Video of school board vote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Is_Awj4Pvg
Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went through public school here, and never suffered through anything worse than the general pettiness that is endemic to teachers and school administrators. There are problems with the American school system, but these outliers are not those problems. Heck, I remember in high school there was a huge protest over attempts to introduce minimum dress standards (e.g. no wife beater shirts, no spaghetti straps) in which…
My concern is not with the intention behind the survey. I believe that the intention was very good. My concern is the idea that a teacher reminding students that they are not under any obligation to complete the survey represents manipulation. Teachers are in a position of real power, there are a great many situations where are expected to do what their teacher tells them. It really is very important to be allowed to…
I'm failing to understand, are you saying the survey was manipulation or the teacher reminding the students of their fifth amendment rights?
How would debates about the US Constitution and its laws make you worried about the US? These are likely the same discussions and debates that many people from many different countries have over their local issues and/or laws. How is the US any different?
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went through public school here, and never suffered through anything worse than the general pettiness that is endemic to teachers and school administrators. There are problems with the American school system, but these outliers are not those problems. Heck, I remember in high school there was a huge protest over attempts to introduce minimum dress standards (e.g. no wife beater shirts, no spaghetti straps) in which…
1. FERPA information can be released in a "health" or "safety" emergency. 2. Records created by a designated official for the purpose of referring violations to police are not subject to FERPA. 3. Institutions have relatively broad power to designate people as school officials with legitimate educational interests, and thereby to designate who may receive FERPA-protected records. Some sources recommend to schools tha…
These cut in favor of the school, though.
1. FERPA information can be released in a "health" or "safety" emergency, but only for the immediate duration of the emergency, and only to "appropriate parties." Moreover, FERPA has a specific carve out for disclosing student health records to parents in the case of drug or alcohol abuse. Read together, the provision can be interpreted to imply that drug use is by itself not a "health" or "safety" "emergency" because otherwise the specific carve-out would be superfluous and statutes are interpreted to avoid making any parts superfluous.
2. Right, but this survey was created for the express purpose of evaluating student psychological health, not for referring violations to police.
3. The same advice notes that police with access to private student information can only disclose that information pursuant to FERPA. Moreover, in the case law there is an emphasis on keeping the separate "hats" of student resource officers separate.
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went through public school here, and never suffered through anything worse than the general pettiness that is endemic to teachers and school administrators. There are problems with the American school system, but these outliers are not those problems. Heck, I remember in high school there was a huge protest over attempts to introduce minimum dress standards (e.g. no wife beater shirts, no spaghetti straps) in which…
My concern is not with the intention behind the survey. I believe that the intention was very good. My concern is the idea that a teacher reminding students that they are not under any obligation to complete the survey represents manipulation. Teachers are in a position of real power, there are a great many situations where are expected to do what their teacher tells them. It really is very important to be allowed to…
> I think that the legal considerations here are a distraction.
To the extent that a teacher undertakes to teach something, he should do it correctly.
Remember the background context of this: there was notice and opt-out opportunities provided to parents in advance of the survey. The teacher then undertook to tell students that they had a right not to fill out the survey, not withstanding their exercise of the opt-out opportunity, as if it were a fact.
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#45"And students cannot incriminate themselves because, even if the district shared the information with police, police can't prosecute based on that, he said. They are only allowed to arrest students if they are harming other students, such as in a fight, or if the student is in possession of drugs or alcohol, Barshinger said." I'm not saying that the school had anything but the best intentions, but It does give them a…
And we're all just taking his word for it, and it's not the only potential for abuse of this information. Why should we trust the school or the private company is handling these non-anonymized surveys properly? What's the chain of custody?
Could these surveys ever come up in any kind of background check?
Their answer is don't worry about it, trust us.
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation needed.
Citation needed. I'm glad you asked. Schooling and Society: The Politics of Education in Prussia and Bavaria 1750-1900 Karl Schleunes (Oxford: Berg, 1989). (ISBN 0-85496-267-0). There are more good citations on the foundations of the current state-controlled school system where that citation came from. http://learninfreedom.org/school_state.html
Thanks for providing it while I was not available :)
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#47I worry that sitting here and reading the articles which turn up in HN each day that I am getting a very particular impression about life in America. Between this and Kiera Wilmot I feel genuinely horrified. Am I just seeing outliers here? Am I seeing frightening trend where children are needlessly criminalised (Kiera) or willfully (even if well intentioned) manipulated (my interpretation of this survey debacle)? Oth…
I went through public school here, and never suffered through anything worse than the general pettiness that is endemic to teachers and school administrators. There are problems with the American school system, but these outliers are not those problems. Heck, I remember in high school there was a huge protest over attempts to introduce minimum dress standards (e.g. no wife beater shirts, no spaghetti straps) in which…
Dryden didn't have time to hire a constitutional lawyer and hash out all the nuances on how the 5th amendment does or doesn't apply. He believed it did. To me it's pretty clear that it should apply here.
If we're all going to restrain ourselves from asserting what we think our rights are we might as well all give up.
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something happened in the past 10-20 years where teachers became the scape goats of the failing American education system. It might be related to the attacks on their unions and the privitization of education. I'm not totally sure. But regardless of your opinions on education privitization teachers are not regarded with the same reverence in American society that they once were.
Every teacher I know (and that's quite a few) shared this cartoon on FB recently: http://www.coreyshepherd.com/wp-content/uploads/Grades_Carto... Sad but true..
I can see both of those being true in previous years and today if one cares to look at what's going on. I can even provide an example.
My older daughter has problems with math. She doesn't like it and doesn't want to do it. Therefore, most of the problems she has with it I relate to her more than her teacher. I view it as a problem for both us as parents and her teacher to figure out ways to motivate her to try harder and to discover what problems she may have that we can work on.
On the other hand, she's a really good reader. She loves to read books and often does so without any outside motivation. When we moved to our current school district my daughter was tested for reading on a computer using software she had never seen before and was rated as a poor reader. We disagreed with this result and told the teacher that likely the problem lay with the system that she had never seen before. In her previous year in another school and at home she's a self-motivated reader that is slightly above average for her age group. The teacher stuck with the results and placed her in a lower reading group, where she quickly outpaced the other students in the group. Thankfully, after a few months, she was moved up into an appropriate group for her reading level. In that case I fully fault the teacher in that because she went with an automated system telling her what to do, didn't do an informal test of her own, and ignored her parents on the matter. Later the teacher even suggested that the sudden and large improvement in her reading was due to their reading programs at the school. The conspiracy theory part of me thinks it was intentional so that her reading scores would show a huge improvement through the school year.
You do have to keep that cartoon in mind as a general kind of thing because otherwise it suggests that there is no such thing as a bad teacher.
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#49I worry that sitting here and reading the articles which turn up in HN each day that I am getting a very particular impression about life in America. Between this and Kiera Wilmot I feel genuinely horrified. Am I just seeing outliers here? Am I seeing frightening trend where children are needlessly criminalised (Kiera) or willfully (even if well intentioned) manipulated (my interpretation of this survey debacle)? Oth…
Those are extreme examples of normal stuff, and that have been normal since schools (not educational institutions) were invented. The idea for schools (with that name) came from Prussia (ie: Germany when they had a king), they noticed that their soldiers were not keen in defending their government, not patriotic, and fled from the battlefield upon hearing gunfire. Someone then invented the "Prussian Model" of educati…
It's true that the U.S. did model some of its public education on the Prussian model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
But there's a lot of conspiratorial libertarian agenda in your comment.
American schools existed before that (and were called "schools", it's a very old word), they were just influenced by the Prussian model. The part that Americans liked was the view that all were entitled to an education in a public school system with a universal educational curriculum, thus democratizing education. As it was adopted they modified it to suit American ideals and needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_Uni...
Also, school (technically σχολή/"scholé") in Ancient Greek means "leisure." Since learning and study were leisure activities, the term evolved in Greek and Latin into the word for learning in the ancient world, while the English term "school" has meant a place of learning and study since the Middle Ages. Arguments from etymologies are virtually always the flashing red light of terrible history.
Re: Batavia school board disciplines teacher after Fifth Amendment survey flap
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are getting it wrong (disclosure - I do not live in the US). Everything you read in the news is outlier in a sort. With 30 million kids in tens of thousands of schools you are guaranteed to get a few cases of something "stupid and abusive from the administrators" daily. After all - a normal school day with no events hardly makes a headline. And with the power of the internet some local news get much more national…
>Everything you read in the news is outlier in a sort. Indeed. Otherwise it wouldn't be news. Anything you see in the news is automatically not worth being afraid of. Your life will be ruined by something mundane, car accidents, cancer etc.
A good example of this irrational fear of what's in the news is the recent studies showing that many people in the US think the crime and/or murder rate is up when in fact it's down.
Too many times I see people from other countries, and the US too come to think of it, assume that every street corner in the US is a scene from a wild west movie with everyone shooting it out because someone said the wrong thing. Well, maybe parts of Chicago.
I guess they get this from what they hear on the news from the US and their own countries. Seems to me that today is likely the safest I have ever been in my lifetime in the US.
As you say, my biggest fear for myself and my family is a car accident.