Infinite Monkeys

This story is crazy. I can't beleive there has not been more done to this teacher.I know it is still early but she should be suspended at least at this point. It hurts me to know that a grown black woman would do this to a child that she knows has a disability and think that she did nothing wrong ..Well i guess it don't suprise me that much. I say segregation is the best thing for our country . And you can say im an uneducated redneck or whatever but you try living among black people as a white person .My sister and I were harrased all through school by black kids because of where i went to school black kids are raised racist and dislike white people i don't care who they are they all beleive we did them wron well i didn't do anything to you nor did any white person in this country it was along time ago and the jews were inslaved and put through way worse than any black person and the jews arn't standing around with there hand out saying there owed something get over and be good people. Quit trying to be thugs and drug dealers and killers and the white man isn't making it that you can't do no better than what your doing you are .your sucking the life out of our country and making each generation worse and worse .. I like hearing about black people killing each other everyday on the news cause we don't need you and i don't want you ..good day........i said good day : )

Oh, Johnson, this is just stupid. Come on, now. Matter of fact, I am a white person living among black people. I live in an unbelievably racially mixed neighborhood. And you know what? No problem. No problem at all.

Note, too, I made no reference to the teacher's race, although that information was easy enough to get. It's impossible to know the racial make-up of the class. The point of the story, really, is the stupidity and cruelty of a so-called educator who should have known better.

Thanks for the post, Ben. I'll add this as reason #794 why we homeschool our kids.

I'd like to blame this on reality television or something, but I'm afraid this is going to have to be filed under, "Some People Are Just Too Stupid To Be Put In Charge Of Anything."

I have been stewing over this story for about two or three days. I ran across a link, earlier this afternoon, that published the Police Department's incident report. I would encourage everyone to read it and decide for themselves what should happen.

http://www.slate.com/id/2192480/

Thanks for the link, Dee. Reading the document should make clear that Wendy Portillo made a terrible mistake. I understand her impulse to make an example of Alex Barton. He was a disruptive influence on her class. I even think that exiling bad actors is good policy -- even as it extends to elementary school kids. But Portillo decided to exile the wrong boy. She picked on the autistic kid. She acted cruelly against a child who could not possibly understand why he was punished as she chose to punish him. So Wendy Portillo needs to be fired, dishonored, shamed, exiled, whatever. Her mistake requires serious accountability.

we obviously need a federal bill to get cameras into all classes nationwide asap.

No, no cameras. But what about vouchers?

Without knowing the primary people involved in this incident directly, I don't feel anyone is fully able to make a fair assessment. Most people are tending to believe everything that Ms Barton said in the report, and much of that came from her own 5 year old troubled child. I am not so convinced of the full truth of it.

Vouchers? People have been talking about that since Reagan days, at least.

Well, John, we do have that police report, which Slate posted and which I linked to in a subsequent post. That provides quite a bit more context than the initial story that appeared in the TCPalm, but it didn't change my mind very much.

You are correct, of course, that incidents like this are often far more complicated than a 10- or 20-column inch news story can relate. But I still think the teacher, Wendy Portillo, stepped in it big time. There is very little about the modern, therapeutic nanny state and school system that I like, but there is one evolution that I can embrace whole-heartedly and that is the abolition of anachronistic public abasement of young children, such as the dunce cap. I don't much care what this boy did -- this was a needless humiliation. If Portillo wanted the boy to spend the rest of the day in the nurse's office, she could have sent him there without fanfare.

A note on vouchers: the idea, in fact, goes back to the 1960s. It was the brainchild of Milton Friedman. Where they've been tried, they've had some modest to good success. I'm not an unabashed supporter of vouchers, but they might have some uses. This Alex Barton story got me to thinking about free-market solutions for special education. Would vouchers be a viable option? I'm not sure -- just asking the question. I've got some research to do.

So, let's check the score here:

Vouchers - Modeled after an idea proposed by Milton Friedman
The US Public School System - Modeled after the Prussian school system

Based on that element alone, I'm going to have to say it's Vouchers: 1, Government Schools: less than zero.

More here.

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