Carol rightly defends teacher unions for defending teachers against the mayhem against them by students in today’s classrooms. However, there is more to the story than standing up for those who, as Carol says, “defend teachers when no one else will.”
One also has to look to the courts. Thus, as Charles Sykes writes in Dumbing Down Our Kids: “The courts also drastically expanded student rights at the expense of the schools’ ability to maintain discipline…[A]s Gilbert Sewall later noted, [this was] ‘as powerful–and potentially destructive–as a lightning bolt.’”
Carol, we need also scrutinize this legal trend, which has undercut the rectitude of adults keeping order and has caused (as Sewall says) “’an adversarial relationship between apprehensive adults and empowered children.