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Comment by james4k | Hacker News Reader

What are you thinking about when you say "nothing effective is allowed"?

Not OP, but removal of problem children from the general classroom environment and clear and consistent consequences for actions.

I found this was mostly a problem with school administration. You don't get enough support from the admin to come by and take a student to the office or out of the classroom if they're being disruptive. They want students only in their overcrowded classrooms and no support staff to cut down on costs. At a better funded school it's easy to phone the office and have someone take a student out to calm down or for a short detention but at the lower end public schools you're on your own to try and deal with everything that might happen in the school day, and so anything that happens you have to personally attend to which ends up eating into your class time or energy.

This is very very necessary and basically impossible to actually get from the administrations. My wife has had kids who violently disrupted her class 3+ times a week, to the point where she had to evacuate 20+ other children from the room for multiple hours at a time (I'm not exaggerating at all).

We finally sat down and I helped her write a specifically worded email (finally got a good use out of all of that HR training as a manager! ha) to trigger the right response from her admin.

Any shitty single kid can ruin a classroom for the rest of their peers. And the system doesn't allow for any consequences. It's massively disappointing.

From my chair as a parent, I could not get teachers to care about one of my kids being bullied in class, and it was the administration that finally did something.

I have now dealt with dozens of public school teachers and while some were good, most were ambivalent and there were more garbage teachers than good ones.

The refrain of It's Not The Teachers rings hollow. It is the teachers. It may also be the administration, the parents, the community, the politicians, everybody, but it is still the teachers.

Sure. But it’s pretty easy to get dejected when you have a large class full of maniacs and no support.

Also, people here should stop generalizing their experience in California to the country at large. MA and NJ have pretty good public schools, some of which are in dense and diverse regions of each state.

You should have started with administration first. Teach aren’t equipped or provided solutions for bullying and many are dealing with acting out or violent children. See the case of the teacher shot by her violent student a few months ago who kept warning school administrators who did nothing, even on the day of the shooting.

Except this is frequently the goal of those children. And so where are you going to send them? To another classroom with other troublemakers, all in one group? What chance would they have?

What everyone is talking around is the fact that the solution to "problem children" in the classroom, if you're removing them, is that you have to spend more money and more time working with them to get them off the "problem" track and re-integrated.

Because that's the stakes: that kid who disrupts the classroom, if you don't succeed, is your future welfare dependency, local crime problem, or incarceration cost and a huge amount of lost tax revenue.

If the other 20-30 students aren’t able to learn, the stakes are 20-30 times as much (regarding tax income).

I'm curious though, what's the alternative? Yes, the problem child will cause problems in the future if they're removed from class. But they're also going to cause problems for other kids now, and there's still no reason to think they'd be any less problematic in the future.

Collecting problem children in smaller, more controlled classes is the only effective strategy. In a class of say, 30 kids, it just takes one to disrupt a lesson. On the other hand, if every kid is cooperating, a single teacher can effectively manage a class of hundreds (and actually do in some Asian countries).

Separation helps the problem kids as well. I have personally observed a high success rate in turning around kids once they get the more focused attention possible in a small class.

To be concrete, if you had 2 teachers and 60 kids with 5 of them "problematic", the most effective approach would be to divide them so you had the 55 cooperative learners in one room and the others in their own class.

There's a funny thing that happens where recruiting that is effective and easy to allow gets allowed. That leaves the things that are hard to allow but effective, because if they aren't effective, nobody cares about them.

Hence, nothing effective is allowed.

It's the same concept by which Google Maps will invariably tell you, "you are in the fastest path to for destination", even if you just took the dumbest wrong turn possible.

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