According to an article By BRUCE SCHREINER of the Huffington post, The Kentucky mother of an autistic boy, Christopher Baker, who says he was stuffed in a duffel bag for misbehaving in class has pulled her son out of school. Baker says she saw her son in a bag Dec. 14. The case has spurred an on-line petition calling for the firing of school employees responsible.
The article further goes on to explain how she pulled her son out of the school and will home school him, until the school officials responsible for the abuse are fired and the school is better equipped to handle children with developmental disabilities.
I find this sort of thing utterly appalling. I have 2 children that have learning disabilities and one that is hearing impaired. My military back ground in the infantry tends to make me very protectave of not just my children but children in general. I have got to commend this mother for keeping her cool. If I had seen my child in a bag and knew who was responsible for putting him in there, there would be one less teacher at least teaching unless he or she could do it in a wheelchair while drooling all over the place.
Honestly the saddest part of this story is, given the track record of our education system, if the teacher responsible has tenure there will be a paid suspension while an "investigation" is completed. Then the teacher will be transferred to another school in the district, end of story.
That is the problem with teachers k-12th grade levals having tenure. Tenure was originally adopted by universities as far back as the 19th century. Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics. Thus academic tenure is similar to the lifetime tenure that protects some judges from external pressure. Without job security, the scholarly community as a whole might favor "safe" lines of inquiry. The intent of tenure is to allow original ideas to be more likely to arise, by giving scholars the intellectual autonomy to investigate the problems and solutions about which they are most passionate, and to report their honest conclusions. In economies where higher education is provided by the private sector, tenure also has the effect of helping to ensure the integrity of the grading system. Without tenure, professors could be pressured by administrators to issue higher grades for attracting and keeping a greater number of students.[Reis, Richard. (1997) Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers in Science and Engineering. IEEE Press.]
The point I am trying to make here is that people that do things like this to kids should not be teaching, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The same people should also be given stricter sentences under the law because of the oath they take as teachers. I also feel that tenure should be left for the university professors that it was intended for. elementary school teachers should be retained on merit not tenure. We would have a much better education system here in America if the teachers jobs depended on there ability to teach children and not tenure. In some states teachers get tenure after just 2 years of teaching, and then it is next to impossible to fire them. this is just an invitation for substandard education, and substandard treatment for those children with some disabilities that are difficultto deal with such as autism and ADHD (attention deficit hyper-activity disorder.
The bottom line is our education system needs an enema. as far as I am concerned. It would help rout out some of the worthless poo, the likes of which would stuff a 9 year old 4th grader with autism into a duffel bag, "because he is hard to deal with".