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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.
There is perhaps one thing parents could do: teach their kids to fight. Starting at a very early age, like age 6, they need to start taking serious martial arts classes, not just tae kwan do for tots or whatever. The Problem kids would be a lot less of a Problem if they were actually punished for their actions, and if the public schools can't do it then the kids have to take matters into their own hands. Instead of being rewarded with candy, the Problem child learns fear that his actions will result in pain. This also helps normal children develop agency and self confidence, as they learn to solve problems for themselves instead of being reliant on public school teachers whose brains have degenerated into a state of permanent childlike mush.
What do you think the consequences of your kid beating the shit out of the “special needs neurodivergent” kid in their class are gonna be?
I would hope they'd be smart enough to do it where no teachers or untrustworthy kids are looking, which is not hard to set up in most schools. If they do get caught... probably a stern talking to in the guidance counselor's office. This whole problem starts with schools being extremely unable to really do anything to punish kids.
Well of course it’s a form of anarcho tyranny. For the smart, high potential kid of someone like yourself, beating up another kid might mean missed grades, bad recommendations, getting booted out of semi-mandatory extracurriculars for elite college admissions, and a dimming of their prospects. For the stupid, disruptive, aggressive kid, none of that stuff matters, and no real consequences follow.
In case you were wondering what the effects of an oversupply of smart/high potential people looks like for a particular region, here it is.
The stupid, disruptive, and aggressive are actually in socioeconomic undersupply, which is why they alone have the privilege to not be similarly forcibly handicapped if they do that. After that it's just a case of rich get richer.
Were the balance equal, the high potential people would have the social power to hit back; if high potential people were in undersupply, beating one would be similarly against the law.
If/when race is an effective proxy for high/low potential, institutional racism is never far behind. This is why South Africa could do apartheid for so long (and it fell apart just like it did for the rest of the world- high potential people stopped being in deficit and started being in surplus, and as such couldn't sustain their social position), and is why progressives are [publicly] racist against "their own" race. It's merely an attempt to ingratiate oneself with they who circumstances have privileged.
This is also why mass immigration and no-human-is-illegal, intentionally importing this class, sound reasonable as a way to fix this issue. But it turns out that doing this runs up against the privileges of the natives who are in undersupply for the same reason, which is why it is in their interest that they vote for someone who will stop the erosion of their privilege!
You have it reversed. When there are lots of stupid people, stupidity is legally protected by the legions of stupids. There are more stupids today than in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Africa#Ethnic_groups
Obvious comment about outgroup midwits, aside, no, there aren't. The cost of labor in Western society being so absurdly high is actually an indication of this- there aren't enough people who will only amount to just enough that you can get away with paying them what their work is worth, so you have to pay them more.
The problem is that most of the high-potential (specifically, as defined by Boomer logic) people are competing for positions that pay less and less every day. It's not so much "elite overproduction" as it is an oversupply of people that can do harder intellectual tasks, so paradoxically they're working those more difficult jobs for less money due to market saturation (and it remains to be seen to what extent AI will devour what remains).
It is that oversupply that has resulted in the complete destruction of this group's human rights. Parenting rights? Gone. Right to self-defense in the places you're forced to go? Gone. Freedom of association? Gone. The pretense that rules could be appealed to? Gone. People didn't get less self-controlled (as crime rates over the last 30 years pretty clearly show); what happened was that the people who could control themselves managed to breed themselves into such oversupply that it's not a scarce resource any more.
This is why this group falls all over itself to paean anti-racist causes, and ruin the lives of those who (quite reasonably) object to those policies- there are too many of them to distinguish naturally between them, so self-oppressing bullshit will be invented such that a distinction can again be drawn (and those doing the selecting can feel morally absolved because they can tell themselves it was about Muh Privilege). This is why purity spirals work.
It's basically what would happen if "take a trade instead" was taken seriously by all of the middle class that go into higher education now- you'd have people performing that trade at a far lower wage relative to what they would get as a mere operator (with no credential)- the operator salary might be less, but not that much less, because most of the wage is coming from the qualification of "is butt at workstation", and the marginal value of intelligence for that task diminishes incredibly quickly.
You can't draw a chief's wage for chief's work if you don't have enough Indians.
There’s some truth to this but it’s more about market restrictions. Consider that society once limited these well paying white collar jobs to respectable white men from good families who went to university (in a society when fewer than 10% of people went to university) so the labor pool for this kind of work was probably less than a tenth of what it is today.
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