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Comment by educationdata | Hacker News Reader

Don't private schools also have zero tolerance policies?

Students who engage in serious misconduct, or repeated disruptive conduct will be “counseled out.” But private schools are generally small, closed communities, which creates a high level of trust and allows routine misunderstandings and disputes to be resolved reasonably. Also, there are strong disincentives to “going nuclear” for both the school and the parents. The schools obviously stand to lose revenue, but the parents also stand to lose their monetary and social investment into the school.

As shared by a friend of mine recently:

Well, my kid screwed up! She took a multitool to school. It has a knife blade. I'm sure every student will go home and tell their parents that someone had a knife at school. Which is true, and only part of the story.

I am glad she is at a private school, where she was only suspended for the day, vs at a public school with an onduty police officer, where she would have been formally charged and entered into the 'system' (a discussion for another time, but this is one problem I have with SRO and the criminalizing of students for minor offenses and how that leads the schools into a pipeline to prisons).

Suspended for the day; sure I guess that’s “reasonable.”

Personally, my wife and I are glad to have homeschooled our kids.

Wait.. there are resident police officers in schools in USA?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_resource_officer

> In the late 1990s, SRO presence on campuses again increased after the Department of Justice created a $750 million grant program, Cops in School, to hire over 6,500 SROs.

https://txssc.txstate.edu/topics/law-enforcement/articles/br...

"Normal country", as they say. Gotta keep the school-to-prison pipeline pumping.

Alternatively, as was the case at my private high school, the small, closed community creates a high level of trust and allows truly awful behavior to be papered over and worked around, because that can line up with the incentives of the community.

Or you could be at an elite private high school, rightly upset about aspects of it, but aware that something which strikes a 14 year old as a pointless abuse of power might actually be the grit for which penicillin and the structure of DNA are the pearls, and desperately hoping that the pervasive homophobia falls in the former category.

Being at a private school won’t stop e.g. kids from being expelled for being caught a single time with a small amount of pot, as happened to my cousin and several of his friends. I guess at least they weren’t referred to the police?

Plenty of zero-tolerance bullshit at (extremely ritzy and exclusive... or any other type of) private schools too.

It’s not like being unaccountable to the local government makes school administrators stop power tripping.

I'd imagine there's a more direct financial incentive; if a student's parent(s) decide(s) to pull that student out of school because of a disagreement with the school's administration, then that directly leads to less money for the school.

Meanwhile, a public school doesn't have that direct penalty; if anything, it's just one less student in already-crowded classrooms, so pushing a student out might very well be a net positive.

> a public school doesn't have that direct penalty

That is false

You are correct. Public schools lose funding when enrollment drops but the magnitude of the funds lost and the degree to which those funds affect the total budget of the school is usually much greater at a private school.

> the magnitude of the funds lost and the degree to which those funds affect the total budget of the school is usually much greater at a private school

This is false

Usually they have the policies, but choose not to enforce them. The rule is there so they can expel or severely punish kids at their discretion, but typically don't want to because that represents lost revenue if the kid leaves.

The biggest pressures on school administrators and teachers are parents through direct screaming and anger, not politics. If you want to have a good schooling environment, make sure to put a parent sized amount of support behind teachers that are good, even when they come to you and tell you little jimmy is being a right asshole and needs to be disciplined

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