Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

I moved around a lot, so I got to sample the public schools in six different states. I observed a lot of wasted time and energy being spent on students who were clearly garbage that would never amount to anything. Garbage that actively resisted being there, and fought back, and disrupted the education of the rest. When you have vermin in your house, and it scampers out the back door, you don't keep dragging it back inside. You let it go, that it might seek its destiny in the sewers and gutters.

I feel you. I completely understand where you are coming from, having seen the exact same thing.

I used to work at a high school that was an institution of last resort. I taught a remedial afterschool class there. This place was where kids who had messed up at two or three previous institutions were sent to. The curriculum was vastly dumbed down, the vast majority of standardized tests were dispensed with, they allowed the students to attend well past the age of 18 and broke the year down into three or four semesters to make it easier to pass. They were also provided with a state-funded afterschool class (several, actually), at which tutoring and mentoring was available.

You would think that the garbage would be quarantined in that situation, right? That the losers were finally segregated from normal people, in such a way that they could do no further damage, right? All the supposedly bad kids were supposedly put together, after all.

Nope. Even in my afterschool class, there were four or five rotten apples who ruined it for sixteen fairly good kids. They did everything they could to not learn. The royal mess they created was unbelievable. A lesson that ought to have taken 2 minutes under normal circumstances took 10 or 15 because of the nonstop disruptions. The good kids would have sat their butts into their chairs and listened to me, if only out of boredom. If only because there was nothing else to do. But once the mean, nasty ones started jabbering and laughing and milling about the room, they poisoned the whole room and the entire atmosphere. I wish I could have removed them to save the rest. The good kids should have been given a fighting chance. Cut the others loose.

The state, IMHO, made a mistake by sending all students with failing grades to this awful school. The criteria should have been failing grades plus mental illness and behavioral issues. They shouldn't have put kids who were merely failing in school but weren't violent, out of control and shockingly rude in the same place as students with horrendous behavioral problems. They lump all so-called "problem children" together, without distinction.

They don't think something along the lines of "Well, this girl got straight Fs and Ds- but she's a sweetheart and if she gets the tutoring she needs, she could catch up in a few years. She isn't stupid and has a grasp of basic manners. She is 18 and has the reading level of a 12-year-old, true, but sending her to a school filled with rude, dumb and crazy garbage is a continuation of the problem, not the solution."