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In general, I like Freddie DeBoer's takes on education. There's a lot of poor thinking about how if only... teachers were better paid, or worse paid; students were tested more, or tested less; unions were weaker, or stronger -- then things would be better. Freddie's there to point out that American public education is exactly what one would expect, given that it is full of Americans.
Enter his newest essay. American schools are exactly what you would expect, given their demographics, there isn't much to be done about that, the teachers and systems are exactly what they need to be, given the constraints they're under, and so... well off parents are racist for preferring schools that are allowed to expel the very lowest performing children.
Wait, what?
My main impression is that when he hears "bad kids," he's somehow thinking of a well meaning black kid who uses AAVE and wants to play sports ball more than learn math, but is in general pretty normal. And in a lot of classrooms it does. But sometimes, in some classrooms, it means a kid freaks out, smashes the other kids' stuff, sometimes hits the other kids, screeches, thrashes around on the floor, and then when they eventually leave, they come back five minutes later with candy in their mouth. None of the other kids are allowed to eat candy in that classroom even if they have it. It doesn't matter, the teacher just mutters to finish the candy quickly and get on with it.
Maybe it's an overrepresented dynamic in schools I've observed, but in addition to outlier events like knife fights, if a kid has the misfortune to be assigned an all day elementary class with a "disregulated" classmate or two, there's literally nothing to do about it, other than changing schools. This is a Problem, actually. It is a Problem with the laws and court decisions, not necessarily individual decisions on a school or even district level, but Freddie is simply wrong in how he talks about the "hardest to educate students." Education Realist was more on track when he wrote about the topic a couple of years ago.
This isn't the same disregulation most parents are pulling their kids out for, since they're in segregated classrooms, but is in fact the "hardest to educate students" that public schools are dealing with. As I recall Freddie did teach actual school at one point, but it looks like he was teaching high school composition, and for all his research, still underplays what the bottom of even normal suburban public schools are like.
You just have to remember that Freddie is a no joke commie, but at least he is internally consistent. Commies want to level out all playing fields. Most leftists turn into blank slatists because if the low can be raised up that would be a nice world to live in, and "this would be best, therefore it must be possible, anyone who says otherwise is a bigot" is their standard way of seeing the world. FDB is smart enough to know that's bs, so his solution is that the top are therefore genetically lucky and responsible for lifting up the bottom artificially. When he is talking about taking their money and giving it to the bottom that sucks, but its standard commie bs so it kinda goes unremarked on. But he ALSO thinks the top need to pay in terms of giving the bottom wide leeway in annoying them, disrupting them, inconveniencing then, etc since it would be somehow unfair to ask anything of the poor benighted bottom and the glorious top can surely take the hit. He doesn't QUITE go as far as saying the top should grin and bear being beaten, raped, and killed in order to spare the bottom the indignity of being policed but he sure implies it.
He definitely does not believe this he has many articles arguing against this very idea. So no he doesn't think that and he's very opposed to the leftists that do.
He does, however, believe that a large number of people are effectively too stupid to participate in the modern economy in an economically productive way and thus the conservative pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the liberal educate everyone into smarts are both loosing propositions for a significant portion of the population.
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Freddie DeBeoer and Matthew Yglesias were two of the specific people i had in mind when i wrote this a month ago.
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