Sorry--my wife and I are currently up to our necks in a bit of home construction, so I haven't had much time to devote to the blog. Please keep checking back, though. I won't be gone any longer than I have to, and I have a feeling some new voices will be checking in soon. Thanks so much to all of you who have been checking in so far!

 I'm noticing how much attention is being paid by the federal government the last few days to public education, and every time I hear something, I just have to grit my teeth and hope that somehow the public is going to suddenly snap awake and say, "Wait a minute! What in the world is the federal government doing trying to regulate something that belongs in the hands of state and local governments? How can they possibly think they can come up with federal regulations over something as widely varied in its needs from state to state, from community to community, as public education?" The last thing we need in education is even more bureaucracy, and nowhere is their greater and more hopelessly entrenched bureaucracy than in the federal government. Why is that such a big deal? Because bureaucracies are loaded with people who have to constantly justify their existence by doing something--instituting some innovative new program or other--whether such a program is beneficial to the institution these people are supposedly "serving" or not.

A perfect example of this comes from a conversation I had this morning with someone very dear to me. She was my student years ago; now she is a fellow secondary teacher in another state. She told me that one of the "programs" her district is pushing currently is a "bullying" campaign (of course, she explained, it's actually an "anti-bullying" campaign, but she says everyone keeps referring to it the other way). Under the terms of this well-intentioned and vitally needed program, teachers are directed to meticulously document every single instance of anything that could be in any way construed as an act of bullying. She says they were given a painstakingly thorough list of such acts in the directive from the district's administration, including, for example, a child announcing that he or she doesn't want a particular other child on his or her team. If such an act occurs, the witnessing teacher is required to write a complete report of the incident and submit it (two copies, I think she may have also said)  to the central administration, where it is going to be equally meticulously noted, documented, and God knows what else. Now, this well-meaning (ostensibly) administrator who designed this plan is just the sort of bureaucrat I'm talking about. In his or her zeal to address an enormous problem we see in our schools--bullying--and, it must be noted, in order to justify this person's existence near the top of the food chain, he or she comes up with a program so ridiculously full of overkill that it will actually serve the opposite purpose than it was intended. By requiring already overtaxed teachers to go to such preposterous lengths to document every instance that smacks of the tiniest hint of inequitous attitudes between middle schoolers, this brilliant bureaucrat is actually driving teachers to the point of letting increasing numbers of these incidents go unnoticed, lest they have to write more of these reports on top of all of the other things being heaped onto them outside of what would normally be called "teaching duties," thereby leading to a a greater likelihood of a proliferation of--you guessed it--incidents of real, honest-to-God bullying. And the administrator/bureaucrat whose brilliant idea actually exacerbated a serious problem rather than alleviate it? On the way up the district ladder, he or she gets to include on his resume the creation of a "comprehensive anti-bullying campaign."

I can't be certain, but I seem to remember once looking up the etymology of the word "bureaucrat," and I think it said it was derived from an ancient Greek word whose original meaning was "clueless, self-importantly officious little twerp who has an important-sounding job but doesn't have any idea how to do it."