Do you know anybody who has ever been "counseled out" of a private school?

That article in the NYT a month or two ago got me thinking.

As a boy I attended a private school (K-3), and it always seemed strange to me how there would be a few of my classmates each year (almost always boys) who would just disappear from school without warning. One day they just weren't in the school anymore, and the teachers never spoke of them again, even to the point of removing their art projects from the wall. These students were usually the mischief makers and or the students who did not perform academically, or refused to even try.

Now it occurs to me that they were probably quietly "counseled out".

Which is one way private schools have of keeping their scores up. Sometimes the disruptive (drug taking, pain in the ass, whatever) is very rich but they may very well boot them anyway.
On edit; sometimes kids change schools and no one talks about them anymore. We lost track of many kids that way ( and have reconnected with a few through Facebook) but the drug dealing kids were pretty obvious.

From a public school to a charter school because the public school district has had their IEP funding and learning disability resources slashed due to budget cuts - and was being encouraged to ship kids that weren't trouble-makers off to a "two hours for two day a week" corporate charter school for a "smart but special needs student" which was being funded, and from that charter school back to "the public school" she had been transferred from because they weren't really chartered to actually take the time and effort to craft a school plan that actually dealt with her learning disabilities like they claimed they could.

Since she was kicked out of her public school, she couldn't get back in the public school system, leaving her in limbo at the age of 16 and a half. We had to sue the school district to get her into an appropriate "mix" school (public/private for IEP students) that she's doing well in, but in the mean time, she lost a year and a half of schooling and isn't due to actually graduate until the month she turns 20.

The current bureaucracy of education is focused on winnowing out the kids who don't hit the proper marks at the proper time, not to educate or engender an interest in learning. No matter what the parents, teachers, or students might want. It's all about "productivity" - basically, cheap-assed, no-thinking involved, profit-making, innovation-killing business rules.

Haele

I don't know what "counseled out" means. I did see kids who were expelled for discipline problems or those who left because they could not or would not make grades.

I went to private school and saw this all the time.

a few years ago. It was a big shock and humiliating for the parents. I think it was deliberately handled in such a way as to make the parents feel too embarrassed to complain.

A friend who has worked in both private and charter schools has told me about "zero-tolerance" policies that were unevenly applied. Sometimes, low-scoring kids were even goaded into behavior that would be used as an excuse to expel them. High scorers (and at the private school, children of the wealthy)could do no wrong.

:kick: