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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 think most of the problems that crop up in K-12 education come from the one-size fits all nature of our system. We educate every kid as though he’s a completely blank slate, with the end goal that every single kid must go to a 4-year university program. This isn’t how any of it works. Kids, heck, adults are different in ability, temperament, interests, skills and attention span. As such, I think the model of tracking kids into paths would work far better. That kid who disrupts classes every day doesn’t benefit from the pretense that he’s going to have the potential to graduate from a STEM program or even get a 4 year degree. That kid’s future is getting on the “do not rehire” list at Walmart. The only thing happening because we insist on the make-believe that we’re throwing away a future from a kid is that the children of parents not rich enough to a private school get screwed out of their education. Put that kid into a special needs school, teach them to their ability. If they’re capable, teach them skills they can use for the work they can actually do (probably fast food or janitor jobs or something). Put the slower learning kids in a track that teaches them skills they can use, and go up the ladder until you reach the scholar level where the kids are smarter than most of their peers and teach them to be engineers or scientists or lawyers or computer programmers.
Other things that I think would help in general are uniforms and cellphone bans, perhaps getting better teachers, and going back to the basics of phonics and mathematics. Don’t pass kids along until they master their studies.
And the moment the lower tracks have way more black kids per capita, half of the country will be screaming bloody murder and demanding we go back to the way things were (with some extra affirmative action tacked on to compensate for our racism in even attempting such a program).
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