How My School and District Failed its Students

My solution? Make attendance voluntary by abolishing truancy laws. Disruptive students don't want to be there, and forcing them to go doesn't teach them anything.<p>Human beings can't be forced to think. This runs absolutely counter to all kinds of notions and traditions, but it's how nature is. Wishing, legislating and expecting that facts be otherwise won't work any better here than it would in the physical sciences (imagine how you might react to such a stance against thermodynamics or the inverse square law).<p>Edit: if you disagree, say <i>why</i> instead of just voting me down.

I don't agree with the notion that classroom discipline is the teacher's responsibility. If a child needs discipline, the child should be sent away to receive it. A teacher should be responsible for teaching, period.<p>Also, if a child commits a crime in school (vandalism, verbal assault, physical assault, disturbing the peace) and is found to be a threat to the learning environment then they should be suspended. It's simply a matter of giving some power back to the authorities. Right now the children know that the teachers are their bitches. Until that changes the fight can't be won. Especially in children who have a gang member mentality.

If you want a more visceral account, "The Corner" by David Simon is a non-fiction chronicle of the Baltimore drug culture's effect on the people who live in it. Simon spent about year (~1993) following and interviewing the people who lived on a specific drug corner in Baltimore; one of those he followed was a high-school-age kid whose description is much like this teacher's description of M.W.<p>There's also an HBO miniseries based on it (which I haven't watched, so I can't vouch), and Season 4 of The Wire is partially about a Baltimore inner-city school (The Wire is fantastic). Simon also spent a year embedded with the Baltimore police homicide division, which became a book, a TV serial (called Homicide), and informed much of The Wire.<p>Some people are commenting that the solution to the problems at these schools is to completely give up on the troublemakers; I don't think it would be that clear-cut for you after you read or watch these. The kids you give up on are the ones lost to the hardcore drug culture forever. Those same kids are the ones that perpetuate the problem- there's a terrible feedback loop going on.

HN seems to have decided I've commented too much in this discussion, and that's probably true, but I want to make one more post to clarify my views before I leave this debate for others to carry forward.<p>In response to jmm, who suggests that by allowing kids to decide freely whether to go to school I am advocating, as he says, throwing some of them overboard: I really don't feel that that's an accurate description of my feelings about this topic. I think that kids are people, not slaves of the state or of their parents. I am not advocating simply abandoning kids who are not interested in attending school; instead, I'd like to see a variety of educational, vocational, and artistic services available for them, free of charge, which they can take advantage of whenever THEY come to the conclusion that they want to do so. I'd like those services to be easy to access, with no red tape involved, and I'd like them to be well publicized and well known within the community.<p>I simply don't understand how allowing kids the freedom to make their own decisions about what they want to learn and when they want to learn it can be anything but a good thing. Must everyone be subject to coercion and force from the earliest ages? Do we have to crush the genuine love of learning most children are born with under the boot of an oppressive school environment they have no choice but to be a part of?<p>My views on this topic are derived in part from my own experience, but they have also been shaped a great deal by the writings of John Holt. For those who are interested, I'd recommend How Children Fail as a great book to start with; it has really been influential in my thinking about education and the nature of school.

What I don't understand about all this is why there isn't a way to use these <i>clearly failing</i> schools for experiments in alternative styles of education. Say what you will about things like voluntary attendance, but when your school is descending into anarchy, it just seems like there's too little to lose not to go out on a limb.<p>The school my mom used to work at was rampant with corruption and ineptitude. It was taken over by the state BOE and three years later, nothing has changed. When the school falls into dire straits, why not offer it up as a test case for passionate researchers?

Sounds to me like the result of a lack of accountability. I see the same thing in many areas of the public sector in my country where responsibility is deferred in an infinite loop.<p>It's as frustrating to the those who use the system as to those who work in it.

I come from a family of educators &#38; private school owners, and if a teacher cannot handle a disruptive class, then we change the teacher. Children are ALWAYS disruptive. It's the natural state of things. Some teachers can solve the problem, and some can't. If a teacher cannot solve the problem, it's not the fault of the Government, or the Community, or the Principal or the Students. It's the fault of the teacher. It's her job to learn the techniques to handle such situations.<p>In our private schools, we simply swap out the teachers. In such schools where the teacher cannot be changed, one can ask an assistant to sit in, or send the teacher on more training courses.<p>A teacher is to train students, and part of that is making the students respect education enough to sit down and listen. If the teacher can't do that, then sorry, but that's not a good teacher. If the teacher realises that a particular class constellation does not work, then he or she should do something about it, not blame an invisible 'system'.

I'll bet that one of the reasons that children in honors courses (AP, IB, etc.) do better and learn more than children in regular courses has nothing to do with the curriculum or the teachers of those courses, but is just due to the fact that they're surrounded by other motivated students and there aren't any disruptive students.

PARENTING.<p>The root cause in all of these issues is parenting. If the parents don't bother to care about their kid's education, it's already lost. The education and school system is part of the problem, but you can trace the child's inability to learn back to the parents.<p>1) Parents dont care about the child's learning<p>2) The child realizes the parents dont care and so they mess around in class<p>3) Teacher and school has no authority to really enforce learning. Meaning, you can assign homework, you can punish them for not doing them, but beyond that, you can't force them to sit down to read and learn.<p>4) Student fails.<p>5) Parent is up set at the school system so they complain to the principle, and the school district<p>6) School district pressures principle, principle pressures teacher to water down the curriculum<p>7) FAILURE of the entire system

As someone from Kansas City, the alleged ineptitude of the school district in KCMO is widely-known. In fact, I would say the problems with the school district impacted the decision of my wife and I more than any other to buy a house across the state line in Kansas. We both continued to work in KCMO, we just knew we couldn't live there once we have children.

The solution is simple - increase teacher salaries and have more computers in schools. It's worked for the last 30years

I think the most immediately obvious solution to the problem of disruptive students is to separate them from the other students, and put them into a separate class. However, someone who enters that class at age 10 isn't going to learn anything, as the entire class is full of disruptive students, and they'll be stuck in the disruptive class for the rest of their schooling, after which they'll be released into society with few useful skills and a lot of problems. Also, very few good teachers will voluntarily work with the disruptive class.<p>One solution is to create a separate school with an educational model tailored to the problem, such as a military academy. This only works if there is a high enough population density to fill that school, the educational model actually works, and parents are willing to admit the problem and send their kids to that school.<p>There are a lot of disruptive students who are best served by going through the normal school system with a moderate amount of discipline when they act up. Many of these kids don't want to be in school, and would prefer to be at home playing video games, or barring that, in an easy, low-effort class. Allowing these kids to skip school, take easy classes, or putting them in a separate system risks allowing them to jeopardize their own future because of the impatience and short-term thinking common to almost all teenagers.

I think this is where all the zero tolerance policies come from. If there is any disciplinary decision that is made where there is discretion by an administrator, there is an opportunity for a lawsuit. With zero tolerance, you remove discretion so you avoid lawsuits at the expense of unnecessarily disciplining students.

Honestly, looking back at myself in highschool, I was a little shithead. I became rebellious at a pretty early age due to my school district having incredibly strict policies, mostly because it was run by fundamentalists. The class where I believed I was the biggest cunt was my chemistry class, where my teacher would often push his evangelical beliefs into the curriculum : Earth is 6000 years old, evolution is a myth, stars are only there to corrupt people into evil, etc. The list goes on.<p>I'd often interrupt class and get into arguments with him because I called him out on this bullshit pretty regularly and frankly I just couldn't take him seriously even at that age. This was in a public school system in a small city in Texas, so I suppose it's kind of expected.

I agree with the author. The problem that's unstated here is that schools have become state run low security prisons for children and adolescents. The idea that academic acheivements are the current focus of public schools is false. It's compliance training.

I was talking to an Indian friend in grad school when he explained why schools in India were better than those in the U.S. He said it had to do with how our kids learned the alphabet with a song. He learned it by memory forward and backward. He later mentioned how a teacher in India might cane a child who didn't pay attention. That's when I became enlightened.

The elephant in the room was race. I'd bet 90% of the problems were caused by kids of a particular race. Unfortunately many public discussions involving it devolve into demonization of the messenger or blame gaming.<p>My second point was that I suspect the easiest fix would be to adopt a zero tolerance policy or three-strikes-then-expelled. The harder solution, though it is better in the long term, is to do something that ensures that the parents take more responsibility and make better life choices and set a better example both for their own kids and their neighborhoods. Ultimately, solving this is not rocket science. Folks are just choosing, explicitly or implicitly, to not implement them. They then reap what they sow.<p>My third point is that it may be that some percentage of kids can never be made to behave properly (short of brain surgery or cognitive drug therapy, for example) and so we may have to adjust our system to accomodate. Arguably, we already have. If a child misbehaves enough they tend to end up dead or in prison.