<p>The 5th grade? Huh?</p>
<p>Well then my son would be disposable to you. Because it was not until 7th grade did we finally surrender to the idea that my son might not be a troubled student or somehow not smart enough so we had him tested for ADHD. Our “D” student turned into a “B” student with medication and cognitive therapy.</p>
<p>Under your scenario by the 5th grade he would have been designated not worth the effort. Nice.</p>
<p>“whole classrooms of kids are failing because of the few troublemakers (who are distributed in each class of each grade in every public school) are holding the whole class back.”</p>
<p>What’s your evidence for this? Maybe it’s true, but I’ve never seen a study showing that when you remove a few troublemakers from the classroom, everyone else’s performance improves. Especially in schools where everyone is disadvantaged.</p>
<p>“Hanna…I think another question is, At what age do you forbid children to disrupt the learning of others?”</p>
<p>Severe disruption cannot be allowed at any age. If the child has problems so serious that others can’t learn, then that child may need a special class, special school, or even special home placement. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a 10-year-old who should be allowed to make life-altering decisions for himself. If he’s truly unable to control himself, that’s a disability and not his fault. If he’s just never learned to do so, then that’s a failure of the adults who were supposed to teach him. The consequence for a child’s misbehavior should never be denying the child an education.</p>
<p>^I am not talking about misbehavior. The current system of education is one of inclusion which in a moral sense I agree with, but when the impact is too great on any number of very bright kids in the class I also feel that something is very wrong. I do believe that we need to have classes that seperate kids according to their abilities as we did years ago. Our current system of education is not promoting the idea of excellence for the very bright kids. The special needs kids are getting far better services than most kids who have been identified as being very intelligent. There has been such a shift in education in the past twenty years and I just don’t buy into the whole inclusive thing.</p>
<p>I believe public schools are absolutely broken, maybe on purpose. (John Taylor Gatto Dumbing us Down) and used to think that neighborhood parent run schools were the answer. But, of course, that only works when there are capable parents. Instead I suggest the majority of resources go to the public school trouble makers. The ones with interested and capable parents are going to be okay.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t underestimate the babysitting service public schools provide society. We have to do something with these kids. jmho</p>
<p>Actually the educational system will not be a long term problem, one way or another.</p>
<p>If we let it decline past the point of producing sufficient numbers of people able to use modern weapon and manufacturing systems, some other nation will walk in and force their way of doing things on what used to be the US.</p>
<p>Many of you have heard this from me before. Epitaph for America;</p>
<p>THEY GOT STUPID</p>
<p>“If we let it decline past the point of producing sufficient numbers of people able to use modern weapon and manufacturing systems”</p>
<p>Dropping kids from the educational system at age 10 if they aren’t interested in school doesn’t seem like a good way to prevent this from happening.</p>
<p>My take-away from Gatto’s book is that the public schools are doing exactly what they were intended to do: create a population that doesn’t question authority and is happy working on an assembly line (or equivalent) responding to the bells and whistles and directions that have become second nature since childhood. The smartest response to this may be trouble making.</p>
<p>I think the problem is believing our schools weren’t intended to create a “stupid” population.</p>
<p>Maybe I am wrong about the message of the book. I am a very slow product of public education.</p>
<p>edit: okay now I think I get it. We are finally too stupid to even be of use to the military industrial complex (how stupid is that??) and thus the reason for concern</p>
<p>We’ve got one “very bright” kid who could be accomodated in the public system, and one “special needs” kid who couldn’t be. Some kids will do fine in a classroom of 35+ students. Others need more personalized attention. I can’t blame our public school system for not being able to provide 12:1 student-to-teacher ratios, there’s simply not enough money for that. I also can’t blame the kid for not succeeding when, despite all her (and our) best efforts, the classroom model that works for 95% of her classmates doesn’t work for her. </p>
<p>We could cull kids from the publics. Or we could try some different teaching models. High-school-dropout-turned-successful-reporter Ta-Nehisi Coates did a great piece over the summer on New York City’s experiment with individual instruction in public schools. It’s just a pilot program now, which is a pity–if it was in place in our district, our family wouldn’t need to be putting one kid in private school.</p>
<p>[The</a> Littlest Schoolhouse - Magazine - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-littlest-schoolhouse/8132]The”>The Littlest Schoolhouse - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>The program sounds like straight-up Montessori to me. I was in a Montessori elementary school for nine years. I don’t think it’s a magic bullet for every child, but I do think it’s the best system anyone’s come up with.</p>
<p>Montessori schools tend to be private with involved parents and small classes.</p>
<p>Put all kids in Montessori? We cannot afford to do that.</p>
<p>Computerized programs of learning may be the answer.</p>
<p>BigG, you really need to read the article if you haven’t done so already. Computerized Montessori is a pretty good description of the program.</p>
<p>Dropping kids at age 10 might help YOUR child learn better but what would those tens of thousands of ten year olds every year do to our economy? What type of financial and services drain would a class of permanently under educated/uneducated kids be on the government, and ultimately the rest of us, because there is not enough menial work for that many people to do on a regular basis for the continued flow of people being discarded at age 10.</p>
<p>You are talking of intentionally creating and perpetuating an underclass of people who would then procreate (unless you want to sterilize them too) and, since they are not educated, will raise uneducated children…sounds like a vicious cycle. </p>
<p>And you think the education system is a vicious cycle NOW? At least the way it is now there is the POSSIBILITY for under privileged and at risk kids to find a way out.</p>
<p>Children are entitled to an education that is appropriate for their individual needs. There are laws that state that and it is what we do in a civilized society. However there needs to be more appropriate settings that are not going to kill the tax payer. I wish I knew the answer because the system as is is crumbling.</p>
<p>Since we are bringing our own experiences into this- Nobody in our family is neurotypical- does that mean they are uneducable?
Hardly.
When the school system told us that they could not educate our gifted yet learning disabled child we found a private school that could.
It was very difficult even with excellent financial aid, but we felt we didn’t have a choice.
The reason given in the public school, was that she was not two years above in all subjects, so she did not qualify for gifted education ( despite 160iq), and she was not two grades * below* in all subjects so she did not qualify for special resources.
We did find an alternative school in the district that I felt would address those needs without labeling, however, it was so popular she never got in, despite applying every year for at least three years.</p>
<p>When her sister ( who did get into the alternative school) entered high school, she was two years below grade level in math ( tested). However, the school felt she excelled in history and she was enrolled in honors as well as the college track biology class.
She worked hard and utilized the extra support for math that this school offered and she made four years progress in two years and was able to enroll in chemistry for 11th grade ( in which she received an A).</p>
<p>But if you took her scores at the end of middle school, you would’nt have put her in the " college track".</p>
<p>Incidentally- while some students may go to college and some won’t- vocational jobs often require college level skills inc math & writing, so unless we are planning on a huge subset of voters who can’t earn enough working at walmart to afford a studio apt., we have to aim to educate everyone.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There’s a good reason for that. Very intelligent kids are capable of learning on their own and augmenting what they get at school. Maybe they won’t achieve their highest potential, as they might with better services, but they’ll still be successul. If the special needs kids don’t get the services, they don’t have any chance of being successful.</p>
<p>Individual, ancedotal evidence can be cited to support almost any position.</p>
<p>What makes sense for society as public policy and what can we afford?</p>
<p>Eliminating a few % of the worst troublemakers early on might make it possible for more disadvantaged kids to “make it”.</p>
<p>Again, it really doesn’t matter. If we don’t fix it, a successor society (i.e. conqueror)will.</p>
<p>OK, if you don’t like anecdotal evidence, where are the empirical studies supporting your point of view? I have missed the citations you posted in the thread.</p>
<p>Hanna, do you hear crickets cuz I do.</p>
<p>For college students;
[Coding</a> Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison](<a href=“http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-bad-apple-group-poison.html]Coding”>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-bad-apple-group-poison.html)
One could perhaps argue that children and adolescents are less suspectible to peer group effects.
Note: My typing skills are minimal for such but much of what I do is “computer programming”.</p>
<p>Children with bad home lives effect other children adversely;
<a href=“http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/domesticviolence.pdf[/url]”>http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/domesticviolence.pdf</a></p>
<p>Sacrifice the few to save the many? The effect of the “bad apples” seems to be real.</p>
<p>Would you care to cite studies showing that removal of disruptive individuals does not improve peer group interactions?
Most people consider it intuitively obvious that removal of problem individuals improves a group. That doesn’t mean its true but some things are “patently obvious to the meanest intelligence”.</p>
<p>Sorry to delay response to your posts.I do have a job and I had to call an exterminator for the crickets.</p>
<p>Home schooling seems to work very well indeed. It is the ultimate elimination of bad peer group influences.</p>
<p>Again, private and parochial school are able to dump problem students and work very well indeed.</p>
<p>Okay, cut loose the “bad” kids early on, to sanitize the classrooms for the rest.</p>
<p>Can’t you envision the discrimination litigation that would result from this policy? Haven’t you seen the differing graduation statistics by race?</p>