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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"For this investigation, ProPublica Illinois and the Tribune obtained and analyzed thousands of detailed records that state law requires schools to create whenever they use seclusion. The resulting database documents more than 20,000 incidents from the 2017-18 school year and through early December 2018.

"Of those, about 12,000 included enough detail to determine what prompted the timeout. In more than a third of these incidents, school workers documented no safety reason for the seclusion."

Done. There's no need for any further discussion. 8000 without "enough detail" and 4000 with no documented safety reason.

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I don't want to take away from the importance of this specific issue.

But documentation at public schools is often a complete disaster anyway. The sheer volume of documentation and even where it should "go" is a huge burden put on teachers who are busy with other things.

I know of a school asking teaches to begin all documentation with some "standard" documentation for every form. Among things like date of birth and etc standard sheet asks for the race of the child, they're explicitly told to not ask the child or family for that information (for a variety of reasons depending on who you ask). They of course have no access to any of the information the school already has about that child. So any documentation automatically becomes impossible to fill out, let alone deliver to the appropriate people.

Okay but the one time you might expect "teachers" to get the documentation right is when they're throwing their kids into solitary confinement.

That's a valid concern, but given that this is a process where an adult has to stand outside the door to observe a child who is typically in severe distress, it seems like mandating adherence to documentation requirements is both important and something they can make time for. There's an upper limit to how much paperwork it will generate.

I think your point is valid and can even be drawn more broadly. Yes, this is horrible, but there's a way that we all share the blame for this. Society's expectations for what education should accomplish have gone through the roof, but nobody wants to commit the resources that are actually required to make it happen. Instead, what we get is more and more top-down legislation, based on questionable research, written by people who don't actually have to deal with real kids day in and day out, that dumps more and more burdens on teachers who are already at the end of their ropes and with insufficient support.

The teachers I know say there is almost no other way they are allowed to discipline children.

It’s almost as though the primary way the brains of every warm blooded animal evolved to receive discipline has been eschewed by polite society and problematic consequences ensued?

What, hitting children? It doesn't seem to work.

The only analogue in nature I can think of is violent competition among adult males.

Nearly every animal with a brain has young that misbehave. Mama kangaroo, elephant, tiger, horse and chimp will put up with a certain amount of bad behavior, eg overagressive play or taking too much food, then they’ll grunt, then a growl, and then when bear cub keeps it up, Mama bear nips just hard enough to get them to stop and hopefully not do it again.

We’ve abandoned something that’s been at the core of nurturing the young for 60,000,000 years. I would assume there’s been a fair amount of natural selection at work in a fundamental aspect of the parent-child relationship. I think choosing not to teach that “when I say stop, stop” without thinking that it will not work out for a meaningful fraction of the population, seems a bit like trying to figure out what the Boeing MCAS engineers were thinking.

Sounds like you only know teachers in Illinois.

I disagree. Surely this has happened _because_ children have been treated as numbers, not humans. The one thing this needs is humanising quotes and narrative.

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