Private schools, even ones that receive less tuition per student than public schools of the same district prove this point because they can set a higher bar and more readily kick out disruptive students.
Nationally, per student cost at Catholic parochial schools is roughly 1/2 of public schools. (Couldn't find California specific numbers, but it tracks what I've seen.) That's cost/spending; tuition is even less. Special education programs eat up 1/4-1/3 of public school budgets, so there's still a gap after accounting for that.
1973 was over 50 years ago. Even the poorest, most "backward" states have long ago largely remediated spending inequities. What you hear today to support claims of inequity are cherry-picked esoteric cases to drive outrage, just like every other topic today. In reality there's clearly much more going on than what advocates for this or that would ever admit.
In any event, "picking your customers" is exactly the point of the previous poster(s). Money doesn't really explain what we're seeing. Once upon a time there was a very strong correlation, and people presumed causation, but now it's quite clear that the causation wasn't there. Certainly not directly, which is why throwing more money at the schools isn't helping.
Public schools have to take children that do not want to be there and make it everyone's problem, and their classmates suffer for it. Maybe this public school policy is the issue that should concern you.
Today in many liberal cities kids simply can't be suspended at all, period. In many other areas corporal punishment and suspensions continue to be used way too much. But actual results don't really track the way people assume they do one way or another.
What's the real difference between parochial schools and public schools? IMO it has little to do with policies or resources, but the fact that parochial schools demand parental engagement. It's often a prerequisite for admission. If the school knows the parent is engaged and working with the school, they'll often deal with behavioral problems that most public schools wouldn't or simply can't. By contrast, a friend of mine saw his entire public grammar school get shutdown by a self-identified radically progressive school board in Boston for failing to expel a kindergartner after a single incident (perpetrator, black boy; victim white girl; though really if anyone was paying attention the boy was arguably the victim, both by the ridiculous outrage, but also whatever was happening in his home life). This was at a school specifically created to mix rich white students with poor black students, and every family opted in to the experiment, and the school staff was simply following the gold-standard liberal policies the school was created for; policies which in this case were easily defensible, IMO. Its sad the way things went down, though the hypocrisy exposed was telling. People want to throw money at problems, virtue signal, and demand everybody else do something about these problems, only so long as they're not personally effected.
If the parent isn't engaged or can't be engaged, throwing more resources at the school won't help. If you want better outcomes, shift attention toward helping parents become more engaged. There are myriad ways to do that, and I really don't know what might help. But trying to fix the problem through school policies and resources isn't going to work. That avenue has been exhausted, though it still demands vigilance in maintaining appropriate resource distribution. Unfortunately, suggesting this kind of approach has categorically become a form of victim blaming--i.e. blaming parents for being poor.
I went to a catholic high school (not for the catholic part, but because it was a good school at a good price and nearby). Anyone with non-trivial behavior issues was kicked out very swiftly, so yes, they definitely turn away the inconvenient kids.
I don't understand your criticism. That 1973, the date of the case in question, is so old that we've solved school inequality?
Rich parents' kids with drug habits or a sense of entitlement can be just as bad.
Because we already know which children will be a drag on society by the time they're six or seven, right? And if we'd started doing this twenty-five years ago, we'd be much better off.
I propose intelligence/physical prowess tests for all children starting at age two or three, so we can start to weed out the dead weight much earlier.
And sterilizing the parents (as well as the kids -- but that goes without saying) will, in the medium term, address much of the tightness in the housing and job markets. It's a win-win!
And if a few decades is too long to wait for this, we could always go with summary executions, right? Or at least work camps for the inferior where they won't be a burden on society.
Sadly, all those "woke" pinko commies want to destroy our way of life by polluting our gene pool with the inferior stock, because they hate us and our free and equal society!
If you're going to say nothing can be done, then okay, the people who want something better will just move to live with each other in a community where this kind of problem doesn't exist, and do everything they can to keep it from following them. They can be happy that they have their standards, and you can be happy that you have yours.
So, by you are those the only two outcomes? Dump/warehouse disruptive kids and deny them any opportunity to become productive members of society before they even hit puberty, or let them run hog wild and burn down the schools?
I'd expect there's some middle ground here that doesn't include either giving up on children just because they're having socialization issues or putting those children in charge of the school.
Do I have all the answers? No. But if you're going to advocate for throwing away children because they misbehave, why stop there? That's not a rhetorical question.
If we're looking at things realistically, some of these children are violent. Yes, those should absolutely be removed and possibly locked in a facility if they can't be controlled. It's unfortunate, but the alternative is allowing everyone else to be harmed, for what exactly? Because you cannot face the reality that they are not going to suddenly turn into a saint and develop an interest in curing cancer when they grow up?
This is the definition of conservatism. It's not a problem as long as it's not your family suffering.
If you had a "problem child" you'd be singing a different tune about how acceptable it was to discard them.
I don't have a problem child. Neither do any of my neighbors. In fact it's apparently normal for 20% of my local school to test at the 99th percentile on state tests, and they're extremely polite. Weird. My wife's volunteering to lead our local girl scout troop and helps regularly at the school. It seems we're doing our part, so I'm really not sure what else you would like.
It's been a problem for literally millennia. This hardly unique to 21st century america.
Yes, I'm glad you don't have a "problem child". That's genuinely great, I wish everyone was that lucky.
What I would like, in the smallest possible way, is some shred of empathy for people who aren't as lucky as you are. Perhaps you could practice the concept of "walking a mile in another man's shoes" and make an attempt to understand what they're dealing with instead of dismissing them as inferior.
I'm also happy your wife is volunteering to help with girl scouts. I think that's a great thing and more people should do it.
But that doesn't excuse your lack of empathy.
Kids are not some kind of deterministic automatons where the same input always produces the same output (as if we could even reproduce the same inputs for an entire life). They're more complicated than that for reasons we frankly can't even understand.
There are a number of things that are highly correlated with producing a "good child", a major one being having enough money that the family isn't under constant stress and you can afford second (or third or fourth) chances.
But callously discarding every child who isn't lucky enough to benefit from this is just wrong. We, as a society, a culture, should be better than that.
Am I expecting you, personally, to go out and change the world? No, no more than I'm expecting myself to do it. But we all make small decisions every day and if enough of us make the "right ones" they can add up, and it starts with empathy for our fellow man.
We do our part, and we've decided to live in an area where others also do their part and try to build a community and a society, and not in an area where people tear down the community around them, or make excuses for those who do that. Again, what exactly are you chiding me for? What should I be doing differently? It's not us keeping them down. We're gone.
Are you familiar with the phrase "pulling up the ladder behind you"?
This isn't pulling the ladder up behind me. It's noticing a ladder, climbing out of a pit, and walking away. Ladder's still right there. Meanwhile others are asking why we don't try to make ourselves more comfortable in the pit.
I would argue that their outcomes in general would still be worse off then their lesser funded counterparts.
Anyways, I'm not taking the position that we shouldn't "remove" "problem children" in the same way I agree that prisons are necessary for society.
I guess if I had to summarize my feelings on this matter in this tiny little text box, it's that while this option should exist, we should all feel shame, a sense of failure, every time we have to exercise it.
We should ask ourselves, collectively, what we could have done differently to prevent the situation from coming to this point.
It's theoretically possible that there was nothing that could be done, but people are way to willing too just leap to that conclusion.
As an extension of that, we should at least pretend a modicum of empathy for our fellow humans. People are... people. They're complicated. Nobody is good or bad. They certainly do good things and bad things, and at some point, given our current society/technology/culture/understanding of the world, our best option might be to put them in prison for the rest of their life, but that doesn't mean we should be happy about it.
Like, I get it, you have a child, you have incredibly strong feelings about how to protect and nurture this child, both biologically/genetically as well as an ingrained cultural response. You want to do the best you possibly can for your child, even if it comes at the expense of everyone else's child.
But society improves when we raise the standards for everyone.
I'm not asking that this guy go out and sell all his possessions and march in the streets or whatever extreme example you want to think of. I'm certainly not doing that either. Just remember that "problem kids" are children just as much deserving of love and respect and help as your child.
Theoretical social causes and activism are great for university discussions and political sloganeering, but it's a whole different pair of sleeves than what's good for your family.
To which "theoretical social causes," "activism" and "political sloganeering" are you referring?
I'm genuinely confused by that, as I mentioned none of those things in my comment. Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment?