A group of students discussing incidents from their pasts that should have gotten teachers fired. They usually weren't.
A junior high school girl suspended for giving Midol to a classmate. (This one hit national TV media.)
Kids being expelled for accidentally taking toy Star Wars "guns" to school. Kids being expelled for taking knives to school for cutting cake with teacher permission Kids being made to take drug rehabilitation programs for accidentally swallowing mouthwash at school or even for taking Alka-Seltzer. (Examples in this paragraph are from Montel Williams nationally syndicated television program, 5/29/97. These were random samples from a 1 hour show devoted to the impact of "zero tolerance" on real kids.)
Here are more current examples: The stupidity continues: "A seven-year-old boy in Cahokia, Ill., is suspended for having a nail clipper at school. A 10th-grader at Surry County High School in Virginia is booted for having blue-dyed hair. A Minnesota high school nixes a yearbook photo of an Army enlistee in the senior class because it shows her sitting atop a cannon outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post."
Have you figured out the caliber of the people running our schools yet? The people who run public education should be our best and brightest. Would you trust these school administrators to run your business? Would you trust them to run a hot dog stand unsupervised? These brain-damaged fools deserve public contempt, unemployment with blacklisting to insure that they will never be allowed to supervise young people again.
Nobody in the stories these examples are derived from thinks these kids are a menace to their fellow students. These are good kids, as kids go these days. These expulsions will follow these kids for the rest of their lives. They will make getting into other schools difficult. These kids can probably forget about going to a first-rate university, forget about making a professional career at just about anything. A bit much for an honest mistake made by a six year old child.
The above is what the public school "zero tolerance" program is doing to real kids.
I've been putting my time in on energy and public policy lately. For more information on what zero tolerance carried to the stupid point means now, go here. The stupidity continues, however, my time to keep up with it hasn't.
School teachers, administrators, and public relations staff who think this is a good idea. There's an Net term for people like that. The word is 'tard. It means "intellectually challenged". If this offends you personally, I hope you're one of the responsible parties. If you're not in the employ of a school and you are outraged that I'm saying such terrible things about our public schools, I suggest you wake the hell up. Try sticking your head in a bucket of ice for an hour and come back to this page. If you are an administrator or teacher at a public school who is offended, write me a clear, literate reply in acceptable college-level English about why this page offends you and how you managed to read this page despite the obvious fact that your head is obviously firmly lodged in your rectum. If you can. Or click here and be reminded that this stupidity not only wastes money, it kills people. Maybe you'll be next. In which case I won't bother wasting more than 5 seconds mourning you.
Drug education programs like DARE which have been repeatedly been proven failures.
School teachers, administrators, and public relations staff who think this is a good idea.
Semi-literate teachers. Ever see the notes teachers send home with kids these days? I know people who've returned them with spelling and grammar errors circled in red ink. Recently, there was a strike in the Pittsburg Union High School District in Pittsburg, CA. While it appears that the district administrator probably shouldn't be trusted to run a free public toilet, let alone a school district, the Letters to the Editor sent to the Antioch Daily Ledger by teachers showed grammar errors, syntax errors, sentences that could not be parsed into any logical statements, regardless of one's perspective on the strike. The shock I got were that the letters were worse than I expected. Nobody expected Pulitzer Prize quality here, understandable expository prose would have done fine.
Teachers who assign hours of busy work every night based on canned handouts from which kids don't seem to be learning anything.
Year-round schools which make it impossible for a child to take advantage of learning experiences available outside the school system.
School administrators who think they can give you as a parent orders just the way they order your kids around. . . and who think that parents should take time off work or from whatever else they have to do to make personal visits to school for whatever reason on zero notice. I.E., school administrators whose feeding at the public trough is giving them delusions of Godhood.
Teachers who automatically assume that the parents of students can always afford to buy the materials and tools to carry out whatever at-home "projects" they find entertaining to assume.
Schools who are allegedly trying to teach computer skills branding kids who discover that their school network administrators are incompetent (would YOU use the word "password" as a root access password?) as evil hackers. The correct response would have been to terminate the system administrator with extreme prejudice. (I mean "ineligible for rehire" and "provide REAL bad reference" to encourage the idiot to find another line of work for which he might be better suited, not shooting the hapless idiot.)
If you agree with me that the public school system needs an enema, check this out. . . I think you'll agree with me that my proposed solution will provide that enema.
Endless fundraising with the money extracted from parents and friends and relatives. . .
An original cure for the "new" fad of kids going postal on their campuses. That last was written last year. Try my Littleton page. I can now add to the above the targeting of anybody who is considered different by students for school administration harassment, go to the Littleton page for details.
There's no point in my writing about this, this is simply to substantiate what everyone knows, that our public schools don't teach, our high school graduates are years behind those of just about every other industrialized country in critical math skills, reading, science, etc. , and that they can't even protect their students from violence.
If you need convincing, look below and start clicking. He cited the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, which found that while math and science test scores among U.S. fourth-graders are among the best in the world, U.S. students are among the least proficient in these topics by the time they graduate from high school. For more on things you never wanted to hear about public education, go here. (no longer exists, link to Wayback Machine).
After reviewing this page, I've decided that I have been too easy on school administrators and elected school board officials. Unfortunately, I don't have time to do anything about it yet.
More on this later if I ever have time.