Agreed, but I think it goes deeper than that. I volunteered as an after-school tutor for a local organization for a semester a few years back. All boys, lower grade-school ages, mostly black and/or hispanic, and mostly good kids. But then there was that one guy...
To put it bluntly, one kid, who was maybe eight or nine, made the experience hellish for everyone (fortunately, he often didn't bother showing up). My very first day there, all the other kids told me what a bully he was and how everyone was scared of him at school, how he even scared the teachers, and I could believe it. I wasn't scared of him (he was less than half my size), but as a homeschooler I developed a lot more sympathy for school teachers who are trying to hold class with kids like this around.
This kid was very bright and had social skills up the wazoo, but he was using those skills in all the wrong ways. Nine years old, max, and he already knew exactly how to play the system. This was the year Disney had the "give a day, get a day" deal, so there were a bunch of college kids volunteering there for a while, and I watched one afternoon while this kid totally played a naive college girl who was twice his age. Couldn't decide if it was more horrifying or fascinating, but the kid, years short of puberty, was just glorying in the fact that he had the entire attention of this pretty blonde white girl, and while she got more and more quietly frustrated, because she wasn't accomplishing what was supposedly her goal (getting him to finish his homework), she also had no idea how to cope with him.
For twelve years, kids like this think they have the system whipped. Nearly everyone they deal with they can either manipulate or bully into giving them attention, so they do pretty much what they want and are convinced it's their smarts and charm that's getting them by. Anyone who sees right through them, they dismiss as hateful or racist. Problem is, it is not just their smarts and charm empowering them; it's mostly the system they're in, so once a kid like this gets out of school, all that power goes Poof!
Without school trapping them in the same room with this guy, his peers won't have anything to do with him. Without the responsibility to take care of him, neither will most adults. People like that can often charm their way into a job now and then, but they can't keep the job, because all they know is bullying, and how to manipulate people dedicated to helping them, and neither one of those skills gets you anywhere in the working world.
This is actually one of the reasons I strongly favor vouchers and eliminating public schools, insofar as possible. Getting thrown out of school after school might possible be the Wake Up Call this kid and his family needs. And giving schools the right to remove these kids from the classroom is definitely in the best interests of the other kids, the ones who hope to be able to get enough of an education to hold down a real job once they grow up.
To me, putting quotas on the number of black kids you can discipline is actively dooming kids to poverty. Not just the ones who go to prison, but also the ones who really want to learn, but instead spend much of their school time watching the teacher coping with deliberately disruptive yahoos.
Many years ago the kids in the school system I went to couldn’t get away with that but for a very few exceptions and they were exceptions because of the occasional weak teacher.
Of course things were so different then. After a visit or two to the principals office, he or she would break out the paddle and as Dr. Sowell noted you’d probably get a lot worse from home.
Now with PC, child abuse laws and accusations of racism it’s a whole different world in school, it’s sad for the students who actually want to learn.
>>Punishing a kid for misbehavior in school when he is 10 years old may reduce the chances that he will have to be sent to prison when he is 20 years old.
Don’t worry. We’ll fix this by enacting similar quotas for prisons.