I think you have a great point, yet something that I haven't seen anyone talk about is scale. The scale of the schools in the United States is enormous. I hear about 2000,3000, 5000-student schools.
Some family's studied in the U.S., and even their middle school and elementary is 2000 students ! That's enormous, gigantic!
Here in Mexico schools are small-scale. Education here is much, much smaller scale. I think that the bigger the student population is at the campus, the bigger the chances are of failing at important problems such as bullying, since extreme standardization of these processes creates more problems than genuine solutions. Plus.
As someone who studied high school in Mexico and the US and saw students get bullied in both, cultural issues at play make all the difference. Even the most vicious bullies had a sense of "oh crap, we've gone too far" in my Mexican high school. I saw the students defend the bullied kid at both schools, but in Mexico, both bullies and the rest of the students showed some compassion towards the bullied. And the bullied got to play soccer with the other students during recess. The bullied were never wholly ostracised. In contrast, when the other students defended the bullied in the US school, there was this feeling of "you should fend for yourself; nobody is going to help you. You're on your own." It's hard to explain, but that's what I felt being a spectator.
All this is just my n=1 experience, and I could be misreading things, but I'm convinced there's a cultural element that can explain the helplessness of bullied kids in the US school system.
I feel you are on to something. I think that on top of those other things, the last straw is that the U.S. society is much less integrated. My neighbors have said 3 words to me the last 10 years I lived here (moved from Europe). Where I come from the whole town would know the troubled kid, would either step in before the bullying got really bad, or sure as heck would not let the kid buy a machine gun.
Maybe the problem with the US is that the society is just too free. Or not enough churchgoing.
Some family's studied in the U.S., and even their middle school and elementary is 2000 students ! That's enormous, gigantic!
Here in Mexico schools are small-scale. Education here is much, much smaller scale. I think that the bigger the student population is at the campus, the bigger the chances are of failing at important problems such as bullying, since extreme standardization of these processes creates more problems than genuine solutions. Plus.