No, sure wouldn't

I think it is a two-way street though. The United States has always been greatly influenced by Europe - England and France in particuliar. These days, Asia wields a great deal of influence over the United States too. Finally, I think that the United States' influence has been in decline because of the poor decisions our government has made ($17 trillion in debt is going to be hard to overcome), and the apathy that some citizens now display. 

Anyways, you won't really have to worry about my opinion. I won't ever teach in an urban public school again, and I'm by far not the only teacher who has made that decision. In my opinion, it is the state's responsibility that every child and teacher feel safe in school, and until the state does it's job, I can't do mine.

After I resigned from that middle school, one of the students at the school assaulted two teachers, the school went into lockdown, and the student later surrendered to police. I do not know what his punishment was. I only knew about this case because it made the news.

I had a friend in undergrad who would come to the school where his wife taught and walk her to her car every day because she was afraid to do so by herself. Why is she so scared? Because there are no real consequences for students. Our schools aren't safe.

Once kids are teenagers, they know what they are doing. They know that violence is wrong. They know when they are trying to hurt other students and threaten and intimidate students. If one act of violence is enough to get you charged criminally in the real world, it should be enough to get you removed from school as well.

I respect those who have a different opinion than me, but the situation in these schools is desperate. And maybe I am not understanding others well enough or communicating my own thoughts well enough.

At another school that I taught at, I had a teacher friend who told me about a time he had been assaulted by a student and woke up in a pool of blood. Luckily, the student was prosecuted. My friend, however, was disappointed that the student only received 6 months in prison for an act that could have killed him. He said it took him a while before he wasn't scared of every student's threat - to where he was good enough again to call their bluffs. When I was contemplating resigning from that school, he suggested that I not go to a high school (we were teaching at middle school) because the students were bigger and therefore could more easily intimidate students and other teachers.

At this same school, I witnessed one of my students get in a big fight with another student, where each were throwing haymakers. The student got a week of out of school suspension (vacation) and was his normal cocky self when he came back, when, in real life, he would have been criminally prosecuted for doing that anywhere else with the amount of people who witnessed it.

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@Aegis, I guess I am not explaining myself very well. I am not proposing that there shouldn't be a process that establishes guilt. There should be. There should be proof that the child commited violence.

But, in the real world, if you punch someone or kick someone just one time, and there is proof of it, that is enough to charge you criminally. Schools just don't treat violence as seriously as this.

For instance, at one of the schools I taught at, one of the teachers was slammed against the wall for not giving a student the grade he wanted. She had a concussion and couldn't even speak correctly for quite some time. What happened to the student? Nothing. Why not? Because there wasn't enough "proof" even though other students witnessed the act (and so did she, of course). In reality, the school just didn't want to deal with the legal costs to go after the student, as well as risking racial tensions because the student was a minority and the teacher was not.

At the same school I had a teacher friend who knew another teacher who taught in New York City, at a normal public school, not a reform school. This teacher, she told me, had to teach behind plexi glass because of the level of violence of the students in that school. Why was the school so violent? Because there are so many legal protections for violent students, when in the real world if you commit just one act of violence you can be charged with a crime.

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@Aegis, I agree that it may sound harsh, but in my opinion, it really isn't. It is the only way to allow kids to go to school without fear. Zero tolerance for violence. Otherwise the process for removing a violent kid will be too convoluted. Who determines what is too severe? What are the steps to removing the child? Will white kids be perceived to get more leeway than black or hispanic kids? Lawyers will get involved, and it will become costly. It needs to be a clear-cut rule that every child understands. You commit violence, you are gone. We need to break the grip that violence, gangs, and drugs have on these schools.