<p>The citation you posted was from a study of domestic violence victims and their children. So not only are the kids victimized by watching their parent suffer from a violent spouse, your solution to the issue of problem children is punish them for being born to a family which one or more of the people have anger control issues and violent tendencies? </p>
<p>What, in this situation, is EXACTLY the child’s fault? Instead of removing them from the public schools they might be better off being removed from their dangerous dysfunctional home. </p>
<p>Again, this scenario goes back to my point of parental choices having negative impact on the student. It’s not their fault and punishing them does not help them or the system. You might be able to filter your child from their exposure through high school but afterward they end up in the same society and even a bigger burden on the taxpayer if they have not been educated or rehabilitated properly.</p>
<p>You can run but you can’t hide from this problem.</p>
<p>A few pages back you said that your son would have been disposable if disruptive 5th graders were not allowed in school. Then you said that you made the decision in 7th to have your son tested, medicated, enter behavioral therapy, etc. Might you have made the decision 2 years earlier had it been the case that exiting him from school for his behavior was imminent? </p>
<p>As my husband (we are both teachers) says, nothing changes with student behavior until the parents are negatively impacted. Kids are disruptive, disrespectful, and parents are disinterested, but let a kid get kicked off the bus and require rides to and from school and it is a national tragedy. </p>
<p>At some point the teachers have to deal with the 28 kids in the classroom that ARE doing what they are supposed to do and protect them from the ones who are troubled, disinterested, etc. If we still had strong communities, with more parents in the classrooms to see how the neighbor kids act, perhaps social censure would kick in. As it is, the vast majority of parents are not there to back the teacher up and require good behavior, but are aiding and abetting their children in being disruptive. I had a parent yesterday who wanted me to change a grade on a blank paper because the child “had an answer in his head, he just didn’t write it down.” Seriously?</p>
<p>Mom, I would have but my husband resisted. He does not believe in drugging children and fought me for two years. I ended up having my son diagnosed and getting a prescription without my husband’s knowledge because I was so worried about the trajectory of his school performance. I gave him the meds for two months before I told my husband. When I did I showed him the progress reports and grade cards from before and after. He was angry at my secrecy but relieved to know that my son’s ‘problem’ was not something we couldn’t address. He’s a believer now.</p>
<p>So yes, ideally parents would come to this realization earlier but sometimes they can’t for a multitude of reasons. We had great insurance which covered doctors visits (took three doctors to get there) and expensive medication. And still, we have family members and friends who think we took the easy way out by drugging him. All I know is he’s happy to be doing better in school and doesn’t hate it anymore. He still struggles a bit but nothing like he would be if we had not gotten proper treatment.</p>
<p>If I had my way I think I would have had this diagnosis made in 4th grade but that was not to be. I live with the guilt of not putting my foot down sooner.</p>
<p>I picked the domestic violence study because it tries to be race neutral. </p>
<p>My interest lies not in punishing kids from bad homes but in preserving the learning environment for others.</p>
<p>It is sad that some kids cannot learn because of their home environment.</p>
<p>It is sad that some kids get communicable diseases. Generally it is not their fault.
Would you allow them to infect other kids?</p>
<p>Disorderly, disrespectful behavior is a communicable disease. Read the cited links.
If it cannot be cured promptly, it must be isolated promptly to protect other children.</p>
<p>The sooner, the better because the damage done is cumulative and can outlast the original disruptive influence.</p>
<p>Denise515,
I am suggesting we confront the problem head on.
What is being done now is “hiding” from the problem by pretending that what we are doing is working.</p>
<p>Having a huge interest in early education, I really like this thread. Thanks BigG!</p>
<p>My incoherent thoughts on public education: I think whether it is a right or privilege depends on what exactly we think schools are supposed to be doing. BigG proposes to help society as a whole (or is he more concerned about individual students?) by removing the troublemakers, which seemed to me an interesting proposal. I wonder what we see as the overall mission of public schools: education? if so, to what level? to be able to work in munitions factories? serve in the armed forces? to compete internationally in science/math/research? to have some basic concept of world history? to have some logical reasoning ability? to understand something about media manipulation? to be able to vote “intelligently”? to provide every child the (at least theoretical) opportunity to achieve the American Dream? to keep gangs of young people out of the workforce so they don’t compete with older workers? to keep them off the street? Do we have a clearly articulated goal for public education? Is it to produce a certain kind of citizen? If we have an idea of what the schools are supposed to do, is there realistically a way for them to accomplish that goal? </p>
<p>It has always been interesting to me that, at least in my limited experience, families whose children have attended prestigious prep schools for generations never talk about “gifted” or “highly gifted”</p>
<p>We don’t have ANY. The only reason the various governments are not broke is because the Federal Government can print money. The Wall Street bankers are trying to take that away by replacing the dollar with the renminbi.</p>
<p>OK, where do you propose to get funding? Take it from programs for disabled students? Cut gifted funding?</p>
<p>Public education is dying. People that can are flocking to home schooling, private and parochial schools , or simply moving to better school districts.</p>
<p>Some students will drop out. Sooner is cheaper and better than later.</p>
<p>Triage. Save those we can. Don’t waste a disproportinate share of resources on problem kids.</p>
<p>Of course we can do nothing but continue as is. The successor society will take care of things.</p>
<p>Not in my area (large metropolitan area) they aren’t. I know far more people who are pulling their kids out of private schools and putting them into publics, because they can’t afford the cost. Moving to better school districts means paying more for housing, and being able to sell one’s home–again, not happening. </p>
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<p>This is penny-wise and pound foolish. You are neglecting the long-term cost to us of having a larger uneducated population, not to mention having random kids roaming the streets during the school day. I agree that if a kid is disrupting the class so that the rest of the kids can’t learn, it’s better to remove him/her from the classroom. That doesn’t mean that they should drop out. Bad for them, bad for their families, bad for society. </p>
<p>You didn’t read that article I linked to, did you?</p>
<p>I agree with this if your definition of an educated public is one that unquestioningly follows authority and is comfortable with non-creative, busy-work jobs (not that there is anything wrong with that-- I’m the least creative person I know!) I don’t agree if you expect and want as many as possible graduates of public schools to have critical reasoning skills, or to be able to compete internationally in research. IMHO some (though not all) of our students with the greatest potential to help society with individual accomplishments are some of the antisocial troublemakers you would eliminate.</p>
<p>Also, I think it would create even a greater class divide than we already have, getting us even faster to the catastrophic times I am guessing (perhaps wrongly?) you are imagining.</p>
<p>Well if the economic woes in the country, thanks to endless war, are creating mindsets where we are willingly discarding kids and creating a permanent underclass then I’m VERY glad my kids are almost done with public schools. </p>
<p>I really fear for the kids who are still in elementary schools because of this mindset. Studies show that in times of economic woe and financial hardship that domestic abuse INCREASES as does drug and alcohol abuse. Thus, there will be more kids in line to be discarded to the permanent underclass which will then increase demand on resources and negatively impact the economy. Which will then create more economic woe and financial hardship…</p>
<p>you get the picture.</p>
<p>Talk about antisocial memes. Just wait until you have a large permanent class of under/unemployed people with no jobs and no way out. Problems relegated now to inner cities will be expanding to areas once immune.</p>
<p>Yes, we do have a too large portion of permanent under/unemployed already but they are there because they can’t make it in the system and not because the system is telling them they can’t make it.</p>
<p>Of course I may be wrong, but it looks like this is the view of someone most familar with middle class suburban public schools, where removing troublemakers might focus more attention on capable students and allow them more time for college prep work so they would have a better shot at the top colleges we are always talking about on this board … Schools where parents actually have the option for homeschooling, private or parochial schools.</p>
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<p>Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid
Jonathan Kozol/ Harper’s Magazine v.311, n.1864 1sep2005</p>
<p>Kozol has written extensively about what money does and doesn’t accomplish in various schools. A lot of people have been concerned for a lot of years about how poorly money is spent on public education. They think the problem is the system not the amount of money.</p>
<p>Some believe when adults label children, as troublemakers not worth any teacher’s time or as stellar students capable of great accomplishments, there is a tendency for children to live up to those labels. Robert Gardner, in the preface to his book Successful Intelligence tells a story from his early childhood illustrating this idea. I wish I could link to it, but I am not very computer educated.</p>
<p>Some, who believe in this Republican OM group, also think this group, by manipulating public education, intentionally created a citizenry too ignorant to be capable of voting in their own best interests, one that is suspicious of education and threatened by unfamiliar ideas. I admit this crosses over into conspiracy theorists whacky-land.</p>
<p>Forgive me for responding to this quote here but I don’t want to post on the Jesus thread and I think it ties back to education being a right or a privilege.</p>
<p>^^ however…
some time ago another poster on this board explained to me I didn’t really understand rights and privileges and I was convinced by her that was true, but even though I have been trying to figure it out ever since, I am pretty sure I still really don’t get it ;)</p>
<p>Exactly who should be put out of schools? Is it the kids who have no regard for learning but just seem to need a place to be or is it the kids who do not have college in their future and will most certainly work in a skilled labor type of job? The trouble maker title is a bit too vague.</p>