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Arizona Ponders FCC Decency Standards For the Classroom
einhverfr writes "Eugene Volokh has posted an interesting discussion of a bill that has been introduced in Arizona, which would tie public school educator conduct to the FCC standards for decency for radio and television. The bill is essentially a three strikes system, firing teachers if they violate FCC standards three times. While the goal of the bill may seem reasonable, the details strike me as silly."
There's no need to bring this puritanical nonsense into the classroom.
Any good high school teacher should be able to say "you guys need to get your shit together" in good conscience. If, on the other hand, a genuinely bad teacher is abusive towards students, this is a job for the parents and school administration to handle rationally.
There are already enough rules handed down to schools by politicized bureaucracies to make education a nightmare, why add to the burden with further insanity from the FCC?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Censorship must start early in life, that's the first rule of government running propag... education system.
You can't handle the truth.
... it's hard to know where to even start. But possibly the absolute worst is at the end of Paragraph B:
B. For the purposes of this section, "public school" means a public preschool program, a public elementary school, a public junior high school, a public middle school, a public high school, a public vocational education program, a public community college or a public university in this state.
(emphasis mine)
For K-12 teachers, okay, I can kind of see this, although the penalties seem Draconian and I'm willing to bet that they already have in-school codes of conducts that prohibit swearing in the classroom. But are they actually saying that this is going to apply to professors in a classroom full of people who are legally adults? To discussions of literature containing the word "fuck"? To research faculty in their labs? Seriously?
Apparently the bill's sponsor, Lori Klein, showed off her gun by aiming it at a reporter a while back. That tells you everything you need to know about the mentality of the people behind this. They're completely insane. Um, apeshit, if you will. And they're growing in power all over the country.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You can already say "Shit" on TV if I recall, ....
Not in the States.
Anyway, I can assure everyone that this will pass?
Why?
Think of the children! mentality.
All you need is one uptight parent who doesn't want their little snowflake exposed to those horrible words and they'll have the school administrators shaking in their boots.
How are these goals in any way reasonable?
That is an idiotic example. Hurting students or otherwise inappropriately taking advantage of them leads to a fine or prison.
This is a level where the school need not and _should_ not be involved, criminal prosecution is none of their business.
And I really doubt it is hard to fire someone who is in prison and can't come to work.
Also that the court process cost "millions of dollars" has nothing to do with teachers but only with a completely and thoroughly dysfunctional US court system, which basically tried to find anything that could be done wrong and then implemented it.
While the goal of the bill may seem reasonable,
This is the Arizona Republican Party we are talking about here. Of course the goals of this Bill are not reasonable.
I can only guess that teachers in Arizona are not in the habit of ripping off nipple shields... so what is this really guarding against? Bad language? Most teachers have to look up the curse words of kids.
No, this isn't about teachers mis-behaving. This is about art, sexual education and the "wrong" kind of books. There are plenty of parents who want to sanitize all education so that little Timmy doesn't learn anything that might upset his parents and this is the way to do it. Don't bother banning books, art or subjects, simply say that undecent things are not allowed and then watch teachers censor themselves to not loose their jobs.
Real nice.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...the mines and the teachers. This is a swift kick to the latter's. Unions are only as strong as their cash boxes are deep. Force the Arizona teacher's unions to start defending members in court against something as wide open to interpretation as FCC decency standards, and that will drain the cashbox very quickly. A brilliant tactic on the part of the union busters; Arizona has long been a "right-to-work" state (read: anti-union) and this will effectively take the teacher's union out of the game if it gets through the legislature.
Tenure is there largely to protect educators' ability to teach effectively.
While there are downsides to the system, the upshot is we have teachers who are partially shielded from political or cultural sway so they can decide a curriculum based on reason rather than the popular flavor of the season.
You can talk about introducing a merit based system, but all this will do is create a popularity contest where effectiveness is measured by how well an educator can mimic whatever is currently in vogue.
You could say the teaching environment suffers when there's a teacher at a school, and they're not very good at what they do, but what about every single teacher at a school being selected based on an artificial politicized ideal? That would be downright frightening, if you ask me.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will