[solistice]

Well, in my case it was absolutely my fault. I angered some of the school administrators and i was academically underperforming. And in retrospect it was the right call. I got thrown into the K12 system in 9th grade from a German school, had a relatively weak academic track record before that, and the school was a private school looking to churn students into the Ivys. The 3 years I spent there were hugely eye opening in regards to what I could or could not do with my life, but ultimately, it was not the right place for me.

But for my brother, it's a little different. He was kicked out of a public school for altercations with another student, and I would say that the situation was not handled in a fair manner. The school claimed that the reason for the suspension was that the other parents didn't feel safe sending their children to the school anymore, which was bogus since my mother actually went and personally called every single parent in the grade. None of them had any concerns over the incident. I'm suspecting that the school was simply overly cautious since about 20 years ago one student (one of the pastors children) murdered another student by stabbing him on a staircase inside of the school building. Whilst I don't fault the school administration for overreacting and deciding to deal with the problem through sweeping it under the rug, I do think the issue could have been handled more gracefully than sending a 12 year old for police questioning AND a psychologist.

Also I was not making a point about whether my or my brothers expulsion was justified, I was commenting about the effects of expulsion, and how variable they can be depending on the student and their upbringing.

I believe that public school systems should act as an equalizer against how you're raised at home instead of compounding these problems.

[acjohnson55]

> I believe that public school systems should act as an equalizer against how you're raised at home instead of compounding these problems.

That's a commonly held belief, and I think it's a lot to put on the public school system. As a teacher, when I wasn't busy, you know, instructing, I was a mental health first responder, surrogate parent, law enforcer, stenographer, and so forth. I agree that, in general, social services should provide a baseline so that every child has a shot, regardless of what life situation they happen to be born into. I'm just not sure it's fair for that to fall so heavily on the schools.

In practice, this is exactly what seems to happen. And I think this over-reliance is a big part of what brings down low income schools. Even within inner cities, there's effect where the most prominent and successful schools tend to scoop up the kids with the greatest relative advantage and the most challenging students are pushed down to progressively more impoverished schools. We end up with multiple layers of elective and systemic segregation. As Paul Tough put it [1], there are big distinctions within poverty, with those who are the very worst off -- in "deep poverty" in Tough's terminology -- often being the people least effectively served.

The neighborhood schools often serve as social glue within their communities, but they're measured academically against schools in more affluent communities that have the privilege of being focused much so on being good educational centers. When these neighborhood schools are labeled as "failing" for academic underperformance, they're closed down and it can be a very traumatic local event.

Now I'm not saying that schools that aren't educating effectively shouldn't be reformed, or sometimes shutdown. I'm just pointing out that the reality of the role they serve and all they're doing isn't typically acknowledged or supported.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/obama-poverty.htm...

[solistice]

I've always thought that measuring schools by student academic performance alone is an incredibly lazy way of measuring performance across the board because it doesn't take into account massive differences in the average student different schools get.

Measuring difference in student performance between two points in time would provide a better heuristic, and even using that as a measure for funding is silly as it creates a feedback loop. I'd rather see this data being used to identify and study top performing schools and the findings being applied to schools performing in the bottom percentile.

But then this entire problem hinges on how we as a society want public schools to work. Do we want them to act as an equalizer in the sake of social stability and mobility, or do we want them to amplify existing situations so that our top performers perform even better?

Whilst there is obviously already a deep relationship between teachers and their students, another method for taking weight off their backs in the regard of being mental health first responders could be having mental health responders on site, whether that be social workers or child psychologists which is how things are handled in Germany. At my previous school we had a psychologist that was shared across different schools in the area, who would be open to talk about any mental health issues a student might have.

Now in Germany we also have a 3 tiered system, where the lowest performing students go to a "Hauptschule", which focuses on putting students into trades, a "Realschule" which opens up moving into either higher reaches of the trades or moving into a "Gymnasiale Oberstufe", which is the conclusion of the "Gymnasium" that focuses on funneling students into universities to pursue further eduction.

Whilst this tiered system has its issues despite possibility to move into higher tiers later in your educational life, it also allows for dividing up certain problems. Students from a "Gymnasium" are usually assumed to come from a stable background, which means less social workers and stronger focus on academics, whilst students from a "Hauptschule" are usually offered more guidance in exchange for a less strict and more practice oriented scientific curricullum.