"what would your questions look like if they were framed so that the child
is best supported?"
That's an interesting problem but something of a red herring. One is almost
forced to assume that each of the stake holders who determine the outcome
(continued retention) believe they have the best interests of the children
in mind, either directly or indirectly, that is they are all looking to
best support the child as a member of some community or other of their own
definitions (the moral community, the hard working community, the thousand
flowers a'bloomin' community, etc.) And of course this is all placed into
the broader frameworks of societal priorities each voice so conceives:
e.g., what good is the realized potential of a Van Gogh if what we really
need is people who know how to make better smart bombs?
I think any way of framing it to take the best support of the child would
have to ask: best support in whose local knowledge? How do you propose to
escape this inevitable relativism of political discourse? Of course
authorial voices have been disallowed from the get-go, no?
Paul H. Dillon