Keep on trying to suppress any views other than own, like a good little totalitarian.

That’s what I thought.

Cry me a river. I understand your “WAGES MUST FALL” arguments perfectly, and the class war is very much yours, you keep insisting it applies to everything for a reason.

@10 – “Everyone knows that the public school system eliminates choice for parents”

Why yes, it forces them to educate those pesky kids, in general. The alternative would be private schools educating the rich, and the poor going to “general” schools run by a few well-meaning charities in which far less is taught on a shoestring budget, ending years earlier.

As history shows us.

@16 – Why yes, only people who are willing to knife each other in the back for pennies like good capitalists should be allowed near kids. How dare teachers talk to each other!

Never mind the actual issues, you have to ensure wages fall.

The solution to calcification is the freedom to come up with a better idea that eventually pushes out the calcified system. A good example of that is the auto industry which was ultimately forced to improve by the invasion from Japan. It would have happened faster had not the government thrown up as many obstacles as it could to protect the calcified American auto industry from competition.

I have opinions about what is wrong with the whole Public School system, and about teachers’ unions, and about local control, but the longer I watch this train wreck the more I think that what is really going on is simpler.

Any system involving humans calcifies over time. The public school system could have been the very best of all possible systems at the start, and it would still have silted up. I say this because, while I think the best possible solution is the widespread use of vouchers and the effective breaking of the public school monopoly, I expect that whatever solution is put into place will ALSO calcify over time. We aren’t going to find a permanent solution, and if we try we will assuredly only hasten the calcification of whatever we put in place by making the solution we adopt needlessly rigid.

I think that, if we examine them closely, we will find that a lot of the problems we see in the Federal and State governments are more a result of this same calcification than any evil on anybody’s part. Which doesn’t make me any happier with empire-builders, power-mongers, and rules-rats.

The school mandatory bigotry policies are really very recent.

Zero-Tolerance policies remove any discretion from principals, such that a computer program could do their jobs adequately, since decisions are reduced to Action A results in Punishment B followed by Expulsion C.

We could save quite a bit of money by reducing how much we pay school principals in ZT areas or simply eliminating the position entirely. Use the money to hire more teachers and reduce class sizes.

The alternative would be private schools where school administrators could use common sense for a given situation and have some confidence that their judgement carries some authority. If the parents don’t like it, they can send their kids elsewhere. The incentive to maintain discipline while still attracting customers is absent in public schools, so politics prevails. Anytime you replace free market processes with political controls, you’re going to get idiocy like this.

I think you give the administrators too much credit. What they want is the power to punish pretty much any child in their power without the personal responsibility for making that decision. The policy may say ‘zero tolerance’, but we know perfectly well that they are only using it when they feel like it. Then they get to punish the child, while blaming the decision on ‘policy’.

Yes. See also, mandatory minimum sentences.

Does anyone know what gun she’s shooting? I’m a gun guy, but I don’t recognize it. I’m assuming it is a .22 of some sort.