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Comment by greenhexagon | Hacker News Reader

Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large.

Based on my own education, a public school where every single day the same 1 or 2 students disrupted the lesson, assaulted nearby students and forced the teachers to waste hours on maintaining order rather than teaching, the result wasn't that the median student pulled the troublemaker up, it was that the troublemaker caused the entire classroom to not learn anything.

Society would have been far better off to have the couple students unable to thrive in a conventional classroom go to an alternative school and have all the other students get a decent education.

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> Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large.

Charter schools aren't needed for that though. Public schools are supposed to already be doing it. Either in the form of escalating detentions/suspensions followed by expulsion, or by moving the most problematic kids into emotional/behavioral disability classrooms/schools, or in the worst cases sending the children to hospitals and group homes.

If public schools aren't doing this, there needs to be changes in administration, just like schools where they simply resort to arresting children and giving them police records for disobeying and being disruptive. Police shouldn't be involved at all for anything less than severe crimes.

If schools don’t have competition there is no incentive to do this.

The incentive is : keep your job / don't get sued.

The law requires certain accommodations for students with disabilities and local elections should handle the rest. All that requires is an engaged community and parents can be extremely vocal/involved. Cities can have good reason to lean on schools too, because good schools bring people into an area and they bring money with them. In that sense, public schools do compete. Families and young adults looking to start them don't want to move to areas without good schools.

Incentives are there, it just takes work and paying attention. A lot of people don't even bother voting in local elections and those that do don't always give much thought to who to elect as superintendent or to the school board. When communities don't take the time to invest in their schools they don't get much out of them. It's part of the reason why poor communities that lack the time/money/energy to be as involved tend to have poorer quality schools. Adding to that are the wealthy families that move to where schools are better or don't move into those areas at all.

So you kind of just explained why public schools aren't actually competing, at least in poor areas. The issue is that many of the families in these areas do actually care about education, but are unable fix their schools because of others apathy. What should they do?

Organize. Campaign. Reach out to other parents. Name and shame. Apathy is hard to overcome, but most people already want good schools. Even people without kids don't want to be surrounded by uneducated people and don't want to deal with the problems they cause. Making time for local politics is a hard sell, but I've become increasingly convinced that it's our best chance to enact meaningful changes and improve our day to day lives.

You need only look at the Moms for Liberty types to see what small but well-organised campaigns can do. If you don't make time for local politics, others will.

This has already been happening and the result in many states is that the path of least resistance is to increase the decision making power of families.

Everyone voting with their feet is functionally equivalent to removing the disruptive kids from class, even though it might not seem like that if one has ideological blinders on.

I’d argue that the majority of people have some desire to be good at their job, and take some pride in that. Competition is a terrible substitute for an effective culture, especially in environments dominated by externalities such as the entire lives of the children that are taught. I doubt many teachers spend much time checking other classrooms to see who is best, they have more important work to be getting on with

>Public schools are supposed to already be doing it. Either in the form of escalating detentions/suspensions followed by expulsion, or by moving the most problematic kids into emotional/behavioral disability classrooms/schools, or in the worst cases sending the children to hospitals and group homes.

The problem is that public schools can't do those things, for various political and social reasons. So the charter school thing is a workaround.

>If public schools aren't doing this, there needs to be changes in administration,

Again, this is a political problem, since administrators are picked by the local government. There's only so much administrators can do anyway. Ultimately, the whole thing seems to be a political and a cultural problem.

Of course it's a political problem. There are people who have been scheming how to dismantle public education. The short term goal is to funnel tax payer money to private schooling. The longer term goal is to make sure the lower classes simply don't ever get an education.

So, yeah, it is a political problem.

This is a conspiracy theory made up and spread by teachers unions for their own vested interests.

I can't speak on whether you're right, but there is genuinely a component where public schooling can't lump everyone together and expect things to work out. In high school, I knew someone who spread vicious rumors and made remarks about Nazi Germany and whatnot. Supposedly on the autism spectrum, although that's not an excuse either way. He was smart enough, but seemed more interested in aggravating and harassing people. There needs to be a separate schooling environment for people like that, one way or another.

And speaking of Germany, over there they don't lump everyone together: somewhere around high school level, they split everyone into one of 3 tracks. Only one of those leads to college, the other two are for low-performers, and for people destined for the trades. Looking at the state of German industry, I'd say the system works out much better than the American system. However, a lot of leftists complain about it because it's somehow "unfair" for low-performing kids to not be grouped in with high performers where they can magically become better students by interacting with them...

I think that all makes sense in a narrow way but I think you are sidestepping the actual challenge of education.

As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. Schools that can be selective take advantage of that. If you are in a position to attend one of those restrictive schools it may improve your outcomes!

However, the question of "how to do a good job educating kids" on a national level must include everyone in the measure. It might be worth having schools for troubled kids! But you have to look across the results of the troubled kids and the more normate ones. I think the root comment's point is that...this seems to have copied the techniques that charter schools use to improve their educational outcomes...but that arguably those schools are not "solving" the same problem as public schools and comparing them does not reveal any insights.

Actually I disagree that a measure of success of an educational system is its breadth. If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education (or an alternative one!) Would that necessarily and absolutely be worse? What about 99/1 or 99.9 etc

Agreed. It’s uselessly idealist to imagine you can serve the 100% without making the 99% much worse off. Actually worse than useless — it’s making things worse for the 99%!

Having seen just how much damage a single disruptive student can do, I think there must be alternatives for those that need them — if only to stop disrupting everyone else.

The truly disruptive students will likely receive no meaningful education regardless.

> If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education

Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.

> Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.

Of course it's an option: this is why charter schools, private schools and home schools are increasingly popular!

Government education is the only meaningful way in which the majority of people are prohibited from meaningful choices for their kids because the government says "but what about the bottom 5%" -- so folks _opt out_ of government education entirely.

This is why "progressive" (i.e. leftist) politicians and activists are trying to make opting out as difficult as possible -- even though "marginalized minorities" disproportionately support opting out.

But despite the "progressive" (i.e. leftist) politicians and activists, the alternatives are increasingly popular. It's slow, but there is improvement on the alternatives.

> As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers.

That’s not quite the point. By excluding low performers, you can improve the outcomes of the other kids, beyond what would be possible by mixing everyone together. So you can achieve a net societal improvement that way.

If those excluded kids are just moved from selective charter schools to non-selective public schools then, by the same argument, they'll be reducing the outcomes of the non-disruptive kids who don't have parents involved enough to take advantage of the system.

So unless these charter schools have a side business selling Soylent Green made from disruptive pupils and those with learning disabilities, they're not actually improving overall results.

> By excluding low performers, you can improve the outcomes of the other kids

Isn't this is what the root comment is saying? I did not summarize the entire thing but that was my understanding of its point.

> you can achieve a net societal improvement that way.

You can improve the outcomes of the non-low-performers, but it's hard to say it's a "net societal improvement" because the low performers are also part of society.

> You can improve the outcomes of the non-low-performers, but it's hard to say it's a "net societal improvement" because the low performers are also part of society.

That depends on the improvement vs loss -- IME, it is a net improvement.

With 100 students, 5 are disruptive, verbally abusive, maybe physically violent. How much does that 5% bring down the other 95%? If we remove that 5% from the other 95%, how much does the 5% lose versus the 95% gain?

IME, the gains in the 95% are miles ahead of the losses in the 5%, which makes it's net improvement.

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