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Baronash posted:Thread has been going for a couple pages, so on the off chance anyone forgot the thread rule, I’m going to reiterate it: Honestly, why is this a thread rule? It seems to me that the OP self-imposed the rule because they don’t agree that it’s the primary problem. Let me give an analogy. Someone starts up a new thread about personal bankruptcy in the US and how it’s a massive, devastating problem. But then they tried implementing a rule saying “no discussion about implementing a single payer healthcare system” and want to focus on more solutions than just “free healthcare”. Wouldn’t it be a ridiculous thing to not be allowed to discuss the biggest solution to the problem? On top of that, to Google Jeb Bush’s point, it’s clear not everyone agrees that gun control would be a good policy solution.
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Apr 18, 2023 14:44
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If discussion of single payer had historically been a D&D lightning rod and the hypothetical OP felt like they had interesting things to say about the credit industry, debt relief companies, or whatever, then it’d probably be worth giving it a try and punting single payer discussion to its own healthcare thread.
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Apr 18, 2023 15:48
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Conflation of single payer with universal healthcare is emblematic of the kind of nuance and attention to detail I've come to expect from D&D lol Is arguing with people over the rule or punishing people for not politely ignoring the elephant in the room really going to be less difficult or contentious than allowing discussion? Even if we all agree gun control is a good idea that doesn't mean there isn't discussion to be had on how far it should go, which elements are highest priority, etc. Just probe anyone who turns it into "...and anyone who disagrees with me likes dead kids."
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Apr 18, 2023 16:10
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Baronash posted:If discussion of single payer had historically been a D&D lightning rod and the hypothetical OP felt like they had interesting things to say about the credit industry, debt relief companies, or whatever, then it’d probably be worth giving it a try and punting single payer discussion to its own healthcare thread. That's not what you're doing though, you're just probing people who mention gun control and making Elendil IK. "D&D modding has been lousy in the past, and I wouldn't want to set a new precedent" is more the vibe going on here. *Gestures to non-existent gun control thread, that apparently you wouldn't want to bother modding anyway* It's true that gun control being the actual solution is blindingly obvious, which makes the pretense that we should discuss utterly failed and fantastical "hardened schools" policies and proposals to death, as if they are not almost totally the product of extreme right wing propaganda, even more insulting. And on top of that, by any serious metric, even well-drilled police who execute their training correctly aren't sufficient to prevent an epidemic of gun violence. But instead of drawing any sort of sensible boundaries like "Discuss gun control legislation that is currently being considered or proposed by politicians, as opposed to forcing Americans to throw all their guns into the fire pit I dug in the middle of town after the revolution," you've blanket banned that discussion.
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Apr 18, 2023 16:22
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Its probably worth discussing non-gun control because national gun control probably isn't gonna happen for myriad reasons. Also discussion of it destroys every single thread it is discussed in in relatively short order. If you want a gun control thread go make one.
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Apr 18, 2023 16:34
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Is arguing with people over the rule or punishing people for not politely ignoring the elephant in the room really going to be less difficult or contentious than allowing discussion? Even if we all agree gun control is a good idea that doesn't mean there isn't discussion to be had on how far it should go, which elements are highest priority, etc. Just probe anyone who turns it into "...and anyone who disagrees with me likes dead kids." For the moment, that’s the rule we’re sticking with, and I’m going to ask that we let this thread return to its regularly-scheduled programming. If anyone wants to discuss it further, my PMs are open. Since there seems to be multiple folks who feel certain ways about it, and the D&D feedback thread is closed, I’d also be happy to follow y’all to SAD if you’d like. Baronash fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 16:39
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PT6A posted:I think it's reflected in who is actually doing these mass killings -- it's not the desperate. Perhaps we like to think it is, because it makes it more comfortable to have a reason why this poo poo happens. But in practice, desperate people are going to do crime that makes money, and if they commit violence, the violence is a means rather an end, and some sad sack middle-class white motherfucker is gonna wipe out a school or a mall because they experienced a minor setback in a charmed life. I think it's that this person has time to be sad and angry about things. Someone living in a refugee camp, or subsistence farming, or living in a slum can be sad but they are scraping by for survival. Someone raised lower-middle-class who gets sad has the time to dwell on it and go through the mental health ringer (or lack thereof) because while there are a lot of things going badly for lower-class americans they're able to get by enough to build up the angst/incel-hatred/racial biases, etc and then act on them. I think also to a certain extent, being in survival situations drives a community together (or violently apart but then the resulting two communities together) and most mass attackers aren't going to harm what they see as their community. A school shooter isn't usually an active member of clubs, playing sports and in the honor society, they're not seeing their peers as communal members they're seeing them as wrong-doers or others, which makes them easier to kill.
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Apr 18, 2023 20:29
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Elendil004 posted:I think also to a certain extent, being in survival situations drives a community together (or violently apart but then the resulting two communities together) and most mass attackers aren't going to harm what they see as their community. A school shooter isn't usually an active member of clubs, playing sports and in the honor society, they're not seeing their peers as communal members they're seeing them as wrong-doers or others, which makes them easier to kill. this is a just-so story. it's especially common because it leads to easy, feel-good, nothing conclusions like "their parents should have been more involved" or "people should have noticed the signs [such as a teenager being sad or lonely or a cruel edgelord]" or "people should've been nicer." it isn't backed up by any reasoned analysis or measurement, just vague observations that can't be used as red flags because everyone would end up red flagged. look at the examples in this thread: most school shooter students are stressed, for example. every analysis is either so broad as to be meaningless or hopelessly overfitted. even though it's a just-so story, people have tried to act on it. insofar as it has resulted in different pedagogy, efforts to actually be supportive have been scuttled at every turn by well-funded conservative efforts to make public schools as inhospitable as possible. (attempts to be more inclusive and supportive are main targets of the recent common core, CRT, and LGBT panics.) insofar as it has led to heightened awareness and surveillance, it turns out every effort to turn schools into a police state is miserable for all involved and inevitably neglected by teachers who correctly see it as useless. but these are not defects unique to americans. dehumanization, anomie, privatizing public services in general or schools in particular, brute cruelty: all of these exist in many countries. if you're going to argue that the US is unique, it needs to be something that isn't just as common in countries that do not have mass attacks. e: i don't mean to be harping on Elendil in particular. it's just that this topic is full of bullcrap both here and outside of SA, and most of that bullcrap is there specifically to derail and diffuse any effort to improve pedagogy, support students meaningfully, or help keep them safe. it sounds good, it feels good, and it translates to inaction or counterproductive action. it's still bullcrap when it's well-meaning bullcrap! Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 21:55
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So far I’ve focused on how to respond, but let’s talk about Averting Targeted School Violence. Once again the Secret Service has put a lot of work into this with their National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC). Those docs don’t allow copy paste, so I’ll screengrab where relevant. The key here is that we’ve found that “students display a variety of observable behaviors as they escalate toward violence.” I imagine the same would be true of other mass attackers if we had a means of studying them in an environment such as a school. This study looks at 67 averted school attack plots. “Students who plotted school attacks shared many similarities with students who perpetrated school attacks.” such as: -Having history of school discipline and contact with law enforcement -Experienced bullying or had mental health issues, frequently involving depression and suicidality -Intended or committed suicide as part of the school attack -Used drugs or alcohol -Had been impacted by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as substance abuse in home, violence or abuse, parental incarceration, etc. The study looked at averted attacks from 2006-2018 where a current or recently former k-12 student took steps to advance an attack plan to cause injury to or the deaoth of aleast one student or school employee. Attacks with a separate criminal nexus (e.g. gang violence) were carved out.  95% of the plotters were male, which is no shock. 95 were also current students, with only 5 being recently former students.   Weapons selection is weighted very heavily to firearms, 96%, but explosives also were planned in over half of the plots. What is interesting is that for firearms, only 67% of plotters actually had access to a firearm, despite almost all of them planning to use one.  For the firearms, most of the unimpeded access is to 18 year olds who purchased legally, or those who planned or who did steal from family. In some cases, plotters knew the safe combo, or the guns were regularly left out or unsecured. But onto Detection and Reporting .   In 94% of plots, plotters shared their intentions about carrying out an attack through verbal statements, online posts, and electronic messaging. So, why are we still surprised by mass attacks at schools by students? Sometimes plotters warned their friends (the classic, “you’re cool, don’t come to school tomorrow”). Interestingly are the plots discovered from behavior only which included:   In many of the cases, reports were happening the same day as the plots, meaning the system for receiving these reports needs to be quick but also fair. When peers observed the communication or behavior of a plotter and spoke up (61% of cases) it’s easy to see why those peers need to feel like the system is a safe climate and where they are empowered to speak up. Trust needs to be fostered. I should do an effort post on SROs but this is where SROs need to realize that their job isn’t to lock kids up, but to be a trusted person to speak to in times like this. Plotters Backgrounds 37% of plotters had some form of school discipline prior to discovery of their plots ranging from dress code infractions to acts of violence. Only one plot was identified where the plotter had previously been the subject of a threat assessment and deemed not to pose a risk. Stressors  91% of plotters experienced life stressors in the five years prior to their averted attack. For 81% it was in the prior year or were ongoing at the time (44%). Plotters averaged 2 stressors. We’re still not great at investigating, dealing with, and reporting/recording bullying, but 44% of plotters were bullied by classmates. 74% of plotters made concerning communications and 49% of those showed a fascination with violent acts, homicide, weapons, and ideologies or beliefs associated with violence. These plotters are putting that out into the world and in many cases the world isn’t acting.  Punishments for plotters is all over the road, mainly because laws and sentencing guidelines and how much leeway a judge has and the facts of each case vary wildly. Key findings -Targeted school violence is preventable when communities identify warning signs and intervene. -Schools should seek to intervene with students before their behavior warrants legal consequences. -Students were most often motivated to plan a school attack because of a grievance with classmates. -Students are best positioned to identify and report concerning behaviors displayed by their classmates. -The role of parents and families in recognizing concerning behavior is critical to prevention. -SRO’s play an important role in school violence prevention. -Removing a student from school does not eliminate the risk they might pose to themselves or others. -Students displaying an interest in violent or hate-filled topics should elicit immediate assessment and intervention. -Many school attack plots were associated with certain dates, particularly in the month of April -Many of the student plotters had access to weapons, including unimpeded access to firearms.
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Apr 18, 2023 23:29
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notably missing: how common are these red flag backgrounds or behaviors among students who do not go on to violence
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Apr 19, 2023 00:13
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Elendil004 posted:Weapons selection is weighted very heavily to firearms, 96%, but explosives also were planned in over half of the plots. What is interesting is that for firearms, only 67% of plotters actually had access to a firearm, despite almost all of them planning to use one. Only 67%?? This is looking at 100 plotters ranging from ages 11-19, with an average age of 16. When it's a majority of cases where mostly juveniles were able to get their hands on a firearm, I would interpret that as ridiculously high Kalit fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 00:51
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Kalit posted:Only 67%?? This is looking at 100 plotters ranging from ages 11-19, with an average age of 16. When it's a majority of cases where mostly juveniles were able to get their hands on a firearm, I would interpret that as ridiculously high It's not hard to get a firearm to commit a crime with especially if you know your parents safe code/grandpa never locks it up/you murder uncle shooty first/etc. Cease to Hope posted:notably missing: how common are these red flag backgrounds or behaviors among students who do not go on to violence "These findings emphasize the importance of schools establishing and maintaining a safe school climate where students are empowered to speak up if they see a friend or classmate in distress." What if we accidentally make a better world for students. Students have a lot of stressors, and I would like to see them able to get help for all of them, which will very likely reduce mass attacks at schools by students.
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Apr 19, 2023 01:11
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Elendil004 posted:It's not hard to get a firearm to commit a crime with especially if you know your parents safe code/grandpa never locks it up/you murder uncle shooty first/etc. This is not a guide to establishing and maintaining a safe school climate where students are empowered to speak up. This is a guide on how to leverage such an environment to investigate a suspected plot, including which people who may have seen something and not understood its importance, not known who to speak to, or simply resisted reporting their own family members to the police. (One of the examples of irresponsible behavior is a mother not turning in her son to the police but instead seeking to dispose of the plotters' weapons herself!) The effects of such an investigation on that supportive environment, how anyone feels about their friends, family, teachers, counselors, and administrators investigating their peers for possible threats, is not a concern dealt with anywhere in this document. It's just a guide to using a threat assessment program like Virginia's to collect evidence. There isn't a single word devoted to how to conduct these investigations with discretion, or what to do when there's warning signs but no plot, or what to do when a student presents a threat to themselves with no crime involved. All of the ways of dealing with evidence of a suspected plot are broadly gestured and end in arrest. Although it pays lip service to interventions that aren't arrests - "the primary objective of a student threat assessment should be providing a student with help and working to ensure positive outcomes for the student and the community" - it doesn't actually offer any advice on how. All of the examples of interventions are someone ending the threat of the plot then turning in the plotter to the police, just because of how the data was collected. Look at the thin section on what to do with reports (pg 32, with some repetition in the executive summary), compared to the bulk of the report describing how to investigate and what might be a red flag. It is tempting to look at these threat assessment programs that focus on behavior and positive intervention as a positive development, compared to much worse Columbine-era fiascos like demographic profiling and zero-tolerance punishment. But they're still fundamentally programs that are situated as treating students like ticking time bombs that need to be defused! They're still training people that they need to think of students as threats. It's just a fundamentally toxic mindset. It's not just a problem that people subscribe to that toxic mindset, either! These programs alienate teachers and staff who aren't interested in adding "pro bono prison warden" to their already-long list of daily tasks. So they check out, and suddenly you don't have people passing along valuable information, because this divide is corrosive to a safe school climate where people are empowered to speak up. This is a cop's guide for cops. There are valuable parts of Virginia's threat assessment program, with teachers and counselors and psychologists identifying warning signs of distress and intervening to direct students to help, but none of them are in this document. What you linked is just the school-to-prison pipeline part of that system. It is absurd, I think, that the only way to get a holistic mental health program for students funded is to pitch it as a Secret-Service-endorsed threat assessment system. Incidentally, Virginia is #9 on the list of states that spend the least on education per student. This threat assessment program isn't part of that, but is instead part of the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, mainly in the form of grants that can only be spent on SROs (who are armed police) or security staff (who are neither). Just textbook funneling money from schools to police. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 02:50
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I don't think reactive programs can work, in all honesty. By the time someone is seriously thinking about killing a bunch of people, the ship has sailed; the moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on. If a students seems to be a loner or whatever, maybe the best solution is to reach out to them in a way that doesn't imply you believe they're an imminent threat to human life, because I can't see that being helpful. If you see kids -- and I mean, that's what we're talking about in the school context, literally children -- who are having trouble, why not just reach out to them out of kindness rather than fear, before it gets to this incredibly hosed up point? I think Elendil's point about community is valid. So, let's work on building a sense of community, then, in a healthy way. A way that doesn't involve going to church and being a "good lad"; maybe a way that involves things that "bad, troubled kids" do. Don't let kids (or adults) hit "The Slide."
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Apr 19, 2023 05:51
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Threat assessment programs need to be paired with high quality, data driven tiered support for students with behavior struggles or for whom school is so aversive that planned aggression on that scale becomes one of many options they can use to escape it. Threat assessments are typically performed with alongside counseling and tiered support, but they often reveal "no, the student is not currently a threat but more observation required." A competent counselor or school psychologist who administers one will also be communicating with their classroom teachers, special education staff, BI professionals, etc., to determine whether the child's support needs are not being met. However, positive behavior supports, mental health services, special education services, etc., are a collaborative effort that also involves data that are relevant to school wide efforts for tiered support, anti bullying programs, behavior interventions, etc. A threat assessment in and of itself is useful or not depending on whether it initiates the involvement of other specialists in support the child. Also, many schools don't have competent staff in even half of these positions, don't utilize effective data based decision making, don't have the resources for non special ed supports to be freely accessible, and have existing staff who are resistant to implementing evidence based practices. Edit: I'm only talking about issues within the existing infrastructure that are unrelated to large scale problems in the funding, development, and legislation surrounding k12 education. Those are also important. NeatHeteroDude fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 05:54
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These ARE children we're talking about. It is the responsibility of educators to create an environment where no child's behavior escalates to this level of planned aggression. Sometimes, students have no received those supports and have been "kicked down the road" to other schools that don't have adequate time or data to determine the most effective intervention and supports.
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Apr 19, 2023 05:56
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NeatHeteroDude posted:Threat assessment programs need to be paired with high quality, data driven tiered support for students with behavior struggles or for whom school is so aversive that planned aggression on that scale becomes one of many options they can use to escape it. Aside from funding and staffing, which are forever challenges, one of the big reasons it's hard to maintain that data is because of privacy concerns. Theoretically, teachers/counselors/admin are all on the students' side, and have their best interest at heart. SROs, on the other hand, are police. Handing information to an SRO is inherently a risk that you're incriminating children unnecessarily for penny-ante nonsense, because they have a much lower threshold for "get someone arrested" than mandatory reporters. So either family lawyers dismantle your data-sharing program once this inevitably happens, or it falls apart because of necessary caution and protective defiance on the part of educators who care more about the well-being of students than what presents to them as intrusive bureaucracy. The students who are most in need of intervention are also the ones who are most at risk to end up in an adversarial relationship with the police. This again manifests as both overly intrusive policing and also paralysis in clearcut criminal situations because people don't want to turn in the kids in their charge to the police, because that's a one-way chute.
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Apr 19, 2023 06:21
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What if you don't need a psychiatrist to determine if the "child's support needs are being met?" Do they really need "positive behavioural supports" and "mental health intervention?" This is some euphemistic bullshit out of a Carlin routine. What if you just treat the children like normal rear end human beings, who deserve kindness? Maybe if we stopped pathologizing the fact that school loving sucks for a lot of kids, and just dealt with the situation at hand, we'd be a gently caress sight safer than we are now. I mean, y'all can see the wonderful custom title I got for suggesting that teachers stop policing when children go to the bathroom to pee. We're policing teenagers' basic bodily functions and we're upset when they end up snapping? gently caress off...
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Apr 19, 2023 06:21
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PT6A posted:What if you don't need a psychiatrist to determine if the "child's support needs are being met?" Do they really need "positive behavioural supports" and "mental health intervention?" This is some euphemistic bullshit out of a Carlin routine. What if you just treat the children like normal rear end human beings, who deserve kindness? Maybe if we stopped pathologizing the fact that school loving sucks for a lot of kids, and just dealt with the situation at hand, we'd be a gently caress sight safer than we are now. This seems founded in a misunderstanding. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor, while a school psychologist is generally a licensed educational professional with a masters, not a medical professional. Schools don't generally have psychiatrists. These terms you're describing as pathologies are rather specific terms for the actions that constitute treating students like normal-rear end human beings who deserves kindness and understanding. It's the opposite of euphemism. Kids do respond better to positive behavioral supports, which involve normal-rear end kindness like being clear and explicit about what you want them to do, recognizing when they're doing their best, and reframing tasks to be successes that are celebrated and not punishments to be avoided. (I wish those strategies were more normal than they are.) Mental health intervention usually means identifying when a student needs specific support, and finding ways to get them that support without isolating and stigmatizing them. These are strategies to make school less stressful in the first place, and to teach kids ways of learning and coping that won't become pathological. You don't need a psychologist to do those things. But you do need to understand kids' psychology: chiefly, that they have any! Kids are actual people, with different needs and desires, and realizing that is imo the largest accomplishment of the last five-ish decades of pedagogy. That means doing what you can to adapt to those needs and encourage those desires, and teach them in a way that allows them to help each other and continue learning for themselves after they leave the classroom. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 06:46
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PT6A posted:What if you don't need a psychiatrist to determine if the "child's support needs are being met?" Do they really need "positive behavioural supports" and "mental health intervention?" This is some euphemistic bullshit out of a Carlin routine. What if you just treat the children like normal rear end human beings, who deserve kindness? Maybe if we stopped pathologizing the fact that school loving sucks for a lot of kids, and just dealt with the situation at hand, we'd be a gently caress sight safer than we are now. A psychiatrist isn't involved in any of these evaluations unless the parents somehow get some kind of assessment performed with one (which I've never seen happen for these things). All the terms you're describing are super-specific and mean more than your gut is telling you. Here are some more, uh, more layment phrases that, while not exactly the same thing, give you a really general idea of what they might mean conversationally. "Support needs being met." -- What's going on for the kid, and how do we help? Are they unhoused? Do they have a disability? What problem behavior are they using to communicate their needs, and how do we intervene to give them better communicative tools? "Positive behavioral supports." - A very specific term related to very specific evidence-based programs that maximize the student's ability to be rewarded for doing good things instead of just being punished for doing bad things. It involves assessment, taking data, analyzing data, finding ways to make the kid's experience at school better, etc. "Mental health intervention." - An "intervention" means that the student is receiving something different from their peers in response to a support need that's not being met. A mental health intervention is us literally saying "have them receive mental health services (counseling etc.) in response to some existing struggle they have to improve their academic and behavior skills. So all these things are things that make a kid's experience at school better. "Kindness," for you looks different than "kindness" for me because I have a more developed set of skills via education and experience working with kids. I would say there are probably things that you think would help kids be happier that I would never implement because they might only result in short-term benefits while making things much worse in the future. For example: an 8th grader struggling with verbal aggression toward adults is taking a math test. Suddenly, they start screaming and swearing at the teacher. In your opinion, what would be the "kind" response this teacher should give? I'll tell you mine once you explain yours. I also don't really appreciate the implication that I've spent the last decade of clinical and school work making kids more likely to shoot their classmates. Both Cease and I have worked incredibly long, hard hours trying to make the world a better place for kids. I leave work at school and go to a clinic where I spend time supporting high school students with disabilities and physical aggression so severe that no school could safely accommodate them. Another example: A 6'2", 190lb 16-year-old with a documented disability and PTSD walks into the classroom and sits at his desk. You turn away to write something on the board, and when you look again, they're out of their seat and about to strike a much smaller student with their 5lb textbook. You don't know if they will for sure, but you have to make a split-second decision based on the student's documented history of physical aggression. What is the "kind" response to this circumstance? In the clinic, I see events like this often enough that I basically know (within limits because clients are different) what I would do even if I wasn't sure whether they'd hurt the other kid.
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Apr 19, 2023 07:08
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NeatHeteroDude posted:Both Cease and I have worked incredibly long, hard hours trying to make the world a better place for kids. i'm not a teacher or in education at all fwiw
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Apr 19, 2023 07:17
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Cease to Hope posted:i'm not a teacher or in education at all fwiw Oh dang, thank you for not Stealing Educator Valor. To keep it vague, I'm certified to instruct in general and special education settings and have the most experience and education in providing ABA services to students with severe problem behavior. i've done work as a special education teacher for behavior intervention, resource, and severe/multiple disability settings. i'm also working through the remaining part of my education/supervision toward becoming a board-certified behavior analyst.
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Apr 19, 2023 07:40
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Part of what makes this so maddening is that educators have actual plans to support kids in distress. It's not some sort of new problem. Pedagogy is not a perfect practice but it is one with a core mission to protect and help every student as much as possible. There just aren't enough educators, aren't enough hours in the day, aren't enough specialist professionals, aren't enough resources or space or a million other things that you could buy or hire with money if there was money to be had. What you instead have is a very successful program to do the exact opposite of defunding the police. This program funnels money away from positive, fulfilling public service to support children, and pouring it into a system of policing that is fundamentally trained to see classes not as students or children, as potential threats or sources of tips. The nicest version of that system pays lip service to the idea of maybe not arresting kids. That's an improvement over, say, the response to Columbine, or gang intervention programs. I am sure the panel of psychologists who make these threat assessment programs are doing the very best they can with an essentially hosed political mandate. But each hour they billed could have been an hour of a speech therapist's time, or an hour of an actual MH counselor to back up the guidance counselor, or an hour of a para so that teachers don't have to plan for what to do when they look away from a troubled student. There's so much undone, so writing briefings for the Secret Service for best practices on neutralizing the threat that schoolchildren pose just comes off as a grotesque waste. Grim absurdity. And, to top all of this off: Teachers stretching shoestring budgets because that money has been funneled into police and privatized programs is not a uniquely American problem. It's a problem that needs to be tackled if you really care about helping students long before things get tragic or violent! But it cannot be the reason that mass attacks are a problem unique to the US.
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Apr 19, 2023 08:44
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NeatHeteroDude posted:Here are some more, uh, more layment phrases that, while not exactly the same thing, give you a really general idea of what they might mean conversationally. Yes, I'm aware these are domain-specific terms with precise meanings. I'm saying it's a bad way to sell the overall problem to a wider audience, because it sounds expensive and tricky, and does not use direct, common language. It's a problem in a lot of fields, where the terms one thinks are common or well-understood or precise end up obscuring meaning to people who don't use them regularly. quote:I also don't really appreciate the implication that I've spent the last decade of clinical and school work making kids more likely to shoot their classmates. Both Cease and I have worked incredibly long, hard hours trying to make the world a better place for kids. I leave work at school and go to a clinic where I spend time supporting high school students with disabilities and physical aggression so severe that no school could safely accommodate them. I don't think that at all, and I apologize if it came across that way. It seems like you are certainly part of the solution, not part of the problem. Now, I would like your opinion on one thing: do you think your job is made more difficult by the failures or mis-steps of other... figures in your clients'/students' lives well before you get to see them? Because that's more what I was trying to get at, even if I didn't express it well. My intuition is that, by the time you're dealing with severe physical aggression in high school students, you're being asked to fix a problem that someone else hosed up really big to create. Cease to Hope posted:Part of what makes this so maddening is that educators have actual plans to support kids in distress. It's not some sort of new problem. Pedagogy is not a perfect practice but it is one with a core mission to protect and help every student as much as possible. There just aren't enough educators, aren't enough hours in the day, aren't enough specialist professionals, aren't enough resources or space or a million other things that you could buy or hire with money if there was money to be had. Yeah, I agree. And, like I said, I've had this discussion before, and it ultimately came down to: "we have stupid, restrictive rules and maintain a sub-optimal environment because we're underfunded, stressed, and busy trying to keep the poo poo down to shoe level and teach something in the process." From a practical standpoint, I get it, but I do think that it ends up kicking the can down the road and potentially makes problems worse, to the point where you need an expert like Neat to come in and say "here's how you deal with a 16-year-old who is frequently violent."
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Apr 19, 2023 13:31
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PT6A posted:Yes, I'm aware these are domain-specific terms with precise meanings. I'm saying it's a bad way to sell the overall problem to a wider audience, because it sounds expensive and tricky, and does not use direct, common language. It's a problem in a lot of fields, where the terms one thinks are common or well-understood or precise end up obscuring meaning to people who don't use them regularly. Do you think "positive behavioral support" sounds ominous? Is that just on its own, or in comparison to "threat assessment"?
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Apr 19, 2023 17:53
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Cease to Hope posted:Do you think "positive behavioral support" sounds ominous? Is that just on its own, or in comparison to "threat assessment"? I don't think it sounds ominous, I think it sounds overly clinical for anything but a very official context. A better way to phrase the same concept for a more general audience would be exactly what Neat said: reward kids for doing good things instead of punishing them for doing bad things. More generally, run schools in a less authoritarian way.
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Apr 19, 2023 19:37
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NeatHeteroDude posted:Threat assessment programs need to be paired with high quality, data driven tiered support for students with behavior struggles or for whom school is so aversive that planned aggression on that scale becomes one of many options they can use to escape it. Many schools, by design, barely have enough staff to fill the schedule. Much less hit reasonable class sizes, or provide other necessary services to do the job well. Austerity politics and privatization solve all problems, right?
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Apr 20, 2023 14:00
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Liquid Communism posted:Many schools, by design, barely have enough staff to fill the schedule. Much less hit reasonable class sizes, or provide other necessary services to do the job well. Austerity politics and privatization solve all problems, right? Oh yeah, my use of the word competent is way too "its the staffs fault for being BAD" and not enough "these programs are training intensive and many schools don't have enough money or sense to provide enough of an incentive for staff to waste their few spare hours learning about multi tiered systems of support and data based decision making." I'm a little biased from some unhappy experiences trying to collaborate with other staff to help kids instead of make poo poo worse, and some people just loving refuse to ever learn anything new or modify their instruction to include things that actually work in practice. However, the incentives for stuff like professional development are half "you're at school before 630 and leave after 530 and then you have prep" and half "well don't you want go learn about Lexia Learning and Dreambox?" Lexia and dreambox are my two least favorite new things in education because both programs have been conclusively shown to do jack poo poo, even in studies those companies pay for that clearly aren't valid or indicative of increased positive outcomes in reading and math. NeatHeteroDude fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 15:09
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Liquid Communism posted:Many schools, by design, barely have enough staff to fill the schedule. Much less hit reasonable class sizes, or provide other necessary services to do the job well. Austerity politics and privatization solve all problems, right? These aren't even examples of austerity! The Virginia threat assessment program isn't cheap at all. It just ends up being more money for the Department of Criminal Justice and unfunded mandates for educators.
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Apr 20, 2023 21:57
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More funding for education isn't antithetical to this thread. Threat assessment programs should be multi-disciplinary and yes, include law enforcement but also include many others. If the one run out of the Virginia DOJ sucks then it probably shouldn't be the model (and isn't) but I mean, if we were all really good at all this stuff there wouldn't be issues to talk about.
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Apr 20, 2023 23:56
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Elendil004 posted:More funding for education isn't antithetical to this thread. Threat assessment programs should be multi-disciplinary and yes, include law enforcement but also include many others. If the one run out of the Virginia DOJ sucks then it probably shouldn't be the model (and isn't) but I mean, if we were all really good at all this stuff there wouldn't be issues to talk about. These programs exist to specifically to funnel money away from schools, and to diffuse pressure to do anything else about gun violence.
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Apr 21, 2023 01:26
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Cease to Hope posted:These programs exist to specifically to funnel money away from schools, and to diffuse pressure to do anything else about gun violence. drat and here I thought they existed to combat the threat of targeted violence in America.
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Apr 21, 2023 03:06
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Last month, Arkansas passed its own new omnibus public school law, and it includes their own threat assessment program and mandates uniformed law enforcement on campus at all times during class or major extracurricular activities. (It's in the final law, section 8 i1.) It's actually a bit hard to find any commentary on that program, because the headline features of the law are expanding the school voucher program, removing the cap on transfer students and allowing transfer students to go to charter schools, banning critical race theory, and mandating that elementary school sex education includes child trafficking but not discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity. Just to top it off, the Senate announcement also brags about their separate laws that make it easier to remove books from libraries and harder for doctors to serve trans or questioning minors. These are not programs that are intended to create safe, inclusive environments where students are empowered to speak up!
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Apr 21, 2023 08:55
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Cease to Hope posted:Last month, Arkansas passed its own new omnibus public school law, and it includes their own threat assessment program and mandates uniformed law enforcement on campus at all times during class or major extracurricular activities. (It's in the final law, section 8 i1.) The bill also bumps up minimum teacher pay, which by this logic must be bad because of what else was in the bill. I keep trying to revise that sentence because it almost sounds like strawmanning, but I can’t because your entire argument seems to revolve around declaring that a thing must be bad because it happened at the same time as other bad things. Only a few of the many links in your last two posts even mention behavioral threat assessments in more than just a passing way.
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Apr 21, 2023 12:51
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Baronash posted:The bill also bumps up minimum teacher pay, which by this logic must be bad because of what else was in the bill. I keep trying to revise that sentence because it almost sounds like strawmanning, but I can’t because your entire argument seems to revolve around declaring that a thing must be bad because it happened at the same time as other bad things. Only a few of the many links in your last two posts even mention behavioral threat assessments in more than just a passing way. My argument, in the post that you quoted, was that the omnibus school bill was not made to create safe, inclusive environments where teachers and students are free to speak up. There are many restrictions on what teachers can say or teach and what books librarians can stock in school libraries. It also mandates that schools have SROs, who in the best case are not educators and worst case are harassing students over non-violent offenses. These changes make public schools more oppressive and unwelcoming, as part of an effort to push students (and their accompanying school funding) to charter, religious, or private schools. Any talk about school safety in the context of those changes is clearly in bad faith on the part of the Arkansas GOP lawmakers. There's a separate agenda involved with the teacher raises that isn't really related to school safety. (The tl;dr is that the act only guarantees funds for the minimum raises so schools that want to attract or keep more-experienced or higher-educated teachers will need to come up with the money from their existing budget. It also removes the requirement to pay more-experienced and better-educated teachers more money, so the poorest districts - where the 2022-2023 pay scale topped out at less than $50K per year - simply may not be able to do so. The $2000 raise for teachers already making more than $50K is not exceptional. The last increase to Arkansas's now-abolished state teacher payment schedule was $3200 across the entire pay schedule, and that previous COLA teacher pay act ran out at the end of the current school year. LEARNS also partially repeals the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act in the process.) The other post, before that, was making a slightly different point. I was listing times that Republicans or other American conservative leaders used this same language about fortifying schools and identifying threats in direct response to political pressure after a high-profile shooting. Some of those cases are especially egregious, like Dan Patrick repeating the same nonsense about door control year after year, or the NRA executive who's been peddling fake school safety programs that encourage buying and carrying guns since the 1980s.
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Apr 22, 2023 00:54
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Hello! If you want to check out a thread that focuses on general and special education discussions, with lots of teachers and professionals contributing, please come over to our k12 Education Thread!!! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4029992&pagenumber=1&perpage=40 Now it IS in cspam, but I'm personally moderating it to be a safe space for other teachers and people to talk about stuff without being trolled or insulted or thrown to the wolves. The goal is to have a thread for educating people about education, competing instructional programs, and (most recently) how we define equity in education! If someone's moved past pushing back and is just being a dick to you, please report or send me a pm, and I'll make sure the space stays calm. People can disagree, but this is not a place to argue about politics. Please come down and hang out! If I probe anyone from dnd incorrectly let GJB or someone, and they can probe me equitably. Thanks!
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Apr 23, 2023 04:01
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Someone posted this in the cspam thread, havent had a chance to learn more about the source but seems to line up with what I've been posting about. 
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Apr 29, 2023 17:29
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I wish more of these included baselines for all these factors among the rest of employees. Like, I guarantee every workplace shooter has pooped shortly before the shooting.
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May 2, 2023 15:08
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