Whatever happened to detention?  Do they really need to go straight to the fucking police station as a first resort instead of, say, making the kid stay an extra hour after school doing her homework?

Frankly, it just makes the principal look like a lazy ass who doesn’t want to do her job.  Running detention would cut into her personal time, don’tcha know, so better to have the cops haul the kid away.

What’s funny is that this makes me miss the days of Catholic school and being used as free labor after school.

It’s bizarre about Althouse that if she sees a photo of a young female, no matter what the context, the only thing she thinks about is how attractive the subject is. There needs to be a term for women who claim to be feminists while objectifying every other female they see.

sophronia, there is, and it involves the word “closeted”.

I can’t believe what’s-her-face is actually a professor of law. Everything I’ve seen written by her looks like something you’d get from a 1L writing an editorial for the law-school newspaper.

That kid’s lucky she hasn’t fully developed yet.  If she had more prominent breasts, Althouse would be calling for her detainment in Guantanamo, or even execution.  We must have zero tolerance for wanton defacement!...

(I can see the next phase of zero tolerance:  “I made it crystal clear that you were to use a #2 pencil on this test, and what is this, an HB?  School rules require that that I call Campus Security to make an arrest, and then you will be turned over to the proper authorities…”)

Althouse is a crazy asshole.  And I do mean batshit crazy, she should be in an institution.  I don’t know if that means we should ignore her.  I like to though.

Whatever happened to detention?  Do they really need to go straight to the fucking police station as a first resort instead of, say, making the kid stay an extra hour after school doing her homework?

Here’s another example of Zero tolerance style policies running amuck. 

What’s more sad is that the school in question is near where I live and I know several kids who were/are students there along with neighbors who taught/are teaching there now.  The kids there seem far better behaved and mature than the classmates I knew at my own public intermediate school back in the late 1980s.  Atmosphere seems much more similar to that of a suburban upper-middle class public intermediate school my older cousins attended than the MSM stereotype of the decaying inner-city public school.

Looking at the picture, the girl is quite pretty.  That’s probably what incited Batshit Ann.  Ann doesn’t like it when girls are pretty.  Pretty girls get under Ann’s skin, much like Dorothy did to a different, yet infamous, batshit lady.  They make Ann’s body twitch and her jaw juts sideways.  Her eyes widen, and then narrow, focused now, with a laser-like intensity, on this pret-ty girl.  This. Girl. Is. Too. Pret-ty. flashes through her swirling mind, and, face twisted, she begins to type.  Once she hits “send” she raises one arm in the air, a signal to her flying monkeys.  They watch closely, their beedy red eyes peeled, waiting for the first blogger who writes a word of criticism about their mad lady’s lastest missive from crazyland.  Hark, it appears.  “Fly my monkeys, fly!” she cries.

And soon, they will be here.

I am embarrassed that Ann Althouse is from my state.  And as sophronia pointed out, it is bizarre that if Outhouse sees a picture of a young, attractive female, she has to put some sexual spin on the way she is posed.  And yes, what ever happened to fucking detention?

It’s more than a little disturbing that Althouse’s need to compete with every woman in sight in the great game of fuckability takes her to the point of lashing out at a 12-year-old who is seen as “cute”.

AnglScarlett FTW!

WTF When I was in school and we wrote on the desks, we were handed a bottle of windex and a paper towel.

I think Ann Althouse’s underlying ambition in life is to up the ante for absurdist comedy.  Nothing else explains how someone so terrifically awful at observation and logic went into law.

Oh man, you would think that the cops would have enough common sense to tell whoever rang them that they have more important things to do and dealing with children is the school’s problem not theirs. Even if they do have to send someone you would think they would avoid sending the guy who obviously has aggression issues.

About 15 years ago my son got in trouble in the freshman year desk doodling in NC.  He wrote the initials FS within a circle, about the size of a quarter.  In pencil.  He got 3 days suspension, and missed a major exam which he was not able to make up.  Then a couple of girls that liked him (girls he didn’t really know) wrote it on a wall, much bigger, in an attempt to gain his affections.  The principal said that the actions of the girls was my son’s fault (as though they were hypnotized) and that if *anyone* wrote FS anywhere in the school ever, my son would be expelled.  Clearly he had the entire school under his hypnotic spell, psh.  I said, anyone that didn’t like him, or anyone with a stupid sense of humor could get my son expelled for something he knew nothing about.  I said it was unAmerican.  The principal already hated our family for not being Christian.  I had to go up a lot of layers of school bureaucracy before I could find anyone who would admit that punishing this one kid for the actions of hundreds of others was not proper.  But finally I did find one, who said the principal would apologize to me.  So the principal called me to say sorry, but he had never said that to me.  I reminded him he wrote it on the suspension notice.  He finally ended up saying that he was sorry I had misunderstood him, that was the closest he could come to an apology.  I said I didn’t care about the apology, I just wanted to it be clear to him that his policy *would not* be going into effect, and now I had the direct number of his 6X boss to discuss it with.  If this were in the current day maybe it would have been handcuffs for him too?

pharmakos@15: Cops? Common sense? I’m afraid you lost me right there. For 90% of them, when their deep-seated need to demonstrate who’s boss kicks in, common sense goes right out the window. And I speak as one who works with cops on a daily basis and actually likes most of them.

Mnemosyne, those were the first words out of my mouth when I started reading this post!  Give her detention, and maybe make her clean the all the desks in that classroom.  She was still on suspension as of Thursday, too!  Four days suspension for using a marker on a desk?  That is insanity.

The article also references a five year old boy who was thrown into the psych ward after “throwing a fit” in his kindergarten class.  This shit is scary.

As I grow older and wiser, so much of this reads to me as OBVIOUS racism. Althouse is dog-whistling that old trope, “THEIR girls mature so much EARLIER than OURS”, which is shorthand for “Black/hispanic/American Indian girls are sluts/perfectly rapeable”. I have seen this trope employed with black girls as young as TEN.

I believe Althouse is sexualizing this girl to dehumanize her, to make her not seem like what she clearly is: A LITTLE GIRL.

Althouse is trying (and failing, I think) to cast her as a CONNIVING, MATURE YOUNG WOMAN. Who is working the system! Because, you know, THEIR GIRLS MATURE SO MUCH EARLIER THAN OURS!!!

Is stoking the victimhood feelings of your child like this a good idea? The girl did wrong, as she knows. She should apologize, straighten up, and rededicate herself to schoolwork. The mother should not tolerate the child’s sickly overreaction — even if she believes the school is too harsh in its response to crimes committed by kids in school.

Yeah cuz nothin’ makes a kid want to behave more than their parents helping the school to step all over her rights. This mother actually stood up for her daughter which I applaud. My mother had to do the same for me when my backpack was searched and I was threatened with suspension because I had allowed a friend to tag my bag. He was an infamous but so far anonymous tagger and they were trying to get me to rat on him. The only lecture I got from my mom was about the appropriateness of telling the assistant principal to fuck off when he asked me for the name. My mom was for me standing up for myself but, well, “Laaanguage! Young lady!”

Schools are prisons.

Schools are prisons.

When she was in middle school my daughter started referring to school as “jail for kids”. I didn’t argue; she was right. She’s had a great time this year as a senior, taking almost all her courses at a local college and no longer being imprisoned in her high school all day.

kmtberry, I think you are absolutely right.

Cops? Common sense? I’m afraid you lost me right there.

My sister is a cop. She spends most of her time dealing with domestic cases, drunk and disorderlys and the usual suspects. Her and her cop buddies’ primary concerns involve not getting hurt, trying to make people go home and making sure no one kills another family member while at home. That is when she isn’t on patrol or doing paperwork. I might not agree with her on a lot of things but she and all of her coworkers whom I have met rely completely on common sense and patience. Maybe in other places cops are evil pigs (arizona) but I think for the most part they are pretty decent people. I can’t imagine what was going through this one guy’s head when he decided to cuff a 12 year old for doodling in school.

“I can’t imagine what was going through this one guy’s head when he decided to cuff a 12 year old for doodling in school.”

...probably something about being upset at not being allowed to use a taser on her?...

Purpleshoes: THank You.

In a similar vein, it is beginning to seem to me that the ENTIRE allure of the Republican Party is to act out one’s Racism. (WHich is very sad for Abraham Lincoln, but, there you are.) Racism is the one thing that binds together ALL Republican platforms. The working poor Republicans (largely rural) do indeed vote against all of their OWN best interests, just for the satisfaction of getting to express their hatred for black people and other minorities. From my observation, that is what this health care reform crisis stems from: poor/middle class whites are terrified and furious that their tax dollars MIGHT pay for medical care for BLACKS.

It does not matter to them, comparatively, that they themselves and their families will not be able to access care if they lost their jobs or even if they themselves cannot obtain coverage while working. It does not matter to them that they are wrong about the demographics involved (chronically unemployed welfare recipients ALREADY GET access to health care via Medicare and Medicaid. Working poor people who have jobs without benefits (all restaurant workers, people who work for small businesses, lots of construction workers etc, people who are starting a new business or working for themselves, FARMERS) are the ones who will suffer from lack of health care reform, not “bums” or “gang members”) None of that matters to them. WHat matters to them is that they get to express their racism.

I even think that there are some Republicans who feel very satisfied with the Republican Party platforms, without even realizing that it is the racism that they are reacting to. It just “feels right” to them, the way a gated community “feels right”.

One good sign, though, is that the Right’s racism is getting more and more and more hysterical and frantic, because it is losing. Americans, in the main, are growing LESS racist. The Republican Party is shrinking, and their racism is growing more obvious and repellent. The more obvious and repellent it is, the fewer people who want to be associated with it.

IN MY OPINION, which is pure conjecture, I think ALthouse and Beck and many others like them get MEDIA “space” because the power elite want the racist message and the “conservative” message to be hammered into the heads of all Americans until they think it all sounds reasonable. It is a “top-down” message. It isn’t what Americans are thinking, it is what they are being TOLD to think. And it is garbage.

Re: the police going through with it—
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the officer was thinking basically the same thing the school was: this is the policy, this is what we’re expected to do, so even though I think it’s dumb I’d better do it (or else risk getting in trouble later for breaking rules, not obeying commands, etc).  Of course there are officers who get off on authority etc., just like there are teachers and administrators who do the same.  But a lot of them (I would guess a majority) are reasonable people who work in bureaucracies, which means their reasonableness often comes up against the rules of the system.  And these days the combined forces of “covering our asses against potential lawsuits” and “responding to the public’s terror of disorderly children” mean that the bureaucratic rules tend to err (really far) on the side of security overkill.

Now I don’t know any more about the case than was posted here, so of course it’s possible that this officer was particularly biased against women/girls/non-whites and was super thrilled to get a chance to cuff this girl.  But I would hesitate to jump to right that conclusion without more evidence than we seem to have here.

pharmakos, I seriously think female cops tend to be better at that kind of situation because they don’t have so hte macho-swagger thing going as too many male cops do.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good cops but the basic model of policing in this country, based on an obsession with “control”, has gone awry and attracts too many of the wrong kind of people. In part that may very well have to do with the prevalence of guns in our society- these problems are all connected.

back in high school, i drew all over my desk with a pencil in latin class, and all i had to do was clean it, same as in middle school and elementary. she drew with a marker, though, and if it was permanent (thereby arguably ruining the desk) she should get detention, or her parents should be billed for the desk and take it out of her allowance or something.

Gray Train,
I doubt it’s permanent even if it says so. You can get that shit off flat, nonporous surfaces with an appropriate cleaner. I’ve done it many times. From what I’ve seen of school desks in the past 10 years, they’re just particle board covered with vinyl or some other plastic. Now, when I was in junior high, they had wood desks, complete with carvings from previous (male) occupiers.

Not to mention that a desk with marker on it is still perfectly usable as a desk—that is, a flat, stable surface to hold books and write on. 

Seriously, what planet do people live on where junior high school desks don’t have writing all over them?

As I grow older and wiser, so much of this reads to me as OBVIOUS racism.

Didn’t Jesse have a post a few months back about how zero tolerance in schools is being used to treat African American boys as big scary criminals at the age of 9? I can’t find it right now. Anyway that’s what I immediately thought about when I saw this, cuz ya know Latinas are slutty, crazy violent bitches that need to be restrained starting at the age of 12. Hell we should start it at age 11 so they’re in the system before they have time to go all crazy on the pure white classmates.

I still can’t get over Althouse saying Justice Alito would be a moderate. I can’t believe she is literate, much less a law professor.

And she is obsessed with the attractiveness of other women to the exclusion of all else. Not to mention the onion ring thing.

Now I don’t know any more about the case than was posted here, so of course it’s possible that this officer was particularly biased against women/girls/non-whites and was super thrilled to get a chance to cuff this girl.  But I would hesitate to jump to right that conclusion without more evidence than we seem to have here.

Another factor I should mention as someone with some familiarity with that intermediate school is that it is located practically across the street from the local police precinct. 

As for biases…I wouldn’t be surprised as the neighborhood has many long-time residents who aren’t happy with the recent influx of non-White minorities….especially Latino, South Asian, and African-Americans.

“when I was in junior high, they had wood desks, complete with carvings from previous (male) occupiers”

Oh yeah, we used to carve our initials with the ever present small pen-knives that every boy carried

In today’s schools they’d call them deadly weapons

I hate to sound like an overly nostalgic old geezer, but this country has really gone down hill in the last 40 yrs

Have any of these zero tolerance things ever been enforced on a white kid? I kind of doubt it. The stories I’ve seen are always about slapping down a minority.

And, boy…Ann Althouse needs some therapy.

KMTBERRY:

I’m not quite sure I agree. Good astroturfing (and the Reich wing are among the best at it in the world) requires a foundation of preexisting prejudice to do its damage—don’t forget, the vast majority of teabaggers will laugh in your face if you tell them they’re being jerked around by the GOP marketing machine. The fact is that the Southern Strategy and its descendants are based not on merely Big Lies, but on exploiting everyone who already believes what the propagandists want to believe to make others think it’s mainstream thought.

I was suspecting an element of racism in it myself when I saw the girl’s last name, though, and not only that, but it goes a long way towards showing up the absurdity of zero-tolerance discipline policy. The latest couple of generations of kids are going to be extremely messed-up.

Wow - when I was in junior high and high school (in “good” schools in a largely upper middle class/wealthy district) the desks were covered with obscene graffiti, both pictures and words.  My teachers probably would have given this kid extra credit for actually writing NICE stuff on her desk.

I’m also shocked that neither the teacher, nor the principal, nor the cops had any common sense.  Plus - this girl can’t be the first kid at her school to write on the desk.  Do they do this every time they catch a kid misbehaving??  Might as well move the school to the police station, if so.

Althouse…I’m generally not a big cheerleader for psychiatric medications, but she needs some, as well as serious therapy.  ‘Issues’ doesn’t begin to cover it…

Re zero-tolerance policies, they may be proposed with the best of intentions, but in practice it seems they are always used to punish certain groups of kids disproportionately.  Think about it:  if this girl’s mom was the PTA prez, on a first-name basis with the principal, or if she was a kid from a wealthy family prominent in the community, would she have been arrested?  Of course not.  Some way would have been found to circumvent the policy.

Certain kids will always be exempt from zero-tolerance policies, while others, who have no special ‘in’ with the administration, and whose social class or race indicates to administrators that they probably don’t have to worry about an irate parent slapping down a lawsuit, will encounter absurdities like this incident.  There is no such thing as blind justice in a school setting, and zero-tolerance policies just give cover to administrators for meting out harsher punishment to less-favored groups of kids, as they have always done.

In my day every kid in class would have had to be handcuffed. Our school desks were practically a history book. Carved initials, pen doodles, etc.
What’s the problem with a teacher telling a kid to, uh, stop doing that. I’ll send you to detention, or, if there’s some stupid no-tolerance policy, I’d just quietly give the kid a mess o’ extra homework to do as punishment. School systems are dysfunctional, and Altmoose has fascist tendencies.

It’s more than a question of common sense, it’s a statement on the essential humanity and compassion of Adults in positions of responsibility and power these days.  They seem to have crazy with the notion that They-Can-Do-Whatever-They-Want to kids and other powerless people, and it’s Their-Tough-Luck.  Suck-On-It.

For a child to be given suspension, community service and ordered to write an essay for writing on a school desk!  Jeez!  It’s just plain CRUEL, an example of how our country is becoming a Police State, with the young female minority being an especially juicy target.

In a civilized system, every Teacher would have a bottle of cleaning solution and a roll of paper towels.  That’s all that was needed.

In 1970 when I started High School, I carried a bottle of Vicodin (well, codeine) in my purse.  I had vicious, and irregular menstrual cramps, and had to have the meds ready the moment cramps started.  No teacher minded, I doubt the Principal even knew, or would have worried if he had known.  They may have been justified in disapproving my occasionally (I was stingy) giving codeine to another cramps sufferer, but it did no harm at all.  And there were ‘dopers’ in our school, and lockers were occasionally raided & students suspended for having Pot.  BFD.

Comment #37: jefft452

“I hate to sound like an overly nostalgic old geezer, but this country has really gone down hill in the last 40 yrs”

The authorities would claim THEY are trying to contain or reverse the “downhill trend” in our society, especially schools.  They would be wrong; they are making it worse.

God, we need intelligence and imagination so BADLY.  One reason our systems are broken, seized-up is the clever -ie: problem solving- people have been locked out.

Every girl with a claim to good looks is probably acquainted with several versions of Althouse’s you’re pretty, ergo you must be a whore/an idiot/utterly self-absorbed/lazily working your looks to get away with murder or to achieve things I did with hard work/etc. crapola. Sometimes it comes from men, but when it comes from women (as I’m afraid is more often the case), they seem to be the most unloved, self-loathing losers, with the emptiest personal lives.

Unless Althouse’s employer has some means of blinding graders to test-takers’ identities, my guess is that if you took the grades she’s given out in her career, sorted them by gender and ran some statistical programs, alumnae of her classes might have grounds for a lawsuit. Especially the pretty ones.

. . .  and ANOTHER thing!  “Zero tolerance” is an idiotic, unrealistic and unworkable idea. It brutally enforces niggling petty rules as a substitute for Genuine Supervision or Leadership.  Leadership is hard work!  Calls for a bit of ratiocination, you know! What ever THAT is!

“Not to mention the onion ring thing.”

I’m afraid to ask?

I hate to sound like an overly nostalgic old geezer, but this country has really gone down hill in the last 40 yrs

You mean the last 15+ years as my classmates and I have behaved far worse than her and yet…no cops were called on us. 

I’d bet we’d all be serving time in Rikers if we’d pulled the same antics in today’s schools populated by zero-tolerance idiots who run our school systems…..

“God, we need intelligence and imagination so BADLY.  One reason our systems are broken, seized-up is the clever -ie: problem solving- people have been locked out.”

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Back in high school, i drew all over my desk with a pencil in latin class

Romani ite domum, perhaps?

ginmar-

If that was the origin, it’s spread. Thanks to random happenstance I went to the rich white school for my high school years and we still had violations like this all over the place. We even had cops stationed on campus in the later years so if someone not on the football team got involved in a fight, they could be disappeared from the good proper folks. Basically Columbine was the 9/11 of the school world allowing all the authoritarian wingnuts who had been infiltrating the schools to make sure Jesus was upheld to really double down on the crazy and begin treating youth as the enemy.

On the plus side, being treated like the enemy by anyone in authority for the entirety of one’s adolescence is doing gangbusters for the anti-authoritarian streaks in today’s youth. Which will do wonders I’m sure for making sure the next generation is just as authoritarian and petty minded as they are. Yup, won’t at all blow back into say the youth being aggressively for all sorts of social justice issues on a similar level to those who came of age in the late 60s, early 70s.

I have to hand it to Althouse. It takes a special kind of person to stick up for idiots so consistently.

It’s more than a question of common sense, it’s a statement on the essential humanity and compassion of Adults in positions of responsibility and power these days.  They seem to have crazy with the notion that They-Can-Do-Whatever-They-Want to kids and other powerless people, and it’s Their-Tough-Luck.  Suck-On-It.

That combined with an inferiority complex and related bitterness for entering a career that is considered mostly a dumping ground for mediocre university students, especially by their higher performing classmates, graduate students in other schools on the same campus….or even later by disdainful parents and some of their best performing students*.  To worsen matters, there’s some truth to this stereotype considering how those with mediocre undergrad records (Below 3.0/4.0 cumulative GPA) can make it to the top ED schools for their teaching credentials….with substantial scholarships to boot. 

Not too surprising how such influences can serve to attract or create petty authoritarians without better career options. 

* Lost count of how many high school classmates vowed to never enter K-12 teaching as they saw it as a career for academic underachievers whose grades weren’t good enough for “better careers” with a petty authoritarian/bureaucratic mindset.

Oh, and another thing—what’s a kid with a name like Alexa Gonzalez doing taking a Spanish class? Is this a nefarious plot to get an easy A? She better watch it, or Charles Krauthammer will get on her case, the way he did a few years ago (no lie) when he bitched about Hispanic high-school seniors earning college credit by taking Spanish AP tests.

“Whatever happened to detention?”

A bunch of “true” Americans fearful of certain “others”, and screaming for “zero tolerance” is what happened.

Best desk graffiti I saw in my Catholic High School referred to a long-time subsitute teacher named “Ma” Dewar.
Carved in a desk in the study hall was the statement: “Ma Dewar does bongs.” 
I graduated nearly 20 years ago.  I think that desk is still there, and Ma Dewar still subs.
I think the administration could have gotten rid of that desk at any time.  That it didn’t says a lot about how Ma Dewar was perceived.  And I bet the young miscreant who immortalized Ma Dewar’s marijuana ways never got caught, much less handcuffed.
Oh, Ma Dewar.  I’m sorry.

Yes, I know this has nothing to do with the story.

“The child’s ‘sickly overreaction,’ as Althouse put it, was crying and vomiting because she was treated like she just tried to commit armed robbery.  How the fuck should twelve year olds react to their detainment for doing shit that kids have done since we started building schoolhouses?” 

Indeed.  On my trip to England in 2008, I visited William Wordsworth’s grammar school in Hawkshead in the Lake District. The school is lovingly preserved—yes, right down to the graffiti the kids had carved into the desks. (I looked but alas did not find “Wordsworth was here, bitchez” or similar enscribed therein).

The “zero tolerance” policies in the NYC school system require a principal to file a report under any and all circumstances and there is a checklist that must be followed to the letter.  Violating the directive of the education borg is risky—individuality can and will be used against you, especially in today’s highly charged NCLB sanctions and accountability atmosphere.  This case was just stupid on every level but it conforms to the policies and procedures of American education today, unfortunately.

It’s just plain wrong and stupid and it is harming American education and the children it serves but changing the narrative is extremely difficult at this point with the Obama administration’s Education Department echoing all the rightwing narratives.  And so a recent survey shows that a majority of Americans have finally bought into the self-fulfilling prophecy of “America’s Failing Schools” and how we need to “fix” them.  This old conservative trope has a long and ugly life.  Up until now most Americans believed that their own kids’ schools were fine but that all the rest were failing.  The borg has won this battle, it seems.

As a veteran teacher of over 20 years I would’ve handled this very differently but then again I don’t buy into the whole Giuliani/William Bratton “Broken Windows” theory that these policies came from.  I saw NYC become “safer” and more “family friendly” and sanitized and saw the gradual creep of fascist control that these fine gentlemen ushered in.  It made the bridge and tunnel parents happy.  It made the midwestern tourists happy.  It also changed NYC from being a cradle of creativity and innovation and into a sterile, Disney-land type of playground for wealthy Europeans and wealthy white kids who have a “dream”.

“Oh, and another thing—what’s a kid with a name like Alexa Gonzalez doing taking a Spanish class?”

...I was born and raised speaking English, and I never considered an English class to be an easy A.  And I’ve known several Hispanic people who knew some Spanish slang, but couldn’t really speak Spanish if their life depended on it.

She should be able to take any class she wants…

At 12 years old I would have been scared out of my mind by a uniformed cop even just sort of lazily shaking a finger at me.* If they insist on a police presence (which is ridiculous anyways) I’m sure a mere “tsk, tsk” would suffice. Having the cops called on you would be terrifying enough without freaking handcuffs. Really, they shoulda just called the janitor on her—“hey, little missy, do you know how much extra work yer making for me?” he could lie, making her feel very sorry, and then he could hand her some Windex.

*Of course, I am white and was not very cute at 12. As Ann’s measured and totally unbiased legal opinion tells us, the big pretty eyes on this whorish Latina strumpet clearly call for stronger measures!

Mike—I’m quite aware of that. That was a joke. I can see where it would be a great idea for someone with a family background in Spanish or any other language (which this kid may not even have) to get formalized instruction in that language.

“Sickly overreaction” my ass. If any cop had treated Althouse with a tiny fraction of what this 12-year-old had to put up with, her fat head would explode.

How much is Althouse’s batshit crazy overreaction to this story motivated by the fact that the incorrigible perpetrator is, as the photo clearly attests, young, female, and lovely?

Judging by the whole “Jessica Valenti has breasts!” controversy of several years back, I think we know what the answer to the question is.

Unfortunately.

Althouse really does have issues:

I’m not saying what the school did was right. Look at the last paragraph! I’m critical of The Daily News for making a star out of this (exceptionally pretty) child. I don’t think this is good for her. I’m not saying the handcuffs were good.

Jebus, Ann. Most of us look at a 12-year-old-girl getting arrested for a petty offense, see that there’s a story about it, and say, “Well, good. Maybe the school and the police will think next time, rather than doubling down on zero tolerance and hurting some kid.”

Ann looks at the accompanying picture and screams, “Strumpet! Vile whore! How dare the media back such a foul temptress as this tween?”

I mean…Ann, please, this is what therapy is for. Consider it. For your own good, and for ours.

There is no such thing as a moral woman who has attention that Althouse wants for herself.

Kwillow,
I went to school in the halcyon days when you could smoke a joint with your teacher (not all of them, of course), and a haze of pot hung over the school. I could even drive anywhere I wanted to go for lunch in high school, and walk off campus in junior high (took a photography class, which was like a free pass to the outside world). Nobody ever got suspended for pot. Now it’s all closed campuses and rigid rules. Poor kids don’t get to grow up until they can vote.

I’ve got to wonder if detention went out with art and music classes as too expensive for compliance with no child Left Behind. That and the supposed adults have gotten really lazy in every way possible.

A shame schools seem to have lost the basics of common sense somewhere along the way.

As a kid, yeah, I wrote on my desk. Didn’t we all?

The punishment wasn’t getting arrested and being terrified out of my mind (and potentially hating school, the teachers, the law and anyone else I could blame). The punishment was cleaning off all those desks. Did it suck? Sure, but it was fair and tied logically to writing on the desks. I didn’t like it but I sure as hell couldn’t say, even then, that I didn’t see it coming, and I never ended up hating anybody for it.

I wonder what lesson this little kid is coming away with?

I hate to sound like an overly nostalgic old geezer, but this country has really gone down hill in the last 40 yrs

I’m not sure about that. I’m 29 now, and I’ve noticed every year since I was a senior in HS, the kids get a little better. They’re not as concerned with authoritarian appearances, like calling everybody Sir and Ma’am, but they are more concerned with treating other people fairly, and affording them human rights. They’re just not as interested in silly rigid social roles.

”… and no creepy vice principle was measuring my skirt.”

Now we have creepy vice principles strip searching girls who are rumored to have Advil on them

PS
Hey you kids, get off my lawn

“Every girl with a claim to good looks is probably acquainted with several versions of Althouse’s you’re pretty, ergo you must be a whore/an idiot/utterly self-absorbed/lazily working your looks to get away with murder or to achieve things I did with hard work/etc. crapola. Sometimes it comes from men, but when it comes from women”.

Wow, really Molly from NYC?  I have some sort of a claim for good looks and I never was on the receiving end of anything like this from women.  My friends who are conventionally less attractive NEVER make me feel that way.  Because among adults, it’s a non-issue.  And really, I don’t know any v. attractive woman who doesn’t see it as anything other than PRIVILEGE.  Nor can I think of other women who were.  I (and other women) did get a little bit of that from men, mostly if we reject them but MRAs are a whole different story.

Could another explanation for this phenomenon is that said attractive woman is in fact self-absorbed or lazy or unpleasant?

I’m 29 now, and I’ve noticed every year since I was a senior in HS, the kids get a little better.

Very likely true, but nothing was said about the kids getting worse. It’s the country that’s worse.

They’re just not as interested in silly rigid social roles.

Which might explain why the country is getting worse. This infuriates the People In Charge, who overreact accordingly. As the old strictures get more ignored, the worse the reactions of People In Charge. Result: the country really does get worse because of the People In Charge.

Althouse is either nuts or vile. Rotten inside, eaten up by her demons, having a heart the size of a raisin.

She has just written a post complaining about Palin wearing a Israeli flag lapel. Well, whatever. But she then quickly meandered into a complaint about Obama having no connection to America because:

His mother married two foreigners.

This petty, small minded, bigoted, cowardly idiot. (Althouse)

“How the fuck should twelve year olds react to their detainment for doing shit that kids have done since we started building schoolhouses? “

This. I’ve been in historic schoolhouses, left the way they were in the 1800, or 1912, or whenever they stopped being used as schools. And graffiti on the desks was the norm.
I guess technically it could be called vandalism or defacement of public property, but it’s traditionally been for the adults to figure out whether to sand the desks, paint them, or just let it accumulate until it’s no longer readable. Traditionally, we expected children to be children, not perfect little robots.

As bad as funding has gotten lately, I wonder if the school district decided to report all graffiti to the police so that they could collect insurance money to pay for what would have just been treated as a maintenance cost in the past. And then maybe the policeman made a bad decision trying to show the school the city didn’t want to send someone out over every little thing.
But a child shouldn’t be made the soccer ball in adults kicking around their problems.

Also, Ann Althouse so needs a shrink, because she hates on anyone pretty, which means she has some serious issues about her own appearance.

”… but they are more concerned with treating other people fairly, and affording them human rights.”

Oh, we had that before Reagan too, I would argue more so
But my rant wasn’t about “these kids today…”
I was complaining about the (so called) responsible adults in (so called) positions of authority

”One reason our systems are broken, seized-up is the clever -ie: problem solving- people have been locked out”

Yes!
Unfortunately, I don’t see how (or even if) we can get out of this hole

After the excessive paranoid “security” measures of the Wilson era, Harding ran on “return to normalcy”.  Obama had a chance briefly to push this, no more strip-searching children, no more taking your shoes off at the airport, no more tasering old ladies at traffic stops

But instead, when he criticized a police sgt for arresting a guy for breaking into his own house and disrespect of cop, he caved to the right wing noise machine immediately and the sgt got invited to the Whitehouse

Too much of this bullshit has been normalized, and I don’t see any way out

iirc, Zero Tolerance policies were meant to, among other things, level out the problem of “good” kids, white kids and connected kids getting away with things that other kids couldn’t.
And to some extent, it worked, at least in some districts.

There was the Eagle Scout honors student who got suspended (expelled?) for leaving a penknife used for Scouting events in his car parked in the student parking lot because he forgot it was there. It was a knife. On school property. So he had to be punished.

Zero Tolerance has kept Valedictorians from giving graduation speeches. Its the equivalent of mandatory maximum sentencing in courtrooms: yes, it prevents bias-based mercy, but it also prevents mercy based on common sense.

I guess I’ll be archiving this thread for the next time someone criticizes my choice to homeschool my kids.  While yes, there’s a need to fight this zero-tol crapitude, at some point, I just don’t have the time to waste, and neither do my kids.

to bizgal@ #18 Yes. One gets finger pointing at bad parent who takes kid out of school because they’ll miss sooo much - even though your trip to Washignton DC means they’ll spend lots of time at the Smithsonian, or you trip to France will give the kid a crash course in whatever language the schools been trying to teach them using the too little, too late method.  But when it’s the school that wants to suspend them, or do some “special” activity, then the missed class time is hunky-dory, peachy-keen.

ANd re: the cop thing - some are power mad assholes, some are really decent people with a lot of understanding of psychology.  The latter kind make great teachers and coaches, the former are your typical wifebeaters, kid abusers and eventually, sigh, politicians.

Oh, and another thing—what’s a kid with a name like Alexa Gonzalez doing taking a Spanish class? Is this a nefarious plot to get an easy A?

The second immigrant generation’s skill with their parents’ language are often shaky, and the third generation’s is usually next to none.  For example, two of my cousins came to the USA as adults, and had most of their children here; one of them has five kids (from two marriages), the other two.  Of these kids, only the eldest from each family two actually speak Spanish, yet somewhat haltingly (one of them has a very thick English accent—and oddly enough, is the more fluent of the two).  The others can understand home Spanish, but can’t really speak beyond formulaic expresions like “por favor,” “gracias” or food names.  I don’t think the two youngest ones (from a second marriage to a Anglo-American) understand a word of it.

Many universities actually have Spanish courses specially tailored to “heritage speakers” who have this kind of background.

wow.

the desks at my high-school were covered top to bottom in scribble, and no one gave a fuck if we added to it. I don’t know it this has changed in the last 10 years, but I highly doubt it’s gotten that bad in Germany yet. After all, Germans are paranoidaly afraid of looking too authoritarian, thus resulting in minimal school rules.

Re: #85: Here in Germany I have recently heard the story from the bemused and amused parents whose eight year old was catched writing his initials somewhere at school. The result was a letter to the parents, crushing enough for the eight year old.

So, no, it can’t happen here.

(But I didn’t write that, not wanting to be condescending to our american friends)

And Ann Althouse, that grave despoiler still annoys me.

(Below 3.0/4.0 cumulative GPA) can make it to the top ED schools for their teaching credentials….with substantial scholarships to boot.

Not too surprising how such influences can serve to attract or create petty authoritarians without better career options.

* Lost count of how many high school classmates vowed to never enter K-12 teaching as they saw it as a career for academic underachievers whose grades weren’t good enough for “better careers” with a petty authoritarian/bureaucratic mindset.
Comment #56: exholt on 02/07 at 04:26 PM

By their peers?  Hell, by the profs outside the education department.  But since most undergrad ed departments have been known to accept those with a 2.5/4 GPA and even less if you were going into math or science because those are “really needed”  the stigma seems to be deserved.  Obviously, there are exceptions to every anecdote.

iirc, Zero Tolerance policies were meant to, among other things, level out the problem of “good” kids, white kids and connected kids getting away with things that other kids couldn’t.

You may be right, but in my memory this crap started with Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” anti drug crusade, the nut ball principal that used to walk the halls with a baseball bat that Ronnie praised, and tales of “crack babies” who would be incapable of learning but would be sitting in the desk next to your precious snowflake

Have you seen this? http://www.newser.com/story/80295/sarah-palins-cheat-sheet-her-palm.html

Have to wonder what Cariboo Barbie would have gotten as punishment in this school?

oops, heres more from Shannyn Moore http://shannynmoore.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/rahm-emmanuel-demands-apology-from-palin/#comments

It’s interesting how the commenters on Althouse’s site are mostly lining up on the girl’s side (and quite a few are reaming Ann herself).

By their peers?  Hell, by the profs outside the education department.  But since most undergrad ed departments have been known to accept those with a 2.5/4 GPA and even less if you were going into math or science because those are “really needed” the stigma seems to be deserved.  Obviously, there are exceptions to every anecdote.

Yep.  Saddest part was that I was talking about the graduate divisions of Ed school as I personally knew a college classmate and dozens of ED school MEd and EdD students/graduates whose undergrad academic performance was really sub-par. 

Worse, most teachers IME don’t seem too interested in their own chosen subjects or otherwise intellectually curious once the school day/year is over. 

It’s sad that even the limited book collection I had for school and personal intellectual curiosity from my last two years of undergrad dwarfs the collection of most teacher/educrats when I had occasion to visit them at their homes.  Not that they necessarily need a home/apartment filled with books, but it is really telling when a teacher/educrat doesn’t even have books in his/her field beyond the textbook(s)/policy manuals s(he)‘s using in his/her class/work. 

I’ve worked in K-12 education; it’s babysitting and wardens, not education.  So it attracts babysitters and wardens as workers and supervisors.  It can’t be anything else; we as a culture hate our children far too much to allow other approaches.

It can’t be anything else; we as a culture hate our children far too much to allow other approaches

I’m glad someone else noticed. All of the child fetishism in our culture right now is just a sad attempt to paper over seething resentment and disillusionment.

Wow, really Molly from NYC?  I have some sort of a claim for good looks and I never was on the receiving end of anything like this from women.  My friends who are conventionally less attractive NEVER make me feel that way.  Because among adults, it’s a non-issue.

Lurker @ 75: I may not have made myself clear—this isn’t something most women do, just that most people who do it tend to be women (IME). Extremely messed-up women. Of whom Althouse is a prima example.

And of course your friends aren’t going to treat you like a slut or whatever, just because you look good. One, they’re your friends, and two, presumably the women you choose to be friends with are reasonably sane. (Or “adult,” as you put it.)  And three, women who rank on other women whenever they look nice don’t tend to have women friends.

there is, and it involves the word “closeted”. —mythago

And the girl is twelve, which makes it worse. Closeted or not, it is deeply messed up for an adult to consider the fuckability of a child in any context. Althouse is the female Ross Douthat.

It can’t be anything else; we as a culture hate our children far too much to allow other approaches.

Indeed. We hate children because we want to be children. We have an entire marketing industry dedicated to keeping us infantilized, the better to sell things to us. To do this, actual children must be displaced so we can take their role.

I’ve worked in K-12 education; it’s babysitting and wardens, not education.  So it attracts babysitters and wardens as workers and supervisors.  It can’t be anything else; we as a culture hate our children far too much to allow other approaches.

It also prepares citizen-consumers for adulthood the Human Resources/4th Purpose Culture. For example, look at this article economist Samuel Bowles, who takes great issue with the Chicago School approach, discusses what happens in a society with a high Gini coefficient:

Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.

The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.

The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.

The problem, Bowles argues, is that too much guard labor sustains “illegitimate inequalities,” creating a drag on the economy. All of the people in guard labor jobs could be doing something more productive with their time—perhaps starting their own businesses or helping to reduce the US trade deficit with China.

So add to that waste and inefficiency teachers who are forced by the system to prioritise things other than teaching.

How about “the beatings will continue until morale improves”?

I would, however, be just a little wary of ranking the quality of students based on their GPAs. Most colleges and universities have classes you can take if you want to make sure you preserve your 4.0. Better someone with a lower GPA than someone who thought they would take those kinds of classes.

I would, however, be just a little wary of ranking the quality of students based on their GPAs. Most colleges and universities have classes you can take if you want to make sure you preserve your 4.0. Better someone with a lower GPA than someone who thought they would take those kinds of classes.

You’re talking about a problem which mainly affects students who don’t IME tend to go into K-12 education with the exception of the tiny portion of topflight undergrads who are altruistic and have progressive ideals about education. 

Unless you’re talking about the few colleges whose Profs tend to grade harshly such as UChicago, MIT, or Cornell, having a GPA well below a 3.0/4 from what I and friends who TA/teach undergrad courses observed usually means the student did less than half/none of the assigned work, turned in extremely slipshod work indicating s(he) didn’t give two craps about it or s(he) had too many academic deficiencies to be taking that course/attending college, and/or didn’t bother to show up to most of the classes. 

Don’t know about you, but those are not the traits I’d expect or want from someone whose job is to educate others…especially those in K-12.

Worse, most teachers IME don’t seem too interested in their own chosen subjects or otherwise intellectually curious once the school day/year is over.

Teachers aren’t the most imaginative people in the world, my father Professor Avenger being the exception to the rule, probably because instead of limiting himself to teaching his major, Biology, he took courses in geology and the other sciences so that he could teach them.  He became so indispensable that they needed two or three teachers to cover all his classes when he took a sabbatical.

He became that creature almost never seen outside of Hollywood and the comic books, a college-level science teacher.

As for books, he stocked the house with science books, SF, westerns for himself, fiction, including an 19th Century edition of Poe, politics, history, etc.

He was a self-made man who didn’t encounter Beethoven until he took a class in music appreciation, and was so moved by his music that he took to playing it for me when I was an infant, something that wasn’t done in 1959, and it wasn’t to stimulate my development, it was done out of sheer joy at the music.

OTOH, when I took acting in college, one of my fellow students was a teacher.  We once were assigned an improv together, and he wanted it to take place in the faculty lounge, and I had to tell him that we were suppose to use our imagination and we came up with an improv well away from a faculty lounge in the end.

I wouldn’t be a teacher today, if I had a time machine and could teach in the early 60s that would be more my cup of tea.

Back n the Seventies, when I was in high school, school administrators never called the police, even for students caught with illegal drugs. Things have changed for the worse, when the criminal justice system (police state) is brought in to any situation.

As I grow older and wiser, so much of this reads to me as OBVIOUS racism. - KMTBERRY

That’s why my wife and I are not too keen on sending our daughter to public schools (even though we are both proud products of that system from kindergarten to college): we are worried about what will happen to our smart, yet very stubborn multi-racial daughter in such an environment.

It’s to the point where we feel like she’ll have fewer issues with racial prejudice at a Jewish day school where she will be one of the only kids with an African-American parent than she’ll face at a more “diverse” public school.

Not to knock Jewish day schools (we do kinda like the idea of her getting a solid religious education in addition to a solid secular one), but it’s pretty bizarre that we have more reason to fear racial prejudice at a public school than at a pretty-much lilly-white private school.

Have any of these zero tolerance things ever been enforced on a white kid?

Yes.

Schools are prisons.

It’s funny you say that because I’d argue that one reason schools are prisons is because kids can be detained on the whim of their teachers and administrators with no judicial recourse.  I’d rather have the cops involved in many cases because at least then kids have access to a judicial process, at least a judge, if not a jury.

you would think that the cops would have enough common sense to tell whoever rang them that they have more important things to do and dealing with children is the school’s problem not theirs.

Tell that to any number of kids who were assaulted (sometimes even sexually assaulted) by their peers where the assault fell within the school’s jurisdiction and the school did NOTHING or, at a minimum, let the violent, little punk(s) continue to go to school with the victim until the “investigation” was completed.  Schools allow multitudes of shitty things to happen to their students that would not be tolerated anywhere else.

having a GPA well below a 3.0/4 from what I and friends who TA/teach undergrad courses observed usually means the student did less than half/none of the assigned work, turned in extremely slipshod work indicating s(he) didn’t give two craps about it or s(he) had too many academic deficiencies to be taking that course/attending college, and/or didn’t bother to show up to most of the classes.

Don’t know about you, but those are not the traits I’d expect or want from someone whose job is to educate others…especially those in K-12.

Well, sometimes people get bad marks because they’re going through other shit.  I think it’s good for a teacher to know what it’s like to struggle with school or feel alienated by it; some of my worst teachers were people who had always been good at their subjects and had no idea how to teach kids who didn’t get it on the first try. 

I take your point generally; I just don’t think getting bad undergrad marks is automatically a sign of laziness or incompetence.

I’d rather have the cops involved in many cases because at least then kids have access to a judicial process, at least a judge, if not a jury.

Well, in theory.  In fact that access is pretty limited if you can’t afford a lawyer (which only some parents and virtually no children can), and zero tolerance policies don’t come out of nowhere: there’s a pretty intense streak of authoritarian child-hating in society generally, very much including the law.  I wouldn’t count on getting cops or judges to condemn even severe violence against children and teenagers, provided that violence was nominally for “discipline”.

I’d rather have the cops involved in many cases because at least then kids have access to a judicial process, at least a judge, if not a jury.

Yes, I agree—but that’s true for prisons, too.

”there’s a pretty intense streak of authoritarian child-hating in society generally, very much including the law”

Agreed
Alito ruled that strip searching a 10 yr old girl without even a warrant was fine, the Renquest court OK’d mandatory urine tests for the high school marching bands on the grounds that carrying a tuba while under the influence was equivalent to driving a train or operating heavy machinery

Well, sometimes people get bad marks because they’re going through other shit.  I think it’s good for a teacher to know what it’s like to struggle with school or feel alienated by it; some of my worst teachers were people who had always been good at their subjects and had no idea how to teach kids who didn’t get it on the first try.

I take your point generally; I just don’t think getting bad undergrad marks is automatically a sign of laziness or incompetence.

First, I’m talking about undergrads who maintained sub-par GPAs over their entire 4+ year undergrad career…not someone who has some Cs, Ds, or even Fs on his/her transcript. 

Maintaining a less than 3.0/4 level of undergrad performance is one which gives most employers hiring for entry level jobs, especially ones with promotional opportunities great pause due to concerns about perceived educational deficiencies/work ethic.*  They don’t want to risk the potential new hire making hash of an entry level job…especially one which requires some rigorous undergrad preparation.  IME, this is understandable as with the exception of harsh grading schools like MIT or UChicago, 3.0s are doable for nearly everyone who bothers to show up to more than half the class sessions, turns in most of the work, turns in work that’s passable…even if it is sometimes half-assed, has reasonable interactions with instructors, and/or is reasonably prepared to tackle course being taken/college level work. 

For someone looking to become educators, I’m not asking for straight 4.0 types(You’ve got a point there).....just competent solid students who have demonstrated basic level of mastery of the field they chose to major in.  A GPA below a 3.0 does not convey that message to me…or most folks, especially most employers and most graduate admissions committees with grad ed schools being a notable exception.  It is a sad commentary on our K-12 system when many of those who become educators or worse…educrats were themselves mediocre/subpar when they were students. 

* With the exception of relatives/friends of company owners/executives.

“Have any of these zero tolerance things ever been enforced on a white kid?”

My nephew. He got a “supercool Eskimo knife” from his grandparents when they took a cruise to Alaska. Took it to show his class as part of a history project and was promptly expelled.

For someone looking to become educators, I’m not asking for straight 4.0 types(You’ve got a point there).....just competent solid students who have demonstrated basic level of mastery of the field they chose to major in.

Good point; I would hate to imagine any child learning to write essays from the people who wrote most of the undergrad-level essays I’ve read.

I may not be completely relating to this because getting into teacher’s college in Canada is quite difficult these days, so the people who go there tend to have solid marks at least.