Reply to Started working at an elementary school last week. Shocked and sad. AMA

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am concerned that some of these posts seem to be attributing these behaviors to minority and poor kids.  I attended a minority majority school in a small Southern town--my graduating class was 72% black, we had socioeconomic diversity ranging from rich kids to kids on welfare, and there was a literal orphanage in my town.  We absolutely did not have issues like what I witnessed in my kids' ES, like kids eloping from the school and rolling around on the floor of the classroom.  The main differences were cohesive communities (church attendance and community involvement meant people knew each other), small class sizes, and discipline.  I don't believe in corporal punishment, but misbehavior was addressed immediately.  More spending might help if it results in smaller classes, but schools here are at capacity and building new ones takes forever.

I don't know what the answer is.
[/quote]

Not one post has put out even in a passive or suggestive manner the thesis of your first sentence. In my experience (3rd grader in large well-rated NYC public elementary) the kids who are most disruptive and don’t have IEPs or diagnoses are the spawn of harried, self-important, ‘busy’ parents. I am able to chaperone field trips every once in a while and we have a class contact list where its clear all of us in an extremely expensive neighborhood live in walking distance to the school, our racial and socioeconomic diversity is pretty piss-poor, and we still have some of the distressing issues addressed here (death threats; multiple kids physically attacking one) even at this age. It’s distressing.

I agree with the idea that when we can’t have a direct, conseqeunce-carrying response to egregious misbehavior the kids who don’t misbehave at this level aren't treated fairly, and that its also unfair to lump ‘emotional disabilities’ with children with low tone, or dyscalculia, or speech impediments. It’s just absurd. Can we be honest for a minute here? A lot of what’s been highlighted (classroom clearing for scary fits and stuff along those lines, threats of and executed acts of violence) are just the prelim steps to an eventual ex of ‘conduct disorder,’ which is the remarketed for parental egos term for sociopathy. Kids who need extra reading assistance or fine motor help in mastering cursive with an OT should not be tarred with that kind of brush - nor should kids who are the racial or economic minority in their school. But I don’t think anyone is saying that, and it seems most are saying that the fundamental issue is the displacement of basic parenting and meting out of consequence onto completely overwhelmed teaching staff, and I personally and others have clearly observed that happening a faqton with UMC parents who decide they are too busy to parent, and who parent from a place of defensiveness. I think part of that is deeply connected to what you’ve mentioned, PP — the absence of broader community. Where we don’t have communities where younger parents can be in some kind of allegiance with older, seen-it-all adults, and listen to what they see and what we in the throes of it might miss, there’s a knowledge gap. Where we’re atomized and are only really close with our own spouse or partner, where we don’t have family, where we don’t have long-term roots (really common where I am in NYC, was also common when I lived in DC proper), we can feel overwhelmed without actually being technically that busy, and we check out. That’s what I’m seeing. I just wanted to counter the idea that people are attributing bad elementary issues to the racially underrepresented and the actually three-jobs-at-menial-wage parents. I don’t think we collectively are doing that.[/quote]

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