NYC DoE and many NYC suburbs already attract very highly qualified teachers. I don't mean just a little bit highly qualified. I mean former (some current) college chemistry professors teaching high school chemistry qualified.

Teachers do have tremendous lifestyle perks associated with their jobs (even shitty schools have stable hours relative to most other high paying professors). We shouldn't pretend ~65k (going up to ~115k with just seniority) a year (not counting pensions and health insurance) for ~190 days of predictable hours is not highly attractive as it is.

We also shouldn't pretend OK paying teachers poverty level wages can attract qualified teachers.

I like how you're glossing over the countless poor people who have no issue ensuring that their children value an education and supporting them in obtaining one.

It only takes a few kids per classroom to prevent any learning from taking place. Those 5 or 6 kids need to be removed from the equation so the rest of their peers can flourish. Send the ones with parents who DGAF to the military boarding schools.

This is why it's annoying when progressives get involved in the discussion.


The thread is about education. No one, from what I've read, has justified keeping the status quo. In fact, everyone wants education to be better. You all want to talk about racial injustice, there are tons of other threads that have been hijacked by progressives to discuss that.


If you really think putting more black kids in rural Alabama, and more white kids in B'more will result in an improvement in education, you need to go talk to who ever educated you, and find out why that's not a coherent idea. You also need to them to teach you that disagreeing with that idea is not justifying keeping things the same.

This is shorthand for "prison," just to be clear. No way he's okay with paying extra tax dollars for actual boarding schools.

People are a direct reflection of their leadership. You can complain about bad parents, and not being good leaders for their kids, but it's a teachers/administrators job to be a leader too, and they largely fail at it, if they continually allow students to hijack their classrooms.

No, this would be to hopefully prevent wasting money housing future prisoners. Many kids already feel like they're showing up to prison every day specifically because their schools are so unsafe.

I would be cool with it. We piss far more money away on far less impactful programs.


The teachers aren't empowered to do anything about it. Anything they do risks their job. The administration won't hand down punishments because it affects the scores on their DPI report cards. The parents who would be helpful in addressing behavior issues are probably already doing so at home, and as such, their kids aren't the problem.

There are far fewer of your “countless” than you seem to think. Policy should not be implemented to benefit the few in any event, no matter how noble they are (they don’t need the help as much anyway).

This military school thing is patently absurd and you keep suggesting it. Of course extremely dangerous students are expelled.

Maybe you shouldn’t deride opposition to your views as being incapable of “fixing issues” that are extraordinarily complex lest it be given any credence.

Anyone with any sense that wants education to be better would realize spending incredibly more amounts of money would do this. Imagine if you could an education system with no money. How ideal would this be? I don’t buy any of the diminishing returns arguments: it all goes back to the medicine analogy.

If you actually read my posts I never endorsed forced integration (except in extreme circumstances, like existed in the 60s and 70s, perhaps), so please stop misattributing and then talk about what is “annoying”.

I don't agree. Children (and people) behave differently for different people, and different settings (one abstract example with adults is the use of profanity at work/home). They also change their behavior during acute situations, and there are many ways to manage this. If it's chronic, it's likely the expectations for how to behave at school was never enforced in earlier grades. This is where counselors and behavior training/psychology for teachers would come in.

This, much like your, "it's not like these kids are attacking the teachers" comment just shows how little you know.

Can't really argue with people who have their head in the sand. We'll continue on our status quo journey and ask ourselves why outcomes remain so poor. Why, it's that damned institutional racism! Never mind that the suburban districts with 50%+ minority populations seem to manage just fine.

The hottest of takes here with the, "Hmmm, maybe if we just ask them nicely to behave?"

MPS has been singing the Mindfulness song for a long time. Not working out so well.

I know you don't have kids, but once they figure out there are no consequences for their actions, you've lost them.

And it would be good of you to actually try to contend with what I'm saying.

At some point you have to look at what's going on in the classroom, where the rubber meets the road. Whatever "problem" you want bring up, think about how that manifest in a classroom. Whether that's Inso issues with discipline, or the progressives issues with racial justice, or my issues with the efficacy and extent of funding for schools.


There is something fundamentally broken with the teacher student dynamic. If teachers/administrators aren't bad, how are any of the issues we all are pointing to able to manifest in a classroom? Racism is just a poor excuse for bad educational outcomes today, unless you accept we have bad/inadequate teachers/administrators.

In that basic interaction in a school classroom, between teacher and student, how is racial injustice, or lack of equitable racial demographics preventing that teacher from educating her pupils?

Discipline and behavior change is not all about negative reinforcement. I have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to "mindfulness". If you can't communicate or effect change with a child, you are failing them. Sure, if you want a camp full of conformist and mindless factory workers, maybe your idea is good to discipline them into submission, but the economy is not too good for those types (not to mention we would go back to 50's era drop out rate). Schools, at the very least, should be a sanctuary, becasue the behavior issues, whatever extent they may be, are not indicative of bad apples, but bad situations.

Cite or ban.

I’ll help out: they aren’t “physically assaulting teachers on a daily basis” was my actual quote not your bland rebranding of “attacking the teachers”.

If you want you to be taken seriously you simply cannot misquote!

The suburban districts manage better BECAUSE THERE IS MORE MONEY in them. Not lol per pupil spending. ACTUAL FAMILIAL WEALTH.

Answering your last question: it is very clear from sociological research that the most segregated and isolated communities foster the most hate and racism. I consider it socially beneficial to root out hatred and racial animus. Ergo, integration is a manifest social good. Education is about far more than learning how to read and write; it’s about learning how to think and feel and be a good person and citizen. Naturally, exposure to different people with different backgrounds and life experiences helps improve educational achievement under my, correct, rendering.

We are not talking about communities. We are not talking about fixing racism. This thread is specific to education. You are talking about socially engineering social justice via everything. Education is not your concern, social justice is. Great, but can we talk specifically about schools, and education policy?

I mean, if the racism and hatred is affecting class curriculum/teacher student dynamic, and ability to learn, that means the administrators and teachers are bad! Changing the demographics does not fix that.

Bolded is way more difficult to execute than you pretend it is. First, not every disruptive student is a tough, jaded seventeen-year-old corner boy like the kids on The Wire.

Sometimes the kid is in second or third grade. That seems a little early to be giving up on a kid off in the way you suggest.

You have cited to your wife's experience teaching in Milwaukee. And FWIW, I am not doubting the veracity of your anecdotes. In fact, I know someone who had a similiar experience to your wife's experience.

But here is a different anecodate. There was a kid in my son's third grade class who was highly disruptive and occasionally aggressive, both to other kids and teachers. There were plenty of parents who would have been happy to see this kid get kicked out of school. But the principal took a personal interest in the kid. There were a lot of days where the kid spent his entire day with the principal.

By the end of the year, the kid had made tremendous progress. He wasn't perfect, but he was much, much better. When the school had its end-of-year thing, several kids said a few words about what the school meant to them. This kid stood up in front of everyone and said that when he started the year, he felt angry all the time and that he thought he was angry at other kids and the teachers. He explained that the school had helped him to realize that he was frustrated and upset about other things and that he was grateful for all the help he had received from the school. Plenty of people were crying by the time the kid sat down.

Not all the stories are bad.

Setting aside the fact that you can’t separate the circulatory system from blood, I have been very clear about my views on education policy and schools: they should get massively more amounts of money and idiotic meddling legislatures should have no control over it once distributed.

I'm aware of countries that have extremely successful education systems that don't give up on 15% of their kids, or force the difficult ones into military school. I'm not aware of any successful education systems that do. Do you know of any, and if not, what makes you think it's a good idea?

Social-emotional learning, which would include mindfulness, seems to be having good results here.

A+ post

This is exactly the sort of perspective I expect the resident libs to have. You just have no clue. We aren't talking about a single kid in a school that has enough time resources to justify that one child spending their entire day being babysat by the goddamned principal. We're talking about 5-8 kids in every single classroom. In the case of WCLL, that meant hundreds of kids preventing many hundreds more from obtaining an education.

Every single teacher that ends up on the burnt heap of early retirement had that same optimistic twinkle in their eye before they showed up to the Thunderdome and had it snuffed out.

I get it. I paid to send my kids to a private elementary school, and moved out of the clutches of MPS to Wauwatosa when they hit High School, which would've been cost-prohibitive for me at the time. The stories that come out of MPS are entirely foreign to the day-to-day experiences of my own children.

I also liked the part about your theatrical vision of the 17 year old edgy corner teen like from The Wire. Those are high school seniors and their immediate path is largely set. I'm talking about the MPS 2nd grade classrooms with half a dozen kids who have absolutely zero respect for any authority and the poor teacher has to try and teach while being called every name in the book by some abused kids who don't belong in a general classroom.

Think this, but he has 5 friends in the room who think it's hilarious and they all join in. Every. Single. Day.

I foolishly tried to talk respectfully to you. I now see that was a mistake.

I don't need you to educate me about the mean streets of Milwaukee. I don't live in some gated community in the suburbs. I live in a city that is 15x the size of Milwaukee. I get plenty of exposure to real life.

I mentioned one kid not because there was only one disruptive kid in the entire ****ing school. I mentioned one kid because he was the worst case and he made a lot of improvement.

The school I was describing was a NYC public school, and not one of the NYC public schools that is a de facto private school. Resources at the school were fairly limited.

Go ahead and send me a link to the school in question. I'm sure I'll find a puff piece online for it.

I'll be happy to write a nice letter to the MPS board on your behalf and use it as an example of what might be possible with the power of love and friendship in the face of adversity.

Ins0’s continuing belief that liberals don’t know anything about what living in a major US city is like is a constant running gag.