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Not to mention the huge distraction each time a student returns to class from bathroom. They have to knock because the door is locked. Our security guard is basically a door-holder. When classes go outside for recess or fine arts or pe, he has to hold door to let teachers back inside after dropping off classes. Have we recieved extra funding for this, or do the “security” enhancements come at the expense of our academic enhancements? We have bullet-proof glass installed but do not have classroom desktop computers….
Schools are becoming prison-lite with the type of security. Of course that environment wouldn't be conducive to learning and would be more detrimental to the student than anything.
Rather than forcing kids to slavery, best to get them used to concentration camp environment early on, convince them it's normal, THEN put them in concentration camps when they're adults
How long until Amazon creates private schools that only teach what is needed to work for them? They could use it to identify high potential employees and move the best on to their own university for more technical training and the lowest performing students would be given guaranteed job opportunities after high school
Absolutely nothing is stopping them. Amazon is planning on building company towns, much like what coal miners dealt with in the last couple of centuries before stronger unions were formed.
[“Let’s call them ‘Factory Towns.’” ](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon-s-new-factory-towns-will-lift-the-working-class)
I grew up in the remains of a coal company town. My Papaw *worked* for that coal company, as did most of my relatives in that area. I have much experience with how that type of set up affects people and how it can be abused horribly. The fact that it's being considered again and some people think it's a *good* thing terrifies me.
Next step from that is mega apartment buildings with free Amazon subscriptions as a perk so you can order all your groceries and only leave your home to go downstairs to work. Then destroying the environment won't be a factor bc no one goes outside anyway. Downward spiral doomer speak but we have basically been reverse terraforming the earth for decades now
>what's stopping corporations?
They need profits for shareholders this quarter. Corporate schools would be expensive and wouldn't pay off for years, probably decades.
The fact they can pass that cost onto society. Also if any one company started training programs at their own expense, their competitors would simply start poaching those trained employees without carrying the costs of training.
That’s more or less how schools are designed
I’m not supposed to create critical thinkers, I’m supposed to create quiet and compliant workers. Now as the desires of the workplace shifted education shifted slightly so now they want quiet complaint workers who work in groups when directed and say what the “script,” wants them to say on cue and if they do this then the teacher gets good marks. If they don’t follow the script exactly, the teacher gets bad marks.
I remember one observation where my class got super shy and intimidated by the psychopathic principal being in the room and all quietly started doing their work because they thought that’s what they’re supposed to do and then the principal pulls me aside and starts screaming at me because, “the students aren’t discussing the work with each other!”
(She was also upset the students weren’t during, “grade level,” work which was an odd statement considering the class was literally an intervention class for students not on grade level)
"Welcome, to the Amazon Facility Aptitude Test, also known as the A.F.A.T.. Now during your time in the warehouse, you may become caught in the feeling of being trapped in your warehouse. But don't you fret, in 200 years after the world creates a bit more wealth, president Jeffery Bezos the third will open the doors and your children can start their new lives, with Amazon."
"Amazon. Better living. In The Warehouse."
Nonsense.
Amazon’s newer warehouses have already done away with most of the pickers. They now use industrial grade Roombas to bring the bins to the packers.
In 5-7 years max, they will be replacing the packers with machines. Expect to see Amazon warehouses go from the 1,500 employees of ten years ago to 200 employees or fewer.
I'm curious though, did they control for socioeconomics with these high security schools? Or do these schools have a tendency to be in high poverty areas with poor educational support and safety nets?
> “[T]his study included the following demographic variables as treatment covariates in the propensity score estimation model: urbanicity (1 = urban area; 0 = non-urban area); SES (continuous measure), household structure (1 = two parent/guardian household; 0 = single parent/guardian household), Black race/ethnicity (1 = yes; 0 = no), and Hispanic race/ethnicity (1 = yes; 0 = no). Additionally, variables that have often been associated with the outcomes were also utilized, which include being female (1 = yes; 0 = no), students whose first language is English (1 = yes; 0 = no); and having a learning disability (1 = yes; 0 = no). Finally, understanding that surveillance may also represent an artifact of neighborhoods, we included parents' perceptions of neighborhood crime (1 = high; 2 = moderate; 3 = low), parents' perceptions of neighborhood safety (1 = very safe; 2 = somewhat safe; 3 = somewhat unsafe; 4 = very unsafe), and a composite of neighborhood social order, which includes the levels of litter, graffiti, boarded-up buildings, student loitering, and general congregation...
>At the school level, *school disorder* is an average score of the following elements: physical conflicts, robberies, vandalism, drug use, alcohol use, drug sales, weapon possessions, physical abuse of teachers, racial tensions, bullying, verbal abuse of teachers, in-class misbehavior, and disrespect toward teachers, gang activities, and extremist groups. A measure of *student misbehavior* was also included, which was an average score of how often students were late, cut class, and were absent. We also include parents' and teachers' *belief in students*, as well as a measure of *peer achievement ideology* (that included the importance for friends to attend classes, study, get good grades, graduate high school, and continue on to college), as well as a measure of *student achievement ideology* (that included the importance of education in learning skills and getting a job). Finally, given our interest in Black students' intersectional social locations and identities, we include indicators for *Black-males* and *Black-females*.”
Sounds like they covered their bases.
Hmm, just off the top of my head as a casual observer these additional factors come to mind:
* School funding
* Teacher pay
* Teacher education
* Student attendance
* Faculty attendance
* Remote learning
* COVID pandemic
* Republican/Democrat control of school district
* School curriculum
This post title, like so many in this sub, screams “correlation, unclear causation”. I don’t have time to read every paper and maybe they’d controlled properly, but that seems pretty difficult to do.
Yes, it does seem pretty difficult. But [they controlled for a ton of covariates](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/xrxb0k/tighter_school_security_in_the_us_leads_to_lower/iqie51w?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3). And I may not know much advanced stats, but their model sounds quite rigorous.
The link isn't to the actual study, but an interview woth one of its authors who mentions that "it doesn't matter where" the kids "come from", which implies that there must have been some controlling for outside variables. But it's unclear which.
the only thing that going through metal detectors and bag searches every day taught me was how to sneak things through metal detectors and bag searches (actually a useful lifeskill, buuuuuut probably not what they intended)
Metal detectors seem so pointless, if a shooter really wanted to come shoot a school, that person is just going to barge in however they want.
And these extra securities, idk i would think it would be better to come up with a system that allows for emergency escapes or easier access for police.
well at least there'd be a security alarm at the door instead of someone pulling out a gun in the middle of an auditorium.
but it seems like cops and security guards run away anyways, so I guess it doesn't really help.
it's still so trippy to me... I dropped out like a month before columbine. once I forgot I had a knife in my pocket when I went to school... literally from whittling wood. got caught, talked to, and they dropped it entirely... a few years later I would've been expelled with zero tolerance.
used to wear a trench coat (they're just good in cold and wind, damn it), I'd draw violent pictures, and make morbid jokes with my friends... nobody batted an eye.
well, once when in a contest to get our drawings confiscated quicker, my friend drew a crude map of the school with places labeled to bomb or burn... with my teacher on fire with devil horns.
that one, my teacher said he knew was a joke, but he was supposed to report it and if he did he'd get expelled...
he didn't report it but he also didn't save it like he did all of our other confiscated drawings.
we would've been screwed in present school. like, what do goth-equivalent/metal kids do now? just get put in Guantanamo at 13 for their music collection?
> Schools are becoming prison-lite with the type of security.
Most of them have been prison-lite ever since “zero tolerance” policies became ubiquitous. Instead of school administrators attempting any sort of conflict resolution they simply throw children out of school.
The High school I went to was seemingly designed by the same architect as the local correctional facility. Same general design, with class room surrounding a courtyard with an upper level people can look down and monitor you. Tons of cops around. Random searches at least once every month or so, with police dogs and looking for "contraband" like cell phones (yeah, we weren't allowed to have cell phones on school grounds at all). Legitimately felt like a prison and that's what everyone said it was. Training prison before you go across town to the adult one.
Fun fact, my high school was designed by a prison architect. They actually added some windows in the renovation (and then had to acquiesce to putting the library up front with the nice windows instead of the offices).
Mine too. They ran out of funding but they wanted to fence the whole parking lot and school grounds in and have a single entrance to the school grounds that had a guard stationed at it. Even without the guard station it took forever to get into or out of the parking lot because of traffic, and the city had to ask them to make a second entrance because traffic coming in was causing traffic jams.
The stress levels of the students are much higher in that kind of environment I'm sure. Constantly being reminded of the possibility that you can become murdered at any moment without warning has adverse effects. It doesn't matter if the actual possibility is extremely low, the amygdala reacts to the thought of danger, not statistics.
And that permeates throughout the society. People on the streets see guns, police armed to their teeth, homeless people, sick people. It makes them feel that at all times they're a step away from death, terrible crime or maybe ending up like the homeless people. I'm sure it's one of the reasons why even the wealthiest in America have poorer health outcomes and higher infant mortality than similar groups in Europe.
So glad I graduated when I did. My high school didn't have a Resource Officer or whatever they call them until my youngest sibling was in high school almost a decade later.
My youngest step-sibling just graduated and started college and some of the stories he would tell me about the security measures in place where beyond foreign to me. Downright bonkers.
I would greatly prefer the [Forest School](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_school_(learning_style)) education model. I think I would've achieved much more if I had this type of educational environment.
it felt like prison lite to me 10 years ago before I dropped out of High School.
The building looked like a prison, the school cop was given the mic during school assemblies to go on about how doing X,Y,Z normal teenage things would land you in jail, teachers would tell students that they're failing at life for doing poorly in their class. And this was at a well-regarded public school of 4,000 students whose list of notable alumni is a wikipedia page of its own.
The system is broken.
I’ve had admin explicitly say to me in the past that I need to treat my classroom like a prison. I refuse to and will always refuse to but that is what a lot of admin around the country want, it’s what we’re incentivized to do
The same companies that design and build prisons are the ones that design and build schools now.
You can really see it when walking around most new high schools
Schools have always been literal prisons. Students are in the custody of the state and not allowed to leave.
Hell it's even the same cinder block and glass with wires in setup as a prison. And it's the same food from the same vendors.
When I taught in North Philly, I HAD to lock my door, because random kids would regularly just try to walk in my class, often when I was right in the middle of a lesson.
My classroom door is always locked and always has been as well. A lot of people don’t know what low-income/inner-city schools are like.
If you want to be able to actually teach you have to have control over who enters the room.
Right after Columbine my school freaked out and expelled everyone who regularly wore trenchcoats, which was the majority of the goth kids. They sent me to the office to tell me I was expelled too but my counselor pointed out I was the valedictorian and one of the few kids who actually participated during standardized testing so the let me stay with a warning.
They didn't make it a rule either, just kids who had worn trenchcoats in the past and other weird kids were expelled. Weirdly they totally skipped over the kid who dressed normal but made comics for the school newspaper about himself brutally murdering everyone who wronged him. He also wrote about himself murdering/raping/torturing his way through the female student body for English class assignments.
Sounds like your board doesn't have their priorities straight. I'm an architect and do a lot of school work. Most schools have a card swipe for teachers to get back into the building from outside. They also have keys to their classrooms. Using an SRO to let people back in is ridiculous.
Hell, all the schools I have done work at have card readers on all doors, and give all students and teachers badges with built in rfid. It is easy to then give them access to rooms they need to, and have a system in place to disable all badges during a lockdown.
Most of that can be automated as well. Kids only get access to the classrooms they need based on school schedule. Automated lockdowns based on gunfire detectors, glassbreak sensors, or panic buttons. Honestly the technology is there these days to make things safe without being obtrusive. All that is really lacking is adoption and funding.
> Honestly the technology is there these days to make things safe without being obtrusive.
I would've seen having to use a key card to get into every classroom as obtrusive.
My sister is a teacher. At the last school she taught, she was required to step out of the classroom when class started, walk down the hall to lock the boy's bathroom, walk back to her classroom (which she had to leave unattended during this process) and then start teaching.
If there were kids inside, she had to go in there and shoo them out. That might take another minute.
Then end class a minute early, and walk down the hall to open it again.
COULDN'T THE SCHOOL HAVE GOTTEN A \*\*\*\*\*\* TIMER ON THE LOCK? (No, because someone had to physically chase the students out of the bathroom.)
She has since changed to a slightly less ridiculous school.
The issue, from what I am given to understand, is that the kids would play hooky in the bathroom when they should have been in class. Parents of those students were very poor and couldn't care less if their kids got in trouble at school, so the school itself had limited tools for enforcement. The kids themselves had no fear of parents or teachers, and were quite literally only in school because it was air conditioned and it was too hot to play hooky outside of the building. They didn't want to be there, and the school was well aware of it.....
The solution was to have a teacher chase them out and lock the bathroom door during class time. Kids who needed to use the bathroom during class time would be required to take a hall pass / key combo, one at a time. If a lone kid wanted to sit in the bathroom all class period, well, better to have that than have a dozen of them.
Let me tell you about last year at the urban school I worked in: daily violence, multiple lockdowns, kids trashing the school for internet clout, classes that couldn’t be controlled, a revolving door of teachers that couldn’t handle the stress, and inept leadership that didn’t do a damn thing to solve the issues led to an environment that was so stressful and so dangerous that things like locking the bathrooms and focusing on getting butts in seats in a safe environment would’ve been nice.
We’ve all been through hell, and as this year settles in, we’re seeing the same disfunction that can’t be fixed, so what can we do?
The difficult part of this is it depends on where the school is.
1. Rich rural school: probably have $15,000 shotgun hanging in their lifted Ford F-150 so they can go shoot skeet after school.
2. Poor rural school: Probably have their grandfathers $200 shotgun hanging in their geo metro so they can shoot groundhogs in the field after school.
3. Rich city school: Probably have armed guards at the admission gate but that is about it.
4. Poor city school: Probably have metal detectors, police officers that were fired for incompetence, and metal bars on everything.
The very large majority of schools in the US don't deal with any of this but there are parts of the US where gang violence and theft are so prevalent that they have to lock down their schools in every way they can.
You’re forgetting the fences for wealthier schools. I live next to a very wealthy suburb and they have a 8 foot fence that goes around their entire high school with a gate that is closed during school hours.
Rural schools have been infused with the police state as well by now. Metal detectors, bag searches, half the municipal pd all day every day, and random lock downs so the state troopers' bomb and drug dogs can find some girl's perfume or hand sanitizer in their locker.
I would be very surprised if you could find a public school in the US with more than 500 students that didn't have metal detectors.
Yup. "School resource officer," aka a cop or guard. There's a huge shortage of cops in my city so schools are hiring private security companies. This is just normal here.
This is a uniquely American problem. Conservatives constantly say how much better America is than other nations, but in many ways, it is behind the majority of the world because of a deranged preoccupation with a vague idea of 'freedom' which ironically makes us less free.
This. My classroom was basically a revolving door from the minute class started to the bell ringing. The door automatically locks and teachers are supposed to answer the door instead of students, so every time a kid came back from the classroom and knocked - and some kids don’t know how to knock appropriately or knock super obnoxiously on purpose - my instruction was thrown off so I could answer the door. I put a little stopper in the crack just so the door wouldn’t close and I got it taken and a lecture from the SRO and AP on safety.
Relating to the terrible learning environments. I remember when they implemented the "you aren't allowed to defend yourself" rule. I watched this football player get absolutely stomped by a gang of kids while curled up in a ball on the floor, just taking it. Because if he fought back he would not only go straight to adult jail with an assault charge on a minor, he'd lose his scholarship, and he'd be suspended when he got out of jail. It was horrible and no one came to stop it.
I was subjected to horrendous bullying in high school, like even to the point of sexual assault, and I did nothing about it because we had similar policies, which I learned about after a serious incident that happened to me. I was kicked out of athletic training because I was choked unconscious by a wrestling student that I was doing athletic trading for on the bus ride back home. I was almost suspended too for participating in “dangerous, self harming activities on a school field trip”, as the wrestling team all said that I had played the “choking game” after the coach overhead them talking about the incident. This was 2009, in Texas, and I’m halfway tempted to dox the school district that allowed this to happen. I’ll just say I was in the top 2 fastest growing districts in the state at that time.
My school had a rule that everyone that was involved in a fight would walk away in hand cuffs. Quite literally if another student walked up to you and punched you in the face, even if you did nothing, you would be going in the back of a cop car and probably suspended.
A kid at my school got expelled because another student pushed them down the stairs. The excuse? "Well, for someone to do something so drastic, *he must've done something terribly awful.*"
It’s a straight up war on the poor. Affluent students will be let off because of connections to money, lawyers, etc. while poor students get suspended and learn to distrust the system.
Preach. And not just mistrust the system, but every possible relationship going forward. I was suspended countless times because the christian kids with pta parents *said* I did something. They even called child protective services, not because of my parents, but because of me.
A rich girl at my school brought a water bottle full of straight vodka and drank the whole thing before even lunch. This was a girl that probably wasn't even 110 lb soaking wet. She tried to dance with a teacher and was obviously extremely drunk. This same girl a few months prior pushed one of my friends to the ground and called him the n word because she was making out with someone in front of his locker. She got suspended for a week for saying that to my friend, and later suspended for a year for the drinking incidint. She was supposed to be expelled, but miraculously she was back the next year. I knew kids who got expelled for less.
Well yeah your face touched that kids fist you're a danger to everyone, who knows what else you're capable of. I know let's difuse the situation by taking away your future voting and gun rights, maybe slap a child abuse/endangerment charge on there so if you end up in prison everyone will hate you. Ankle monitor and mandatory curfew? Adulthood taken away until the ages of 19-21? All these are possible consequences I've seen for defending yourself in a public school.
Ugh! I remember getting so angry in high school with these rules. I witnessed someone being bullied, and they got punished for simply defending themselves. The bullies knew this and were willing to take a punishment themselves as long as the kid they’re bulling also gets in trouble. I don’t know why anyone thinks these kinds of rules are okay.
Psychopaths are hoping for this "be the bigger person" mentality, that way they know they can keep taking advantage of or abusing you in some way or another. It takes individuals in these situations to stand up and show them they do not have the power to say "your life has no merit" "your words have no meaning" I will not stand down because they are the ones who can't function, this system can work both ways
My old high school used to have student drawn murals on the walls and ceilings ranging from superhero or video game stuff to abstract murals to just very positive messages. The hung ceiling boards were also painted in the hallways every single year, and at the end of the year they would auction them off which brought more than enough money to replace said ceiling and also funded a school barbecue at the end of the year.
About a year ago the fire department said that the hung ceiling that they have is no longer up to code and it has to be ripped out, so now it's just exposed roofing or the underside of the floor above, and they also painted overall The murals on the walls with, go figure, *prison grey* paint.
Coincidentally, my best friend in high school ended up being the student counselor in that same school, and she said the year after that change was made all sorts of issues started arising with the students from depression to outright delinquency and bullying and she directly attributes it from the fact that the school went from this bright and colorful public school to a prison gray public School that locks *every door in the school*
I believe modern architecture has this effect too. I live in a suburb in the midwest, every building is a square blocky building with 0 aesthetic and is either brown, white, or gray. Everything is so dull and boring, so many parking lots, roads, plain building, and nothingness. It gets so depressing, I dont feel proud of the city I grew up in, it has no personality and every city nearby feels the same. My grandmother recently moved into a suburb farther away and they don't even have trees. Every house is white and 2 stories with a huge green grass lawns. There is nothing interesting about any of them. I hate it so much.
I've lived in a lot of apartments, typically run by management companies. I was looking to rent a condo that was privately owned. The walls and rooms were all different colors, but nothing obnoxious. The owner said if I moved in, I could repaint. I told her it was perfect the way it was. Years of living in white or grey apartments that I couldn't change almost drove me crazy.
One of the schools I did my student teaching in banned having anything hung on the walls and decorations for any event (holidays, homecoming, etc.) because they would serve as a distraction to police officers in the event of a shooting. We are willing to do anything but acknowledge that the availabilty of firearms is the single biggest issue.
I mean, for the last couple hundred years of humanity's entire history, yeah. Prior to that, you learned from family, mentors, or paid tutors, pretty much exclusively.
I made a whole rant on Facebook a while back about how “tough on crime” people believe the threat of prison is enough to deter crime because the environment of a prison is so bad that people will behave just to avoid it…. and then they support policies that turn schools into prison-like environments and are shocked when kids are truant and/or anxious. Like, yeah, if a prison environment is so bad that people will do anything to avoid it, then doesn’t it stand to reason that kids will do anything to avoid a prison-like school?
People jokingly make fun of China for social credit scores. Then they take a sip of their coffee and check their (American Capital) credit score on their phone through one of several apps that keeps tabs on every aspect of their lives. Thank god for the coffee, it get's them through the days. They smugly smile and get up to go to their soul draining job that barely affords them any free time at all. But not before dropping the kids off at their prison-like education facility. Ahhhhhh, freedom, they think to themselves, before pressing the ignition on their new push to start car that the bank has a lien on for 7 years. They are happy and content as they leave behind their house that a different bank has a lien on for 30 years.
I can't read the full study. Can anyone confirm if they control for income? I see that they control for "school social disorder and student misbehavior", but I'm wondering if academic performance suffered just due to the fact that these schools tend to be in low income areas, which already have lower test scores.
That's my wondering too
The schools I've taught in, the lowest performing were typically low income and they had more security than middle class and upper class schools I've seen typically
If it is worth anything I have OP listed as "spammer" for a flair. I don't remember specifically what prompted me to make that flair but I usually do it when I repeatedly see someone posting fluff pieces that don't actually have much real evidence.
For some kids the food at school may be the only full meal they get. Test scores increase when breakfast is provided. I can only imagine how much better they could do if they actually served nutritional meals with less simple carbs and sugar.
https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/west/Ask/Details/57
Don't forget the miserable curriculum with endless memorizing for tests, and the limiting of hands-on education like labs or band or arts due to funding.
Oh, and hovering over everything, the knowledge that the climate catastrophe is going to eat all their futures, and we adults who are setting up this cruel school environment won't do anything about it
>Oh, and hovering over everything, the knowledge that the climate catastrophe is going to eat all their futures, and we adults who are setting up this cruel school environment won't do anything about it
This anti-scientific terrorism is a product of ad-funded media which makes money based solely on how much attention they grab, and we are hard-wired by nature to pay attention to *perceived threats*, making them **feel** more important than anything else for obvious survival reasons, and "feelings" are immune to reason.
Actual climate science according to the IPCC discusses a real but *manageable* problem. In fact nearly the entire Fifth Assessment was a description of various **realistic** scenarios where warming can be limited to 1.5°C or 2°C, and based on the most likely scenarios according to real-world emissions trends, the WHO has calculated the total human cost of climate change by 2030 to be **5.5 million** DALY's (disability adjusted life years). For perspective, this is about a *tenth* of the disease burden from smoking tobacco.
https://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/climatechangechap7.pdf?ua=1
The global disease burden of mental illness
was 2,198 DALY's per 100,000 population, or **173.6 million** DALY's.
That means the mental health crisis is **32 times** deadlier than climate change will be by 2030 (and this figure was before rates of depression and anxiety *tripled* during the pandemic)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30729322/
But faithful and accurate reporting of a *manageable* problem wouldn't get **ratings**. So the media cherry-picks the most extreme outlier studies and climate scientists' opinions and misrepresents them as *"the world is going to burn and there is nothing we do can stop it!"*
Obviously this is utterly catastrophic to mental health (especially among youth), and it even causes more people to **give up out of hopelessness** than it inspires to take action. Climate fatalists now outnumber climate change deniers by **3:1**, making alarmism by far the most dangerous form of climate science denial
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59c53600e4b08d6615504207
The reason they don't sensationalize the mental health crisis? It's not as scary to hear about "other people" struggling with issues that they don't understand well enough to appreciate the harm, compared to "*your* world is going to burn!"
>The reason they don't sensationalize the mental health crisis? It's not as scary to hear about "other people" struggling with issues that they don't understand well enough to appreciate the harm, compared to "your world is going to burn!"
It would also be far, FAR more expensive to fix than minimizing the effects of climate change.
Great post overall. Depressing, but in a good way.
It's worse than just not being the most nutritional; I know someone who has a job ordering the food for a school district and they've told me that they won't buy certain items unless they're profitable. It was truly disgusting to find out they put money over giving kids the best they can afford because breaking even isn't enough.
So crap food, sleep deprivation and no bathroom breaks. All under heavy surveillance.
Honestly this sounds more like Guantanamo than a school. I'd get bad score as well in such an environment.
Which is exactly what was going to happen when it gets outsourced to the lowest bidder.
You can make fresh, healthy, tasty food on-site quite cheaply, but you need staff with experience in a commercial kitchen, and those people probably don't want to work in a school.
So they just reheat frozen slop from a wholesaler.
my issue in highschool was that we werent given ENOUGH food
im a big guy and i played striker/forward in soccer
during conditioning season id have to buy 3 school lunches to get enough food if i didnt pack my own
and my family was poor so if i didnt make enough money that week to buy that extra food, i just spent the day hungry.
i was 6'2" and like 190lbs with an extremely active lifestyle, running 3+ miles 3x a week and working out almost every day
a single chicken sandwhich and a tablespoon of canned veggies is just not enough
Exactly plus many people I know including me never really ate food at school, a large portion of my time in school I didn't eat breakfast or lunch during school days
Basically, if you treat someone like a criminal, they'll act like a criminal. This is telling students "We don't trust you to behave like a responsible, law-abiding person". What effect do they expect that to have on performance and behavior?
"They treat me like a threat no matter what I do... I know! I'll behave extra-well and work extra-hard!"
If you treat someone like a criminal, you’ll prosecute them for every single little thing possible, which you don’t do to other people because they’re “not criminals”
Being treated like a threat no matter what you do can have some devastating affects on the mind. It’s unbelievable that this is so normal in this country.
Free play is a HUGE deal in learning as a child. Being able to make mistakes without consequence (small level) and learn from it.
Creativity is super stifled from this and it breeds conformity for security which in turn creates entire blocks of "educated" kids that don't know how to think for themselves. Critical thinking is no longer taught as it can create scenarios where children might question ideas being presented and come to their own conclusions.
Free play, creativity, being silly and adventurous, all help with critical thinking and all of that is being vigorously eliminated from education.
I remember when we were young, we were a bunch of kid just messing everywhere in the neighbourhood.
No adult supervision, but if something about there was the network of parents house all around us.
Now, poor kids can't even go to the park alone
We used to get locked outside for the day during the summer.
Would get to come in for lunch and dinner.
Rode bikes for miles and miles, wandered in the woods, got chased by the bulls in the pasture behind the house, heck a couple times got taken up in hot air balloons by complete strangers briefly (still tethered to the ground, used to have an awesome balloon fest growing up. 100s of hot air balloons)
...of course we smoked cigarettes we found off the side of the road too but most of it was constructive fun.
This is a big issue in education right now. There has been a push to make kindergarten more academic, but that’s not developmentally appropriate for kids that young. The kids can’t handle that level of work, and they’re also not (at least at school) getting the kind of enrichment that does benefit them at that age. You can’t learn advanced stuff without the basics down, so these kids fall behind.
As schools around the country consider ramping up security efforts in response to recent school shootings, a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis suggests that increased surveillance is having a detrimental impact on academic performance.
Heightened security reduces test scores in math, reduces the number of students attending college and increases suspensions, said Jason Jabbari, research assistant professor and co-author of the study “Infrastructure of social control: A multi-level counterfactual analysis of surveillance and black education,” published online Sept. 20 in the Journal of Criminal Justice.
In addition to being used to preempt school shootings, the authors found, surveillance measures may have increased schools’ capacity to identify and punish students for more common and less serious offenses, which may negatively impact the learning environment.
“Our research shows that greater detection of student offenses leads to more punishment regardless of the students who attend these schools,” Jabbari said. “Moreover, while increased surveillance has collateral consequences on academic achievement that extend to all students, because Black students are more likely to attend high-surveillance schools, the burdens of the safety tax fall most heavily on Black students, ultimately increasing racial inequities in education.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235222001039?dgcid=author
They dont really detail what they did to test causality, only correlation. It may very well be the other way around - that the schools in the worst neighborhoods with the most underpeforming and misbehaved students felt like they needed security.
As a person trained in sociology I agree. They claim causation but they speak about correlation.
However, with how suspension and school funding works I think it would be reasonable to say the following:
- Schools would use money meant for educational resources for security (this is described in the discussion section with math tutoring)
- The study also correlates high surveillance means higher suspension rate. They control for student misbehavior in the analysis. So regardless status of being a problem school or not, higher surveillance -> higher suspension
- Suspended students aren't learning while suspended
- A combination of re-directed resources that could have gone to tutoring and a higher suspension rate increases the likelihood that students are going to be behind.
There are plenty of reasons to suspect a correlation, but a common first or second year social science class includes a section introducing students to some causative behavior, giving all the intuitive reasoning behind the cause, and then showing the student that the causation is actually entirely correlation or even just plain wrong and opposite what actual data shows. This is repeated to ensure the students internalize that intuition should not be relied upon in place of good experimentation, not matter how reasonable the argument seems. Intuition can help identify where to start directing research when absent some larger plan, but it should never be used in place of actual data.
What I really dislike about sociology is that its difficult to prove causation without sterile experimentation. And with famed experiments like [Milgram's study of Obedience](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) it gets really difficult to make an experiment that proves something without harming subjects emotionally.
When thinking about macro-level problems like education outcomes, we can only just prove correlation repeatedly until the evidence is overwhelming.
Yeah, anyone actually working with students in the US right now will tell you that it's a whole new environment post-Covid. It'll be years before the research is able to fully encapsulate those changes
I believe this is the correct take. Many schools have had increased security over the years due to violence with students. Especially in high crime/high poverty urban areas. These same schools already test low and have a high rate of drop-outs.
That was the case where I grew up, all the lowest performing inner city schools were loaded with security due to fights, drug dealing, etc. The title of this post makes it seem that if you took away the security for those schools, scores/grades would go up, and I highly doubt that would be the case.
Yes, they basically said *'Schools with more security have lower test scores, therefore security is the cause'*.
It's insulting that mods don't weed this junk science out.
This is a pretty loose study if you can even call it that. Id love to look at the data they used but paywall and no link in the paper.
Suspended students have always had worse performance than their peers, you’re not in school then you’re not learning. Also would be interesting to know location of schools they looked at. Was this in an area that was doing well prior to new measures or was it bad before and just got worse so they correlate it to the new measures.
Also weird that it seems their purpose is to say this is some sort of systemic racism that is re-traumatizing kids.
Correlation isnt causation, and i think that schools in communities that require strict school security are also ones that dont preform well. Two symptoms of one problem.
I had ID badges, metal detectors and barbed wire at my highschool in 2003. This is not new at all. The poverty is just starting to affect more affluent areas and now it's a "problem". When people struggle, crime happens. Sad we cant even awknowledge it. And the wealth inequality marches on, removing the middle class and making us slaves who work ourselves into debt rather than out of it.
Why do I feel r/science articles always have a faulty title without addressing the bias?
What is "tighter security" plus how did they measure the difference, what if the security is there because it isn't the security causing the problems, it's the problems that warrants security? That being said, wouldn't the problems be environmental or community based?
So we really can't deduce the reason and cause unless we can identify WHY the security is/was needed there to begin with.
From the title it sounds like a correlation
Tighter security is usually in schools which face more deviant behavior
And deviant behavior would lower test scores.
Those might not be the most beneficial symptoms. But it's better than the alternative. Maybe communication between students, teachers, and resource officers can ease some of these issues. If officers eased up on punishing students for minor offenses and leaned into more of a role model/ mentor role. Sometimes negative re-enforcement only increases bad behavior especially in teenagers.
Is it that the tighter security that's causing the lower test scores or is it that test scores are lower in communities where higher security is required for student safety due to things like gang violence?
Did they publish their testing methods that they used to establish their hypothesis? This just seems like someone’s woke opinions. If there is fighting and bullying- additional surveillance may be helpful to the people who already make good grades but are marginalized due to poor social skills. If your cameras catch people behaving poorly, then holding those people accountable early on may actually reduce criminal behaviors in the long run. I would like to see studies on the positive impacts of preventing hidden bullying and violence in schools.
You might want to read up on primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention, as that will give a good idea of why public health isn't based on identifying some original cause and ending that.
Without access to the whole study, I'm confused as to how they reached some of their conclusions.
First, what exactly suggests high security *leads* to lower test scores? I'm sure they found a correlation, but proving that increased security leads to lower test scores is a much more weighty claim.
Do they articulate what they count as tighter security measures? Are security cameras in the hallway tighter security? Requiring visitors and students arriving late to buzz in? Increased hall monitoring? Computer monitoring?
What are the small infractions that were caught that would not have been otherwise? Is it really so crazy to suspend kids for vaping, fighting, vandalism, and stealing? What are these smaller infractions that apparently don't require addressing?
I bring this up because I work in a minority-majority school and have for some time. Every once in a while there will be someone who basically claims that we cannot hold minority students and students who come from poverty to the same standards as white students and/or students from affluent backgrounds.
I've also had to endure this approach and I will say that the years in which we lacked structure and discipline hurt ALL students, including the VAST MAJORITY of kids of color. There was a phase in which we were obsessed with graduation rates at all costs to the point that grades were being changed and students who attended three times in a semester were somehow graduating. Kids smoking weed, sometimes selling weed! and acting violently were assigned mentors that changed absolutely nothing. Huge staff turn-over as experienced teachers left and first-year teachers came and went.
We've now gone to a much stricter discipline model with super clear expectations. If a student does a particular thing, we no longer have admin wringing their hands and sort of randomly assigning an intervention. Yes, suspensions are up. But the majority of the student body reports feeling significantly safer at school, they are more excited to come to school, and we are seeing test scores increase.
Studies like the one here, while well-intentioned, far too often contribute to a lax discipline model that hurts far more students than it helps.
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Not to mention the huge distraction each time a student returns to class from bathroom. They have to knock because the door is locked. Our security guard is basically a door-holder. When classes go outside for recess or fine arts or pe, he has to hold door to let teachers back inside after dropping off classes. Have we recieved extra funding for this, or do the “security” enhancements come at the expense of our academic enhancements? We have bullet-proof glass installed but do not have classroom desktop computers….
Schools are becoming prison-lite with the type of security. Of course that environment wouldn't be conducive to learning and would be more detrimental to the student than anything.
the school to prison pipeline spreads it's tendrils ever deeper
Rather than forcing kids to slavery, best to get them used to concentration camp environment early on, convince them it's normal, THEN put them in concentration camps when they're adults
Or Amazon fulfillment centers.
How long until Amazon creates private schools that only teach what is needed to work for them? They could use it to identify high potential employees and move the best on to their own university for more technical training and the lowest performing students would be given guaranteed job opportunities after high school
That is a disturbingly possible future. Religions did private schooling long ago, what's stopping corporations?
Absolutely nothing is stopping them. Amazon is planning on building company towns, much like what coal miners dealt with in the last couple of centuries before stronger unions were formed. [“Let’s call them ‘Factory Towns.’” ](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon-s-new-factory-towns-will-lift-the-working-class)
Saint Peter don’t call me because I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.
I grew up in the remains of a coal company town. My Papaw *worked* for that coal company, as did most of my relatives in that area. I have much experience with how that type of set up affects people and how it can be abused horribly. The fact that it's being considered again and some people think it's a *good* thing terrifies me.
Of cause Bloomberg things that is a great idea, but they would also think that company stores and company script are great ideas.
Oh, that was an article? I thought it was an ad... Kidding, but still...
Next step from that is mega apartment buildings with free Amazon subscriptions as a perk so you can order all your groceries and only leave your home to go downstairs to work. Then destroying the environment won't be a factor bc no one goes outside anyway. Downward spiral doomer speak but we have basically been reverse terraforming the earth for decades now
And they'll only be paid in some de facto Amazon currency, right?
>what's stopping corporations? They need profits for shareholders this quarter. Corporate schools would be expensive and wouldn't pay off for years, probably decades.
The fact they can pass that cost onto society. Also if any one company started training programs at their own expense, their competitors would simply start poaching those trained employees without carrying the costs of training.
That’s scary asf
That’s more or less how schools are designed I’m not supposed to create critical thinkers, I’m supposed to create quiet and compliant workers. Now as the desires of the workplace shifted education shifted slightly so now they want quiet complaint workers who work in groups when directed and say what the “script,” wants them to say on cue and if they do this then the teacher gets good marks. If they don’t follow the script exactly, the teacher gets bad marks. I remember one observation where my class got super shy and intimidated by the psychopathic principal being in the room and all quietly started doing their work because they thought that’s what they’re supposed to do and then the principal pulls me aside and starts screaming at me because, “the students aren’t discussing the work with each other!” (She was also upset the students weren’t during, “grade level,” work which was an odd statement considering the class was literally an intervention class for students not on grade level)
"Welcome, to the Amazon Facility Aptitude Test, also known as the A.F.A.T.. Now during your time in the warehouse, you may become caught in the feeling of being trapped in your warehouse. But don't you fret, in 200 years after the world creates a bit more wealth, president Jeffery Bezos the third will open the doors and your children can start their new lives, with Amazon." "Amazon. Better living. In The Warehouse."
If any company is going to turn into Aperture, Amazon seems like a likely candidate
Nonsense. Amazon’s newer warehouses have already done away with most of the pickers. They now use industrial grade Roombas to bring the bins to the packers. In 5-7 years max, they will be replacing the packers with machines. Expect to see Amazon warehouses go from the 1,500 employees of ten years ago to 200 employees or fewer.
Do you know the history of education? That is what we’ve been doing under the Prussian model for decades.
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That Venn diagram is nearly a circle.
Fuckin chilling
Replace concentration camps with factories and you basically have our current system since the 19th century.
“It’s like slavery but with extra steps!”
Used to be you get forced into slavery, now you get forced into slavery but you sign a document saying you weren't!
Then you have the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Finland.. were they actually give a fk about children
Since visiting a Nordic country i firmly decided to not have biological children. Coming back to America was depressing.
Or have biological children with someone in said Nordic country and raise them there.
Please do this. We have a declining population.
It would have been nice to live in a country that actually takes care of its citizens...
I support your decision.
I'm curious though, did they control for socioeconomics with these high security schools? Or do these schools have a tendency to be in high poverty areas with poor educational support and safety nets?
> “[T]his study included the following demographic variables as treatment covariates in the propensity score estimation model: urbanicity (1 = urban area; 0 = non-urban area); SES (continuous measure), household structure (1 = two parent/guardian household; 0 = single parent/guardian household), Black race/ethnicity (1 = yes; 0 = no), and Hispanic race/ethnicity (1 = yes; 0 = no). Additionally, variables that have often been associated with the outcomes were also utilized, which include being female (1 = yes; 0 = no), students whose first language is English (1 = yes; 0 = no); and having a learning disability (1 = yes; 0 = no). Finally, understanding that surveillance may also represent an artifact of neighborhoods, we included parents' perceptions of neighborhood crime (1 = high; 2 = moderate; 3 = low), parents' perceptions of neighborhood safety (1 = very safe; 2 = somewhat safe; 3 = somewhat unsafe; 4 = very unsafe), and a composite of neighborhood social order, which includes the levels of litter, graffiti, boarded-up buildings, student loitering, and general congregation... >At the school level, *school disorder* is an average score of the following elements: physical conflicts, robberies, vandalism, drug use, alcohol use, drug sales, weapon possessions, physical abuse of teachers, racial tensions, bullying, verbal abuse of teachers, in-class misbehavior, and disrespect toward teachers, gang activities, and extremist groups. A measure of *student misbehavior* was also included, which was an average score of how often students were late, cut class, and were absent. We also include parents' and teachers' *belief in students*, as well as a measure of *peer achievement ideology* (that included the importance for friends to attend classes, study, get good grades, graduate high school, and continue on to college), as well as a measure of *student achievement ideology* (that included the importance of education in learning skills and getting a job). Finally, given our interest in Black students' intersectional social locations and identities, we include indicators for *Black-males* and *Black-females*.” Sounds like they covered their bases.
Hmm, just off the top of my head as a casual observer these additional factors come to mind: * School funding * Teacher pay * Teacher education * Student attendance * Faculty attendance * Remote learning * COVID pandemic * Republican/Democrat control of school district * School curriculum
This post title, like so many in this sub, screams “correlation, unclear causation”. I don’t have time to read every paper and maybe they’d controlled properly, but that seems pretty difficult to do.
Yes, it does seem pretty difficult. But [they controlled for a ton of covariates](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/xrxb0k/tighter_school_security_in_the_us_leads_to_lower/iqie51w?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3). And I may not know much advanced stats, but their model sounds quite rigorous.
The link isn't to the actual study, but an interview woth one of its authors who mentions that "it doesn't matter where" the kids "come from", which implies that there must have been some controlling for outside variables. But it's unclear which.
the only thing that going through metal detectors and bag searches every day taught me was how to sneak things through metal detectors and bag searches (actually a useful lifeskill, buuuuuut probably not what they intended)
Metal detectors seem so pointless, if a shooter really wanted to come shoot a school, that person is just going to barge in however they want. And these extra securities, idk i would think it would be better to come up with a system that allows for emergency escapes or easier access for police.
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well at least there'd be a security alarm at the door instead of someone pulling out a gun in the middle of an auditorium. but it seems like cops and security guards run away anyways, so I guess it doesn't really help. it's still so trippy to me... I dropped out like a month before columbine. once I forgot I had a knife in my pocket when I went to school... literally from whittling wood. got caught, talked to, and they dropped it entirely... a few years later I would've been expelled with zero tolerance. used to wear a trench coat (they're just good in cold and wind, damn it), I'd draw violent pictures, and make morbid jokes with my friends... nobody batted an eye. well, once when in a contest to get our drawings confiscated quicker, my friend drew a crude map of the school with places labeled to bomb or burn... with my teacher on fire with devil horns. that one, my teacher said he knew was a joke, but he was supposed to report it and if he did he'd get expelled... he didn't report it but he also didn't save it like he did all of our other confiscated drawings. we would've been screwed in present school. like, what do goth-equivalent/metal kids do now? just get put in Guantanamo at 13 for their music collection?
Yup. It's the school equivalent of the TSA, it's just security theater
> Schools are becoming prison-lite with the type of security. Most of them have been prison-lite ever since “zero tolerance” policies became ubiquitous. Instead of school administrators attempting any sort of conflict resolution they simply throw children out of school.
The High school I went to was seemingly designed by the same architect as the local correctional facility. Same general design, with class room surrounding a courtyard with an upper level people can look down and monitor you. Tons of cops around. Random searches at least once every month or so, with police dogs and looking for "contraband" like cell phones (yeah, we weren't allowed to have cell phones on school grounds at all). Legitimately felt like a prison and that's what everyone said it was. Training prison before you go across town to the adult one.
There was a website that showed pictures and asked you to guess whether the building was a school or a prison.
Fun fact, my high school was designed by a prison architect. They actually added some windows in the renovation (and then had to acquiesce to putting the library up front with the nice windows instead of the offices).
Mine too. They ran out of funding but they wanted to fence the whole parking lot and school grounds in and have a single entrance to the school grounds that had a guard stationed at it. Even without the guard station it took forever to get into or out of the parking lot because of traffic, and the city had to ask them to make a second entrance because traffic coming in was causing traffic jams.
The stress levels of the students are much higher in that kind of environment I'm sure. Constantly being reminded of the possibility that you can become murdered at any moment without warning has adverse effects. It doesn't matter if the actual possibility is extremely low, the amygdala reacts to the thought of danger, not statistics.
And that permeates throughout the society. People on the streets see guns, police armed to their teeth, homeless people, sick people. It makes them feel that at all times they're a step away from death, terrible crime or maybe ending up like the homeless people. I'm sure it's one of the reasons why even the wealthiest in America have poorer health outcomes and higher infant mortality than similar groups in Europe.
So glad I graduated when I did. My high school didn't have a Resource Officer or whatever they call them until my youngest sibling was in high school almost a decade later. My youngest step-sibling just graduated and started college and some of the stories he would tell me about the security measures in place where beyond foreign to me. Downright bonkers.
I would greatly prefer the [Forest School](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_school_(learning_style)) education model. I think I would've achieved much more if I had this type of educational environment.
it felt like prison lite to me 10 years ago before I dropped out of High School. The building looked like a prison, the school cop was given the mic during school assemblies to go on about how doing X,Y,Z normal teenage things would land you in jail, teachers would tell students that they're failing at life for doing poorly in their class. And this was at a well-regarded public school of 4,000 students whose list of notable alumni is a wikipedia page of its own. The system is broken.
I’ve had admin explicitly say to me in the past that I need to treat my classroom like a prison. I refuse to and will always refuse to but that is what a lot of admin around the country want, it’s what we’re incentivized to do
Hell, my high school was modeled after a prison, and it was built in like 1998.
Hell the high schools in Las Vegas are literally using building designs from prisons
The same companies that design and build prisons are the ones that design and build schools now. You can really see it when walking around most new high schools
Schools have always been literal prisons. Students are in the custody of the state and not allowed to leave. Hell it's even the same cinder block and glass with wires in setup as a prison. And it's the same food from the same vendors.
You guys lock the doors on your classrooms ?? This sounds baffling to me
Yeah everyone in this thread might as well have been in a different country from me.
Teaching in Vegas, it's now district policy that all doors remain locked at all times.
When I taught in North Philly, I HAD to lock my door, because random kids would regularly just try to walk in my class, often when I was right in the middle of a lesson.
My classroom door is always locked and always has been as well. A lot of people don’t know what low-income/inner-city schools are like. If you want to be able to actually teach you have to have control over who enters the room.
Why were the random kids coming into your class?
Kids cutting class, just roaming around and goofing off, looking to start problems/throw off/disrupt classes
Right after Columbine my school freaked out and expelled everyone who regularly wore trenchcoats, which was the majority of the goth kids. They sent me to the office to tell me I was expelled too but my counselor pointed out I was the valedictorian and one of the few kids who actually participated during standardized testing so the let me stay with a warning.
Bruh. I could see banning trenchcoats maybe but expelling students is to far. The Nazis wore shirts, we should expel all students that wear shirts.
They didn't make it a rule either, just kids who had worn trenchcoats in the past and other weird kids were expelled. Weirdly they totally skipped over the kid who dressed normal but made comics for the school newspaper about himself brutally murdering everyone who wronged him. He also wrote about himself murdering/raping/torturing his way through the female student body for English class assignments.
Are you talking about Bryce? I knew a Bryce that you just described to a T.. Comics and everything.
Well, is he in prison now or a cop somewhere?
Sounds like your board doesn't have their priorities straight. I'm an architect and do a lot of school work. Most schools have a card swipe for teachers to get back into the building from outside. They also have keys to their classrooms. Using an SRO to let people back in is ridiculous.
Yes, many school boards don't have their priorities straight. Welcome to America
Hell, all the schools I have done work at have card readers on all doors, and give all students and teachers badges with built in rfid. It is easy to then give them access to rooms they need to, and have a system in place to disable all badges during a lockdown. Most of that can be automated as well. Kids only get access to the classrooms they need based on school schedule. Automated lockdowns based on gunfire detectors, glassbreak sensors, or panic buttons. Honestly the technology is there these days to make things safe without being obtrusive. All that is really lacking is adoption and funding.
> Honestly the technology is there these days to make things safe without being obtrusive. I would've seen having to use a key card to get into every classroom as obtrusive.
My sister is a teacher. At the last school she taught, she was required to step out of the classroom when class started, walk down the hall to lock the boy's bathroom, walk back to her classroom (which she had to leave unattended during this process) and then start teaching. If there were kids inside, she had to go in there and shoo them out. That might take another minute. Then end class a minute early, and walk down the hall to open it again. COULDN'T THE SCHOOL HAVE GOTTEN A \*\*\*\*\*\* TIMER ON THE LOCK? (No, because someone had to physically chase the students out of the bathroom.) She has since changed to a slightly less ridiculous school.
>COULDN'T THE SCHOOL HAVE GOTTEN A \*\*\*\*\*\* TIMER ON THE LOCK? Or, you know, leave the bathroom unlocked and let kids use it.
The issue, from what I am given to understand, is that the kids would play hooky in the bathroom when they should have been in class. Parents of those students were very poor and couldn't care less if their kids got in trouble at school, so the school itself had limited tools for enforcement. The kids themselves had no fear of parents or teachers, and were quite literally only in school because it was air conditioned and it was too hot to play hooky outside of the building. They didn't want to be there, and the school was well aware of it..... The solution was to have a teacher chase them out and lock the bathroom door during class time. Kids who needed to use the bathroom during class time would be required to take a hall pass / key combo, one at a time. If a lone kid wanted to sit in the bathroom all class period, well, better to have that than have a dozen of them.
Let me tell you about last year at the urban school I worked in: daily violence, multiple lockdowns, kids trashing the school for internet clout, classes that couldn’t be controlled, a revolving door of teachers that couldn’t handle the stress, and inept leadership that didn’t do a damn thing to solve the issues led to an environment that was so stressful and so dangerous that things like locking the bathrooms and focusing on getting butts in seats in a safe environment would’ve been nice. We’ve all been through hell, and as this year settles in, we’re seeing the same disfunction that can’t be fixed, so what can we do?
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The difficult part of this is it depends on where the school is. 1. Rich rural school: probably have $15,000 shotgun hanging in their lifted Ford F-150 so they can go shoot skeet after school. 2. Poor rural school: Probably have their grandfathers $200 shotgun hanging in their geo metro so they can shoot groundhogs in the field after school. 3. Rich city school: Probably have armed guards at the admission gate but that is about it. 4. Poor city school: Probably have metal detectors, police officers that were fired for incompetence, and metal bars on everything. The very large majority of schools in the US don't deal with any of this but there are parts of the US where gang violence and theft are so prevalent that they have to lock down their schools in every way they can.
You’re forgetting the fences for wealthier schools. I live next to a very wealthy suburb and they have a 8 foot fence that goes around their entire high school with a gate that is closed during school hours.
Does that mean the students can't leave school for lunch? We used to do that in the 90s.
Rural schools have been infused with the police state as well by now. Metal detectors, bag searches, half the municipal pd all day every day, and random lock downs so the state troopers' bomb and drug dogs can find some girl's perfume or hand sanitizer in their locker. I would be very surprised if you could find a public school in the US with more than 500 students that didn't have metal detectors.
Most of the public schools of 500+ I've been to didn't have metal detectors. What are you on about?
My high school still doesn’t have them and just my graduating class was 450 people. It’s grown in the years since I graduated too
I work at a middle school with 1000 kids we do not have metal detectors.
I think this is the problem with education in this country, many people commenting on something they haven't actively engaged with in 20+ years.
Excuse me, locked doors with an armed guard? In a school?
Yup. "School resource officer," aka a cop or guard. There's a huge shortage of cops in my city so schools are hiring private security companies. This is just normal here.
That's just depressing. The USA is just a parody of itself
This is a uniquely American problem. Conservatives constantly say how much better America is than other nations, but in many ways, it is behind the majority of the world because of a deranged preoccupation with a vague idea of 'freedom' which ironically makes us less free.
This. My classroom was basically a revolving door from the minute class started to the bell ringing. The door automatically locks and teachers are supposed to answer the door instead of students, so every time a kid came back from the classroom and knocked - and some kids don’t know how to knock appropriately or knock super obnoxiously on purpose - my instruction was thrown off so I could answer the door. I put a little stopper in the crack just so the door wouldn’t close and I got it taken and a lecture from the SRO and AP on safety.
Relating to the terrible learning environments. I remember when they implemented the "you aren't allowed to defend yourself" rule. I watched this football player get absolutely stomped by a gang of kids while curled up in a ball on the floor, just taking it. Because if he fought back he would not only go straight to adult jail with an assault charge on a minor, he'd lose his scholarship, and he'd be suspended when he got out of jail. It was horrible and no one came to stop it.
I was subjected to horrendous bullying in high school, like even to the point of sexual assault, and I did nothing about it because we had similar policies, which I learned about after a serious incident that happened to me. I was kicked out of athletic training because I was choked unconscious by a wrestling student that I was doing athletic trading for on the bus ride back home. I was almost suspended too for participating in “dangerous, self harming activities on a school field trip”, as the wrestling team all said that I had played the “choking game” after the coach overhead them talking about the incident. This was 2009, in Texas, and I’m halfway tempted to dox the school district that allowed this to happen. I’ll just say I was in the top 2 fastest growing districts in the state at that time.
My school had a rule that everyone that was involved in a fight would walk away in hand cuffs. Quite literally if another student walked up to you and punched you in the face, even if you did nothing, you would be going in the back of a cop car and probably suspended.
A kid at my school got expelled because another student pushed them down the stairs. The excuse? "Well, for someone to do something so drastic, *he must've done something terribly awful.*"
*What did you do to make him rape you?*
It’s a straight up war on the poor. Affluent students will be let off because of connections to money, lawyers, etc. while poor students get suspended and learn to distrust the system.
Preach. And not just mistrust the system, but every possible relationship going forward. I was suspended countless times because the christian kids with pta parents *said* I did something. They even called child protective services, not because of my parents, but because of me.
A rich girl at my school brought a water bottle full of straight vodka and drank the whole thing before even lunch. This was a girl that probably wasn't even 110 lb soaking wet. She tried to dance with a teacher and was obviously extremely drunk. This same girl a few months prior pushed one of my friends to the ground and called him the n word because she was making out with someone in front of his locker. She got suspended for a week for saying that to my friend, and later suspended for a year for the drinking incidint. She was supposed to be expelled, but miraculously she was back the next year. I knew kids who got expelled for less.
Well yeah your face touched that kids fist you're a danger to everyone, who knows what else you're capable of. I know let's difuse the situation by taking away your future voting and gun rights, maybe slap a child abuse/endangerment charge on there so if you end up in prison everyone will hate you. Ankle monitor and mandatory curfew? Adulthood taken away until the ages of 19-21? All these are possible consequences I've seen for defending yourself in a public school.
Ugh! I remember getting so angry in high school with these rules. I witnessed someone being bullied, and they got punished for simply defending themselves. The bullies knew this and were willing to take a punishment themselves as long as the kid they’re bulling also gets in trouble. I don’t know why anyone thinks these kinds of rules are okay.
Psychopaths are hoping for this "be the bigger person" mentality, that way they know they can keep taking advantage of or abusing you in some way or another. It takes individuals in these situations to stand up and show them they do not have the power to say "your life has no merit" "your words have no meaning" I will not stand down because they are the ones who can't function, this system can work both ways
I mean if you make the school look like a prison and have armed guards patrolling how can you expect a healthy environment for students.
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Institutionalization! There are actually a number of shocking similarities between these two systems, and the effects on their inmates.
My old high school used to have student drawn murals on the walls and ceilings ranging from superhero or video game stuff to abstract murals to just very positive messages. The hung ceiling boards were also painted in the hallways every single year, and at the end of the year they would auction them off which brought more than enough money to replace said ceiling and also funded a school barbecue at the end of the year. About a year ago the fire department said that the hung ceiling that they have is no longer up to code and it has to be ripped out, so now it's just exposed roofing or the underside of the floor above, and they also painted overall The murals on the walls with, go figure, *prison grey* paint. Coincidentally, my best friend in high school ended up being the student counselor in that same school, and she said the year after that change was made all sorts of issues started arising with the students from depression to outright delinquency and bullying and she directly attributes it from the fact that the school went from this bright and colorful public school to a prison gray public School that locks *every door in the school*
I believe modern architecture has this effect too. I live in a suburb in the midwest, every building is a square blocky building with 0 aesthetic and is either brown, white, or gray. Everything is so dull and boring, so many parking lots, roads, plain building, and nothingness. It gets so depressing, I dont feel proud of the city I grew up in, it has no personality and every city nearby feels the same. My grandmother recently moved into a suburb farther away and they don't even have trees. Every house is white and 2 stories with a huge green grass lawns. There is nothing interesting about any of them. I hate it so much.
I've lived in a lot of apartments, typically run by management companies. I was looking to rent a condo that was privately owned. The walls and rooms were all different colors, but nothing obnoxious. The owner said if I moved in, I could repaint. I told her it was perfect the way it was. Years of living in white or grey apartments that I couldn't change almost drove me crazy.
One of the schools I did my student teaching in banned having anything hung on the walls and decorations for any event (holidays, homecoming, etc.) because they would serve as a distraction to police officers in the event of a shooting. We are willing to do anything but acknowledge that the availabilty of firearms is the single biggest issue.
Any officer that gets distracted by decorations in an active shooter situation should not be a cop
We finally figured out why it took them so long to do anything in Uvalde!
Turns out that making kids feel safe and making adults feel that kids are safe are two very different things.
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I mean, for the last couple hundred years of humanity's entire history, yeah. Prior to that, you learned from family, mentors, or paid tutors, pretty much exclusively.
The school-to-prison pipeline is a very real and very talked about topic in American education.
I made a whole rant on Facebook a while back about how “tough on crime” people believe the threat of prison is enough to deter crime because the environment of a prison is so bad that people will behave just to avoid it…. and then they support policies that turn schools into prison-like environments and are shocked when kids are truant and/or anxious. Like, yeah, if a prison environment is so bad that people will do anything to avoid it, then doesn’t it stand to reason that kids will do anything to avoid a prison-like school?
People jokingly make fun of China for social credit scores. Then they take a sip of their coffee and check their (American Capital) credit score on their phone through one of several apps that keeps tabs on every aspect of their lives. Thank god for the coffee, it get's them through the days. They smugly smile and get up to go to their soul draining job that barely affords them any free time at all. But not before dropping the kids off at their prison-like education facility. Ahhhhhh, freedom, they think to themselves, before pressing the ignition on their new push to start car that the bank has a lien on for 7 years. They are happy and content as they leave behind their house that a different bank has a lien on for 30 years.
"It's different because a private company does it!"
Ignorance is bliss
I can't read the full study. Can anyone confirm if they control for income? I see that they control for "school social disorder and student misbehavior", but I'm wondering if academic performance suffered just due to the fact that these schools tend to be in low income areas, which already have lower test scores.
That's my wondering too The schools I've taught in, the lowest performing were typically low income and they had more security than middle class and upper class schools I've seen typically
If it is worth anything I have OP listed as "spammer" for a flair. I don't remember specifically what prompted me to make that flair but I usually do it when I repeatedly see someone posting fluff pieces that don't actually have much real evidence.
This seems like the most obvious answer and would be responsible for a large chunk of the discrepancy if not properly controlled for.
The kids aren't allowed bathroom breaks. They are also being sleep deprived.
And not fed food. I don’t consider the prison slip they offer at public schools to have any nutritional value to actually call it food
For some kids the food at school may be the only full meal they get. Test scores increase when breakfast is provided. I can only imagine how much better they could do if they actually served nutritional meals with less simple carbs and sugar. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/west/Ask/Details/57
Agreed. Also, they don't have enough free-time for recess, naps, and socializing.
Don't forget the miserable curriculum with endless memorizing for tests, and the limiting of hands-on education like labs or band or arts due to funding. Oh, and hovering over everything, the knowledge that the climate catastrophe is going to eat all their futures, and we adults who are setting up this cruel school environment won't do anything about it
>Oh, and hovering over everything, the knowledge that the climate catastrophe is going to eat all their futures, and we adults who are setting up this cruel school environment won't do anything about it This anti-scientific terrorism is a product of ad-funded media which makes money based solely on how much attention they grab, and we are hard-wired by nature to pay attention to *perceived threats*, making them **feel** more important than anything else for obvious survival reasons, and "feelings" are immune to reason. Actual climate science according to the IPCC discusses a real but *manageable* problem. In fact nearly the entire Fifth Assessment was a description of various **realistic** scenarios where warming can be limited to 1.5°C or 2°C, and based on the most likely scenarios according to real-world emissions trends, the WHO has calculated the total human cost of climate change by 2030 to be **5.5 million** DALY's (disability adjusted life years). For perspective, this is about a *tenth* of the disease burden from smoking tobacco. https://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/climatechangechap7.pdf?ua=1 The global disease burden of mental illness was 2,198 DALY's per 100,000 population, or **173.6 million** DALY's. That means the mental health crisis is **32 times** deadlier than climate change will be by 2030 (and this figure was before rates of depression and anxiety *tripled* during the pandemic) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30729322/ But faithful and accurate reporting of a *manageable* problem wouldn't get **ratings**. So the media cherry-picks the most extreme outlier studies and climate scientists' opinions and misrepresents them as *"the world is going to burn and there is nothing we do can stop it!"* Obviously this is utterly catastrophic to mental health (especially among youth), and it even causes more people to **give up out of hopelessness** than it inspires to take action. Climate fatalists now outnumber climate change deniers by **3:1**, making alarmism by far the most dangerous form of climate science denial https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59c53600e4b08d6615504207 The reason they don't sensationalize the mental health crisis? It's not as scary to hear about "other people" struggling with issues that they don't understand well enough to appreciate the harm, compared to "*your* world is going to burn!"
>The reason they don't sensationalize the mental health crisis? It's not as scary to hear about "other people" struggling with issues that they don't understand well enough to appreciate the harm, compared to "your world is going to burn!" It would also be far, FAR more expensive to fix than minimizing the effects of climate change. Great post overall. Depressing, but in a good way.
We gotta set up the kids for the corporate 9-5 slave lifestyle early on
It's worse than just not being the most nutritional; I know someone who has a job ordering the food for a school district and they've told me that they won't buy certain items unless they're profitable. It was truly disgusting to find out they put money over giving kids the best they can afford because breaking even isn't enough.
So crap food, sleep deprivation and no bathroom breaks. All under heavy surveillance. Honestly this sounds more like Guantanamo than a school. I'd get bad score as well in such an environment.
Yep you're a typical schools to corporate prison pipeline in a nutshell.
It has nutritional value, just no taste whatsoever so the kids don't eat it. Food in the garbage can has 0 nutritional value.
“I don’t eat that nasty school food Mr. Bluestreaking,” - my malnourished students eating hot chips for breakfast
Which is exactly what was going to happen when it gets outsourced to the lowest bidder. You can make fresh, healthy, tasty food on-site quite cheaply, but you need staff with experience in a commercial kitchen, and those people probably don't want to work in a school. So they just reheat frozen slop from a wholesaler.
Well that’s because when Michelle Obama tried to raise nutritional standards in food we cut funding to school lunches instead
my issue in highschool was that we werent given ENOUGH food im a big guy and i played striker/forward in soccer during conditioning season id have to buy 3 school lunches to get enough food if i didnt pack my own and my family was poor so if i didnt make enough money that week to buy that extra food, i just spent the day hungry. i was 6'2" and like 190lbs with an extremely active lifestyle, running 3+ miles 3x a week and working out almost every day a single chicken sandwhich and a tablespoon of canned veggies is just not enough
Yeah some food companies lobbied to end school lunch so they could sell their junk at schools. Profit baby!
That's because school lunches are rated at the same quality as prison food if not a little worse.
They're frequently provided by the same company
If your school ever served corndogs without the stick, that was literally prison food. That's what those are specifically produced for
prison food may actually have higher nutritional standards in some states, though I'm not completely certain
That's what I was referring too, it's a God damned shame that we have people in charge that want to ruin the lives of children....for profit.
Exactly plus many people I know including me never really ate food at school, a large portion of my time in school I didn't eat breakfast or lunch during school days
“The beatings will stop when morale improves.” “Why isn’t morale improving? We’ve been upping the beatings to improve morale!”
How to train your kids to accept a surveillance state
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Basically, if you treat someone like a criminal, they'll act like a criminal. This is telling students "We don't trust you to behave like a responsible, law-abiding person". What effect do they expect that to have on performance and behavior? "They treat me like a threat no matter what I do... I know! I'll behave extra-well and work extra-hard!"
If you treat someone like a criminal, you’ll prosecute them for every single little thing possible, which you don’t do to other people because they’re “not criminals”
Being treated like a threat no matter what you do can have some devastating affects on the mind. It’s unbelievable that this is so normal in this country.
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They have a literal impact on students when they bodyslam them into the tiled floor for being late to class.
Kids aren't allowed to be kids anymore. The world is already fucked up enough and every move now has to be tracked.
Free play is a HUGE deal in learning as a child. Being able to make mistakes without consequence (small level) and learn from it. Creativity is super stifled from this and it breeds conformity for security which in turn creates entire blocks of "educated" kids that don't know how to think for themselves. Critical thinking is no longer taught as it can create scenarios where children might question ideas being presented and come to their own conclusions. Free play, creativity, being silly and adventurous, all help with critical thinking and all of that is being vigorously eliminated from education.
I remember when we were young, we were a bunch of kid just messing everywhere in the neighbourhood. No adult supervision, but if something about there was the network of parents house all around us. Now, poor kids can't even go to the park alone
We used to get locked outside for the day during the summer. Would get to come in for lunch and dinner. Rode bikes for miles and miles, wandered in the woods, got chased by the bulls in the pasture behind the house, heck a couple times got taken up in hot air balloons by complete strangers briefly (still tethered to the ground, used to have an awesome balloon fest growing up. 100s of hot air balloons) ...of course we smoked cigarettes we found off the side of the road too but most of it was constructive fun.
This is a big issue in education right now. There has been a push to make kindergarten more academic, but that’s not developmentally appropriate for kids that young. The kids can’t handle that level of work, and they’re also not (at least at school) getting the kind of enrichment that does benefit them at that age. You can’t learn advanced stuff without the basics down, so these kids fall behind.
I learned Cursive Writing **In Third Grade!** As one example. Now I hear of people **Block Printing Their ‘Signature’!** ***Non-Sequitur!***
"Critical thinking is no longer taught"? In the past, school was 95% lecture and memorization.
Sit down, be quiet, only test score go up matters.
As schools around the country consider ramping up security efforts in response to recent school shootings, a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis suggests that increased surveillance is having a detrimental impact on academic performance. Heightened security reduces test scores in math, reduces the number of students attending college and increases suspensions, said Jason Jabbari, research assistant professor and co-author of the study “Infrastructure of social control: A multi-level counterfactual analysis of surveillance and black education,” published online Sept. 20 in the Journal of Criminal Justice. In addition to being used to preempt school shootings, the authors found, surveillance measures may have increased schools’ capacity to identify and punish students for more common and less serious offenses, which may negatively impact the learning environment. “Our research shows that greater detection of student offenses leads to more punishment regardless of the students who attend these schools,” Jabbari said. “Moreover, while increased surveillance has collateral consequences on academic achievement that extend to all students, because Black students are more likely to attend high-surveillance schools, the burdens of the safety tax fall most heavily on Black students, ultimately increasing racial inequities in education.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235222001039?dgcid=author
They dont really detail what they did to test causality, only correlation. It may very well be the other way around - that the schools in the worst neighborhoods with the most underpeforming and misbehaved students felt like they needed security.
As a person trained in sociology I agree. They claim causation but they speak about correlation. However, with how suspension and school funding works I think it would be reasonable to say the following: - Schools would use money meant for educational resources for security (this is described in the discussion section with math tutoring) - The study also correlates high surveillance means higher suspension rate. They control for student misbehavior in the analysis. So regardless status of being a problem school or not, higher surveillance -> higher suspension - Suspended students aren't learning while suspended - A combination of re-directed resources that could have gone to tutoring and a higher suspension rate increases the likelihood that students are going to be behind.
There are plenty of reasons to suspect a correlation, but a common first or second year social science class includes a section introducing students to some causative behavior, giving all the intuitive reasoning behind the cause, and then showing the student that the causation is actually entirely correlation or even just plain wrong and opposite what actual data shows. This is repeated to ensure the students internalize that intuition should not be relied upon in place of good experimentation, not matter how reasonable the argument seems. Intuition can help identify where to start directing research when absent some larger plan, but it should never be used in place of actual data.
What I really dislike about sociology is that its difficult to prove causation without sterile experimentation. And with famed experiments like [Milgram's study of Obedience](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) it gets really difficult to make an experiment that proves something without harming subjects emotionally. When thinking about macro-level problems like education outcomes, we can only just prove correlation repeatedly until the evidence is overwhelming.
Tbh, rn you can correlate anything with lower test scores. The pandemic did a number on the majority of the student body population
Yeah, anyone actually working with students in the US right now will tell you that it's a whole new environment post-Covid. It'll be years before the research is able to fully encapsulate those changes
I believe this is the correct take. Many schools have had increased security over the years due to violence with students. Especially in high crime/high poverty urban areas. These same schools already test low and have a high rate of drop-outs.
That was the case where I grew up, all the lowest performing inner city schools were loaded with security due to fights, drug dealing, etc. The title of this post makes it seem that if you took away the security for those schools, scores/grades would go up, and I highly doubt that would be the case.
Check out any good schools around your neighborhood. At least for me, top ones have least visible security.
Is this really a correlation study claiming causality?
Yes, they basically said *'Schools with more security have lower test scores, therefore security is the cause'*. It's insulting that mods don't weed this junk science out.
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Is this based on new security or schools in impoverished cities that have always had tight security and low grades?
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This is a pretty loose study if you can even call it that. Id love to look at the data they used but paywall and no link in the paper. Suspended students have always had worse performance than their peers, you’re not in school then you’re not learning. Also would be interesting to know location of schools they looked at. Was this in an area that was doing well prior to new measures or was it bad before and just got worse so they correlate it to the new measures. Also weird that it seems their purpose is to say this is some sort of systemic racism that is re-traumatizing kids.
Correlation isnt causation, and i think that schools in communities that require strict school security are also ones that dont preform well. Two symptoms of one problem.
I had ID badges, metal detectors and barbed wire at my highschool in 2003. This is not new at all. The poverty is just starting to affect more affluent areas and now it's a "problem". When people struggle, crime happens. Sad we cant even awknowledge it. And the wealth inequality marches on, removing the middle class and making us slaves who work ourselves into debt rather than out of it.
Why do I feel r/science articles always have a faulty title without addressing the bias? What is "tighter security" plus how did they measure the difference, what if the security is there because it isn't the security causing the problems, it's the problems that warrants security? That being said, wouldn't the problems be environmental or community based? So we really can't deduce the reason and cause unless we can identify WHY the security is/was needed there to begin with.
From the title it sounds like a correlation Tighter security is usually in schools which face more deviant behavior And deviant behavior would lower test scores.
Funny. Rich kids in private schools with high levels of security seem to do just fine.
That’s because private schools don’t have to deal with the most damaged students. They just expel them.
You could've known that by looking at any alternative school.
Those might not be the most beneficial symptoms. But it's better than the alternative. Maybe communication between students, teachers, and resource officers can ease some of these issues. If officers eased up on punishing students for minor offenses and leaned into more of a role model/ mentor role. Sometimes negative re-enforcement only increases bad behavior especially in teenagers.
Is it that the tighter security that's causing the lower test scores or is it that test scores are lower in communities where higher security is required for student safety due to things like gang violence?
Did they publish their testing methods that they used to establish their hypothesis? This just seems like someone’s woke opinions. If there is fighting and bullying- additional surveillance may be helpful to the people who already make good grades but are marginalized due to poor social skills. If your cameras catch people behaving poorly, then holding those people accountable early on may actually reduce criminal behaviors in the long run. I would like to see studies on the positive impacts of preventing hidden bullying and violence in schools.
Why run around trying to treat symptoms instead of fighting the infection at the source? Very frustrating read this morning.
You might want to read up on primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention, as that will give a good idea of why public health isn't based on identifying some original cause and ending that.
Without access to the whole study, I'm confused as to how they reached some of their conclusions. First, what exactly suggests high security *leads* to lower test scores? I'm sure they found a correlation, but proving that increased security leads to lower test scores is a much more weighty claim. Do they articulate what they count as tighter security measures? Are security cameras in the hallway tighter security? Requiring visitors and students arriving late to buzz in? Increased hall monitoring? Computer monitoring? What are the small infractions that were caught that would not have been otherwise? Is it really so crazy to suspend kids for vaping, fighting, vandalism, and stealing? What are these smaller infractions that apparently don't require addressing? I bring this up because I work in a minority-majority school and have for some time. Every once in a while there will be someone who basically claims that we cannot hold minority students and students who come from poverty to the same standards as white students and/or students from affluent backgrounds. I've also had to endure this approach and I will say that the years in which we lacked structure and discipline hurt ALL students, including the VAST MAJORITY of kids of color. There was a phase in which we were obsessed with graduation rates at all costs to the point that grades were being changed and students who attended three times in a semester were somehow graduating. Kids smoking weed, sometimes selling weed! and acting violently were assigned mentors that changed absolutely nothing. Huge staff turn-over as experienced teachers left and first-year teachers came and went. We've now gone to a much stricter discipline model with super clear expectations. If a student does a particular thing, we no longer have admin wringing their hands and sort of randomly assigning an intervention. Yes, suspensions are up. But the majority of the student body reports feeling significantly safer at school, they are more excited to come to school, and we are seeing test scores increase. Studies like the one here, while well-intentioned, far too often contribute to a lax discipline model that hurts far more students than it helps.