Comment by julianeon

I think the answer to this is that schooling/care for people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal school should be a totally different budget with different success criteria than the budget for normal school.

There are two different and contradictory goals here- the current dynamic where every gain for one is a loss for the other creates a ton of bad outcomes across the board.

The current situation, where students succeed regardless if they completely failed to learn and do zero work is also pretty bad

> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.

Most struggling students are not special ed. It's a serious mistake to conflate the two. In some ways special ed students are taken better care of than the typical remedial student, since training for special ed happens to focus on effective instructional methods (such as direct instruction) that are actively deplored by most progressive educators as "demeaning" towards their profession.

You're too optimistic on the skills of teachers and school admin.

Let's ignore good teachers and principals, they aren't an issue.

Bad teachers and admin will do what bad students do when facing a high stakes test - forget that learning is important and just do a crap job gaming the test, and often do worse than if they would focus on just doing the content properly.

A bunch of people here probably don't see the issue - they think that they would do a good job learning or teaching a student when focusing on a specific test. But it's not the good teachers and good students who are the issue. A bad teacher might give students the same past paper every week for a year, and their bad students just memorise the right answers for the multiple choice. This is just an example, there are lots of bad strategies and the bad teachers will find them all (while the good teachers ignore all the noise).

It's the bad teachers and students that the system needs to fix, and too heavy an exam focus will screw it up (as will zero exam focus).

"Well just fire the bad teachers lol" um ... ok ... that's a bold strategy, but you can't axe that many and not massively increase their salaries to find replacements. You want super star individual performers, you gotta pay to attract them. You want a cheap consistent workforce where the bad eggs do less damage, focus on a good process that the weaker ones can follow, not rewards for individual success.

I’m not going to defend the broader plan (I don’t believe in it, or at least, I haven’t thought about it enough to be convinced either way). But for the ejection issue, one possibility would be to just count all ejected students as a “fail” for the school, right?

Then, the incentive would shift to prevent the students they don’t want from entering the school in the first place. Which could be a real pain for the students. But, this does seems like it would incentivize the schools to do what the original poster wanted, check that the incoming students actually learned what they were supposed to.

This already happens — my district when I was in school, and my son's district now, both have / had "alternative" high schools that kids get transferred to when they're struggling. Kids who are dropping out inevitably get transferred as part of the process; the high school they were originally attending has stellar graduation rates. The alternative high school has miserable graduation rates, but no one really cares.

> the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically

Top schools aren’t that way merely because of socioeconomics.

Public school districts cannot expel students in California.

In what was in my time yugoslavia and isn't anymore, we had a similar system and it worked great.

From the austria-hungary time, the primary school (8 years, ~6/7 to 14/15yo, now 9 years, where preschool became year 1) was mandatory, and after that it was your decision what to do next.

You could then go to a "general high school" (gymnasium) for the next 4 years, and some of them were better than others (mostly because of students, but teachers too), and you had to collect enough points from grades and standardized testing in primary school to be accepted there. All the illiterate idiots didn't have enough points to get accepted, so you'd be in a nice class with comparable peers and teachers could teach new stuff instead of repeat the stuff the students should already know. The classes were "general" (math, languages, history, geography, etc.) and the idea was to prepare you for college.

The less-smart students went either to "not that good" gymnasiums or to other highschools, like the one for electricians or construction workers, farmers, etc., where they would get the legally required education to later eg. become an electrician or something after 3 years or 4, without the need for college or extra schooling and with the reduced amount of "general" subjects (only 1 or two years of history instead of 4, etc.).

The system somehow worked and still does.

> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling.

You're saying that like it's a bad thing.

I'm continuously surprised by how America, a supposed capitalist country is more communist than some communist countries.

I grew up in Romania, after the revolution, but we still had basically the same education system. Even in communist Romania, if you wanted to get into a good high-school, you had to pass exams, and if you didn't perform well in school, you got left behind.

Everyone understood that if you wanted kids to succeed, you couldn't let the slow kids pull down the smart kids.