School administrators are scared of any controversy and potential litigation it may provoke. In the school where my wife teaches, a teacher was disciplined for comparing efforts to legalize same sex marriages to the struggle for the civil rights. How controversial can this be in a state that passed legislation legalizing same sex marriages by a popular referendum? Well, some crazy christer parents created ruckus and the administration caved in. Another public school teacher I know was forced out because she refused to change the grade of a student whose parents threatened litigation.
My wife tells me that such reactions of the administration are quite frequent, and the main reason is fear of litigation brought by crazy parents. Although such litigation is not guaranteed to succeed, it creates enough problems for the administrators, so they try to avoid anything that even remotely is controversial like the plague. Add to it the general political climate in which school teachers and their unions are scapegoats for every imaginable social problem and the media are trigger happy to launch a witch hunt - and you end up with outcomes as the one described in this article.
On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 11:09 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> http://news.yahoo.com/popular-seattle-teacher-forced-teaching-kids-racism-181200553.html
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-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."