Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. You fell through the cracks, that's hardly an optimal outcome.
>and led to more positive interventions in your education
You mean actions that are arguably beneficial on paper but in practice amount to the school telling the at-risk student to <cartman>respect my authority</cartman>?
That stuff never works in practice when the party the at-risk person doesn't respect/care about is the same party or has sufficient/control or incentive alignment with the party doing the intervention.
So you're saying you were beyond all influence so they just should have left you alone? At that point they should have expelled you- did you ever think of the damage you were doing to the rest of the school population by your actions?
edit- did not realize you were not parent poster, though I think this holds true.
That is an interesting point. "Get rid of the bad so the good can flourish". Which is opposite of the "equity" doctrine so popular over the last year.
I don't know what 'expelled' means in your definition. I was kicked out of the normal high school and sent to an 'alternative placement center' full of troubled youth several times. That was part of the reason I never failed a grade in high school.
The alternative center had very few teachers and had students from 6th grade through 12th. In the math and english classes, they were combined with students from high school and middle school. So when I'd get sent there, I'd have failing grades in math and english, but then in the alternative center, I was given 6th grade level work which I got all A's on and saved me for the year.
If you got kicked out of the alternative center, there was some kind of bootcamp type place you'd go to. Most of the kids I know that got sent there just ended up dropping out of school completely.
But all this is a contradiction. Many here are against homeschooling, yet when push comes to shove, no one wants trouble makers in the public school. But if homeschooling is bad and they can't go to public school, then what is left?
Oh yeah, nobody who is an educator would ever say such a thing. But as the spouse of one you can only hear so many stories of behavior before you start asking what the other students were learning while one kid goes on a 15 minute meltdown. But it's really dangerous where that thinking leads- so much of school performance/behavior is tied to family situations that it can go to some dark places if you replace the compassion most teachers have with simple pragmatism.
Homeschooling gets a bad rap here because of it's association with the right, but unfortunately for society as a whole it's a step in the wrong direction. It makes the quality of your education wholly dependent on your parents, which pretty much just accelerates the cycle.
Overall I think most towns have to accept it takes more resources to educate a kid on average than the public has been willing to allocate- it really is an 80-20 or 95-5 situation. But schools get decreasing budgets and increasing responsibilities, and react by cutting 'extraneous' activities that caught some of the marginal kids in the past (shop, art, etc) or by restricting things to a certain grade average (sports, activities), further disassociating those on the edges. The main thing I've notice at my kid's high school that is different from 30 years ago is the total lack of community- kids are told they need to excel and excel fast, which leads to a every man for himself kind of mentality. If you haven't found your niche by 14 you may as well pack it in, and that niche better be computers, nursing, or football or you're just wasting everyone's time.
But I can guarantee that most teachers/ administrators/ districts would rather do almost anything than deal with social media monitoring crap they barely understand- unfortunately the only thing worse than helping set up the police state is to have to explain to a news crew how you missed so many warning signs while EMTs are wheeling out bodies in the background.
>You can only hear so many stories of behavior before you start asking what the other students were learning while one kid goes on a 15 minute meltdown.
They're learning how to deal with people which is more important than the crap on the whiteboard.
I hear so much about how our schools are held back by accomidating problem students. Yet in my experience it was the students always disrupting the lesson plan and the class that caused me to learn shit. The teacher left to their own devices will merely teach kids how to get great marks in academic subjects which is a horrible waste of everybodies time. It only teaches people how to open doors.
That's a separate problem- students play dumb so class is easy as the teacher struggles to figure out how the kids made it so far. Then they get dinged when kids do miserably on standardized tests. And they don't dare just flunk them, or the parents will be in demanding the teachers head for disparaging their little genius.
>but unfortunately for society as a whole it's a step in the wrong direction. It makes the quality of your education wholly dependent on your parents, which pretty much just accelerates the cycle.
I'm still trying to figure out why everyone is against homeschooling. Everyone is negative, and if any reason it is given it is of the "won't get socialized correctly" type. But you mention "cycle". What cycle?
The cycle I see (and have seen personally), is a troubled youth floats through the public school system. Ends up working a minimum wage job for the rest of their life. And in the process of that, has children which then go through the public school system with no involvement from the parent. Then rinse wash and repeat.
So what is the "cycle" with homeschooling? In most cases you are already dealing with someone that is middle class or above (after all, homeschooling books cost lots of money) and someone that is involved with their child's education (otherwise why would you be homeschooling?). And to be middle class, you have to have a good trade or career path. Certainly something worth showing your kids. Public school seems to teach very little of the local government and small business world. After all, if you were good at small business, why would you be a teacher? The point I make is that with homeschooling, there are many more opportunities to give your children a diverse learning experience. Overall it mostly seems healthier mentally to the child as well. The pressures of hanging with the right crowd mostly go away as well as the depression associated when one feels like they are going to a prison everyday (and the cutting and self harm that comes with that).
Of course that's the best case scenario. I can use my own mother-in-law as one of the bad cases. She home schooled her kids without any input from the father. He was rarely home anyway. The boys started hanging out with the wrong crowd once they were teenagers. But it wasn't some rogue group of socially misfit home schooled children they joined up with. It was a group of socially misfit public school children from the wrong side of town. This is where I don't follow the "homeschool causes social issues" argument as in this case, the boys would have had the same friends whether they were home schooled or in public school. They only way to change that would have been to move.
But back to the question. Where's the "cycle"? In my mother-in-law's case, she was public schooled, then home schooled her daughter and boys single handily. The boys, well they're not doing too well. I'm sure they'll have kids of their own and I highly doubt they'll home school them. And statistically, if a parent performs poorly in school, so will the children. So the only cycle I see is one of under performers in school (regardless of whether public or private), produce children that are under performers.
But there is one saving grace. That mother of the home schooled boys had a daughter that saw the folly in her brother's ways. And as she was home schooled, she was not pressured into acting any one certain way, and chose to act maturely in all her ways. I then married her at my age of 28, having spent nearly 10 years looking for the "right" one. I think that has some merit.
For an individual family homeschooling may make sense, assuming they really are committed to it. The socialization issues are minor, and I agree that keeping them away from the 'bad' element is a huge plus.
But for society as a whole, it's better that the lower performers be exposed to a larger world than their dysfunctional situation. The odds are against them, but many are exposed to enough to improve their situation. That's the theory, anyway, and as someone raised on Egalitarian principles it seems to me the only way for a free society to function. But that seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of lower taxes and an I've got mine mentality.
>Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education.
I've honestly thought about that a lot. You know, "what if someone took me under their wing and showed me how to truly fit in with society and be a great person". I doubt that would have worked. I saw most adults as idiots at the time and was not inclined to listen to anyone. For one, the advice I did get never helped or lined up with reality.
My parents told me to graduate high school, even though they hadn't. The counselors told me not to do drugs, even though the grapevine told me they themselves had (doesn't matter if that was true or not, as a teenager you make up your own "facts"). And my brain told me I had it all figured out and was part of the elite, and the rap music I blared that spoke of killing cops, beating women, and "making millions" justified my own thoughts. I was beyond help. It was only through basically getting kicked of my parents house and going all the way to the bottom did I then realized that I knew nothing.
Of course, perhaps if there was some counselor or authority that I could have repected at school, maybe then I would have listened. But finding someone to mesh with my mentality would have been difficult and would have required a lot of thought, care, and time on their part. And in my general experience, most counselors seem to get pretty burned out after 5+ years of dealing with unruly children and they then revert to not trying much and just occupying a desk chair. Most of my high school's faculty was like that. Most had had the same position for the last 20 years.
