Why is this a bad thing? Its possible I'm missing some nuance because I have not dealt with the US education system in a long time, but I think one fundamental problem with universal education is that one really bad student can easily ruin the education of dozens of others.
If anything, there should be some sort of behavioral/educational reform schools, probably operated in something closer to a military fashion, to help out not only these kids, but the countless others who they'd otherwise be disrupting.
This issue is one (of many) for why if I did decide to have my children go to school in the US it would be at a high performing private school. I'd actually prefer they have the less bubbly experience of public school, but I'm not willing to tolerate having their classes disrupted by kids who are just bee-lining to jail anyhow. I had that upbringing and I think it substantially delayed my 'educational maturity'.
Exactly, ~10-15 years ago Denmark decided to start integrating "problem" children into the regular classroom and scores have dropped across the board. Currently private education enrolment has been massively on the rise since private schools are not forced to accept these kids, and/or they can more easily kick children out.
What's really sad is that now the parents are not only paying extremely high taxes to cover the standard school, but now also are having to shell out extra to make sure their child gets the eduction they deserve.
Why this is shocking is that Denmark (the whole nordics) has an extremely strong public education tradition which is being very quickly eroded. Just 20 years ago private education was seen as something for the elites (e.g. Royalty) but now it's becoming an expected expense.
Almost everyone is frustrated by this: teachers, parents, students, as well as their special needs counterparts. The only people winning are the politicians who get to morally grandstand.
As someone that spend most of school except for the last year in my hometown's low ranking one I cannot compreheend why you would integrate problematic kids like that.
I was doing my best, but with others' constant attention seeking behaviour (shouting, interrupting the teacher, and other more insane things) it was impossible for the teacher to teach and me to concentrate.
If it wasn't for my last year at a private school I wouldn't be where I am now.
I understand they want to create an environment where the kids may feel guilty or something else, but the problem isn't with who they're with in school, most likely. And by problem I mean the CORE problem. That is in most cases a deep issue at home.
In Ontario, Canada they completely got rid of special needs classes recently (so they aren't treated as second class or something), as well as gifted classes, and from two teachers and one child psychologist I talked to it's been a nightmare. Some classes will have 5+ disruptive students constantly yelling or fighting. And in the younger classes when a student has a "meltdown" they aren't allowed to send the kid to the principal, instead they clear the other kids out of the class to wander the halls, bring in the social worker lady (who is always on call), and wait until the problem kid calms down. They told me it was happening at least once a week in one classroom.
We're basically running social experiments on kids.
There are problem kids, but the effect of concentrating them is much worse than the effect of distributing them, much like piling things on one section of net is more likely to break it than distributing them.
There is, in IMO, a ceiling to the percentage of behavior and academic IEP kids you can have in one classroom without it impacting regular kids substantially. (Though for very extreme kids it might just plain not be viable or safe at all.)
Historically reform schools have not been an effective model, but they were also often basically just a way to keep problem kids away from more normal ones and would have treated teen pregnancy the same as severe autism the same as emotional disorders.
You do see more and more self-contained rooms in publics for severe case kiddos that can't be in normal classrooms, which is a bit similar.
Which is to say one child really can ruin the experience of other children. But making it so that private schools and charters have means to keep down the ratio of destructive traumatizers, IEP time wasters, etc., compared to publics doesn't solve anything. It just artificially makes public schools seem worse, cost burdens them, and creates more social stratification.
You basically end up with a tiered system where most public schools have turned into bad reform schools that can't avoid underperforming. Meanwhile, it's not that charters are good, it's just that they've been able to take advantage of two layers of selection to filter out cost centers that decrease performance.
And in turn you are now damaging the prospects of any kid whose parents aren't interested in keeping them out of the public school compared to the other options.
If anything, there should be some sort of behavioral/educational reform schools, probably operated in something closer to a military fashion, to help out not only these kids, but the countless others who they'd otherwise be disrupting.
This issue is one (of many) for why if I did decide to have my children go to school in the US it would be at a high performing private school. I'd actually prefer they have the less bubbly experience of public school, but I'm not willing to tolerate having their classes disrupted by kids who are just bee-lining to jail anyhow. I had that upbringing and I think it substantially delayed my 'educational maturity'.