Essential Madison school district supplies:
tasers and lawyers

Crime causes poverty

That’s what we shall call Madison public schools: the Schools of Unmet Needs.

More details emerged from the fight at East high school (we reported before anyone else) on Tuesday: two girls insisted on fighting each other, tumbling into the bushes of a neighborhood residence, whaling away on top of each other — despite the presence and admonitions of a police officer, who had to use a stun gun to stop them!

Preventing horse thievery

So the WI State Journal this morning reports the East high school principal saying: “It’s not as if it’s never occurred in the past, but there’s been a lot of activity in the past couple of weeks,” he said. 

“We are doing everything we can right now to identify what the needs of our students are and make meeting those needs a priority so that it doesn’t continue moving forward.”

Poor people have poor ways

May this failed school board candidate suggest that what those students need is some discipline? Yes, self-discipline must be taught, like reading and figuring.

Well we remember the black caucus delegate from Kansas City telling us, at the 1992 Republican national convention in New Orleans, “Poor people have poor ways.”

These fighting girls of East high are moving nicely through a pipeline to prison of their own making. Because, Blaska Policy Werkes repeats for the umpteenth time: Crime Causes Poverty!

Which is what two academics writing for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal under the headline, “Behavior Matters; Why some people spend their lives in poverty and social dysfunction.”

If you allowed your Readers Digest subscription to lapse, here is what journalists call The Nut Graph:

“The ingredients to living a meaningful life involve self-restraint,
tenacity, and personal responsibility.”

If Madison schools did nothing but teach that, the achievement gap would evaporate like spit on a griddle. 

If you’re a victim you’re not to blame

“Activists on the left,” the authors of “Behavior Matters” note, “prefer to disconnect an individual’s behavior from his lot in life — whether it’s by obscuring the violence committed by criminals or blaming it on external forces, downplaying the aggression of problem students in public schools when they’re minorities and talking instead about the “school-to-prison pipeline,” or suggesting that the vagaries of chance explain individual success and failure.” 

In this way of thinking, implicit bias is invariably to blame … bad behavior, at least by certain favored groups, should be ignored, or, if not ignored, then explained away by diabolical social forces — poverty, in particular — that cause the bad behavior. This harms society and does nothing to help the people whom the Left claims to want to help, especially since its explanation is backward: poverty is far more often the outcome of bad behavior, not the cause of it.

Attention Muldrow and Mirilli:

The authors of “Behavior Matters” continue:

The contention that behavior matters … is what got law professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander in trouble with left-leaning colleagues. In a 2017 op-ed defending “bourgeois culture,” Wax and Alexander argued that traditional social norms provided people with the values and ways of acting that ultimately improved their lives. What were these recommended behaviors?

• Get married before having children and to stay married,
• Get an education,
• Be a good employee,
• Serve one’s country,
• Be neighborly and charitable,
• Avoid lewd public language,
• Respect authority, and
• Stay away from crime and drug abuse.

Isn’t this what you tell YOUR children? Why can’t our teachers do the same? But for progressives, police are the problem?

“Behavior Matters” gives the last word to economist Thomas Sowell: “The vision of the Left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom — whether black or white —  who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counter-productive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior.”

What do YOU think?