Cost of Disruptive Students

[xoxoxoBruce]

The National Bureau of Economic Research says...

A large and growing literature has documented the importance of peer effects in education. However, there is relatively little evidence on the long-run educational and labor market consequences of childhood peers. We examine this question by linking administrative data on elementary school students to subsequent test scores, college attendance and completion, and earnings. To distinguish the effect of peers from confounding factors, we exploit the population variation in the proportion of children from families linked to domestic violence, who were shown by Carrell and Hoekstra (2010, 2012) to disrupt contemporaneous behavior and learning. Results show that exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 26 by 3 to 4 percent. We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence explains 5 to 6 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data, and that removing one disruptive peer from a classroom for one year would raise the present discounted value of classmates' future earnings by $100,000.

Good grief, that number is hard to fathom, and trying to figure out how they measure that gives me a headache.

[glatt]

Yeah, I don't know how to think about this.

Obviously removing disruptive students from the classroom is better for all the remaining students, but as a society, what do we owe the disruptive student? Whether it's a kid "linked to domestic violence," or a kid with ADD or whatever, it's not their fault, and don't they deserve the chance to be the best they can be? Having them in the regular classroom with kids who are good examples and who hopefully help provide a stable environment has got the be better for them. It lifts them up, hopefully a lot, while it drags everyone else down a little.

*shrug* I honestly don't know what's best.

I know that there are some disruptive little shits at our Scout meetings that I would love it if they didn't come, but I remind myself that they need Scouts more than the good kids do.

[DanaC]

As much as having to cope with disruptive students may have a negative effect on later academic success or earnings (emphasis on 'may' as I have some doubts about the study) surely at another level it teaches kids how to live in a society of different people. The world is not ideal. Workplaces are not ideal. Families are not ideal. Sooner or later we all have to interact with people who are not perfectly attuned to their environment or wholly committed to the project or venture at hand.

I think educational establishments can correct for a lot of environmental or cultural disadvantages. They can ameliorate inequalities of opportunity and plug some of the gaps borne of racial, gender or income disparity - but they cannot and should not correct for everything. They cannot provide a perfect set of learners.

[Clodfobble]

On the other hand, sometimes they are disruptive precisely because they require a different type of environment than the one that they are being given. Yes, the abusive household set the dominoes up, but the behavioral opportunities of the one-size-fits-all classroom model allows them to fall. I think the real problem is that the rehabilitative environment they really need--extra emotional support and retraining, that is, not extra punishment--is not something the schools can realistically afford. And every publicly-funded attempt I've seen at such an environment ends up being somewhere between a slight and a colossal failure.

That said, I'm obviously biased because I took my kids out of the system at the first available opportunity. In the same way that being in the abusive environment doesn't magically make the abused kids more resilient to abuse, I don't believe that being in a disruptive school environment will teach them how to deal with disruptive people.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I sure my mother would have jumped at the chance to remove some of the "bad influences" in my youth.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

On the other hand, sometimes they are disruptive precisely because they require a different type of environment than the one that they are being given. Yes, the abusive household set the dominoes up, but the behavioral opportunities of the one-size-fits-all classroom model allows them to fall. I think the real problem is that the rehabilitative environment they really need--extra emotional support and retraining, that is, not extra punishment--is not something the schools can realistically afford. And every publicly-funded attempt I've seen at such an environment ends up being somewhere between a slight and a colossal failure.
.

I agree with all of that. My problem though is the current tendency, in the UK at least, to exclude disruptive children. Some of that is through the formal system of exclusion, sometimes handled well, with intensive units to help those kids for a time, and then return to the main school community. But some of it is in admissions and is hidden. As our school system has become more and more centred on academies and 'free schools', essentially partially privatising the state school sector, there is a lot more room for schools to be selective in their admissions. They also can use exclusions as a way to trim away kids who jeopardise their targets.

I don't like a lot of the rhetoric involved either, in public dicussions about classroom discipline. It's a heartbeat away from 'bad kids shouldn't be allowed in our schools ruining good kids' education'. Meanwhile, as politicians make hardline speeches, funding to help kids who are struggling with the school environment gets stripped further and further back.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I agree with all of that. My problem though is the current tendency, in the UK at least, to exclude disruptive children. Some of that is through the formal system of exclusion, sometimes handled well, with intensive units to help those kids for a time, and then return to the main school community. But some of it is in admissions and is hidden..

I think the biggest problem facing schools today is the shifting paradigm of what education is, its purpose, and the most expedient way to achieve that purpose. The second biggest problem is the policy makers are essentially the blind leading the one-eyed. There is a recursive irony to process whereby the people who have been given authority to make changes to policy about how education should be carried out are products of that same, presumably flawed otherwise why does it need changing, system.

There doesn't seem to be a review of the underlying assumptions about education, they are taken as sound and are a given. Yet there is, I think, the same flaw that occurs when a liberal measures a conservative by liberal metrics rather than conservative metrics. E.g. "Monsanto shouldn't do X because it is bad for the environment." Yes, well according to your values the relative health of the environment is cause for concern and should be taken into account when deciding a course of action. For Monsanto, that has nothing to do at all with the company's decision making. Profitability is what drives their decision making so an appeal to the environment is as relevant to them as arguing that they should change their behavior because ABC did not order another season of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD.

To look at our educational system and wonder why there are not protocols in place for accommodating square pegs rather than forcing them into round holes presumes that such accommodating of differences in students is a value of the system when it is not. See bold excerpts below

Part of the problem is the failure of the the educational model but a bigger question that doesn't seem to be asked is "Why the ever increasing legion of square pegs?" Were they always there or are there more now?

I believe what needs to happen is to completely redesign education and it needs to be done by people who are not products of the educational system. Some of the most significant design breakthroughs come from people who have never seen the box in the first place so they don't need to think outside of it. To them, there is no box at all.


From a paper by John Taylor Gatto:
The bold is mine.

...We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not:

"... to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else."
...

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia.

...

Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here.
...

But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable."


Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas.

...

Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.

It is unpleasant and difficult to consider these ideas but trying to change a system without first questioning the foundation of that system is essentially re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

You might also say, it is like arguing that the educational system should accommodate outliers and misfits because oranges are a fruit.

[footfootfoot]

It's the neonicitinoids

[Aliantha]

They should just bring back the cane! That'll fix them up.

[DanaC]

As long as it is the law that all children be educated, then it is necessary to make some accomodation for the square pegs. If all children mustbe educated, and only a tiny percentage of parents are able to provide that in a way that meets that legal obligation without sending their children to a school, then it is necessary to ensure all children, including the outliers, are catered to, in some way, by the education system.

It is inexcusable to place such a legal requirement of attendence on children without ensuring that there is somewhere suitable for them to attend.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by DanaC

As long as it is the law that all children be educated, then it is necessary to make some accomodation for the square pegs. If all children mustbe educated, and only a tiny percentage of parents are able to provide that in a way that meets that legal obligation without sending their children to a school, then it is necessary to ensure all children, including the outliers, are catered to, in some way, by the education system.

It is inexcusable to place such a legal requirement of attendence on children without ensuring that there is somewhere suitable for them to attend.

Exactly, OR redefine the educational system to make it work for all students. I am not 100% sure, but talking with the parents of kids that go to Waldorf type schools or Montessori type schools, there doesn't seem to be the same problem. The problem stems from forcing kids to be unnatural and accommodate a flawed system rather than designing a system that works with the natural stages of child and community development. This is threatening to creating a docile and subservient workforce.

[DanaC]

I think it is less about creating a subservient future generation of workers as it is about facillitating the current generation of working parents continuing to work full-time with long hours, whilst kids are safely corraled together in a classroom.