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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14289 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 mean, Freddie's main argument in the essay is that:

  1. Public schools have terrible metrics.
  2. A bunch of RWers want to abolish public schools, because of the terrible metrics.
  3. But public schools don't have terrible metrics because the schools suck. They have terrible metrics because they're the school of last resort for the children who suck.
  4. So abolishing the public schools won't fix anything; those children will still suck wherever they are.

That argument holds water.

There's a secondary argument, more implied than stated, which goes:

  1. Public schools have bad metrics.
  2. This makes non-sucky parents pull their non-sucky kids out of public schools.
  3. This very effect, rather than the quality of teaching, is why public schools have bad metrics, in a vicious circle.
  4. Hence, non-sucky parents are wrong to do this.

This argument does not hold water; propositions 1-3 are correct, but while parents doing this solely for quality-of-teaching are indeed making a mistake, there are two other valid reasons to do it: 1) their children could be harmed by the sucky kids, 2) the sucky kids may directly impair the ability of non-sucky kids to learn (I hear this one is particularly a thing recently in the USA due to various court cases and policies). I can certainly sympathise with reason #1, having had an arm broken and a tooth knocked out at one of the bad kind of public schools (my mother actually predicted that I'd lose teeth before I went there), if perhaps not reason #2 (I think better classroom control is/was in place in Australia, at least during the late 90s-early 00s when I was there).

I will note that there is a socialist solution to the problem of roughhouse public schools, and one that's fairer to poor-but-non-delinquent kids who beat the lottery - remove the delinquents from the normal public school system and put them in less-common reform schools that explicitly only serve delinquents (and possibly have the required infrastructure to stop the delinquents beating each other up). I have a vague feeling that this isn't permitted in the USA due to the aforementioned court cases and civil rights laws, although I don't know the particulars and could be wrong. But yeah, were that solution in place, Freddie would be mostly right about the secondary argument.

Reform schools totally exist in the US, but due to incentives of the US system(that is, very high parental say) they're basically only for kids who would otherwise be in Juvie.

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