He’s fallen far now, and seems to think that thrashing about in the muck will raise him up, rather than make him dirtier. He’s got an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal 🤮, titled “A Scientist’s Sexuality Shouldn’t Matter”. I agree, it shouldn’t, but we’re dealing with facts here rather than a disgruntled conservative’s feelings, and it does matter, unfortunately.
Krauss is upset because federal grant agencies ask applicants about various bits of demographic data.
The Survey of Earned Doctorates is an annual census of new postgraduate research degrees. The National Science Foundation, a federal agency, collects data on academic discipline, sex, race, ethnicity, debt burden, disability and citizenship. The results are used by government, universities and industry to track the demographics of women and minorities in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.
Well, yes, it’s a survey. That’s what surveys do. Krauss wants them to stop because — wait for it — sexism is over! According to a notorious sex pest, that is.
The sex and race data — the latter has been collected since 1975 — was initially useful in efforts to overcome barriers to women and minorities in academia. Those barriers have largely disappeared, yet quotas and preferential hiring have persisted. After such a concerted effort, demographic disparities are less likely to point to systemic biases in academia than to underlying societal factors.
That’s especially true when it comes to disparities of sex. Women earn a majority of postbaccalaureate degrees over all STEM disciplines in the U.S. Since female undergraduates outnumber male ones by about 3 to 2, this trend is likely to continue. Further, a recent large-scale study found that previous claims about sex bias in academic science were overblown. Tenure-track women and men in STEM receive comparable grant funding, journal acceptances and recommendation letters, and women have an edge in hiring.
What quotas? What preferential hiring? I’ve been in a lot of job searches over the years, and we’re told over and over by the administration that there are questions we can’t ask, and they’re all about avoiding bias. I’d agree that there are fewer biases in academia (but not no biases) because of policies Krauss doesn’t like, and that we’re dealing with larger societal factors, but academia is part of society, if you hadn’t noticed.
A good example of those societal factors: undergraduate women outnumber men, especially at liberal arts colleges like mine. Is this a good thing? Nobody thinks so. It’s not at all because we preferentially admit women — please, high school men, do apply and come to UMM, we love you all — but because when universities stopped discriminating against women, many women saw a college education as a tool for escaping traditional roles. Liberal arts colleges also actively encourage students to explore new ideas, which is appealing if you want something more than a fast-track to a job.
Of course, to a white man the barriers are invisible, so they don’t exist.
Such personal matters are irrelevant to science and essentially invisible. In my 40 years in academia, I have worked with all sorts of colleagues and students. Many were highly eccentric, but that didn’t matter if they were good scientists. As one colleague put it: “You are teaching a chemistry or physics course. Your lectures describe concepts and present equations. ‘Suppose a magnet is moving relative to a loop of wire.’ You barely know any of your students. You give tests and grade them. You have no idea, nor care about, the ‘sexual orientation’ of any of your students. . . . What career barriers are there?”
What a blinkered ass…you might as well say, “no one is trying to rape me, therefore rape and sexual harassment are not a problem anywhere.” Which is just what a self-centered serial harasser would say.
I’m also appalled at the idea that a professor just lectures and gives tests and grades them and doesn’t need to know anything about their students. What university was this at? Krauss should have mentioned it so everyone would know to avoid it. Of course we are and should be aware of our students’ lives, to a degree. We invite deeper interactions than just talking at and grading them — I listen when students are struggling and try to help them resolve conflicts and issues.
I don’t even understand this factory-style approach to impersonal teaching.
Asking respondents if they’re “transgender,” “gender non-conforming,” “nonbinary,” “gender-fluid” or “genderqueer” is patently ridiculous. These are subjective categories, unobservable by others unless the person in question makes it a point to label himself publicly. Most scientists, like ordinary people, couldn’t even define most of these terms, let alone use them as a basis for discrimination.
You don’t need to define the terms, you just need to categorize your students and colleagues as highly eccentric
.
This is peak clueless offensiveness, though. Non-heterosexual identities are patently ridiculous
and mere subjective categories
? They matter to the people who have them, and what also matters is professors who so callously dismiss their lived identities. You know, the ones who think people who aren’t like them are not ordinary people
.
Jesus. Krauss is making me aware that we do discriminate. If we were interviewing a job candidate and they spewed out that stuff about how teaching is just about giving tests and grading them, calling gay and trans students eccentric
and patently ridiculous
, it’s true — there’s no way we’d hire them. We try not to employ assholes.
Also, we’d rather not hire stupid people. Krauss even quotes the goals of these agencies, but doesn’t understand them.
What’s the purpose of all this? Nature magazine paraphrases a statement from the NSF’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Charles Barber: “Collecting these data will help the NSF and other agencies to analyse employers’ policies and procedures for addressing unintended barriers to employment, advancement and inclusion.” The magazine then quotes Mr. Barber: “This gives us an opportunity to create more opportunities and broaden participation to yield equitable outcomes for the LGBTQIA+ community and others.”
Yes. Collecting data to detect “unintended barriers to employment, advancement and inclusion.” How would you know if an organization discriminates, unintentionally or otherwise, if you have no information about the population of a class known to be subject to bias? How would you know if an organization has successfully knocked down all barriers to advancement if you don’t look? Krauss is advocating willful blindness to abuse and harassment and bias…unsurprisingly, for a guy with his history. If those meddling kids hadn’t noticed and reported his behavior, he’d still have a job!
Does that mean quotas?
No.
If so, how would one even go about determining the “correct” proportion of “queer” or “genderqueer” scientists? The percentage of the population that espouses these labels is so small that any data the NSF gathers will be statistically useless.
The correct proportion is one that roughly matches the proportion in the general population, because that would indicate that there’s probably an absence of selective bias. That wasn’t so hard, Larry.
It’s kind of astonishing to see a physicist dismissing an event as insignificant because the frequency is too low. What happened to 5-sigma, Larry? Does the Higgs boson not matter because it’s so difficult to see that you have to spend billions of dollars to detect it? Most of the stars in the sky are not exploding, so why waste our time looking for novas? The frequency of stellar class A stars is only 0.63% — can we just ignore them, then? Heck, our sun falls into a group that makes up less than 8% of all stars. Must not be important, then.
You know we can detect all kinds of numbers if we just look. Here’s a result of the US census — over a million ‘eccentric’ people live in same-sex relationships.
We also know, because people looked at the data, that over 1.6 million ‘ordinary’ people are transgender, and that the proportion is rising as social barriers fall.
A study published on Friday estimates that nearly 1.64 million people over the age of 13 in the United States identify themselves as transgender, based on an analysis of newly expanded federal health surveys.
The study estimates that about 0.5% of all U.S. adults, some 1.3 million people, and about 1.4%, or 300,000, of youth between 13- and 17-years-old identify as transgender, having a different gender identity than the sex they were assigned at birth.
I really don’t understand this frequency based argument. Can we just ignore 1.3 million people, or worse, oppress and discriminate against them? They’re statistically useless, you know. It’s just that they are people.
Wow, Krauss has become a right-wing cartoon at this point.
Note the use of the default male by Krauss for a random hypothetical queer person.
Gee what biases? Bias is a thing of the past.
(/snark)
“These are subjective categories, unobservable by others . . .”
Undoubtedly one of the most serious bits of bias directed at transgender people: that we’re subjective, that transgenderism is not an objective phenomenon. The categories that we fall into, even if others can’t discern them, are no less objective than an individual’s particular nature. I could no more correctly declare myself non-binary than an Egyptian could declare himself Chinese.
“Most scientists, like ordinary people, couldn’t even define most of these terms, let alone use them as a basis for discrimination.”
Oh. If they can’t define us, they can’t discriminate against us. Mr. Whoever-You-Are, I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again: at this point it would be hard to say how many anti-transers I’ve encountered, either on-line or in person, and I have yet to encounter a single one who could tell you what a transgender person is. Every single person who discriminates against us or who would like to do so is unable to say what we are.
“Most scientists, like ordinary people, couldn’t even define most of these terms, let alone use them as a basis for discrimination.”
Apparently ““queer” or “genderqueer”” people, as he calls us, aren’t “ordinary people”…
The Krauss strategy: if you refuse to ask about people’s gender identity and orientation, then you can never collect evidence of bias!
Most non-physicists can’t define what quantum entanglement is, so I guess it’s a subjective idea that doesn’t really exist.
There is so much wrong with what Lawrence Krauss wrote that it is hard to know where to start.
A teacher in a lower division course of 200 students is unlikely to have any major say in the career choices and progress of those students.
That isn’t the teacher you have to watch out for though!!!You can be sure that at the upper division and graduate levels, the professors you deal with are going to know a huge amount you and some of them will be biased.
Nice mansplaining there, Krauss.
Shouldn’t you be asking the women and minorities about those barriers and biases though?. They are going to know a whole lot more about them then some famous cis het white guy.
A scientist is upset that someone is collecting useful data?
Krauss knew at one time that…science was all about collecting data.
Christ what an asshole
Got that wrong also.
Krauss is also oblivious that a huge number of scientists don’t work in academia any more. In biology, it is the biotech industry, and the computer and computer related fields that we call tech are major employers in the USA.
A friend of mine was interviewed by a startup biotech company a while back, early 2000s for a senior scientist position. They all but flat out asked if she was a lesbian and it was not an idle inquiry.
Her crime was being tall, athletic, middle aged, single, and childless.
She made a point of mentioning several times that she was divorced.
I see how this is a likely reason, but I wonder if it’s backed up by actual evidence. Do we know how much male high school seniors nowadays more often feel there are better opportunities elsewhere than college?
Does it matter where the bias comes from?
That’s the sort of claim that should have a reference, or a footnote.
raven@6–
Yep. I accept that there are fewer barriers today than, say, the 1950s, but the idea that the barriers have disappeared from academia is pure nonsense spouted by someone who has no personal experience of those barriers and doesn’t give a shit about learning from people who do. And it’s got to be ‘doesn’t give a shit’ rather than ‘optimistically naive’ because the evidence base for this is overwhelming. It is so galling to see self-described hardnosed scientists and skeptics simply refuse to acknowledge the mountainous pile of high quality research because it doesn’t align with their political views. Saying there are no longer barriers to minorities in academia is as fucking stupid as being a flat earther, and a lot more harmful.
And regardless of the research base, I have seen so many examples with my own eyes that it is impossible for me to believe that Krauss, who is older than me and spent a lot more time in academia, thinks these barriers no longer affect any of his students or colleagues.
Krauss’s article would have been stupid enough a few years ago. In the current climate, where conservatives are whipping up a shitstorm of retracting minority rights, banning minority works from libraries, gunning for minority professors, and inflaming violence against minorities, it is positively pathological.
Stay in your lane, Larry. Just like flat-earthers, Creationists, and other science deniers should shut up and listen to you regardless of it destroys their backwards beliefs, YOU need to shut up and listen to the expert social scientists in their field.
Asked if she was a lesbian? No, we can’t do that. We absolutely cannot ask a candidate if they’re married, if they have kids, what church they go to, how they vote, any potentially biasing questions that Krauss is worried about. Those kinds of questions might be asked on an anonymous survey, though.
We do ask about teaching styles, research projects, office policies, etc.
Who at the Wall Street Journal is deciding that notorious sex pest Lawrence Krauss rates an Op/Ed?
Quoting for truth. Well said.
Quoting #11. chrislawson for truth that is..
Tangent – whatever happened to so-called (ok, never really there but) “Compassionate conservatism?”
Anyone else recall that? Back when the regressive science denying wing of politics had to pretend with at least a thin veil not to be complete and utter, red faced, mouth-foaming, hate spewing, ranting and raving outright bigots?
#16, from its wiki page:
@ ^ imback : Thanks. There’s a wikipage? Huh. Of course there is :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassionate_conservatism
I shoulda checked first.. Dóh.
Maybe Krauss is trying out to replace Tankie Carlson…?
There have been compassionate conservatives, although they didn’t have the poor taste to call themselves that. In Canada, they were called ‘Red Tories’. Bill Davis, the Ontario premier from 1971 to 1985, comes to mind. His legacy was flushed down the toilet by Mike Harris, and many other of the douchebags who came to dominate conservatism in the 1990s.
Hugh Segal is another. He’s been a champion of the universal basic income for years.
Frequency-based arguments are beloved of antivaxxers, too. After all, if COVID-19 “only” kills, say, 3 out of 1,000 people infected, to antivaxxers it’s basically harmless and no vaccine is needed The same argument was made about MMR and the measles, not coincidentally, because measles “only” kills about one in a thousand children that it infects.
ah yes, “what barriers?” says a person whose gender identity, race, sexuality and nationality have never been a stumbling block.
re: tech industry, i know for a fact that i was subject to employment discrimination for being trans–i have a statement from a person who was there when the decision was made to not hire me specifically for that reason.
They also just make up their numbers as well.
“Covid-19 virus has a 99.9% survival rate.”
The actual case fatality rate for a naive population was 1.6% or 1.6 people out of hundred infected ended up dead.
For a nation of 333 million people, that would have been around 5 million Americans.
To put this in perspective, we lost 58,000 in Vietnam and 3,000 during the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.
The vaccines saved an estimated 3 million US lives.
It also completely ignores the 10% who ended up with long Covid syndromes. My friend got it in March 2020. She is still sick with a syndrome that her doctors have no idea how to treat.
So if my subjective category that comes with a different awareness of intense language bothers Krauss I guess I can ignore his unobservable feelings? It’s like some of these things are related to how attention and subjective feeling works and his view will undermine him at some point.
From there one can see their mistake, or seek allies against kinds of humans developmentally speaking. I’ll definitely be coming up with disparagement and shaming for the second.
I have a different read of what he said.
Translation: Many are sexual harassing, rapey creeps, but that didn’t matter if they were good scientists.
Indeed, I can pretty much turn his arguments around and they’d literally be an attempt to defend Josef Mengele.
Still, there is a harsh irony here, a biologist correct a physicist in a glaring math error.
That’s gotta burn!
Off topic rant incoming. Sorry.
I would argue that knowing the source of the unjust bias and point of action of the unjust bias would help us create better policies to address and fix the unjust bias.
I’m personally not the biggest fan of affirmative action benefits and quotas at university admission alone. I would want to look into the reasons for disparities in test results, and to the extent that the test results reflect real ability to achieve success in university, I’d like to know the reasons for those disparities. Being married to a new teacher, and learning more about what I already knew about primary and secondary education in the US, I think there’s a lot more that we could and should be doing at that level.
For starters, all school funding should come from the state and be equally assigned per pupil, with reasonable cost-of-living adjustments for staff in different areas, and based on taxes, etc., and public schools should be forbidden from receiving funding or gifts from cities, counties, or the local bake sale fundraiser. I’ve learned too much about how the different sleazy ways that rich people spend more money on their own children’s education at the cost of the education of other children in poor and minority areas. (Ideally this funding would be national, but then we have “enumerated powers” constitutional headaches to deal with.)
I’d also ban all voucher systems that allow diverting money from public schools to private and quasi-private schools. — I don’t think I’m quite ready to advocate for banning private schools (yet), but I’m very ready to say that they should still be required to pay for public schools even if they don’t use them.
I’ve been exposed to a lot of the “interesting” ideology that controls modern university-level pedagogy in America, and some of it is just wrong, and it lies behind the IMO wrong-headed view that any policy with racially disparate impact is automatically wrong and verboten. Specifically, I’d get rid of “no child left behind”, and I’d start allowing school admin a little more leeway to suspend and expel persistent unreformable troublemakers, and to allow school admin to force severely underperforming students to repeat the same grade, in spite of disparate racial impact that it might have. I think that in our quest to forbid any policy with apparent disparate racial impact, we’ve destroyed some of our schools in minority areas where lack of discipline problems make it impossible to teach. My wife as a student teacher has personally seen a student in middle school attack another student, causing them to go semi-blind in one eye for several days and to be in a neck brace for at least a week, and for that attacker student to be back in the same class next week with their victim still in the neck brace, and the school admin can’t or won’t do anything about it because of their fear of coming up on the state’s disparate racial impact numbers for suspensions and expulsions. And this in spite of the attacker student having a long prior history of violent behavior.
In this case, the fix is worse than the disease IMHO; keeping the violent and super disruptive students in class has a severe negative impact on the other students in the school.
And again, please, let’s have some restorative justice in the classroom, but restorative justice can only be one part in the “carrot and stick” approach. Students with a pattern of violent behavior (or extreme singular cases of violent behavior) need to be removed from the normal classroom. Students with a severe pattern of disruptive behavior in the classroom, after extensive attempts at restorative justice and other approaches, also need to be removed from the classroom.
Separately, I’m super annoyed about the ideology permeating pedagogy today where it’s quite expressly said that the teacher can never say that it’s the student’s fault, nor the student’s parents’ fault; the rules of the EdTPA are that if you say anything like that for your EdTPA, then you should receive an automatic failing grade for that section. I appreciate what they’re trying to achieve with the rhetoric because too many teachers give up too quickly on their students (often for racially biased reasons) when they haven’t tried everything, but it’s ridiculous to say that the parents don’t have significant responsibility and impact on the academic achievement of the child.
My wife can’t discipline her class effectively because all she can do is send the disruptive student to the principal’s office for the day. No suspension. No expulsion. No matter how repeated. And because she got placed in a bad school for her student teaching, and because she lacks the necessary tools for classroom management, she actually failed one of her rounds of student teaching with the mentor teacher saying that she needs to try other tricks to maintain their attention, which she already does a lot. It’s perverse to blame the teacher in this case IMO. When she was placed in a different school for her repeat student teaching, she had no problems.
/rant
That presupposes the absence of a non-environmental biasing factor. People like Krauss expect that this factor explains the status quo. It’s the old “I’m not sexist, it’s just that women can’t math” canard. I don’t believe there’s anything to it, but I’m a little troubled by the lack of good evidence either way.
(Of course in the absence of good evidence, we should accept the null hypothesis that there is no difference between the groups)
@27–
There is a wealth of evidence that women, ethnic minorities, sex and gender minorities, etc. are just as good at math as straight white men and that the differences in career path are due to systematic bias.
Here’s a recent systematic review of the evidence to get you started. And here’s a large (n=580,000) cross-sectional study.
If you only read one paragraph, this is the one:
So women are good enough at math and science to be half of all STEM graduates, almost exactly their proportion in the population, and yet less than a third go on to have careers in STEM. And it’s not because of lack of talent.
And of the research looking at why women leave STEM careers also shows that the main problem is systematic bias. Again, if you want to look at one single graph this is the one. There is simply no way this graph can be explained by women being innately worse at math/science.
@22. Ada Christine : “re: tech industry, i know for a fact that i was subject to employment discrimination for being trans–i have a statement from a person who was there when the decision was made to not hire me specifically for that reason.”
That’s awful and my sympathies. I don’t know what the anti-discrimination laws are like where you are & you may have considered and looked into this already but any chance you could take some sort of legal action over that?
GerrardOfTitanServer @ # 26: Students with a pattern of violent behavior (or extreme singular cases of violent behavior) need to be removed from the normal classroom.
This reminds me of a friend’s kid, who would lose control and get violent in class, to the point of expulsion. In a different and (I think ironically) more “conservative” city – thus a different school district – with a little counseling and trial-&-error they found out this kid had attention-span issues, and couldn’t handle the same subject for the standard time between bells. Given 20/25-minute lessons, the same kid now thrives, with high grades.
Why should the other students have their right to physical body safety be sacrificed for this singular child while they search for a solution that does not exist?
I’m willing to grant some time depending on the level and amount of the violence, but one student’s right to education should not trump the right of the other 20 students to avoid being so seriously injured as to require a neck brace for several days.
That *might not exist
My comment was intended to highlight the difference between finding solutions and imposing punishments.
Sorry if that doesn’t work for you.
@28 chrislawson
Let me offer one datapoint from several years ago. It regards a 36 yo Asian female with a masters in civil engineering that I met. She was working for the Houston regional office of TXDOT. A little background though. About 20 years ago the Houston metro, in one of the road building trade pubs, acquired the distinction of being the benchmark standard for road and infrastructure planning, build out and management. The distinction was good for the county who at that time had built the tollways but thefreeway infrastructure is the responsibility of TXDOT.
As an engineer myself I was naturally interested in her career. She immediately informed that she planned to leave her job for another career, I forget what. I asked her why, and the first thing out of her mouth was a complaint about working with hyper-aggressive male engineers; and especially difficult for her were meetings with these guys. She even imitated their body language and vocal style in her telling.There was no hint of anything sexual in her complaint, the problem was her lack of enthusiasm and comaraderie on the level that the guys were expressing.
Now we can complain about alpha males in the workplace all we want, and come up with all kinds of remedies to make women feel more accepted in STEM. But how about just letting guys be guys when it comes to being creative and building the astounding structures we all depend upon? I use this amazing infrastructure every day and I appreciate what guys do to make it happen including the construction crews which are invariably guys also. But somehow it’s much less of a problem that women are way ‘unrepresented’ in the construction trades. We never complain that women don’t open enough plumbing businesses, don’t own enough lawnmower repair shops, etc.
groovimus, so you met one stereotype and from that asume that the TXDOT couldn’t be even better with female input. Do you have a disabled black friend too?
Pierce
Removing an extremely violent student from school is not a punishment. It’s a method to protect the other students. Again, they matter too.
Gerrard… @ # 36 – But the solution actually found benefitted all concerned, not just the majority population.
Simple removal would have just postponed the problem, with the now-successful child growing to an adult menace to the others.
You’re assuming that there is a solution in the first place, which I find objectionable.
Also, you’re putting the other children at risk in the meantime. No one knew it would work. And presumably they didn’t just arrive at this conclusion immediately, meaning that the other kids were put at risk while they were throwing possible solutions at the wall to see what sticks. I know that if I was a parent of another child in that class, I would be pissed. The child should be removed from the classroom until a solution is found. That is the best approach on whole for everyone. What’s wrong with that? This is Clockwork Orange levels of madness, forcing classroom students to be guinea pigs in repeated experiments to see what methods of behavior alteration might work on the violent student. If there was a violent adult, we don’t allow the violent adult to wander the streets while the doctors experiment to see what might help control their violent outbursts. That would also be madness. Why do children have less rights to personal bodily safety than adults?
Students with a pattern of violent behavior (or extreme singular cases of violent behavior) need to be removed from the normal classroom. Students with a severe pattern of disruptive behavior in the classroom, after extensive attempts at restorative justice and other approaches, also need to be removed from the classroom.
Removed to…where? If there’s an alternative setting where such kids can be educated (not just imprisoned or warehoused, mind you), then fine, send them there — hopefully with some real attempt to actually figure out what the problem is. Violent or not, difficult or not, they’re still kids, and adults — individually, institutionally and as a civil society — are still obligated to take care of them and prepare them to function responsibly in the society in which we’re raising them.
Why should the other students have their right to physical body safety be sacrificed for this singular child while they search for a solution that does not exist?
How the fuck do you know a solution “doesn’t exist?”
You’re assuming that there is a solution in the first place, which I find objectionable.
Why is that more “objectionable” than the opposite assumption — or whatever actions (or non-actions) it would lead to?
There was no hint of anything sexual in her complaint, the problem was her lack of enthusiasm and comaraderie on the level that the guys were expressing.
She flat-out told you the problem was one thing; and you then told us the problem was something else. Do you really think “hyper-aggressive” = “camaraderie?” They’re really not the same thing.
But how about just letting guys be guys when it comes to being creative and building the astounding structures we all depend upon?
Or, how about reminding guys that they can still be guys, and still do good work, while behaving more respectfully toward each other and toward women on their teams? Seriously, would you have the same reaction if it was a guy who had to work with obnoxious assholes while trying to do his part in “being creative and building the astounding structures we all depend upon?”
You do know that being rude and obnoxious toward coworkers is generally considered a fireable offense, right?
…I appreciate what guys do to make it happen including the construction crews which are invariably guys also.
“Invariably?” I call bullshit. I’ve seen quite a few women on construction sites.
The child should be removed from the classroom until a solution is found.
Sure, Gerrard; here’s a little anecdote to show where that mindset is likely to lead:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2023/04/28/tjjd-in-our-name/
Raging Bee in 42
False dichotomy.
Raging Bee
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few who are putting others into neck braces and permanently damaging their vision through their violent attacks on top of a long history of violent behavior.
While your #42 is a false dichotomy, the difference between us is that in extreme cases, when everything else has failed, I am ok with putting extremely violent kids in the equivalent of state prison (ideally focused still on rehabilitation) until such time that they show that they can reenter society safely. It seems you think the better approach is to keep them in normal school while they continue to severely injured other students with their outbursts which is simply beyond the pale for me.
…the difference between us is that in extreme cases, when everything else has failed, I am ok with putting extremely violent kids in the equivalent of state prison…
Actually, the entire thrust of your comments has been about putting kids in “the equivalent of state prison” before ANYTHING has been tried. Here are your own words: “The child should be removed from the classroom until a solution is found.”
Also, my citation @42 is not a “false dichotomy;” it’s a fucking anecdote about the visible consequences of your undue haste to separate and isolate “problem” kids without sufficient thought to what can or should be done to resolve the problems.
And getting back to your initial rant:
I think that in our quest to forbid any policy with apparent disparate racial impact, we’ve destroyed some of our schools in minority areas where lack of discipline problems make it impossible to teach.
Is it really “liberal ideology” that’s “destroying some of our schools?” Or is it Republitarians who never wanted to spend any money on educating even the “normal” kids, let alone anyone with unusual needs or problems? I notice you said “some of our schools,” not all of them, so that should serve as a hint that it’s not “liberal ideology” that’s the problem, it’s Republitarian-driven disinvestment and defunding of public education. So do us all a favor, cut the tired old refrain about “liberal ideology destroying our schools,” and start looking at what your own side are doing — or rather, adamantly and childishly refusing to do — in this area.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…
Wow, did someone say “false dichotomy?” The problem with that sort of thinking (one of the problems anyway) is that we can’t necessarily predict which of “the many” might one day become one of “the few” or when that might happen or what/who might cause that to happen. And as Pierce @30 pointed out, isolating a “problem” child doesn’t always help in finding out where/what the problem is, and in many cases may only make the problem worse, or make us unable to identify it.
I don’t care if isolating the problem child doesn’t allow us to identify what we can do to fix the problem if the alternative entails incurring substantial risk of substantial permanent injury to other children in the process. Having another child be permanently blinded for life or paralyzed for life is simply not worth it.
As I wrote in my earlier post, the law titled appropriately enough “no child left behind” is a problem and needs to be removed. Some children do need to be left behind. We can’t save everyone.
Your lack of concern for the physical well-being of everyone else to maybe help the worst of the worst problem children is horrifying.
PS:
Not in California Bay Area it’s not.
Your lack of concern for the physical well-being of everyone else to maybe help the worst of the worst problem children is horrifying.
Your extreme hyper-emotional and blatantly dishonest rhetoric is beyond ridiculous. (“Clockwork Orange levels of madness?” Really?) As Taylor Swift might say, “you need to calm down.” Or as Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson might say, “go the fuck to bed.”
Also, there’s no “California Bay Area.” Read a fucking map some day.
And I see nothing of substance to respond to.