Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's actually very difficult to fire a public school teacher in the US. Take, for example, the case of Freshwater. Not only did he repeatly ignore the curriculum, but he used his position as a teacher to preach his religious views to the class, and then *repeatly burned students*. Yes, he actually branded them. Used the science equipment to physically injure them. You might think that if a teacher does that he'd be fired on the spot, but it actually took months of paperwork and reviews to get him fired - and then he appealed it in a legal battle that cost the school millions of dollars.
I picked him out because he should be well-known to the slashdot crowd, but this isn't a liberal-vs-conservative thing. There are plenty of teachers from both sides who like to use their position to advance their own agenda (It's why some of them become reachers) and a lot who are simply incompetant. They are just very difficult and very expensive to get rid of. Teachers have some very powerful unions, and have used that power to achieve incredible job security.
So think.. what would schools really like to help manage their teachers? How about some rule that is hard to obey, ideally so convoluted that you'd need a lawyer just to work out what it permits, and for which offenders can be promply sacked? The FCC standards are ideal. Hard to even figure out, and it only takes a momentary lapse of thought to violate them. The law appears to have no right of appeal, no board review. It's just written for selective enforcement. If the management wants to continue employing a teacher, they can just turn a blind eye to the occasional bit of mild profanity... but if they want rid of a teacher, all they need to do is wait. When the rules are so difficult to follow, everyone will slip up sooner or later. Indecency becomes the perfect excuse.
Exactly what that results in would just depend on the school. It might be used as a quick-and-sneaky way to fire inept teachers without having to go through years of reviews and appeals, which is good. But equally it might be used for ideological clensing, so management can more easily stock the school with a staff who will indoctrinate the students into their own political agenda.
How are these goals in any way reasonable?
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.
Will they get someone in the classrom with a beeper who will beep over those words? That would be awsome!
America, land of the free and home of the brave
Teachers' Unions.
Firing a teacher for anything short of driving their car into the school while drunk and getting a hummer from the head cheerleader is nearly impossible because of them.
Tell that to the 22,000 California teachers laid off last year.
Education is consistently targeted for cuts during this recession, and people keep insisting teachers have it easy.
Wake up. It's our kids that are going to suffer.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
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
Firing != laid off
The two are synonymous. Look it up, if you don't believe me.
It depends on your dictionary, as with all questions of semantics. However, the point being made boils down to this:
"Firing" is referring to what happens when an employee is dismissed for something they have done, e.g. driving a car through the school while drunk.
Being "laid off" is what happens when an employee is dismissed because they are surplus to requirements and is commonly called "being made redundant" where I'm from (compared with "being sacked").
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Having survived many layoffs I will tell you that this is incorrect. Layoffs are a way to release a person, for any reason, without having to follow the usual guidelines for termination. This allows companies to not document wrong doings, and to let people go for personal reasons. It is usually done under the guise of resource reduction, but in many cases those laid off employees are replaced with in a years time.