Middle school teacher resigns amid horrific abuse from students

boing
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Ah, so desu-ka! I get you now.

I don’t buy that argument, because social progress would never have happened in human history if it was valid. We did free the slaves, all over the world, and we did forcibly vaccinate my entire generation of children, and we did many other things simply because our cultural values and physiology both include fellowship with other humans.

I think my own decisions could be said to show why millions of parents have to be offered a better choice than the current system. Right now they have a choice of a crappy education or a crappier education, and wisely the most educated will choose the former for their children.

But we can afford to give every child a better education than my kids got. And I’m giving a specific prescription, based on real world experience, of how to do that. Make the comprehensive public schools the best schools, and make attendance mandatory. Humans have had compulsory education since as early as 400 BC, and even compulsory military service, this is not something new and unacceptable or unworkable.

If there are enough teachers, discipline is less of a problem, lack of personal instruction time available to less prepared students is less of a problem, inter-student conflict is less of a problem, grades and competence go up for all students, in fact all the most pressing problems are decreased in a way that does not exacerbate and enforce economic discrimination that is harming us.

If you have a better idea, I am all ears, of course. But the current system is unsustainable; it is getting worse over the time I have been observing it.

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130

Formated tables are hard or impossible in discourse, apparently (@codinghorror?) but here’s data from the 2012 S.A.T. testing in the United States. It’s publicly available online.

Family Income         Reading      Math
0$ – $20,000            433        461
$20,000 – $40,000       463        481
$40,000 – $60,000       485        500
$60,000 – $80,000       499        512
$80,000 – $100,000      511        525
$100,000 – $120,000     523        539
$120,000 – $140,000     527        543
$140,000 – $160,000     534        551
$160,000 – $200,000     540        557
More than $200,000      567        589

You can see that income is a valid predictor for academic performance in the current system.

So school systems that separate higher performing students from lower do in fact explicitly segregate the poor, and do decrease the quality of the education provided by tax dollars.

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131

Just indent 4 spaces and line things up as needed. Use the code button in the editor to insert preformatted block.

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132

Can we use a tab instead? [ducks]

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133

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