His name is Seth. He is an internmate here at HISD with me. I admire this guy because he does a great job in "keeping it real". We can debate issues, and then laughs when we disagree. There have been long lunches and slow afternoons that we tend to pick up some topics such as politics, religion, public schooling, homosexuality. You name it, we have talked about it. Although Seth is a bit more liberal than me, we agree on a variety of things.
Today we talked about alternative schools. For those of you who don't know, when a student comits a pretty bad offense (bring a weapon to school, multiple suspensions, drug use), they can be temporarily "expelled" to an alternative school. The school is military style, where students walk with their hands behind their back, eat alone, and can't talk to peers during class time. Sounds great, right? Well, not really. Research has shown over and over and over and over again (yes! that many times) that putting kids with behavior problems together in a school makes them worse not better. So why do schools have this faulty system? Well for one, principals get these kids out of their school. (Out of sight, out of mind. Second, kids have to have "consequences" for bad behavior. Okay. So principals want to shed some responsibility and the way to do this is tough love. The state of Texas has a rule right now that if you go to juvenile detention 3 times, you get sent to boot camp for 3 months. sigh. Dear Texas, stop using my tax dollars for "preventing crime" when its actually making it worse. Seth and I talked about this over lunch and agreed there has to be a better way. Some people have suggested turning schools into business andhanding out vouchers. Well, if kids keep on getting kicked out, then we come back to the same problem.
If the US is moving towards empirically supported interventions, why hasn't this changed? Oh well. I guess this is why I still have a job :)
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