BPS to end suspensions for youngest students

Your 2nd paragraph is so on target. Self selection by escape. Worthy of remembering. The problem is there is no more escape. Yea, parents with the money can move out to a wealthier area where the level of education is higher and the degree of neighborly (and hopefully familial) dysfunction is lower. But there remains many people who can not escape.

So do we maintain urban factories that produce criminals? Or do we as a society address what pushes many people into criminal conduct or creates criminality?

Laws are to protect everyone, to impose some degree of fairness, to maintain order, to fulfill the ideals of both the Constitution and the principles that stand behind the Constitution.

Yet laws still are not used as they should be. They continue to be used to create classes in society. Sometimes those classes are based on wealth, sometimes on skin color.

Example: Cocaine versus crack. Extremely similar yet in 1986 the penalty for possession was far greater for crack. Was there a legitimate reason? No. It was about who used what. Even with the change of penalties crack garners a greater punishment.

Coke was the white person's drug of choice. Crack the black persons. That was and remains the reason for the disparity in sentencing.

To put all responsibility on an individual for their behavior ignores the fact that conditions of life promote one set of behaviors over another. Fortunately the Federal system provides some recognition of that fact in sentencing. But it does not go far enough.

The war on drugs failed a long time ago. When crystal meth and now opiates (pushed ironically in legal contexts) became prominent the war on drugs was squashed by reality. But billions continue to be spent, billions continue to be wasted, suffering unending continues because as a nation we put our heads underneath the sand pretending that one day bad drugs will just go away.

That is what was said during Prohibition. If the harmful addictive drugs were recognized as public health problems there would far more success in helping people stop using and far less money spent in warehousing people (especially poor black, brown and white). Gangs would be hurt; they will remain because so long as there is money to be made outside of law (prostitution, non-state gambling, murder for hire!) there will be people ready to take on the job.

But if we want to decrease the problems of acting out in schools or acting out in society we need to stop escaping from the harder and uncomfortable solutions that actually serve the purpose of helping people of all skin colors. Until we reject the model of the prison-industrial complex that profits off the suffering of others we will just have more of the same. More crime, more acting out, more unteachable children.

In 12 Step programs there is an idea. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

The answer to how many is about one out of every eight in the population at large, or about 320,000 per year nationwide.

This is roughly the number of people with an expected IQ below 80. 80 keeps getting thrown around as the empirically determined cutoff below which the ability of an individual to contribute positively to an organization's bottom line diminishes appreciably. That's obviously subjective and not a clean dividing line because that number came from the cutoff imposed by the US military for contributing positively in the context of wartime service. But a shift to either side of that number will still leave a lot of people on the wrong side of it.

Just so I don't get accused of shit when I don't mean to be, I'll give an example from my own high school graduating class, which was nearly all white and nearly all upper middle class. About two percent were unreachable. They had diagnosed intellectual disabilities. Two percent is an IQ of about 70 or lower.

In Pennsylvania in the early 2000s, a community service project was a requirement of graduation. In my school district you got to pick your own and I picked volunteering with the middle school math teacher.

She taught five sections of 8th grade algebra composed of the same demographics: all white, all middle class, all with a potential tiger mom or tiger dad back home ready to advocate for their kid. One or two of the sections were "honors track" two were "mid track" and one was the euphemistically named "conceptual track" for the less talented kids.

If I were to stop there, I could say that 1 out of five is an IQ of about 85 or so (Dr Swirly can check my math, I'm typing on a phone and don't have an ERF() function handy). But I'll go further, because as temporary teacher's aid it was my job to actually help the kids with their lessons one-on-one. My memory is fuzzy since it was a long time ago, but I remember being directed to help three different kids learn how to expand quadratic polynomials. (a + b)x(c + d)=? kind of stuff.

One boy got it and understood it with individual attention. And if memory serves toned down the clowning by a tick. One girl cried her eyes out when I informed her that she'd have an easier time following the lesson if she weren't spending her time conversing with her neighbors. And one boy wasn't much of a clown or a jerk but just didn't get it, and later I was informed that he had a diagnosed intellectual disability.

So out of that small sample of three, between 33% and 66% of the lower 1/5th of students weren't teachable for an overall estimate of between about 1/15th and 1/7th of an all white upper middle class suburban school district.

So the Jordan Peterson number looks pretty solid.

Now that's the number of unteachability, now disruptiveness in class. But I'll tell you, they're probably pretty close to each other. I find it hard to picture the honors track lessons not getting derailed if the low track kids were interspersed in between and being completely lost and bored.

citations needed

Great way to make them pathological liars and sociopaths just like you.

Maybe you shouldn't be talking about it here.

Middle School back in the early to mid-1960's, I witnessed several incidents in my classes, when kids (namely boys) who acted very badly in class get swatted, cuffed, and in general, physically roughed up by the teacher.

In my younger brother's class, during the mid to late 1970's, there was a French teacher who was fantastic as a teacher, but who had a lousy temper. One one occasion, a kid in his class deliberately walked across the teacher's desk and squashed his lunch. The teacher hit him. The principal of the school warned the French teacher that he'd be fired if he ever laid his hand on a kid again.

Later, a couple of the kids in one of the French teacher's class were fighting, and the French teacher hurried over and knocked the two miscreants' heads together. After that, the school administration fired him.

It can backfire horrendously, in more ways than one.

As for parental punishment of kids, I can see slapping or even spanking a kid as a very last resort, if a kid does something that's extremely dangerous to them or others, or if his/her behavior is very, very extreme, but that's as far as it should go.

When I was growing up, I knew kids whose law-and-order parents would take the belt strap to their hide every time they acted out, or sassed them back, or who got slapped or spanked at home constantly.

nowadays, although I could be wrong..

Don't expect to land a job at Google after saying something awful like that.

decent, two-parent homes, who constantly bullied, acted out, constantly got into trouble, and ended up with both regular and in-school suspensions in high school, because their parents were simply unable to manage them, despite being decent people. Several of these same boys that I knew received a three-week suspension during Senior year of high school, for having gone up to the high school and hazed the Freshmen, who'd started a few days earlier than the Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors, for Freshman Orientation.

. Some kids do mellow out as they get older, while others don't. Sometimes, the attitude "Well, these bullies will get theirs later" does pan out--karma, as it's called.

One guy I knew became a severe alcoholic, another became a heroin addict who ended up serving a jail term for stealing in order to obtain heroin, and another ended up with early-onset Alzheimer's disease and ended up being put into a special home.