Aohell

Leave Them Kids Behind

Once upon a time, kids could drop out of school. When it no longer served their needs as an institution, they could walk right out of the doors and never return. They were the high school dropouts, doomed forever to pump gas and say "would you like fries with that" at the end of every business transaction, or so the legends went. Actually, a good number of them wound up in jails because they didn't have good enough jobs to afford the kinds of lawyers that keep criminals out of jails.

Meanwhile, the kids who stayed in school got to enjoy a much better educational experience once the dropouts dropped out. No longer were their classes clogged with disruptive types who were held in classes against their wills. There were one or two, but a teacher could handle those ruffians and deliver some quality teaching to the rest of the bunch.

Enter egalitarianist reform.

Shocked and horrified by the numbers of crimes committed by high school dropouts, people with no clue about education decided to pass laws to keep those guys in school and to make sure they graduated, or the teachers and administrators of those districts would catch all hell, because, of course, it was all their fault for some kids being either too lazy or too stupid to master the skills necessary to graduate high school.

Now, we got kids who used to drop out forced into the system again. I don't know about the number of crimes committed by high school dropouts, but I know the number of crimes committed by high school <em>students</em> on campus is spiking in districts in and around where I teach. Worse, there's pressure to make sure <em>everyone</em> passes the courses and state tests necessary to graduate. If we get too many kids in a minority subpopulation who fail to go the distance, our entire school gets labeled as "non-performing", no matter how many National Merit scholars we produce.

Our school was "non-performing" for a few months several years ago due to an accounting error that labeled one dropout as hispanic. That put our school 0.5 hispanics over the dropout limit. Fortunately, we were able to prove he was really some other subpopulation, so we were 0.5 under the limit for hispanic dropouts after that. In the meantime, we had some outstanding performance in lots of other areas. AP tests were good, the band and orchestras did great, the choirs and theater kids were outstanding... we even started to have a winning football team again! Never mind any of that, though, if the school is 0.5 hispanic dropouts over the limit. It's obviously a failed institution.

That's only part of the ludicrousness of state and federal mandates that don't take into account local issues and needs. They rule like a blind mole, completely ignorant of conditions on the surface.

Thank goodness they don't look too hard at Arabic or Southeast Asian subpopulations. Arabs frequently get lumped in with "whites" and SE Asians with all the other "Asian/Pacific Islanders". We've got some issues with those kids, mostly new immigrants, but if they can be masked by other high-performing subpop groups, we don't have to get them to work harder. Classify either of them as hispanic, and we're all over their cases like a duck on a junebug. We're on the knife edge with that subpop. We really wish we had more hispanics, so one or two deciding to hit the bricks wouldn't skew our percentages so badly.

The petty criminals stay in school, too. Theft is way up on campus. I even have staplers get stolen out from under me. Staplers! They're only five bucks at an office supply store, but I gotta keep mine locked down, or I'm out that five bucks plus the gas for the trip on over. And never mind the occasional crude language directed at me - we got loads of kids with guns in our nation's schools.

Don't talk to me about metal detectors or searches. They are easily defeated within one week (often earlier) of their installation. These kids aren't in lockdown and have access to the outside in ways folks at San Quentin can only dream of. The guns are in every school and it's a miracle the body count in our schools is as low as it is.

Maybe it's because a lot of these guys are also coming to school stoned. If they're too mellow to open fire, that's a good thing. Don't let them drink alcohol - that's a nasty mix with handguns - but maybe we could look the other way on the pot if we're forced to keep the violent guys in school. Maybe if we had methadone in the school clinic, we could cut waaaaaay back on fights in the halls. That way, we could keep kids in school and maintain a secure environment. I'm thinking something along the lines of the opium dens the British and French used in Asia back under colonialism.

But will they learn? Nope. Not that it's different from what they're doing now. They don't want to be in school, and preaching polemics about the glories of edumacashun is not going to change any of their minds. I was once told to never try to teach a pig to dance, as it would frustrate me and annoy the pig. Someone should change that proverb to be a little more direct so the geniuses in the legislatures will figure out that trying to teach someone who doesn't want to learn what I'm teaching will frustrate me and annoy the student.

There are days where my heart leaps within me when I notice certain students aren't in my classroom. Even better is when one of these lambs is in alternative educational placement - the modern school equivalent of spending a night in jail. You may have once known it as in-school suspension. That didn't have enough syllables, though, so it needed changing to sound more confusing. I think it should be shortened to "school jail", so the proper stigma is associated with the sentence.

But, yeah, my heart leaps... if I know a troublemaker is gone for three days, I know I can cover a lot more ground in that class than usual. I can have great discussions, meaningful conversations, and happier students. Then, when ol' Sunshine returns and asks "Hey, didja miss me?", we return to the same old power struggle grind between a guy who doesn't want to be in my class and me, the guy who doesn't want to force him to be there.

I fail to see the societal benefit of keeping the louts in the schools. They should be turned loose after 6th grade, really. That would make junior high so much more pleasant. And believe me, it needs all the help it can get. I do not fail to see the societal plague of "No Child Left Behind". NCLB results in worse classroom environments, dumber classes, and more miserable educations for the good kids.

I'm serious. They break out into applause when the hoodlums withdraw from school. Imagine how much happier they'd be if those same hoodlums were gone much, much earlier.

And for goodness' sake, quit holding teachers responsible for dumb and/or lazy kids. I've got a teenager, myself. I want her to be responsible for her actions. I don't blame teachers when she exercises poor judgment. Bless her heart, but it's her fault when she does something wrong. She can fix it up and get better at not screwing up, and that's what we want in our adults, right?

But it gets to a point where it's not the parents' fault anymore. It's not the teachers' fault. It's the damn kid who's taking advantage of the system as much as possible. If the exploiter has to be forced into staying in school, he's going to force everyone else to be as miserable as he is. Let him go, and he'll stop being a pill.

What to do with the little potential criminal? If he can't hold down a job, don't give out any benefits from the state. That only rewards irresponsibility. Either let him realize he's got to get his act together and get back into school the right way, or let him live a hard luck life. Maybe he could take one of those legendary jobs Americans supposedly don't want to take.

But these are teenagers we're dealing with. Human free will is one hellacious statistical variable, and these guys are just loaded with it! How can anyone reasonably hold anyone else responsible for what a teenager does?

I know I've got some extremist ideas about schools. But getting rid of NCLB would be one step towards making public education that much less of a failure in America. We're a nation built on ideals of free choice, personal responsibility, and work ethics, so why should we have a government system built on command economics, shifted blame, and screwball statistics?

Leave 'em behind if they can't appreciate the system. Maybe all they really need is a different road from what the rest of the nation is traveling on.