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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9501 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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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.

Special ed law originated before medical advances kept children alive in conditions we never anticipated. Imagine just one severely disabled child born at 25 weeks, blind, wheelchair bound, incontinent, and destined to life institutionalization. That child will need an expensive wheelchair, transportation, at least two paras, at a cost of what–$100K or more? Now multiply by what, 100,000 kids? Fewer? more? Now move up the disability chain to kids who can walk, can make it to the bathroom with an escort, but and can’t be put in a classroom without two full-time paras and they’ll disrupt the classroom every day. Or the kids who are locked in an autistic world, screaming if touched. There are still several steps up the chain until you get to the merely low cognitive ability students, the “mildly retarded” as they used to be called, the Downs Syndrome children that IDEA was originally intended to support.

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.

I am surprised that you are surprised. Freddie has always been able to look reality in the face but only up to a certain point. It's easy to forget sometimes, but he really is a literal Marxist, and that informs everything he writes. In the redistributionist world of his dreams, these inequalities would not exist because no one would have the option of selfishly providing a better education for their own children by removing them from environments with disruptive students and taking resources away from those students.

It’s bizarre then because actual communist countries (at least in Eastern Europe) had a very discriminatory high school system. If your child didn’t have the right grades, and you didn’t come from the correct background, they’d be sent off to be a vocational school to become a bricklayer or a janitor at the age of 14.

The acceptance rates of gymnasiums were very low, even if they significantly favoured students from a proletariat background, and the curriculum at engineering high schools was on par with a modern undergrad university course.

If you’re against selective public high schools and try to mix students of different academic abilities in a classroom, it seems to me like the American system is exactly what you’d get, where private and charter schools act as a substitute of public high schools with selective admissions. In what world would you want to put a 13 year old who knows calculus with one that’s functionally illiterate in the same class? They need to be taught different materials at different speeds otherwise you’re wasting precious public money paying for one to do nothing in class, either because they have already learned the material or because they can’t follow it. Each according to his ability, each according to his need, no?

Actual communist countries also didn't allow people to shoplift freely, consume narcotics in the street, walk into their countries by the millions and demand welfare. Lots of things become possible when you have full immunity from Progressive social critique.

Speaking plainly, the problem isn't figuring out that the calculus kid and the illiterate kid shouldn't be in the same classroom. The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom, and is almost entirely insulated from any form of consequences for the bad outcomes their desires produce. It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.

The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom

I don't think that's actually the case. It's more accurate to say that the educational elite (who design curriculums and whatnot) is dedicated to that. These are the same people who keep thinking that "open classrooms", major emphasis on group work and so on are a must have even though the people on the ground tell them those are just making everything shit.

The phenomenon that was written about it Coming Apart and its consequences...

As someone who was educated in semi-elite schools for most of my childhood/college, I recall the real kick in the teeth I felt in my 20s when I learned, through experience, that people who actually obeyed rules and put in honest effort into improving oneself was a rarity, rather than semi-common (still likely a minority or barely a majority in the schools I attended). People who grew up in even more elite institutions and then stayed only in elite institutions professionally, surrounded primarily by other people with similar experiences, just don't seem to have the capacity to understand just how dysfunctional vast swathes of society are, and how much of keeping society running is making sure their dysfunction doesn't cause too much damage. It seems like just another case of the apex fallacy, which seems endemic in the culture wars, including gender relations, race relations, and immigration.

Now, one possible point of hope there is that it's easier than ever before to see direct evidence of the actual lives of the actual people with whom one doesn't share an environment. I've seen people reference this with respect to the popularization of bodycam footage since they became near-ubiquitous among police forces post-Floyd. However, people - including myself - had foolish, naive, stupid, idiotic ideas about the proliferation of social media bringing people of different ideas and principles together, when, AFAICT, it has done the exact opposite. And generative AI adds a new wrinkle as well. After all, you can bring a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink. So I'm pretty pessimistic.

I felt in my 20s when I learned, through experience, that people who actually obeyed rules and put in honest effort into improving oneself was a rarity, rather than semi-common

Quite often the rules are set up to make those mutually exclusive.

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