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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.

Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.

>Hiding DEI/civil rights issues because you might actually be forced to fix them, and pay for the fix.

Sounds racist. And exactly the way people want it.

Vagueposting is a new term online for this kind of behavior - it stems from people getting absolutely destroyed online for various opinions, resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean. Sometimes it's hateful opinions, sometimes it isn't. The end result is people will become unable to simply state their opinions and we won't be able to pick apart people with terrible ideas from the good ones, because no one wants to talk!

> resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean

This is hacker news, most of us are anonymous. People say all sorts of vile things on here. Come on, Ambolia, have the courage of your convictions.

It's more effort than courage. Saying vile things takes no effort for many people. Saying a difficult truth takes more effort.

In any case, his caution birthed a comment tree that's normally verboten.

This isn't Reddit, you aren't going to get softbanned by downvotes

We're talking about schools in the US, which means we're talking about black and latino students. This trips the culture war wires, so people get wink winky.

Because some things are politically incorrect to say.

If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.

Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.

Probably because what this poster seems to be implying is a sort of inconvenient or unpopular truth. The kinds of things that there's no point actually saying out loud no matter how true they are, because they just make people angry and being explicit about it just paints a sort of target on you instead of actually driving anything towards a solution

We already have a lot of studies and statistics about problems with education, but the narrative about education problems seem to focus on the wrong things, things that the studies and statistics don't really support.

It's not rocket science, certain kids showing up as getting impacted by punitive measures looks bad on certain government measures. So they stop getting punished. Problem solved!

Which ones?

Does it matter which kids is it? Just remove the metrics, apply the punitive measures fairly, and let the dice fall where they may. Or don't and allow the safety of teachers and the quality of public education to keep degrading. We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.

Punitive measures only work if you believe you have something to lose, a lot of these kids don't. Sure, you can þunish them for their infraction, and you'll have justice, but it's not going to stop them from doing it again unless they feel like the lost out on something. And if you have nothing in the first place why do you care?

And a punishment is also just attention from an adult, and that often feels like a win over being completely ignored the rest of the time.

> þunish

Today I learned that the Icelandic keyboard has a dedicated key for typing þ

The British one doesn’t, so I’ve no idea how I did that.

Conpiracy theory: someone wants to track you. It looks like a typo but switching one letter in an uncommon word can make the word a unique enough fingerprint to track an account. Of course I'm assuming you're typing on a computer that has been compromised.

Alternatively you have fat fingers and use Linux (is there a correlation?) and you hit AltGr+T. From Wikipedia about British keyboard:

  Using the AltGr key on Linux produces many other characters and symbols, e.g. ¹²³€½{[]}@łe¶ŧ←↓→øþæßðđŋħjĸł«»¢“”nµΩŁE®Ŧ¥↑ıØÞÆ§ÐªŊĦJ&Ł<>©‘’Nº×÷· (If reconfigured as a compose key, an even larger repertoire is available)

It appears your brain has been compromised and needs an antivirus scam.

> We live in a harsh world and sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a higher cause.

Maybe that’s what the people sacrificing the teachers believe too?

From other anecdotes in the comments it seems like it’s not just teachers but other customer service professions too. Your hypothesis that you don’t want to go into detail on might be incorrect. Guess we’ll never know

OK — Under-represented minorities would be expelled at higher rates than whites and asians, and the district would get sued for discrimination.

Yeah I read that and gave up. It's also one of those "let me explain Smittywergermanjensen's Law to you"

Because these things are for unfortunate reasons of historical happenstance, correlated with race. And if you let race into the discussion the evil people who peddled all this bad metrics and bad policy can use it to sow division and get everyone arguing with each other while they quietly dodge blame.

Because he would immediately get massively downvoted and flagged.

"...so weird".

"weird" is two years ago. Time to update your firmware.

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