When schools become the bullies

 Washington Times:

A 13-year-old New Jersey boy was suspended from school Thursday for twirling his pencil around in math class and making another student uncomfortable.

Ethan Chaplin, a 7th-grader at Glen Meadow Middle School in Vernon Township, was twirling around a pencil with a pen cap on it when a student behind him yelled, "He's making gun motions, send him to juvie!" a local news station reported.

The school suspended Ethan and ordered him to undergo a physical and psychological evaluation, his father, Michael Chaplin, told the station.

 "I'm absolutely livid," he said. "I think it's gross misconduct at its finest. They took something so minimal and took it so far over the edge."

Vernon Schools Superintendent Charles Maranzano said school policy requires an investigation when anyone in the school feels uncomfortable or threatened by another student.

"We never know what's percolating in the minds of children," he told the news station. "And when they demonstrate behaviors that raise red flags, we must do our duty."

Mr. Chaplin told Alex Jones' website Infowars that his son had to go through a five-hour evaluation, which came back clean.

"The child was stripped, had to give blood samples (which caused him to pass out) and urine samples for of all things drug testing," he told the website. "Then four hours later a social worker spoke to him for five minutes and cleared him." [Emphasis mine, throughout]

I'm not exactly sure what "twirling around a pencil with a pen cap on it" means,  but it doesn't sound like much of a deal. If it took another student to call attention to it, it doesn't even sound very disruptive. As a teacher, I'd have asked the pencil-twirler to stop. I'd also have spoken to the second kid about yelling in my classroom. I suspect that would have been the end of it, and instruction would continue.

Instead, this teacher and school went nuclear. They subjected a 13-year-old kid to five hours of humiliation and abuse -- making him strip and undergo a battery of physical and psychological tests -- all for playing with a pencil, a very typical behavior for a middle school boy.

Unless there is a whole lot more to the story, the "adults" who mistreated this kid should be disciplined. The parents certainly should consider legal action against all involved, including those that instituted a policy that says that anything that makes anyone uncomfortable in any way must be "investigated" in this manner.

The idea that no one should ever feel uncomfortable is asinine to begin with. Life is uncomfortable, and our schools should be helping kids to understand and deal with that fact, instead of becoming bullies themselves.

Stoopid government schools

Associated Press:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A central Ohio principal says she suspended a 10-year-old boy from school for three days for pretending his finger was a gun and pointing it at another student's head. 

Apparently this principal endorses a very strict reading of the Second Amendment, where the right to bear arms is protected, but the right to bear fingers is not. 

To be fair, I shouldn't only mock the principal for this nonsense. She was following her district's "zero tolerance" policy regarding "pretend gun play." Yes, there's an app for that.

Look, I get that people are concerned about gun violence, especially in our schools, but adopting policies of militant stupidity that prevent kids from being kids isn't the answer. 

Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident. The article mentions other examples, including a similar policy that was cited last year when a Maryland school suspended a 7-year-old boy who had chewed a Pop-Tart into a gun shape. It's unclear whether the yummy pastry was loaded, or whether the boy had obtained it legally.

It's easy to laugh this stuff off and chalk it up to good intentions gone awry. But it's far from clear that good intentions are behind these policies. It is clear, however, that some serious consequences result from them. Kids lose instruction time. Tax payer dollars are wasted. Good kids end up with permanent marks on their records suggesting that they are prone to violence, sexual harassment, and other offenses. These are heavy consequences for a 6-year-old to bear, for doing nothing 6-year-olds haven't been doing for centuries.

A toxic culture also emerges as a result of this nonsense. Educators -- nearly all of them Leftists -- get quite drunk on their power to militate for their causes. Don't like guns? Punish a 7-year-old for the way he eats. Think men are predators? Punish a 6-year-old for kissing a classmate's hand, even if she welcomes it. Don't like America? Ban the American flag while allowing flags of other countries to stay.

It's insidious. It's also dangerous. Such a culture becomes so rigid and controlling that not only are kids not allowed to be kids, but adults stop being adults as well:

A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student–dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet–to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite.

Administrators wouldn’t let the student retrieve her clothes, sit in a car or wait inside another building...

It was 5 degrees, with a wind chill of 25 below, and they literally forced this girl to stand there and freeze rather than allow her to take safe,  nearby shelter. How culture-whipped and unthinking does one have to be to blindly follow a policy that puts a kids' health in danger?

This is the price of militant stupidity. And no one does militant stupidity like government. Our government schools have gone down a very dangerous path. They have crossed the line from educational malpractice into child abuse. Our children are no longer safe, and it's not only mass murders we should fear, but those who would protect us from 7-year-olds wielding Pop-Tarts.

Skin color trumps all

The Washington Times:

A popular gifted-student program at a New York City elementary school is getting the ax after school officials decided it lacked diversity.

PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald told parents in a letter Jan. 24 that Students of Academic Rigor, or SOAR, would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners, the New York Daily News reported.

"Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in," Miss McDonald said in the letter posted on Flickr.com.

Let me see if I have this right. We have a popular program, presumably serving a need, that is being discontinued solely because of the students' skin color.

How is that not blatant racism?

In a follow-up letter sent to parents Monday, Miss McDonald wrote: "At PS 193, we believe that all children can learn and achieve high standards. We also know that we want all children at PS 193 to have equal access to high quality, challenging curriculum, and to have ample opportunities to master complex material and build academic and personal self-confidence. We also want our classes to reflect the diversity of our community. We believe we can have both: classrooms characterized by rigor and diversity."

Any time you hear the word diversity, you can be sure it's being used to justify an act of racism.

This principle is dishonest when she claims the school is seeking both rigor and diversity. By her own admission, a program called Students of Academic Rigor is being canned because skin color is deemed more important.

Why should kids suffer simply because the world doesn't look the way some government bureaucrats think it should?

You keep using that word...

I'm posting this chart just so I'll have it handy next time someone says we need to "invest" more in education.

We've increased our "investment" in education nearly 300% over the past several decades. We've got exactly nothing in return.

The Truth Behind Teachers Unions

"When school children start paying union dues, that‘s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children."
 ~Albert Shanker, former President, National Education Association

"We bear a lot of responsibility for this [resistance to school reform]. We were focused -- as unions are -- on fairness and not as much on quality.
~ Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers

The above statements expose a vital truth about why government schools aren't improving. Teachers unions are extremely powerful in America. Unfortunately, that power is primarily used to advance the interests of the unions themselves rather than to improve student performance. This point is well made in a new video from Reason TV and the Moving Picture Institute.

Update: I forgot to mention one quibble I have with the video. It states that teachers are forced to join unions. This isn't true in all states. Some states have no official requirement, but the pressure to join the union is so great that there might as well be a requirement. In other states, teachers are not forced to join a union, but are required to contribute to them even if they don't. Still other states have no membership or contribution requirements at all. It's a mixed bag, and the video should have made this clear.

The business of education...

Our public schools continue to flounder because they lack two things: competition and accountability. St. Louis has taken a unique approach to accountability (via Education Weak):

Faced with a financial crisis of enormous proportions and failing to deliver an adequate education to thousands of children, the St. Louis Public School System in 2003 made history, becoming the first known district to hire corporate restructuring consultants to implement a plan for reform that would save the system. As courageous as it was controversial, their decision has resulted in progress that once seemed unimaginable and serves as a beacon to school districts around the country still struggling to provide quality education to their children...

Last year, the St. Louis Public Schools were on the brink of bankruptcy, facing an astonishing $75 million year-end deficit and a near-term $99 million cash shortfall… In all, the district has succeeded in reducing expenses by an astounding $79 million. It has a balanced budget for FY 04-05 - the first in recent memory.

Financial savings, sure, but what about the effects on student achievement?

The district is now nine points closer to achieving full accreditation - something it has lacked for years. When this process began, a disturbing 41% of elementary school students and 36% of high school students were "at-risk" for reading proficiency - the lowest possible group in the Scholastic Reading Inventory. In just eight months, the numbers were reduced to 35% and 24%, respectively. At the beginning of the 2003-2004 school year, not one middle school student read at the SRI's advanced level. Now, 7% do.