Why Bullying Remains a Problem

Michael Milczanowski has been bulled constantly at his high school. He says: "It was ever-constant, never changing, ongoing harassment—that's all it was." We hear constantly, when some poor kid finally takes his life to end the torment, that the schools "did all they could" to end it. We are told that they try to address such issues but that they don't know about many of the cases. Kids in the schools regularly contradict the school authorities. They say that the teachers turn a blind eye to the problem. Rarely have we had such dramatic proof.

Milczanowski does not return the punches. He is not complicit in the assault in any way. His math teacher stands there watching and says a few words but otherwise does NOTHING. Milczanowski said: "I expected him to physically intervene to keep that from happening, but I guess I was wrong." The victim has dropped out of high school because he is afraid to go back.

The parents of this Texas town, as Texans are known to do, are attacking the victim. I have read dozens of hateful comments from parents saying that Milczanowski is violent. Odd that the "violent" student is the only one not trying to take punches?

As for the "poor" teacher that they are all lamenting about, well it appears he has allowed fights in his classroom before. And one of them was video taped as well. The second video is instructive. In the video the fight continues until the teacher says: "Okay, that's enough." I'm sorry, but that appears as if he allows them to punch each other until he decides they've had "enough" and only then does he step in.



With two videos of students fighting in the same classroom, with the same teacher, it is much harder to feel sorry for the teacher. This is especially true given that he seems to have a policy to allow the fighting to go on. In the Milczanowski case he stood by allowing it to happen even as the attacks pummels Michael, who does not attempt to fight back.

I regret having to say it but Texas is a place that decent people should avoid. The fundamentalist mind-set of the state is well-known. It is hateful state. This is a state where you can be arrested for selling a dildo, that executes innocent people in its rush to punish sinners, and that hates gay people. It is also one of the most heavily Southern Baptist states in the country. I do not think that a coincidence. Fundamentalism is a hateful religion and turns out hateful people.

But we also have the problem, in this case, of a governmental school system that tends to be, of the teachers, by the teachers, for the teachers. The teacher's unions put teachers ahead of students. And the politicians allow it because the unions make sure they get re-elected and teachers, being independent thinkers, tend to follow instructions from the unions. What we have is a system where teachers get attention while students don't. Teachers' unions treat teachers the way the police treat their own: they deny wrong doing unless absolutely forced to face reality.

If this teacher had not been caught on video ignoring a bully attacking another student, I can assure you he'd still be in the classroom. As is, various bureaucrats are defending him. The assumption from government employee unions is that their members are a sacred bunch whose interests must always come first—even when they are complicit in bankrupting states like California. Politicians who dare touch the sacred band of political parasites are pummeled, much the way Milczanowski was pummeled in the government-owned, government-controlled educational prison.

The whole rotten system has to go. I stand by the reform that all funding should follow students and that the funding should be allowed to go to private school as well. We here people whining about monopolies all the time and then defending the education monopoly. The government school system is a coercive one. It exists entirely because it has the ability to force people to fund it, force parents to send their children there, and because the unions have such a powerful hold over the politicians.

We have crappy, violent schools because they don't have to be better. They have a captured audience and captured funding. Only when a blatantly awful thing happens, and can't be ignored, does it get attention. Otherwise it is business as usual. It takes a video tape of a student being assaulted in full view of a do-nothing teacher to get attention. It takes kids around the country going home and hanging themselves, or putting a bullet in their brain, before anyone pays attention. Even then the hateful types come out and blame the victims.

The sooner the educational monopoly collapses the better.

Decentralized self-learning for kids.

Here are a couple videos about how children can use computers to teach themselves. Fascinating. Things like this scare the shit out of the organized labor unions of teachers who believe the education system exists for their own benefit.

Some stories on school choice.

Here are some short videos on school choice. This boy seems to have a good thesis.



This boy is autistic and he explains how he used school choice to attend the type of school that works best for him.



One student talks about how school choice changed his life.



Another one gets it right.



Why the choice of a charter school helped this girl.

School choice and special needs students.

The importance of school choice for special needs students. About 4 minutes.

Poor are educated well by Pakistani private schools.

Private education is for the elite. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. It is the wealthy and well-off who can “afford” private education. So private schooling is inherently elitist and destroys community cohesion by separating people into economic classes. This is the sort of rot you get from Marxists and teacher’s unions.

So it might surprise you that private education thrives in the poorest places on earth -- even more so than it does in the wealthy nations. Researchers associated with the World Bank, Harvard University and Pomona College recently studied the state of education in Pakistan. What they found is that “private schools have become a widespread presence in both urban and rural areas, providing parents another option for investing in their children’s education. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of private schools increased from 32,000 to 47,000, and by the end of 2005, one-third of enrolled children at the primary level were studying in a private school.”

In the past the typical Pakistani lived in a village with two government schools. But a survey in Punjab province found that half the population “lives in villages where parents can choose from 7 or 8 schools.” The researchers now describe the education sector in Pakistan as “an active educational marketplace with multiple schools vying for students whose parents are actively making educational decisions.”

Even though the government teachers are better paid, and have more education, they don’t seem to do as well at their main task of educating students. The World Bank reports: “Children in private schools score significantly higher than those in government schools 1.5 - 2.5 years of additional schooling to catch up to where private school children are in Class 3.”

The superior results aren’t because the private schools cost more. They actually cost less. The World Bank says “it costs half as much to educate a child in a private school (Rs. 1000 per year) compared to a government schools (Rs. 2000 per year).” The main reason for the higher state expenses is that costs are “driven by higher teacher salaries”.

The fact is that when education is provided via the political system then teachers become a special interest group with enormous clout and they will tend to redistribute educational spending toward themselves. This is less of a problem in private education because private schools are not run by politicians needing to placate special interest groups.

Even the private schools in the rural areas are affordable for the poor. “In a nationwide census of private schools in 2000, the fee in the median rural private school (50 percent of all private schools charge lower fees) was Rs.60 per month. According to household survey data from the Pakistan Integrated Household Survey, 18 percent of the poorest third sent their children to private schools in villages where they existed.”

What the poor are spending is substantial when compared to state spending. The survey found that “Out-of-pocket spending by households on children’s education is higher than what the government spends on providing education through public schools for the richest one-third” of the rural households in the survey. Even when they looked at the poorest one-third of households they spent 75% of what the state was spending. In spite of state schooling being “free” parents are investing substantial funds in the education of their children outside the state system. And apparently they are happy with the results they are receiving if growth rates in private education is any indication.

Monopolists and politicians band together against students.

One of my earliest memories of school days, most of which were just a blur, was the time the teachers went on strike. Of course, we students were enthusiastic supporters of the teachers. It wasn’t that we cared one twaddle about their contract. But when they were on strike we were off from school. Our self-interest happened to coincide with their self-interest. But I learned, over the years, that the self-interest of the teachers and that of the students often do not coincide. And when they conflict the teachers, with some notable exceptions, will screw over the students.

The teacher’s unions are powerful lobbies for a special interest group -- their members. And teachers will use emotive language about the “good” of the children while lobbying for their own financial well being. Now, the optimal situation for the teachers themselves, for setting teacher benefits, is to have a monopolistic provider of education negotiating with a labor monopoly. And if the monopolistic provider is a bunch of third rate politicians more the better.

The union knows it can pour money into campaigns, in the name of the children of course, to unseat recalcitrant politicians who don’t obey the orders of the union to fleece the taxpayer for more benefits for teachers. Unions love it when politicians are the providers because Big Labor are experts at manipulating the political system for their own self-interest, no matter the actual consequences to the students.

For instance, the unions frequently have pushed through regulations which make it almost impossible to fire lousy teachers. Bad teachers harm generations of students. But the unions lobby to defend those crappy teachers from any discipline. And perhaps it ought to be that way. The union’s job is not to provide a quality education to students. It is to give teachers as much as possible out of the public purse. They do their job and they do it well. Teachers benefit and students get screwed over. Politicians get rewards and taxpayers pay the bills.

Politicians tend to line up to kiss ass when the teacher’s union comes along because it is powerful. Some years ago, in a previous existence, I ran for office. And our campaign headquarters was calling voters. I, like the campaign volunteers, was on the phone as well. I hated campaigning with a passion. But we had a bank of phones and I was on one calling around.

We would ask people what they thought about five different issues. If they agreed with my position on 3 or more of those issues we would inform them and ask them if we could send them campaign literature. The only call I remember was when I got a teacher on the line. She outrightly stated: “When it comes to voting I just follow the instructions of the union.” Well, no wonder so many students turn out to be independent thinkers. But lots of teachers act the same way. They obey orders and do what the union tells them to do. And that means they vote according to union dictaates and fund campaigns according to union preferences.

The teacher’s unions hate non-political education -- that is any education provided outside the direct control of the politicians. It makes it much harder, if not impossible, to manipulate the system in order to pick the pockets of taxpayers while providing mediocre education, if one is lucky. To maximize the profit of its members the union has to do what it can to protect a state educational near-monopoly. And that means smashing, when possible, alternative education.

I previously reported on a successful alternative school in Dayton, Ohio. Most the students were African-American and the students came from mostly impoverished families. Yet all the graduates had been accepted into university. The teachers at this school are dedicated to helping the students. And most are union members and the school was a state funded alternative school. It was rare in that it worked well.

But when the budget for the school district required cutting the union demanded that teachers be fired according to seniority not their teaching skills. Good teachers were to be fired, if only recently hired, while crappy teachers had job security merely for hanging on for so long. That is how the union puts the needs of students first.

Utah recently passed a universal voucher system for students. Each student, who prefers an alternative school, will receive a fraction of the funding that would have gone to the school and that funding will follow the student to the alternative school. It cuts education costs because no student receives the full amount that would have paid their state schooling. The students and their parents have more choice and are happier. State education has a little less income but a lot less expenses. And their classrooms aren’t as crowded -- they used to say that was a problem.

I thought that the progressive and political Left community ought to embrace this and open alternative schools themselves. Utah is pretty much a Republican monopoly and I felt that humanist, secularists, such as myself, would prefer to have schools teaching “our” values as opposed to those which push a Theopublican agenda. I urged non-Republicans to embrace the voucher system in order to create real diversity in Utah by opening alternative schools.

But the Utah Education Association, the big labour front for the teachers, is pushing to eradicate vouchers. There must be no choice for students. The ability to manipulate the political system for the benefit of teachers, at the expense of taxpayers and students, must not be threatened. Big Labour is throwing in millions to push for a referendum so that they can spend more millions in order to scare voters with false claims about the evils of chose in education. And the Democrats are lining up with the labor monopoly. There is no surprise there.

With money from the unions, a front group has gathered signatures to strip choice from the system. Now the battle goes to the voters directly and you can bet that the teacher labor monopoly will inundate little Utah with cash in order to protect their self-interest. They will use every myth and lie they can muster.

They will say it strips money from public education, ignoring the fact that it increases funding per remaining student in the state system since departing students remove all their direct costs but only a portion of their financing. They will say it creates segregation even though private schools tend to be more ethnically and economically diverse than most state schools. What they won’t say is that this threatens the perks of the unions. And the Democrats won’t say that they are in bed with this labor monopoly.

The more secure the educational monopoly the more the teachers can receive in benefits. They, in turn, have to give a fair percentage of those funds to the union as a protection racket. And the racketeers have to buy off the politicians to keep the vicious cycle going. The politicians find it easiest to purchase support from the Democrats. So the Democrats are loyal to the unions -- and well they should be, a dog should always obey the master who feeds him.

The sad thing is that the students may well end up stripped of choice to placate the greed of the members of Big Labour. And the chance to build decent, secular schools that promote basic liberal values will be destroyed to protect the self interest of teachers, their unions, and some politicians.

Good grades for everyone.

The story is going around the internet about a student who took a true/false test with 100 questions and got all of them wrong. Everyone is concentrating on the “fact” that the student didn’t get one single question correct when he had a 50/50 chance on any one question.

The student was given a generic answer sheet with five possible answers. The test had just two answers. You either filled in A or B, true or false. He filled in C for every single question. Or I should say he supposedly filled in C as there is a chance this is all a hoax.

After failing his test completely he supposedly received this email from his professor.

Dear Michael, Every year I attempt to boost my students' final grades by giving them this relatively simple exam consisting of 100 True/False questions from only 3 chapters of material. For the past 20 years that I have taught Intro Communications 101 at this institution I have never once seen someone score below a 65 on this exam. Consequently, your score of a zero is the first in history and ultimately brought the entire class average down a whole 8 points. There were two possible answer choices: A (True) and B (False). You chose C for all 100 questions in an obvious attempt to get lucky with a least a quarter of the answers. It's as if you didn't look at a single question. Unfortunately, this brings your final grade in this class to failing. See you next year! May God have mercy on your soul. Sincerely, Professor William Turner

Now of course the student might be just having one over on the professor. But all that is irrelevant. What is being considered by most people is unimportant. The real issue, as I see it and if this is genuine, is contained in the professors email: “Every year I attempt to boost my students’ final grades by giving them this relatively simple exam...”

I thought the purpose of a course was to teach students something worth knowing and not merely to give them a high grade. This is the dumbing down of education. If true this professor is admitting that he intentionally gives simplistic tests in order to raise the grade levels. His goal is not teaching but good grades. This is brought home again when he complains “your score of zero... ultimately brought the entire class average down a whole 8 points.” He’s interested in a high class average not teaching.

Now clearly this student, if real, doesn’t belong in university or in this class. I suspect that university is over-attended, which drives up the costs, and it's overrated. The reality is that most employment doesn’t require a university education. And the employment market knows this. The jobs that do require advanced education are few and they, these days, generally require more than a university degree but a masters or doctorate. Many used to settle for a university degree but no longer do so because university degrees are so plentiful, and with teachers boosting grades artificially, they have little value. It seems a huge waste of time and resources to me for most people. It saddles them and the country with lots of debt and gains them little in real terms.

Clearly this professor, if real and if he wrote this email, shouldn’t be teaching. A grade in a course reflects what the student has learned. At least it ought to reflect what he has learned This professor clearly wants high grade averages just for the sake of high grade averages. He has cut the link between grades and learning. And that is one reason a university education have lost so much value. The real story here is not the student but the teacher.

Vagina gets girls suspended from school.

I have long thought that the American school system is under the control of morons. In fact I thought then when I was a school kid. I remember our teachers going on strike one time, because they said they were too lowly paid -- no salary increase satisfies them -- and watching these people picket the school. What annoyed me even then was how several of them had misspelled words on their picket signs. Not the hallmark of good teachers.

Education in America has become a redistribution program that confiscates money from parents, so they can’t afford a good education for their children, and then redistributes it to the lackluster, under performers who run the schools. It is a system that is meant to keep the teachers union happy.

Now we get yet another indication that morons run the schools. The moron in question is Richard Leprine, principal of the John Hay High School in Westchester, NY.

There was some event at the school recently on a Friday night and various students did readings. Three girls, Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson, all honor students, read excerpts from Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. The girls were suspended from class for one day for saying the word “vagina”.

Now of you want an indication of exactly how moronic this alleged educator is consider this. Principal Moron says the girls were not suspended for saying the word “vagina”. Oh, no, not at all. They were suspended for not obeying his order to not say the word vagina. To quote the head moron himself: “the girls were punished not because of what they said but because they disobeyed orders not to say it.” That is not censorship, he says, but insubordination. And this man is in charge of people teaching children! This man shouldn’t even be a janitor at a school.

This sort of logic justifies every single authoritarian action around. If you wish to ban a religion you don’t ban the religion you just order people not to practice it or believe it and then arrest them for disobeying orders. And you proclaim you respect freedom of religion. You don’t install price controls, you just order people to sell at a specific price and then arrest them for disobeying orders while claiming you support free markets. This is lunacy.

Principal Moron claimed that because the event was open to the public the word mustn’t be used just in case a child heard it. Remember the schools have sex education courses where the word vagina is used all the time. So this doesn’t make any sense. Vagina is not a dirty word any more than eyeball or finger. Now had they said asshole, to refer to a body part and not the Principal, that might be a dirty word though in the latter case it would appear to be accurate. And there is no indication that children under high school age were in attendance. Though it really wouldn’t make a difference if they were.

What is frightening is not just the irrationality of this man but his pompous nature. He reminds me of the bumbling bureaucrat, Gordan Brittas of the BBC comedy The Brittas Empire. He portrays himself as a “leader” who inspires his followers. He speaks of a “passionate commitment to a dream (vision)” . But a principle is not a leader with followers. He is supposed to be an individual providing a service. If the local grocery store owner referred to himself as a leader and his customers as “followers” he would be out of business. His entire statement about his self perceived role is pompous and condescending. He’s arrogant on top of being stupid.

But if you read his “vision” you understand why he suspended the girls. He truly does think he’s a leader and everyone else is required to obey him. He does see this as insubordination. He’s the George Bush of schooling. I do recommend you read his vision only because it is intentionally written in a pompous way. He doesn’t want to teach children to think for themselves he wants a “passion that elicits higher order critical thinking skills”. His words drip with pomposity.

People like this shouldn’t be teaching. You don’t teach “higher order critical thinking skills” by demanding obedience. He’s not just a pompous moron but a hypocritical one as well.

UPDATE: It appears that public outrage over the pompous principal and his punishment is causing something of a rethink. One of the girls has said she was told that the punishment has been postponed for at least a week so the Board of Education has time to meet first. There is almost zero support for the principal in this case so it maay not be a surprise if the punishment is cancelled.

Utah has education vouchers: why liberals should embrace the change.

Utah has become the first US state to introduce a full school choice program for students. Of course the real beneficiaries of state education have never been the students but the unionized educators who see public schooling as way to transfer wealth from parents and taxpayers to teachers and bureaucrats. Teachers unions and the Democratic lapdog opposed giving parents choice in regards to schooling.

Under the new legislation, which has been signed by the governor and is now law, parents will be able to claim a voucher of between $500 and $3000 to help send their children to private schools. Voucher values are higher for lower income parents than for higher income parents.

The flaw is the bill is that it excludes anyone now attending a private school. Ideally it should also attach all education funding to the students and have the funds follow the student. School districts that do poor jobs would see funding cut as students abandon the failed schools for more successful ones.

A particularly stupid remark came from state Senator Gene Davis, a Democrat, who said: “It’s about taking taxpayer dollars and giving them to private industry.” Really? Then so do food stamps for the poor which Democrats support. Welfare recipients are given other people’s money to spend in privately owned grocery stores. They don’t spend that money down at the city hall canteen.

Democrats don’t seem particularly worried if welfare cheques are spent with the crack dealer of the beneficiaries choice? They aren’t stopping taxpayer funds, via welfare recipients from going to the local liquor store. Now why is it that they are so concerned about whether parents spend their money on good schooling if they don’t worry about how welfare recipients spend their money? Could the difference be that the teacher’s unions pour millions of dollars into the Democratic Party. Democrats are pro-poor unless, of course, they get more money from wealthy unions and then they’ll sell out the poor in a flash.

At least with school vouchers the parents are given back some of their own money to spend at the school of their choice.

This might help solve one problem. A state legislator is trying to use the power of the state to prevent students at schools from forming a Gay/Straight Alliance on campuses. There are 14 such student groups in Utah already.

Tim Beagley, a former member of the Utah Board of Education argues that the legislators can now stop trying to micromanage the schools.

Legislators can start by killing some bills currently before them. For example, they no longer need to tell districts how to elect their board members. If parents don't like how their district works, they can leave. No government oversight is required. In their own words, people can vote with their feet.
They don't need to regulate school clubs. If parents don't like the clubs at their school, they can choose another education vendor. They don't need to tell schools what to do if students are truant. If you don't approve of the way your school handles problem children, you can now take your child to a school that is more to your liking.
They don't need to regulate what teachers say in the classroom. If you don't like what your teacher is telling you or your child, you can go somewhere else.
After they cut the red tape from this year, they can start hacking away at regulations from prior years. At long last, we can abandon all that useless testing. Accountability now resides strictly with the parents, not the government. We can get rid of No Child Left Behind. We don't need UPASS, CRTs, NAEP or Iowa Basic Skills. Best of all, we can throw out that ridiculous high school graduation test. It only seemed to catch the students with severe disabilities or poor English skills anyway.
Parents can tell if their student is progressing adequately.
If the Legislature really believes in free markets and parental control of education, legislators need to step out of the way of both.

Now what I would like to see is for some of the good teachers in the schools to form their own educational co-op. A private school, contrary to the ranting nonsense from the Democrats, need not be a private company at all. The co-op can be formed by teachers and it can provide a decent education to students without the micromanagement of the state. Get the rules and regulations out of the way and let the teachers teach.

I would like to see good quality, secular, private schools teaching kids. Instead of bitching about private education mainly being run by religious groups secular liberals need to open their own schools. Consider this my friends on the Left. You can have a school where you don’t have to turn over the ID date to the military for recruitment as you do with state schools. You can have a school where you don’t have to have some fundamentalist nutter come in with his version of sex education -- as you do in the public schools. You don’t have to worry about some board of education forcing theology on you in the form of so-called Intelligent Design.

Now if I were a resident of Utah (and quite honestly I can’t envision that ever happening) I would be jumping up and down with joy especially if I were on the political Left (and where I am is anybody’s guess). Here are the facts. Utah is a Theopublican state and it will be a Theopublican state for a long time. In a state system of education that means the Theopublicans will be running the system. They will decide what is taught, how it is taught, what texts to use, etc. Now here is your chance to have a school with different values. Use it.

So find a few teachers. Check out the local United Church of Christ congregation and see if they have a church big enough to house a school during the week. Go to the various liberal congregations and organizations in the state who will be just as unhappy with Right-wing controlled schools as you. Now you have some students. Use those vouchers to help cover the costs. Education doesn’t have to be expensive to be good. Here is your chance to run a school by your own values and show that it works.

Consider a classroom with 25 students. Assume they are lower class students qualified for the full voucher of $3000. That is $75,000. That ought to cover a salary for the teacher, school books and pay the church something for the use of their facilities. If the church can hold five classes of that size you have a budget of $375,000. I can see with that sort of income you should be able to run a fair school if you aren’t wasting funds on lots of bureaucrats who don’t teach. And that is assuming no income from the parents, no donations from local groups or businesses, etc.

I think this is a prime opportunity for those of us who are secular humanists to get the kids out of the hands of the Theopublicans and give them the education they deserve. Stop whining and get that school going now.