Craziness in Kids’ Classes

Craziness in Kids’ Classes

Parents who went to public schools decades ago likely assume their children are receiving the same types of lessons and instruction that they did. They couldn’t be more wrong. ...
Selwyn Duke

If the “philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next,” as the apocryphal saying goes, then today’s Blackboard Jungle could lead us to a true dark age. This may seem an extreme statement to those whose public-school days are decades past. But just as entertainment has changed radically over that time period, with cultural effluent streaming out of Hollywood and leftist and libertine messages streaming into children’s minds, so has education — and just as much. In fact, what transpires in government schools today is so bizarre that sometimes you’d be inclined to say “You can’t make this stuff up” — except that someone did.

It’s appropriate to begin this exposition with a school policy that might have helped create a nation-shaking event: the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. The Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO) was called to the home of the killer (as is my habit, I won’t use his name and provide him publicity) perhaps as many as 45 times during the past decade; additionally, the BSO received a warning that he “could be a school shooter in the making.” There were also warnings sent to the FBI. Yet while “South Florida police detectives have arrested a slew of young men in unrelated cases who exhibited similar, troubling behavior on a variety of charges,” taking “them seriously,” wrote the Miami Herald February 23, it “never happened with [the Florida shooter].” The reason why might not have just been garden-variety incompetence, either.

In 2010, I reported on the Barack Obama administration’s $4.3-billion “Race to the Top” initiative, which involved an effort to reduce the suspension and expulsion rates of black and Hispanic students. In other words, the goal was to assign punishment based on quota. This was embraced by various school systems, such as that of Minneapolis, Minnesota, but was also likely inspired by one: Broward County’s.

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