Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the American P

[Dominus Atheos]

Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the American Police State

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

In the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

Indeed, at a time when we are all viewed as suspects, there are so many ways in which a person can be branded a criminal for violating any number of laws, regulations or policies. Even if you haven’t knowingly violated any laws, there is still a myriad of ways in which you can run afoul of the police state and end up on the wrong side of a jail cell.

Unfortunately, when you’re a child in the American police state, life is that much worse.

Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

If your child is fortunate enough to survive his encounter with the public schools, you should count yourself fortunate.

Most students are not so lucky.

By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested.

More than 3 million students are suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for minor misbehavior, such as “disruptive behavior” or “insubordination.” Black students are three times more likely than white students to face suspension and expulsion.

For instance, a Virginia sixth grader, the son of two school teachers and a member of the school’s gifted program, was suspended for a year after school officials found a leaf (likely a maple leaf) in his backpack that they suspected was marijuana. Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not marijuana (a fact that officials knew almost immediately), the 11-year-old was still kicked out of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in an alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches for drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems.

As the Washington Post warns: “It doesn’t matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf—okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if another kid thinks it might be marijuana, that's grounds for expulsion.”

Many state laws require that schools notify law enforcement whenever a student is found with an “imitation controlled substance,” basically anything that look likes a drug but isn’t actually illegal. As a result, students have been suspended for bringing to school household spices such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

It’s not just look-alike drugs that can get a student in trouble under school zero tolerance policies. Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in detention.

Acts of kindness, concern or basic manners can also result in suspensions. One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

Unfortunately, while these may appear to be isolated incidents, they are indicative of a nationwide phenomenon in which children are treated like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.

The schools have become a microcosm of the American police state, right down to the host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, employed to keep constant watch over their student bodies.

Making matters worse are the police.

Students accused of being disorderly or noncompliant have a difficult enough time navigating the bureaucracy of school boards, but when you bring the police into the picture, after-school detention and visits to the principal’s office are transformed into punishments such as misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting (nearly 20,000 by 2003). Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SROs) have become de facto wardens in the elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force.

The horror stories are legion.

One SRO is accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line. That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury. In Pennsylvania, a student was tased after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.

Defending the use of handcuffs and pepper spray to subdue students, one Alabama police department reasoned that if they can employ such tactics on young people away from school, they should also be permitted to do so on campus.

Now advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry will tell you that school safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy Hook. What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare. As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.

In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems.

Indeed, the transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team.

According to one law review article on the school-to-prison pipeline, “Many school districts have formed their own police departments, some so large they rival the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety division in New York City’s public schools is so large that if it were a local police department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the country.”

The ramifications are far-reaching.

The term “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to a phenomenon in which children who are suspended or expelled from school have a greater likelihood of ending up in jail. One study found that “being suspended or expelled made a student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year.”

Not content to add police to their employee rosters, the schools have also come to resemble prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, random locker searches and active shooter drills. The Detroit public schools boast a “‘$5.6 million 23,000-sq ft. state of the art Command Center’ and ‘$41.7 million district-wide security initiative’ including metal detectors and ID system where visitors’ names are checked against the sex offender registry.”

As if it weren’t bad enough that the nation’s schools have come to resemble prisons, the government is also contracting with private prisons to lock up our young people for behavior that once would have merited a stern lecture. Nearly 40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations above all else.

Private prisons, the largest among them being GEO and the Corrections Corporation of America, profit by taking over a state’s prison population for a fee. Many states, under contract with these private prisons, agree to keep the prisons full, which in turn results in more Americans being arrested, found guilty and jailed for nonviolent “crimes” such as holding Bible studies in their back yard. As the Washington Post points out, “With the growing influence of the prison lobby, the nation is, in effect, commoditizing human bodies for an industry in militant pursuit of profit… The influence of private prisons creates a system that trades money for human freedom, often at the expense of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: children, immigrants and the poor.”

This profit-driven system of incarceration has also given rise to a growth in juvenile prisons and financial incentives for jailing young people. Indeed, young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry, which profits from criminalizing childish behavior and jailing young people. For instance, two Pennsylvania judges made headlines when it was revealed that they had been conspiring with two businessmen in a $2.6 million “kids for cash” scandal that resulted in more than 2500 children being found guilty and jailed in for-profit private prisons.

It has been said that America’s schools are the training ground for future generations. Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters, however, we seem to be busy churning out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every school police raid and overzealous punishment that is carried out in the name of school safety, the lesson being imparted is that Americans—especially young people—have no rights at all against the state or the police.

I’ll conclude with one hopeful anecdote about a Philadelphia school dubbed the “Jones Jail” because of its bad reputation for violence among the student body. Situated in a desperately poor and dangerous part of the city, the John Paul Jones Middle School’s student body had grown up among drug users, drug peddlers, prostitutes and gun violence. “By middle school,” reports The Atlantic, most of these students “have witnessed more violence than most Americans who didn't serve in a war ever will.”

According to investigative reporters Jeff Deeney, “School police officers patrolled the building at John Paul Jones, and children were routinely submitted to scans with metal detecting wands. All the windows were covered in metal grating and one room that held computers even had thick iron prison bars on its exterior… Every day… [police] would set up a perimeter of police officers on the blocks around the school, and those police were there to protect neighbors from the children, not to protect the children from the neighborhood.”

In other words, John Paul Jones, one of the city’s most dangerous schools, was a perfect example of the school-to-prison, police state apparatus at work among the nation’s youngest and most impressionable citizens.

When management of John Paul Jones was taken over by a charter school that opted to de-escalate the police state presence, stripping away the metal detectors and barred windows, local police protested. In fact, they showed up wearing Kevlar vests. Nevertheless, school officials remained determined to do away with institutional control and surveillance, as well as aggressive security guards, and focus on noncoercive, nonviolent conflict resolution with an emphasis on student empowerment, relationship building and anger management.

The result: a 90% drop in serious incidents—drug sales, weapons, assaults, rapes—in one year alone. As one fifth-grader remarked on the changes, “There are no more fights. There are no more police. That's better for the community.”

The lesson for the rest of us is this: you not only get what you pay for, but you reap what you sow.

If you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.

If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.

But if you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums. Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state.

http://rutherford.org/publications_reso ... lice_state

[Eternal_Freedom]

One in three US kids will have been arrested by the time they leave high school? Jesus fucking christ.

[Simon_Jester]

Some critical points-

One, this does NOT square with my experience at work on a day to day basis. While there are no doubt schools that are as the author describes, saying "American schools are like this" is pretty far off the mark.

Two, there are somewhere in the neighborhood sixty million school-age children in the US, which corresponds to something like a hundred thousand schools. It is not hard to cherrypick those hundred thousand institutions and find the ones whose administrators, faculty, and staff don't have the sense God gave a goose... which is how you get horror stories about students being arrested for accidentally having a maple leaf in their backpack or suspended for shaving their head. If there are a thousand such idiotic stories every year, that would correspond to roughly one school in a hundred being effected.

As we've all heard before, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'

...

This is separate from the issue that there are hypersecured schools where the students are treated like inmates. These are mostly inner-city schools which have actual problems with gangs, armed violence, and the like- and a very typical parent reaction is to break out the heavy artillery. A very troubling percentage of our nation's children DO grow up in these schools- because the people in these communities are having their children young, and in unusually large numbers.

It is entirely true that we need to make sure our schools emphasize healthy interaction, a healthy approach toward discipline, and so forth- I do not dispute that for a moment.

What I WILL note is that one of the reasons this may NOT happen has to do with restrictions placed on the schools. In many respects, schools are no longer given so much autonomy to identify who is and is not expelled or suspended for cumulative behavior problems. There are paper trails to build, policies to comply with, documentation to file. One result of this is that the school may have little choice BUT to robotically follow procedures if it wants any hope of maintaining basic order in the building.

This is especially true in cases where the school cannot count on effective support from the child's parent(s) on disciplinary concerns- when you've called the same parent eight times about their child's chronically disruptive behavior, and nothing has changed, then either that child has a medical issue (which cannot be treated without the parent's consent) or that child is effectively free-range and uncontrolled (in which case having them in a classroom has the same effect on teaching and the character-building of other students as releasing any other sort of wild animal into the room would).

[salm]

What I WILL note is that one of the reasons this may NOT happen has to do with restrictions placed on the schools. In many respects, schools are no longer given so much autonomy to identify who is and is not expelled or suspended for cumulative behavior problems. There are paper trails to build, policies to comply with, documentation to file. One result of this is that the school may have little choice BUT to robotically follow procedures if it wants any hope of maintaining basic order in the building.

In your experience, do schools try to fight such silly restrictions placed on them to a sufficient degree? Do they keep complaining to whomever is resposible for this? Or do they blindly follow ze orders without complaining to politicians/media/whomever?

[Ahriman238]

I sub in an inner city school that for the longest time had serious gang, violence and drug problems, and it's nowhere near as bad as these stories. We don't have metal detectors, though I've been to schools that do, nor even security guards. About once a month the cops bring in a drug-sniffing dog and walk it past all the lockers, occasionally they find something. We've had two or three teachers get injured breaking up fights, but nobody explicitly attacked a teacher.

Some of that was ruthless enforcement, but when the incidents stepped down, so did the school administration. If you don't start trouble, none will find you. We do have cameras in the halls, but not the classrooms and those are more for concern of outsiders breaking in. Just as all the doors open from the inside, but only the front door gets you in, and after the latest round of school shootings we instituted a system where a visitor has to give up their photo id and trade it for a visitors badge.


@ salm: Schools are all over the map as far as accepting nonsensical orders from high, from meek compliance to outright refusal. But different states and school districts can have wildly different policies on how far a school principal or teacher can fight the shit from above without risking their job. And most teachers carefully don't have opinions for the first two or three years, until they can only be fired for cause.

[Elheru Aran]

What I WILL note is that one of the reasons this may NOT happen has to do with restrictions placed on the schools. In many respects, schools are no longer given so much autonomy to identify who is and is not expelled or suspended for cumulative behavior problems. There are paper trails to build, policies to comply with, documentation to file. One result of this is that the school may have little choice BUT to robotically follow procedures if it wants any hope of maintaining basic order in the building.

In your experience, do schools try to fight such silly restrictions placed on them to a sufficient degree? Do they keep complaining to whomever is resposible for this? Or do they blindly follow ze orders without complaining to politicians/media/whomever?

It bears noting that a big reason why public schools are the way they are in the States is that there's simply not enough funding. Put it this way: Assume that a parent is offended with the way their child is disciplined in the school and sues. The school cannot afford to undertake a prolonged lawsuit, so instead they rely upon careful record-keeping and explicit policies to stop such suits before they start. And, if the teachers or administration complain... the threat of having their funding cut hangs over their heads. If a school isn't performing to standard, obviously it's incapable of using its funds wisely, after all!

[salm]

At what point are you morally obliged to risk your job? I mean if the orders you have to follow are sufficiently bad there´s a point where you can´t follow them without being a moral coward with no civil courage no matter if that might cost you your job.

[Kingmaker]

One in three US kids will have been arrested by the time they leave high school? Jesus fucking christ.

The actual article hyperlinked says by age 23. It also says it was self-reported, and included things like truancy, shoplifting, etc... that didn't necessarily result in an actual arrest. It's still not great, but it's not 'a third of students arrested in high school'.

It bears noting that a big reason why public schools are the way they are in the States is that there's simply not enough funding.

US per capita spending on students is higher than other developed countries that achieve better outcomes, so I find it hard to give credence to the notion that there's just not enough money, as opposed to inefficient spending or poor allocation. The other alternative is to posit that American students are much more expensive than students in otherwise comparable countries, which could be true, but I am like skeptical.

[Darmalus]

It bears noting that a big reason why public schools are the way they are in the States is that there's simply not enough funding.

US per capita spending on students is higher than other developed countries that achieve better outcomes, so I find it hard to give credence to the notion that there's just not enough money, as opposed to inefficient spending or poor allocation. The other alternative is to posit that American students are much more expensive than students in otherwise comparable countries, which could be true, but I am like skeptical.

US schools are funded out of a combination of local taxes and federal taxes. This means schools in wealthy areas are rolling in funds while a school a few miles away in a poor area will be on a shoestring budget.

[Elheru Aran]

It bears noting that a big reason why public schools are the way they are in the States is that there's simply not enough funding.

US per capita spending on students is higher than other developed countries that achieve better outcomes, so I find it hard to give credence to the notion that there's just not enough money, as opposed to inefficient spending or poor allocation. The other alternative is to posit that American students are much more expensive than students in otherwise comparable countries, which could be true, but I am like skeptical.

US schools are funded out of a combination of local taxes and federal taxes. This means schools in wealthy areas are rolling in funds while a school a few miles away in a poor area will be on a shoestring budget.

^That. The per capita thing is averaged out across the entire nation, so it's not actually representative.

While I haven't seen the statistics, I imagine the per capita average may be including high-ticket costs such as stadiums and athletic programs. It's obscene enough in some parts of the country that a high school football coach can be paid twice as much as the principal of the school that he notionally works for. And of course, the money that goes to all this bullshit doesn't actually help the academic endeavours of the students nor the teachers' efforts.

[Kingmaker]

It bears noting that a big reason why public schools are the way they are in the States is that there's simply not enough funding.

US per capita spending on students is higher than other developed countries that achieve better outcomes, so I find it hard to give credence to the notion that there's just not enough money, as opposed to inefficient spending or poor allocation. The other alternative is to posit that American students are much more expensive than students in otherwise comparable countries, which could be true, but I am like skeptical.

US schools are funded out of a combination of local taxes and federal taxes. This means schools in wealthy areas are rolling in funds while a school a few miles away in a poor area will be on a shoestring budget.

I'm well aware, but that would fall under 'poor allocation'. I am, however, also skeptical of simple 'needs more money' solutions, since in many cases the core problem really is awful management/policy or squandering resources (e.g. by turning the school into a detention facility; I was not terribly surprised to learn that the US, while having higher per student spending that most other countries, spends a lot more of it on non-educational things, 'security' among them) and giving out more resources without fixing those problems will just result in more resources being wasted.

[jwl]

The thing about the words "public school" is that they can mean "state school" or "fee-paying school" depending on who says it.

[Lagmonster]

I have this bullshit theory that the worst stories of outlandish enforcement against kids probably takes place in the safest areas of your country. I would bet that it's homogenous middle-class suburbs where life is good where you find kids getting arrested for innocent things, because I strongly believe that when you have everything, you worry the most about losing anything.

Which is where, if I were right, you'd get calm, quiet schools flipping out and arresting kids for being childish, because they're terrified about the problems they've heard about on the news coming to their nice neighbourhood.

[Simon_Jester]

What I WILL note is that one of the reasons this may NOT happen has to do with restrictions placed on the schools. In many respects, schools are no longer given so much autonomy to identify who is and is not expelled or suspended for cumulative behavior problems. There are paper trails to build, policies to comply with, documentation to file. One result of this is that the school may have little choice BUT to robotically follow procedures if it wants any hope of maintaining basic order in the building.

In your experience, do schools try to fight such silly restrictions placed on them to a sufficient degree? Do they keep complaining to whomever is resposible for this? Or do they blindly follow ze orders without complaining to politicians/media/whomever?

A mix.

Nearly all the teachers I know think it is too difficult for a child to get suspended or expelled for chronic behavioral problems. At the same time... the paperwork requirements are laid down at a level above that of individual schools- district-level decision. We legally cannot expel a student on our own initiative, that was always the case so far as I can tell. The only difference is that the district wants proof that we tried literally everything we can think of and the student is actively dangerous, not just "he hasn't come to class in a month and even when he did it was just so he had a place to plug in his cell phone while disrupting the lesson."

The orders are not being followed blindly, but at some point there is no use in complaining to a boss who has decided to compel you to make bricks without straw.

It bears noting that a big reason why public schools are the way they are in the States is that there's simply not enough funding. Put it this way: Assume that a parent is offended with the way their child is disciplined in the school and sues. The school cannot afford to undertake a prolonged lawsuit, so instead they rely upon careful record-keeping and explicit policies to stop such suits before they start. And, if the teachers or administration complain... the threat of having their funding cut hangs over their heads. If a school isn't performing to standard, obviously it's incapable of using its funds wisely, after all!

It's more complicated than that.

It's not that there is no money. American schools are not grossly underfunded by global standards. It's that all this money is being used- and a significant fraction of it is effectively wasted.

When each individual teacher burns 10% of their working hours chasing after disciplinary issues, or attending repetitive trainings on how to you this year's iteration of the software for storing standardized test scores, or for that matter fooling with the standardized tests themselves, it cuts into instructional quality.

School budgets are as high or higher than they were in the '70s. Our knowledge of how to teach and the technology with which to do so has advanced tremendously since the '70s. We should be doing a lot better than we were then... but the combined effects of the disciplinary issue and high-stakes testing are killing us. Those are the reasons we're releasing so many kids as "high school graduates" who only have what is by international standards a 9th or 10th grade education.

At what point are you morally obliged to risk your job? I mean if the orders you have to follow are sufficiently bad there´s a point where you can´t follow them without being a moral coward with no civil courage no matter if that might cost you your job.

Please note that the problem I was referring to and that you replied to is that the schools (at least in my district and probably most that are like it) can't expel a child for being chronically disruptive over a period of months, or for effectively not showing up to classes. At least, not without extensive filing of paperwork and a dozen or so meetings.

It's debateable whether insisting on our right to do this is 'moral courage.' But as a practical matter, if we want an educational system that provides good educations it is necessary; you cannot get a good harvest from a garden you are unwilling to weed.

US per capita spending on students is higher than other developed countries that achieve better outcomes, so I find it hard to give credence to the notion that there's just not enough money, as opposed to inefficient spending or poor allocation. The other alternative is to posit that American students are much more expensive than students in otherwise comparable countries, which could be true, but I am like skeptical.

If US students are more expensive it's probably because we're spending our money inefficiently.

One of the highest-paid people in our building is a "test coordinator" whose sole job is to keep track of all the standardized tests we have to administer over the course of the year. We need her- but in a school system that didn't have so many tests, we wouldn't. And her salary would pay one highly experienced teacher by itself.

Likewise, we're spending money on licensing a huge proliferation of software systems and technology, more than any one individual can easily make use of. Many if not all of them are helpful- but the volume is excessive in my opinion.

I'm well aware, but that would fall under 'poor allocation'. I am, however, also skeptical of simple 'needs more money' solutions, since in many cases the core problem really is awful management/policy or squandering resources (e.g. by turning the school into a detention facility; I was not terribly surprised to learn that the US, while having higher per student spending that most other countries, spends a lot more of it on non-educational things, 'security' among them) and giving out more resources without fixing those problems will just result in more resources being wasted.

The problem is that when 'security' isn't there, you can get other problems. Last year for one reason and another our security department was ineffectual. Our administrative team of vice-principals were, through no fault of their own, ... and by the end of bogged down dealing with meetings with higher echelons... and by the end of the year I would casually estimate that 5-10% of our student body was in the halls cutting class at any one time.



That sort of thing is in itself a major obstacle to education, especially when it's the same 5-10% of the student body doing it every day, and you can't hold them meaningfully accountable... because that's the 5-10% that will subtract from your graduation rate, that will fail every standardized test, and that barring a miracle will never, ever change.

It is possible to design a school that will reach and effectively teach this 5-10% of the population. But you have to do special things and put special measures in place, and it is massively wasteful to try and implement these in a general education population.

It's like, I can teach a kid who's deaf. I can teach a kid with a reading disability. I can teach a kid with ADHD. I can probably figure out how to teach a kid who's blind. Any of those is going to be a lot easier than teaching a kid who's a psychopathic disruptive jackass. So if you throw a couple of dozen jackasses into a school, you can just watch as their test scores end up plummeting.

A few decades ago schools 'dealt with' this problem by expelling such students. This had drawbacks- serious ones. But it at least gives you the chance to offer a good education to the remaining 95% of your student body.

[Wild Zontargs]

Simon, I'm curious as to what you think of this list of "they'd never go for it" reforms from another teacher:

To understand these proposals, a Reality Primer:

1) Some children cannot learn to the desired standard in an acceptable timeframe or, in the case of high school, in any timeframe.
2) The more rigorous the standard, the greater number of students who will be incapable of learning to that standard.
3) As a result of the first two immutable facts, schools can’t require an unbendable promotion standard.
4) By high school, the range of student understanding in any one classroom is beyond what most outsiders can possibly conceive of.

and somewhat unrelated to the previous four:

5) Education case history suggests that courts care neither about reality or costs.

[...]

I originally had all the proposals as one huge post, but I’ve been really short on posts lately. Here’s the list as I build it:

1. Ban College-Level Remediation
2. Stop Kneecapping High Schools (aka Put Remedial Classes Back in High School)
3. Repeal IDEA
4. Make K-12 Education Citizen Only
5. End ELL Mandates
[Note: linked posts for each item can be found in the original]

[Simon_Jester]

I agree with elements (1) through (4) of the primer. (5) is at best partially true and at worst an outright lie.

As to the recommendations...

(1) is foolish. Colleges are private organizations and if they want to admit students who will need remediation they are within their rights to do so. Conversely, if they do not want to do so, they will cease to do so.

(2) is an excellent idea. If colleges are willing to offer pre-algebra classes to students who lack knowledge of pre-algebra, then damned sure high schools should. It might be embarrassing to the student, but at least it gives them a fighting chance of actually learning any math in high school. Plunking them straight in Algebra 1 when they don't know how to divide by a fraction or convert a percentage into a decimal is just cruel and stupid. Frankly, students should be administered a placement test in the summer after they leave the eighth grade, which is the last year in which they receive 'generic' curriculum and the start of their receiving specific course selections. Placement in high school classes should be determined by the placement test, not by any other factor.

(3) is flaming, horrible idiocy. IDEA is not the problem. Students with disabilities as a whole are not the problem. Students with behavioral issues are the problem, because they require vastly disproportionate teacher effort to deal with and actively subtract from the amount the other students can learn. This is a specific subset of the children covered under IDEA, and should be handled separately from the rest of the children covered by IDEA. Because unlike students with physical disabilities or learning disorders, they present active dangers to other children and/or to the learning environment. So while IDEA should be amended, repealing it is blind, evil idiocy.

(4) is pointless and irrelevant and has nothing to do with our actual problems. (5) is likewise pointless and irrelevant and has nothing to do with our actual problems in addition to being actively bigoted.
_______________

So basically, this guy has correctly diagnosed the ultimate cause of the problem in American education, but has totally screwed up the proximate cause. He thinks the problem is disabled and ESOL kids, when in fact the problem is badly behaved kids.

Go figure he'd decide to beat up on the dyslexic kid and the Salvadorean kid, instead of going after the school bully...

[Simon_Jester]

Addendum:

On reading some of the guy's posts, it appears that he's advocating for blocking out the children of non-citizens from public education, and ending ESOL programs, because he doesn't want immigrants competing with the low-IQ children of our own citizens. This is at least... coherent in a weirdly nationalist way, but I'm not going to say it makes me more amenable to his ideas.

[Civil War Man]

(3) is flaming, horrible idiocy. IDEA is not the problem. Students with disabilities as a whole are not the problem. Students with behavioral issues are the problem, because they require vastly disproportionate teacher effort to deal with and actively subtract from the amount the other students can learn. This is a specific subset of the children covered under IDEA, and should be handled separately from the rest of the children covered by IDEA. Because unlike students with physical disabilities or learning disorders, they present active dangers to other children and/or to the learning environment. So while IDEA should be amended, repealing it is blind, evil idiocy.

(4) is pointless and irrelevant and has nothing to do with our actual problems. (5) is likewise pointless and irrelevant and has nothing to do with our actual problems in addition to being actively bigoted.
_______________

So basically, this guy has correctly diagnosed the ultimate cause of the problem in American education, but has totally screwed up the proximate cause. He thinks the problem is disabled and ESOL kids, when in fact the problem is badly behaved kids.

Go figure he'd decide to beat up on the dyslexic kid and the Salvadorean kid, instead of going after the school bully...

This is the same impression I got. Those last 3 "reforms" seem like they come right out of a right-wing nativist's wet dream. Special Ed programs are already pretty overtaxed in a lot of areas, since teaching kids with disabilities or behavioral problems is a lot of work and teachers who specialize in Special Ed are pretty rare, so repealing IDEA would pretty much take those programs behind the shed with a shotgun and bury them in a shallow grave.

Advocating getting rid of ELL entirely and restricting free K-12 to citizens, meanwhile, is basically saying that they want immigrants to be trapped in a permanent uneducated underclass, since if the parents are not already wealthy enough to pay for school out of pocket, then their kids don't get educated, which means that it's very likely that those kids, when they grow up, will not have the money to pay for their kids to get educated, and so on.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, if SPED ceased to exist, the following would happen:

Kids with non-emotional/behavioral disabilities would be effectively locked out of the educational system. This would not significantly improve the schools, and would have a horrible effect on those children.

Kids with behavioral and emotional problems would either be 'mainstreamed' all the way back into general education, which would actively make things worse, or they would simply be expelled, which would make things better... but frankly we could do that anyway if we chose to.

[Wild Zontargs]

So basically, this guy has correctly diagnosed the ultimate cause of the problem in American education, but has totally screwed up the proximate cause. He thinks the problem is disabled and ESOL kids, when in fact the problem is badly behaved kids.

OK. Not being an American, I wasn't sure, but this sounds like reasonable criticism.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it's not that he hasn't identified actual problems which exist.

It's not even that he hasn't found some partially correct solutions.

It's that he's got this nativist thing going which interferes with his grasp of the problem, and that he doesn't really understand the way special education interacts with the school system at large.

[Zaune]

A few decades ago schools 'dealt with' this problem by expelling such students. This had drawbacks- serious ones. But it at least gives you the chance to offer a good education to the remaining 95% of your student body.

A few decades ago there were things that 5% of complete hopeless cases could do to earn an honest living that didn't require much in the way of education: Shoveling ore into blast furnaces, humping boxes around in a warehouse, Primary Mine Finder in the Army and suchlike. That's not so much an option today, though the third option still applies in a lot of countries outside the US.

[Elheru Aran]

A few decades ago schools 'dealt with' this problem by expelling such students. This had drawbacks- serious ones. But it at least gives you the chance to offer a good education to the remaining 95% of your student body.

A few decades ago there were things that 5% of complete hopeless cases could do to earn an honest living that didn't require much in the way of education: Shoveling ore into blast furnaces, humping boxes around in a warehouse, Primary Mine Finder in the Army and suchlike. That's not so much an option today, though the third option still applies in a lot of countries outside the US.

Not just incapable students, but also people with disabilities had options. It wasn't uncommon for there to be charitable organizations which would employ handicapped people for simple manual labor-- for example, IIRC I read a while ago about a blind guy who grew up in one such organization that employed him as a chair caner (weaving cane into chair seats). As long as they could *find* something that their disability wouldn't impair them in performing, they could usually stay there for a while. Even today a lot of deaf people still find work in janitorial fields-- they go in after hours, don't have to deal with customers that way. My work (Home Depot) employs a number of deaf people primarily in freight and receiving (again, areas where there's minimal customer service expected).

But to a large degree those simple manual jobs have vanished. Price of progress, I suppose, but what are the people who used to fill those jobs to do?

[Darmalus]

But to a large degree those simple manual jobs have vanished. Price of progress, I suppose, but what are the people who used to fill those jobs to do?

I think we are going to have rising unemployment (hidden by the "gave up, no longer looking" loophole) until AI obliterates and few hundred thousand white collar middle/upper-middle class jobs. Until we get in a situation where it becomes obvious that the number of jobs (well paying "respectable" ones) for everyone is decreasing faster than it can be papered over with "poor people are poor because they are lazy" rhetoric, the problem will be ignored. In the US, at least.

The changes to the school system will be interesting when you can look at a large % (or even majority) of your students and say "You will never have a job, there are zero opportunities for you outside the welfare line." Makes one wonder if mandatory attendance or the concept of universal education will still be a thing in a generation.

[Simon_Jester]

One very possible outcome for quite a while is that we will see massive growth of jobs that require a human face and social interaction, and where a machine cannot be trusted to do the job right even if it's a very efficient machine (e.g. daycare workers).

On the other hand, these are jobs that require trustworthiness and (usually) a degree of intelligence... so you do need education. But the kind of education that is needed differs.

A few decades ago schools 'dealt with' this problem by expelling such students. This had drawbacks- serious ones. But it at least gives you the chance to offer a good education to the remaining 95% of your student body.

A few decades ago there were things that 5% of complete hopeless cases could do to earn an honest living that didn't require much in the way of education: Shoveling ore into blast furnaces, humping boxes around in a warehouse, Primary Mine Finder in the Army and suchlike. That's not so much an option today, though the third option still applies in a lot of countries outside the US.

The problem is, this 5% is not more able to be educated than they were forty years ago. Their problem is not that they need to go to high school (and weren't), their problem is that they need to get their head out of their rears. Until that problem is solved, high school won't do them any good.

Putting them in the schools isn't going to solve the problem, unless you somehow 'fix' them so that they are prepared to receive education. And it will actively lower the educational attainment of all the other kids who are in the same building with them.

I advocate the establishment and growth of institutions that seriously intend to teach this 5% (I know! We could call them 'reform schools!'). But the blunt reality is that taking the minority of students whose mental mechanisms that tell them how to behave and function in the schools are broken, and putting them in the schools along with the majority, is leaving us not just with an uneducated minority, but an undereducated majority.

It's much easier to face an economy where unskilled jobs are being squeezed out when you've taken everyone fit to receive good education and given them such an education.

It's much harder to face such an economy when you cannot provide good education to the masses, because the schools are forbidden from weeding their own gardens and the weeds of bad behavior are choking out the growth of the intended outcome.

Not just incapable students, but also people with disabilities had options. It wasn't uncommon for there to be charitable organizations which would employ handicapped people for simple manual labor-- for example, IIRC I read a while ago about a blind guy who grew up in one such organization that employed him as a chair caner (weaving cane into chair seats). As long as they could *find* something that their disability wouldn't impair them in performing, they could usually stay there for a while. Even today a lot of deaf people still find work in janitorial fields-- they go in after hours, don't have to deal with customers that way. My work (Home Depot) employs a number of deaf people primarily in freight and receiving (again, areas where there's minimal customer service expected).

But to a large degree those simple manual jobs have vanished. Price of progress, I suppose, but what are the people who used to fill those jobs to do?

Thing is, we can educate people who have... I'm going to call them 'real' disabilities, as in disabilities that have to do with something other than behavior. We really can. We can build schools for the deaf, or use sign language interpreters in mainstream schools.

What we can't do is teach a kid who actively gets off on insulting his teachers, punching other kids on a whim, and tearing up his work and throwing it away every time someone looks at him funny. Or rather, we CAN teach that kid... in the right environment, with properly trained handler-teachers, who have the authority to impose discipline on him. Which requires a specialized school.

I'm all for educating people with disabilities. And if the disabilities are not behavioral in nature, they can be educated in normal schools to a large degree. But students with behavioral disabilities, or just plain badly behaved children, pose a threat to the school environment and the education of other children. If this threat cannot be neutralized by lesser means, then we must be prepared to remove the child from that school environment. And find (or found) a new school where they cannot do harm.

I don't mind paying a high price to educate one more child. But the one currency I am NOT willing to spend is 'the education of other children.'