NYC Educator: The School Safety Shuffle

NYC Educator: The School Safety Shuffle

The School Safety Shuffle

There's a recent Post article that suggests it's a bad idea to take school security from the police and assign it to the DOE. They trudge out Mona David and her mysterious parent organization, and offer two examples of bad behavior before the officers were under the supervision of NYPD. David, of course, is the woman who thinks teacher tenure will lead us to Armageddon. I'm sure she's good for a quote here and there.

The two examples are the kind of argument frequently used against us. This teacher is awful, and that teacher is awful, and therefore all teachers are awful. It's exactly the sort of argument people like Campbell Brown and Mona David like to use. Take away teacher tenure, and have them depend on the tender mercies of Joel Klein and Mike Bloomberg, or every single teacher will be terrible. They take a few sensational examples, a quote here or there from one questionable source or other, and the case is closed.

I don't know about you, but I could tell stories about rogue police officers and write a similar story. I could cite examples of rogue reporters and write a similar story. We have a President who tells stories about reporters who tell the truth and condemns them for it. If you want to make an argument against a group, you don't do it effectively via a few sensational arguments about outliers. Arguments of that sort are called stereotypes. I'm offended by them, and you should be too. They can be used against any and all of us.

Will the DOE do a terrible job supervising school safety officers? Of course they will. The DOE does a terrible job at everything. It's a monument to blithering incompetence, a master of bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake. I don't know how much time I've wasted over the last decade fighting with idiots employed by Tweed. Any chapter leader who CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: The School Safety Shuffle