Remember when?
After sitting down with the two candidates for the one contested Madison WI school board seat, a respected citizen suggested Blaska quit picking on Bret Wagner. We will but not today.
The candidate asks: “Did you know 50% of Madison students read below grade level, including 75% of latino students and 90% of black students?” Yes, we’ve done our homework. The candidate vows, “I’ll make reading proficiency Job #1.” Like the class wisenheimer, we asked: How, exactly?
Awaiting an answer, the Lovely Lisa unearthed her high school student handbook from 1964 — the year the Beatles hit our shores. She attended Milwaukee Pius XI, a Catholic school named after a Pope (1922 to 1939). We compared her handbook to today’s equivalent in Madison WI public schools — it’s called the Behavior Education Plan — for possible lesson plans.
Pius XI taught respect. “A student should rise when a teacher enters a room.”
Lisa’s school expected proper behavior. Madison public schools’ Behavior Education Plan, fearing the dread curse of disproportionality, reads like it expects a civil rights lawsuit. The BEP is as dense as a statute book, hectored with more due process than an ACLU-litigated consent decree. Forget the church/state argument: We found no explicit Catholic doctrine in the Pius XI handbook. Didn’t demand belief in transubstantiation or the Virgin Birth.
It’s in here somewhere …
Madison’s BEP 2025 lists 47 offenses under 16 general headings like “Firearms,” “Sexual contact,” and “Fires/Explosives.” Each offense is arrayed on five levels of seriousness, with only the 5th meriting suspension.
Interventions range in intensity and are situational. The table to the right shows that there are often layers to the approach. When a specific student behavior does not change using the lowest identified level of intervention and/or discipline, or the behavior increases in frequency, intensity, or duration, the next level of intervention and/or discipline is used. — Madison public schools’ Behavior Education Plan
Got that, counsellor? Pius XI in 1964 did not think it necessary to address student firearms, bombs, or sexual assault. Or require “layers to the approach.” Closest the Milwaukee Catholic school came to itemizing offenses was this:
The principal and deans may suspend a student for truancy, theft, smoking …. willful damage to school property, or for bad morals. The principal may expel a student for open and repeated defiance of authority, etc. … It would be impossible and it should be unnecessary to translate this standard and list all that it permits or forbids.
Yes, it is impossible and should be unnecessary because “Students are expected to conduct themselves as young ladies or young gentlemen at all times.” Does anyone even know what those terms mean any more?
Students wore uniforms
Which meant that teenaged Lisa didn’t have to compete with the rich kids. “If girls desire some kind of ornament, one award pin may be worn on the blazer lapel. Excessive make-up is in bad taste.”
“School uniforms are being adopted by U.S. public schools in increasing numbers. The percentage of public schools that required school uniforms jumped from 12% in the 1999–2000 school year to 18.8% in the 2019–20 school year. … School officials and other advocates of the new uniform policies noted improvements in students’ frame of mind and stated that uniforms had ‘sharply reduced discipline problems.’” (Source here)
On clothing alone, Madison’s public schools in our 2025’s litigious society feel it absolutely necessary to prohibit:
• Clothing or accessories that may be used as a weapon
• See-through clothing
• Clothing or accessories with statements or images that are vulgar, obscene, or promote illegal drugs, alcohol, sex, violence, or gang activities
• Clothing or accessories that expose undergarments or the buttocks
• Clothing or accessories with words, pictures, or caricatures based on stereotypes of a specific gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or disability
• Clothing or accessories with Native American team names, logos, or mascots that depict stereotypes.
Vikings and Fighting Irish, permitted.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: If students are expected to rise when a teacher enters the room, might they also knuckle down and learn to read? Blaska’s public high school in Sun Prairie WI was not that different. For one thing, we all could read.
Would school uniforms be a start?
O.K., wise guy! Not police uniforms!
10 responses to “Students behaving as young ladies & gentlemen!”
In the 60s & 70s most kids came from 2 parent homes. Parents taught kids to behave & how to conduct themselves outside the home & to respect authority. Parents then were not perfect; there were some homes with problems but in general kids grew up ok & were expected to succeed, go to college or learn a trade.My parents didn’t have a lot of money to spend on frivolous things but we had library cards, friends whose parents were always around ( no getting into trouble for us)& activities or chores to keep us busy. Too many kids today are left to flounder in their homes with no direction; no wonder they don’t know how to behave in school or know how to learn. Unfortunately their parents are products of LBJs “Great Society.”
In short learning & behaving start at home.
But if it doesn’t start at the home may it be picked up at school?
I’d say “yes” if I had more confidence that the type of behaviors picked up in school today would be better than in the type of home implied in the comment.
Given the quality of many school board members or education department leaders I’m not sure there would be any improvement
you can’t even keep them from being shot. Now you got a woman in DC that wants to shut down the entire Dept of Education. Your happy happy joy joy article is a
load of crap. Musk asked all his expensive brains to write down five things they did the other day. 1. build a rocket. 2. fill it with fuel. light the fuse. 3. watch it explode.4. ask dump for more money. 5. repeat.
This “reply” is a point-by-point validation of the positions expressed by Blaska: Students with lack of reading comprehension, poor grammar, and no respect for others, are the norm in most school systems. The ability to communicate is of paramount importance. In Einstein’s early years he lacked it and was almost sent to a remedial facility as a dunce. This guy sounds like either a recent graduate of the current school system or the guy who sat in the back of the class and shot spitwads under the previous regime.
First of all, Musk’s “five things” question was directed at do-nothing, no-show government bureaucrats, who Dick L. sounds happy to protect. Elon’s “expensive brains” accomplished their work in the office and under a real budget long before Elon became a part of DOGE, Also, the last accomplishment in Dick’s list should have been either “catch the rocket stage in mid-air, on live TV” or “defeat Starlink’s Russian hackers and get Ukraine’s internet back online in one business day” (again, pre-DOGE). Musk gets paid on performance, a concept foreign to blue-state flat-earthers.
“Ask ‘dump’ for more money?” Keep it up, Dick, that sort of childish taunt was lame in the third grade and your thinking cost your own geniuses Biden/Kamala/Soros an election.
Blaska is absolutely correct, if young kids don’t learn discipline and good manners at home, they turn out like Dick, confused, multi-gendered and bitter. No one should expect public school systems to possess a ‘miracle cure’ to correct bad upbringing once the resulting behavior is entrenched. Thanks LBJ for starting the ball rolling… downhill.
So are either candidate have any ideas to increase reading and math scores? Most school board candidate I’ve head about just have some word salad answer that makes no sense. When I hear the school superintendent talk about reading and math it is all words with no meaning. Good luck to the generation in school now. Your future doesn’t look good especially for the ones that can’t read or do math.
But they will know there are 97 genders
Did either candidate give you an answer?
If a kid misbehaved at St. John’s Lutheran School in the 50s, he (usually) could expect to be punished by the teacher and then again by his parents (who were notified of his misbehavior) when he got home. Methods that nowadays would fall under the rubric of ‘domestic violence.’ Unfortunately, even if by some miracle Madison schools were to adopt the policies suggested by our Host, students, conditioned by years of lax standards, would never comply, and their parents would no doubt file lawsuits alleging abuse. Classic case of trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.