The Washington, DC Prison Experiment
I agree with the Ace of Spades commenters who said that if this had been their daughter, there would be injured school officials and an imprisoned parent. When did strip-searching children for medicine they can buy over the counter on the tip of a single other classmate become acceptable?
This isn’t an isolated incident. I first saw a version of it reported in May of 2004, when Maryland’s Kent County High School called in the police to strip-search students based on the smell of their schoolbooks. The only thing isolated is that this time the student and the parent kept up their legal fight.
Public schools are a real-world version of the Stanford prison experiment. Students are imprisoned into schools, school authorities are given vast power over them, and any attempt at escape must be put down—even programs such as the Washington, DC, school voucher program. So what if the DC voucher program helps underprivileged children excel at learning? Learning isn’t the purpose of public schools. Power is.
In an arbitrary forced imprisonment like our government-run near-monopoly on schools, this kind of abuse is inevitable. It’s the same mindset that convinces school officials that mass murder drills—without telling the students it’s a drill—is a legitimate school function. The drug war was the catalyst, but something like this is inevitable when any alternatives are forcefully shut down.
- October 23, 2019: Why is it so difficult to hold schools accountable?
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This is part of what a Texas school accountability rating looks like.
Thinking about the backhanded Occupy Democrat campaign for school choice reminded me that back in January, I was at a presentation where Monty Exter of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, expressed confusion about why it is so difficult to tell when a teacher is doing well compared to other industries. At the same time, he complained about relying on standardized tests to measure student outcome, in order to determine whether the teachers are teaching well.
Of course, the reason it’s harder to acknowledge merit in education compared to other industries is that parents cannot pull their dollars from a failing school and transfer them to a successful school.
There are a lot of teachers who complain, justifiably, about too much paperwork, especially standardized tests. They’re a one-size-fits-all mechanism that can’t be customized to the classroom or the student.
But failing the ability to do what they’d do for any other industry failing their children—switch to someone who isn’t failing—parents will demand some form of testing. Testing is a substitute for accountability. Accountability can only come when students and parents are free to take their money and go elsewhere. But because parents don’t have that choice, they ask for substitutes. Testing tries to simulate accountability in a monopoly. Unless you want to give parents the ability to fire public school teachers, standardized testing is the only substitute for choice.
The reason parents demand one-size-fits-all testing is that school administrators and union administrators demand one-size-fits-all schools. Parents can’t choose where to send their kids without paying twice, so they demand some other form of accountability. Sadly, simulating accountability in government schools will probably work about as well as simulating accountability in government health care. It is very difficult to ensure that a monopoly is accountable. Monopolies cater to the bureaucrats who control the checkbook, not the taxpayers who pay into it. As with doctors and hospitals, only choice makes schools accountable. Only pluralistic schools are accountable, and they are accountable because they are accountable directly to the parents. In a system of choice, it is the parents who control the money.
This is what accountability looks like: I hire the school to teach my children. If they don’t do a good job teaching my children I fire them and hire someone else.
educational diversity
- The Fight Is Still on for D.C. Schoolchildren: Kathryn Jean Lopez
- “By preventing new scholarships from being awarded, you are effectively ending a program before Congress has had the opportunity to consider reauthorizing it. Therefore, we respectfully request that you consider reversing your decision.”
- Obama’s Outrageous Sin Against Our Kids: Juan Williams
- “If there is one goal that deserves to be held above day-to-day partisanship and pettiness of ordinary politics it is the effort to end the scandalous poor level of academic achievement and abysmally high drop-out rates for America’s black and Hispanic students.”
strip search
- Another reason to ban cell phones from schools
- Scales Elementary in Murfreesboro has another reason to ban cell phones: kids might be able to call their parents when they’re about to die. That would put teachers in danger during mass murder drills.
- Maryland schoolgirls put on show for police
- Teaching young women to show skin a “top priority” says Superintendent Bonnie Ward.
- Rural Maryland Cops Force Students to Disrobe During Drug Raid
- “It was supposed to be business as usual—just another police dog drug search—at Kent County High School in Maryland’s Eastern Shore on April 16, but it ended up with 16 students patted down and two female students ordered to strip down and be inspected by a female sheriff’s deputy. No drugs or other contraband were found on any of the 18 students.”
- Stanford prison experiment at Wikipedia
- “The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.”
- Strip Search Case Goes to the Supreme Court: Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ
- “This is the one where a 13 year-old student was subjected to a strip search in the nurse's office after another student who was caught with prescription-strength ibuprofen implicated her. The search of her bag turned up nothing, but the school has a "zero tolerance policy" when it comes to drugs of any kind, so the administrators lost their minds and made her strip. And shake.”
- Teen Strip-Search Case Heads to U.S. Supreme Court
- “Savana Redding was 13 years old when she was told to remove her clothes for a strip search by school officials looking for two ibuprofen pills. And while the humiliation hasn’t diminished in the past five and a half years, she hopes the U.S. Supreme Court can do something about the emotional scar.”
More education
- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave
- Not only does slavery make life worse for slaves, it doesn’t make life better for slave-owners. And the ultimate freedom is freedom to learn.
- Teaching kids to fail
- Are schools designed to teach kids to fail?
- ACLU enables Texas textbook takeover
- If you give the government a gun, some politician or bureaucrat somewhere is going to pull the trigger. Make sure that whatever powers you cede to the government are powers you want them to exercise.
- Blogs fight resegregation in DC?
- Can bloggers resurrect a successful education program that beltway Democrats killed?
- Government food courts
- Imagine there’s no grocery… it isn’t hard to do… nothing to grill or fry for…… and no bacon too…
- 10 more pages with the topic education, and other related pages
More government schools
- Why is it so difficult to hold schools accountable?
- Simulating accountability in education has the same problems as simulating accountability in health care or any other monopoly. Tests and grades and paperwork are never as effective as choice.
- Anything less than school choice is unfair
- Forcing people to pay for one government school regardless of where they want their kids to go is so unfair that even far-left Democrats think it’s wrong.
- Democrats endorse public school elections, teacher recalls?
- Should legislators and teachers be evaluated for job performance in the same way? A group called Winning Democrats suggests that public school teachers should be elected positions rather than tenured, and that teachers should be subject to recall by the communities they serve.
- What is a captive audience, anyway?
- G.K. Chesterton writes, in Eugenics and Other Evils, that whenever someone starts asking “what is x anyway?” you know they’re trying to pull some wool over your eyes and make it the default. So, really, what is a captive audience, anyway?
- Oregon schools call minorities “shiftless & mindless”
- Oregon white privilege conference says blacks, hispanics best-suited for taking orders from white masters, as they are unable to make decisions for themselves, think for themselves, and achieve success without direction.
- Seven more pages with the topic government schools, and other related pages