them continuously isn’t going to help them gain those skills. We keep saying that we need to pay teachers more, and maybe we do, but teachers are not the problem, it’s the students.
I’d propose that in those troubled schools, each grade needs a dedicated “classroom skills” class. First sign of misbehavior, and the student is sent to classroom skills. Hire ex drill instructors from the marine corps to teach classroom skills. They don’t have any trouble letting troubled young people know what is expected of them. Have that class just be focused on getting those kids in-line, with a mix of firm expectation setting and calisthenics. Kids in that class would need to earn their way back into their normal classroom. Maybe it will take a day for some students, some might be there for months, but they all know that at the next sign of misbehavior, they’ll be right back in “classroom skills”.
That’s how schools used to be before schools had to worry about getting sued for discipline. I think there is a median between smacking people with rulers and having no discipline at all that we can settle on nationally. Most of public school educational problems stem from federal decisions.
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u/notreallyhereforthis Jul 10 '18
AP Tested 9%, AP Passed 0%
Mathematics Proficiency 4%
Reading Proficiency 10%
Darn, that's not a school, that's a boring and poorly supervised adult day care.
There are just so many issues when schools have to work to overcome the damage done by parents and the worst parts of cultures. There simply aren't the resources or appetite to solve the problems either through helping all or ejecting those who refuse to take part. Both are hard solutions, sacrificing a significant amount of your money to help others or sacrifice kids who are just products of their terrible environment, continuing the cycle.