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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.
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.
I don't necessarily have a problem with the argument that this is tax money, redistribution is the best form of distribution, and the Public doesn't care how aggravating your childhood is. Well, I'd rather have even more niche schools than charter friendly states currently have, but it's a valid preference. My main problem with the current article is:
Which is entirely unproven, and more snide than he usually is. What if it's not that the kids are poor, but that they're flailing around in the school entrance, screaming their heads off? (I've seen this) What if it's not that they're of color, but that they're pacing around relentlessly, stealing everyone's school supplies, tearing up their papers, for hours at a time? (I've seen this) What if your child has a disability, and their also disabled classmate keeps pulling her by the hair, and the staff are all wearing helmets and shin guards, because the classmate kicks them and throws things at their heads, but your child doesn't have those protections, and isn't able to protect herself because she's a six year child with Down's syndrome? (I've seen this)
I don't mind Freddie having his Marxist policy preferences, as long as he shows that he knows how disruptive the most disruptive 5% of children are.
This is going to sound messed up, but can we (if we update laws) reasonably not educate these children? As medical advances in life saving technology improve, we are investing more on a slim minority of children, instead of the education of all children as a whole. I have no idea about how this would be implemented, maybe a child would have to take a basic test of some sort to prove worthy of educational investment, I suppose. We are not a post scarcity society that can infinitely provide health care at taxpayer expense when our national debt is constantly increasing. It's just leaving a debt to future generations, kicking the can down the road.
My mom had a 40 year career in essentially Special Education. She spent the last 25 years in a niche Private School that was essentially designed as 'the special education school for upper-middle+ children between 5th to 10th percentile in educational capability plus those with behavioral issues that made them difficult to educate but not actively dangerous' to begin with. That niche was a great spot for the first 15 or so years she was there, and generally the school would get most students up to like a 5th-grade educational level which enabled them to work a minimum wage role and kinda acted as a finishing school otherwise to make it less socially obvious.
Then a combination of factors hit. Upper-Middle+ economy eroded a bit/started valuing private education less, so a lot of the name-brand good private schools who'd happily offload their lower kids onto the private school in the good times started dropping their bottom thresholds a bit and/or bringing special education classes into their schools. As a result, the selective school had to dig deeper on their waiting lists which started increasingly hit those that my mom essentially implied were just not productively educatable. There were also some legal changes that meant that schools had to actually trial all applications on the waiting list, which causes perverse incentives with special education since a lot of the issues that lead to you putting your 2 year old's name down for a high school slot are ones that are very apparent/major and tend to slot you into the very bottom tier.
This was due to some parents managing to sue another school for discrimination for dismissing their child out of hand where they'd essentially made a read that the child was absolute bottom percentile and that they'd be better suited for the lower tier of education (which is perfectly fine and well-resourced but most parents aren't really capable of understanding why/what their child is being filtered on) which suits the like 0th-5th percentile. The schools being able to largely sort this themselves saved a ton of stress and issues in the system previously. But in her experience parents are more interventionalist on behalf of the lowest tier of kids (which frequently isn't really to their benefit. If a person's mental is 3 and they're gonna be there for the rest of their life there's really not much you can do aside from keep them entertained and engaged which is what the lowest tier services are pretty good at doing) and the legal situation now makes it a lot messier to sort.
Seems like people will pay for the illusion that their child is not special needs, even if they are. Probably would be a better use of resources to save that money in an index fund managed by a trust, but maybe the children already have that and money is no object for some parents.
I mean it's also a multi-barreled thing. There's parents with kids in the bottom 1st percentile who won't accept that their kid isn't really going to progress beyond toddlermode and that it's best to focus on enrichment and low-level socialization. There's also parents with like 10th percentile kids where a good outcome is 'achieves enough to be able to reasonably hold a stocker job at Walmart' where they insist on trying to handle them like there's a reasonable chance of them directing the family business on their own.
Also a peculiarity my mom observed a lot was the amount of cases where it was two intelligent parents who'd inevitably throw the occasional major autistic child from overlapping their own recessive tendencies. Probably a byproduct of the socio-economic filtering that the school had, but she saw a lot of Doctor/Doctor older parent couples.
Interesting bit with the doctor-doctor couples. Doctors should know the risks best with maternal age and major autism risks, I heard about it from a friend in the first year of medical school classes. Apparently it wasn't in the textbooks but the lecturer wanted to emphasize the risks because many doctors delay family to focus on their studies. By the time the subspecialty doctors are established in their careers they are 35+ on the young side.
Then again I have a family member who miscarried during her (now illegal) 100+ hours per week residency, so there's the risk of high stress pregnancies too.
Not literally just Doctor-Doctor but yeah a lot of mid-thirties parents where they're both in high-intellect careers and both have vague spectrumatic inclinations.
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