Comment by camgunz
4 days ago
A couple things are true here:
- The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings.
- No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering).
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I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky.
Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway.
But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
Absolutely yeah, it's like the "ZIP code is destiny" is also some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
What do you mean by "fault"? My concept of "fault" is whoever I'm going to punish to make society better. (More precisely, assume everyone has some policy `p_i` for actions they take. If a certain action `a` is bad for society, they get punished proportionally according to `KL(a, p_i)`, i.e. they are that much at fault.)
If their home circumstances are forcing them to act this way, then too bad for them! That is part of them and they should be blamed until you can fix the root cause.
Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic, any policy built on that expectation will be ineffective at best and likely harmful, and thus anyone advocating for it is at best asking us to waste resources and at worst asking us to harm kids.
You've got over 20 posts in this thread, many of them putting the blame on children with no evidence that this would be helpful (probably because it wouldn't be). You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
I can tell you're passionate about, but frustrated by this issue. My advice is to take a breath and if you're really interested, do some reading and get involved. There are successful education systems out there (everyone references Finland); things aren't hopeless.
> You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
Do you really believe this? I flagged your comment, because I'm worried that you are trying to convince people by building an ethos (and tearing down others' ethos) instead of appealing to logic. Your writing is very good, but there isn't much substance to it. For example, you say
> Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic
but don't substantiate why it is unrealistic. I've found that when people disagree (in America) there are usually layers of rhetoric that have been built around the issue, so much so that it can be hard to dig down to the crux of the issue and actually resolve the disagreement. This is why I'm worried about how you're writing: it seems to be adding layers instead of removing them. (EDIT: Note, I don't think you are doing this intentionally.)
Now, I do think I have been adding to the discussion. For example:
- I proposed we raise salaries by 10x and fire everyone to balance the budget.
- I gave an anecdote showing that even top-tier public schools have anti-learning cultures.
- I've pointed out that the "for whom" is important when discussing what is good or bad.
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"Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions "
And expecting other children to suffer for their actions is wildly unfair.
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