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Comment by autoexec | 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.

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.

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>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...

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

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